| Title | : | Cannon |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1606997025 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781606997024 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 296 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2001 |
Cannon Reviews
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When a pilot is shot down over China, he's brainwashed as the perfect killer. The United States government rescues him but, discovering they can't undo the brainwashing, finish the job and train him as a secret agent for the United States government as Cannon!
I'm a Wally Wood fan from way back and this was on my radar for years before I bought it. Produced for a newspaper for oversees servicemen, Cannon is the ultimate in testosterone comics. It's all fighting, guns, planes, and naked women.
Wally Wood writes, pencils, and inked the strip. I don't see anything to indicate he didn't also letter it. I have a feeling this was a blast for Wood to draw. I'm not exaggerating to say you can't go three pages without seeing a bare breast or ass and most of the pages that don't have nudity will have at least one gun or plane or fight scene on them.
The stories are James Bond type affairs with masterminds, schemes, double dealing, and sex, although the women in Cannon don't have sex pun names other than Madame Toy. Cannon is a combination of James Bond, Nick Fury, and any number of other spy characters, a bad ass that can handle any situation. I can see why servicemen would eat this shit up.
While I wouldn't quite put it in the same league of Atom Bomb, this was clearly a labor of love, be it a nubile naked woman, a jet, or a down and dirty fist fight. Wood uses stark blacks, shapely female forms, and knowledge of military craft and hardware to put together a fun and filthy masterwork.
Cannon - Wally Wood never met a plane, firearm, or naked woman he didn't like. Four out of five bullets. -
Cannon is an hilarious collection of strips done by Wallace Wood (who also did Sally Forth, among other things in the mainstream press. This is an adult comic done in the early seventies, end of the Vietnam era, for Overseas Weekly, largely for military personnel. As Wood says of another strip he drew, Heroes, "It has sex and Violence and horror, it's a guaranteed hit!" The hilarious thing about this comic is that every page has naked women in it. Well, almost every page. And sometimes women wear clothes, but not for long. The main character is a jar head programmed (pre-Jason Bourne!!) to be a perfect assassin. Women literally can't resist him. The tales are not great, all gunplay and testosterone, which creates a kind of interesting picture of our men in uniform and what they need. It's a kind of portrait of American Male, in a way, for the time.
Wood's storytelling is silly, but his drawing is great throughout. There's a selection of Heroes, pencilled by Steve Ditko, and all of Cannon is basically in that ere style of war comics. I used to read war comics even as an anti-war protester in the seventies, but I never saw anything like Cannon. Could not have been widely available then in the states. It's a fast read, as you might expect, pausing from time to time for a close look at particular images. . . hey, I was an adolescent in the seventies!
The main reason to take a look at this is for (ahem) historical purposes, as a cultural artifact, for comics history, for war comics collectors. This is a large book framework, with short essays by various people about Wood and his comics. Maybe if you can set aside the quality of the stories and the kitschy period art and the corny "sexy" dialogue this is actually a five star collection. I laughed aloud a few times. I guess it's maybe a 3.5 for me, finally, rounded up. -
Goodness gracious was this ever fun. As long as you could overlook the copious racism, lusciously stupid sexism, and insane Cold War imperialism, this comic was a BLAST. It was just hilarious, with beautiful black and white compositions. Hitler running a South American republic with a stolen American nuke, forcing the Playboy-bunny-shaped woman superspies from China and Russia to team up with the emotionless American supersoldier? Laugh-out-loud ridiculous fun. And Wood's inks were amazing, the substance of his figures were crazy. When the later stories got more soap opera-y and less over-the-top action-y, it lost some steam, but rarely do you get a book that has you putting it down so much to hold your eyes and sides from laughter.
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2,3,4 star ratings, no reviews. I wish people would just stick a one-liner in and say why they liked/didn't.
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Two stars might seem harsh, but the rating scale says that means "it was OK," and honestly, that's all I can really say. This was a weekly one-page strip about a James Bond-style secret agent, with the entire run collected here, and little about it stands out. Wood is one of the masters of comics art, and that is often reflected here, but all too often, pages look rushed, or even completed by other hands (the introduction does acknowledge his use of assistants). The stories are, well, pretty much generic spy pulp, rarely offering anything more than relatively silly thrills. The strip's heavy dependence on partial female nudity (lots of breasts, occasional butts, and a lot of improbably placed objects to obscure genitalia) only adds to the implausibility of it all--after a while, one begins to wonder just how many ways a woman can be deliberately stripped, or accidentally fall out of her clothes--not to mention how there can be so much sex with nary a genital of either sex ever in sight. That said, nobody draws hot chicks like Wood, so there's that, anyway.
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The art is superb. No question about that. And if you're a fan of Wally Wood, then this is one you'll need to read. But if you're looking for great Wood storytelling, then you should check out some of his EC work or T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. The premise is great, but the various storylines devolve into cliches. The adventures become excuses to showcase Woods wonderfully rendered naked women on about every page (or every installment in the original strip). Given the original audience, overseas male readers, this shouldn't surprise. At times, the narrative set ups become sadly laughable. I'd like to imagine Wood laughing as he created much of this.
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Oh, man. This is...uh...Well, it's of its time. It's strong jawed, macho men punching out bad guys and bedding women. Women who seem unable to keep their clothes on...when they even bother to put any on. Definitely not for the casual comic reader, or for kids. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it's totally reprehensible. At least it was from a time when everyone could agree that Nazis need to get punched and shot whenever there's an opportunity.
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If you can imagine Cannon as a film co-directed by Sam Peckinpah and Russ Meyer, you'll probably have a good idea what this contains. Wally Wood is a legend, and though this is trashy and sexist, it's still hilariously over-the-top (intentionally so) and incredibly well drawn.
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A nice collection of Wally Wood comic strips from the early 70s. The strips were originally published in Overseas Weekly, "a tabloid intended for U.S. military personnel stationed abroad" and could never have appeared in the comic books of the times.
By today's standards the strips seem fairly tame; not publishable in mainstream comics, but probably nothing beyond what you can see in some of the independents. There is lots of gratuitous female nudity with carefully positioned legs, furniture, hands or whatever preventing us from seeing any more than boobs and butts. There's also lots a hand-to-hand and gun violence. I'd rate it somewhere between PG-13 and R.
I love Wood's art, and this didn't disappoint. My only complaint is that the book is in a odd format (11" wide by 7.5" high). Apparently the strips were originally published is a more standard vertical format, so each original page was cut in half and spread across two pages of the book. On the plus side this made the art really big, about twice the size of a regular comic book. Unfortunately it also means we don't get to see the original page layout; and on one page only, it meant we only get got to see 2/3rds of a panel. This left a bit of space on the second half of the page, and the editors thoughtfully showed us the full original page (although in a smaller size.)
For the main part of the book this wasn't really a problem, but book's appendix contains reprints of two additional Cannon stories. These are printed in their original vertical format, with two comic book pages per book page, so the art is smaller than I would have liked. Especially since the art in these stories was drawn by Steve Ditko (and inked by Wood), another one of my favorite artists. -
Trashy and glorious. A bawdy tale by Wallace Wood for servicemen, this tome manages to cram as many buxom women with it's square-jawed ultra macho protagonist as it can. Think of a Russ Meyer film traced to a page. Although certain sexist attitudes are quite non-PC, one can still be entertained without feeling guilty. Some weakness comes from the shallow characters racing about from one scene to another. Even Cannon changes his looks frequently to be in disguise. If you like being tittilated then by all means pick this one up !
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Amerikan soğuk savaş düşünce dünyasının her yönüyle sergilendiği bir çizgi roman Cannon.
Cannon kariyerine U-2 uçak pilotu olarak başlayan ve ABD ordusu adına Kızıl Çin'de casusluk yapan bir asker. Uçağı düşürülüp Çin Halk Cumhuriyeti askerleri tarafından yakalanınca çok şiddetli işkence ve beyin yıkama operasyonlarına maruz bırakıyorlar onu. Ardından Madam Toy (Bayan Oyuncak) isimli bir çinli kadın tarafından beyni yıkanıyor ve ABD'ye nükleer bilimcileri öldürmek için görevlendirilmiş bir ölüm makinesi olarak dönüyor. Bu sefer Amerikalılar onu yakalıyor ve yeniden beyni yıkanıyor. Her şeyin sonunda Cannon, insanlığa, duygulara ait hiç bir şey içinde kalmamış bir askere dönüşüyor. Görevini tamamlamak için kadın, çocuk bile olsa düşmanları öldürmekten rahatsız olmayan bir ajan.
Buraya kadar olan çizgi romanın hikayesi. Peki soğuk savaş düşünce dünyası nerede mi? Kadınların (iyi ya da kötü olsunlar farketmeksizin) çıplak olduğu, özellikle Rus ya da Çin kökenli kadınların tamamının cinselliği kullanarak Amerikalı Erkekleri ele geçirdiği, onları kullandıktan sonra öldürdüğü bir dünya burası. Küba benzeri San Sierra denilen diktatörlükte asi gerillalara Rus ve Çinliler, diktatöre ise Amerikalılar destek çıkıyor... Ülkesini sömüren, halkına zulmeden bir diktatöre destek çıkmanın ardında hiç bir sorun görmeyen Cannon bir anda bu diktatörün Hitler olduğunu görünce ortalık karışacak tabii ki...
Velhasıl, askerler, savaş silahları, yarı çıplak kadınlar, her an cinsel ilişki kurmaya çalışan casuslar, Rus ve Çinli kötüler ile sıradan amerikalı'ya salınmak istenilen korkunun tamamı bu çizgi romanda kendine yer buluyor. -
This is amazing if you don't mind paper-thin plots and salacious material. Goes out of it's way to show naked girls and the main-character John Cannon has no personality. This is intentional too. In fact, other characters constantly remark on how he acts like a machine. Turns out he had been brain-washed too many times and that left him with no personality. So I guess everything you could fault this series for is intentional. You can't complain about it, because it is exactly what it sets out to be. My only legitimate (I think) gripe, is that the writer intentionally kills off all the most interesting characters.
I don't think I would ever read this again. But I would like to keep it on my shelves for the art alone. Not sure if wood does all of it. But my guess is that he had a lot of assistance in the inking department. In my humble opinion, this is the nicest Wood art that I have seen. That might be because these strips don't have primitive color messing up all those nice lines. -
Great art in this collection of comic strips created for a newspaper distributed to overseas servicemen. How could the art not be great? It’s by Wallace Wood. (I’ve heard he didn’t like to be called Wally.)
Since it wasn’t going to appear in a family newspaper, there is quite a bit of violence & nudity in the strips. That wouldn’t bother me if the excuse for so much of the nudity weren’t rape or the threat of rape. About a third of the way through the book, the sexual violence stops. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have finished the book. I have dropped my review by a star for what is there. I know the 60s-70s were a different time, but it’s still awful to encounter such blatant examples of how different. -
I didn't quite read all of it. I read about a third in one sitting, them skimmed through the rest. I went in expecting to just enjoy the art, but I ended up actually enjoying the story a lot! It's fun to try to get into the headspace of the intended audience (servicemen reading it one strip at a time), seeing some fairly complex plots play out in that manner was interesting. It all moves at a fast clip, of course, never boring.
Wally Wood's art is of course the main draw here. And it does not disappoint. The perfect comic artist, he knows when to use simple clean lines and when to add details. Everything is distilled, perfectly punchy and ridiculously sexy. Pure Pulp Fantasy. -
The writing was pretty bad, art was phenomenal, I learned a bit of Wallace Wood story reading this and he was a pretty remarkable dude with an incredible career. From an army veteran to Starting work at Mad magazine designing the Daredevil iconic look, creating crazy erotic magazines parodies pushing the envelope. He just lived life to the fullest. I have respect for him. The comic was produced for soldier I think in Vietnam its got generic plot but its a cool little American answer to james bond with some cool adventures of tintin twists.
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I think this would be a much better book to parse out and review over a longer period than an afternoon. It's just a lot of repetition, which makes sense as it was originally comic strips. It's funny how in each storyline the female character always loses her clothes early on. Probably not realistic for real life.
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The last paragraph of the bio on the last page by J. David Spurlock makes me cry. Such a remarkable life and a stunning contribution to comics. Each panel here is action packed with lovely ladies, lively lads and international intrigue written with American GIs from the 50s and 60s in mind.
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Un maestro du dessin et de l'encrage, mais les scénarios sont un peu simplistes... Sauf qu'ils sont malicieusement construits pour faire apparaître une femme nue toutes les trois cases...
Sauvés ! Dieu soit loué !
Mes vêtements...
On n'a pas le temps... Venez... -
This was fun. Then it got even more fun when I started visualizing it as a movie shot word for word (and thought for thought via voiceover). It would be so silly. Ben Stiller as Cannon?
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The drawings were great. The stories weren't of the best I've read!
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Uma obra um tanto datada, mas divertida. Só que é bastante sexista e machista, até porque foi escrita para servir de diversão para os soldados americanos que serviam na Guerra do Vietnam.
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DNF. BEWBS.
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One of the best books I’ve read this year.
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Pros: Wallace Wood is an exceptional artist. Cons: Everything else. Sexism, Racism, Sexual Violence...
No thanks. -
This one collects the complete run of legendary comic book artist Wally Wood's "Cannon". Hence the name "Cannon". The book is beautiful, the layout MOSTLY fine, and the art is of course a wonder. Sadly plot wise, it's a bit dumb. The basic story is Cannon is a secret agent, one man army type guy in constant peril. The stories are an excuse for Wood to near constantly draw women in peril in various states of undress. There's pretty much boobs on every page. Which isn't really a complaint since Wood was a master at drawing beautiful, 1950's pin-up type women. It's more a case of the plots being a bit too pulpy and goofy, instead of pulpy and clever to justify the sexiness.
My only real complaint is the layout. It's laid out in this book like a newspaper strip instead of the original full size page layout. It mostly works, except for one panel that they had to cut. They reprint a tiny version of the page as a concession, but I wonder why it was a concession at all? Why not just reprint the pages as they were original published, in it's original chapters? It would of had a lesser page count I believe, but be more true to the original. It's never explained in the appendix.
That aside, it's still pretty fun. I'd give it 3.5/5 if they allowed half points. -
When Cannon came out, over forty years ago, it was edgy and shocking on many levels. The character was based on 60s spy novel and noir tropes, including a nearly amoral main character who is irresistible to women, and women who don't want resist pretty much any available man. The two repeated femme fatales are busty, sexy, and rarely fully clad. The Chinese one is an interesting take on the traditional "Dragon Lady" stereotype, and is actually given a back story. We see an alternate version of one page within this volume. The Russian female spy is also an interesting character, a very different take on a Black Widow-type.
The artwork isn't Wood's best, but is generally very good. The stories are, unfortunately, nothing special. The worst is one in which a helicopter has no problem riding out the shock wave from a nearby nuclear explosion. Lives are cheap, and no character is safe. The book's ending, while somewhat satisfying, felt totally arbitrary in its timing, like he had run out of pages for the planned comic.
Wood does villainize all sides of the political spectrum, including Manson-like evil hippies, a right-wing Texan with his own private army, wannabe Nazis, random dictators, and evil commies.
