Review: The Complete Lunar Tunes

The Complete Lunar Tunes
Written and Drawn by Wally Wood
Published by Vanguard Productions $9.95 USD

The other day I bought a cd to replace the copy that had been missing the past couple years, The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. The reason I bought the cd rather than downloading it were the lyrics, artwork, and the fact that for some reason Amazon was selling it for $6.97. The clearance price got me to thinking that it was very likely they were getting rid of the old stock because the cd was being reissued soon, probably with improved sound and maybe a bonus disc, the way so many of the albums I grew up with are being reissued. So I bought this knowing it might be a sort of stopgap purchase, but hey, it's only seven dollars, right?

That's a little like the feeling I often have when buying Vanguard books--that a better, more complete version will come out some day, but for now, let's enjoy what we have.

Lunar Tunes was a shortlived strip Wood did for his Witzend magazine, and several strips weren't published there until after his death. They concern a space hero boy named Bucky Ruckus, a newborn but talkative and ambulatory baby named Pip--both drawn in the cute character style Wood brought to MAD work like "It's Melvin," as well as the sexy Moon chick Nudine and lots of aliens. Although the strips are only a couple pages long, they hold together well enough in a collection due to there not being any real point or narrative to any of them. It ends when Wood had enough of his life but not at any specific point.

Whether Wood was working on other projects in addition to Lunar Tunes isn't made clear in the brief jacket cover introduction, and the lack of historical context sure doesn't do this work any favors. Publisher J. David Spurlock, who touts himself as "the best assistant Wally Wood NEVER had" (tongue-in-cheek and yet self-aggrandizing at the same time) hypes "the wit that made (Wood) a star at MAD" being combined here with the "far-out settings from Weird Science," and yet it wasn't Wood's wit that made him a star--he was the artist on those stories, not the writer. The wit that is really on display here in these strips is a kind of cartoon martini of burlesque vermouth shaken with Lewis Carroll gin, the aliens representing the verbal and visual nonsense of Alice in Wonderland. Throw in a couple olives pickled in the brine of bad relationships and voila!

The work here has no real feeling of its era, which makes it all the sadder. Despite being produced in 1981, the back cover describes it as "a hilarious roller-coaster ride reminiscent of a 1960s cocktail party--complete with nudity." I wouldn't know about a 1960s cocktail party, but from any other cocktail party I've been to, they are generally only hilarious if you're actually there. I would agree that in these strips a reader can find the soul of Wood emerging here and there, just like the melancholy of a drunk tends to come out by the tail-end of a party, after all the laughs and madcap antics. His sour feelings about women and his career make frequent and defiant appearances at the end of strips.

For fans of Wood, it's good that Vanguard has published as much as they can of his previously uncollected work, because Wood was such a great artist that he does deserve to have as comprehensive a set of in-print books as possible. That said, this collection is some of his least affecting, least coherent and sloppiest work, and not recommended for any but the most hardcore fans. It's not even like some Wood work where you just ignore the words and drink in the images, as the art here is Wood doing as little as he can get away with, or perhaps all he was up to doing at the time. It's a curious, occasionally interesting footnote to a tremendous career.