Basil Wolverton was born in 1909 and died in 1978, and spent most of his life in Vancouver, WA and was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991.
Wolverton first started his cartooning career by pitching comic strips to newspaper syndicates. In 1929 The Independent Syndicate of New York accepted his comic Marco of Mars but never distributed because it was deemed too similar to Buck Rogers, which debuted that year.
In 1946, Al Capp's Li'l Abner newspaper ran a contest to depict "Lena the Hyena", the world's ugliest woman. Among 500,000 entries, Wolverton's was the winner.
In the 1950s, Wolverton produced 17 comic-book horror and science-fiction stories for Marvel and other comic-book publishers, including one story by author Daniel Keyes, which led to him being "hailed for creating uniquely grotesque monsters"
In 1968, Wolverton did the Ugly Posters series of trading cards for Topps and later returned to main stream comics in the early 70's.
Wolverton's son, editorial cartoonist Monte Wolverton, draws in a style similar to his father's; the younger Wolverton also worked for The Plain Truth and contributed to Mad. Several cartoonists have been influenced by Wolverton's "spaghetti-and-meatball" style, including Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.
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