Wallace Wood: Against the Grain, part 15 When Orlando fled the boredom of the Long Island stockroom and returned to the creative electricity of West 64th Street, he was surrounded by stacks of Rocket to the Moon and Mask of Fu Manchu pages: “We were doing art for Avon, run by Sol Cohen. He loved our work. Sometimes the publisher didn’t like something we had done. We did a Fu Manchu cover that the publisher rejected, so the cover that was printed was our second version. It was really nice; I remember it had a large face and big hands with claws. Most covers were submitted in same-size, color-sketch form prior to our doing them. They had guys like Everett Raymond Kinstler working for them; we knew we were in good company. Fox was really the bottom of the barrel. Avon had a better line with better distribution. With Fu Manchu Wally did the bulk of the book; I penciled a couple of pages, and Sid Check did a couple. I remember doing the garden scene. It was a team effort. When I brought in Captain Science Wally went through the roof. We really wanted to do the book, but our backlog was staggering. I was very paranoid about getting enough work, so I took anything I could get my hands on. It got so heavy at times we would work in Army shifts, sleeping two hours and then slapping each other with wet towels to wake up. If a job really got late, we would pencil and ink one page at the same time. I had a lot of fun with Captain Science. By that point we had a pretty good idea of how to do comics, but we were still experimenting. It was very exciting. We knew Wood was the master, and we respected him.”  ¶ 10:30 AM