When Alex Wald appeared on the Japanese game show Naruhodo, Za Warudo in 1993 he answered only one question: Ultraman’s father once appeared disguised as which character from European folklore? Wald slapped his buzzer and, for the first and only time during the taping, it worked. The answer: Santa Claus. The show, which was taped on the roof of a Holiday Inn in San Francisco’s Chinatown, pits the cultural literacy of its Japanese contestants against Americans who are Japanese culture aficionados. Wald says that he would have scored more points but for the malfunctioning equipment.
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An illustrator of what he calls “confectionary smut” for record labels and magazines, Wald was selected for the show–whose title translates roughly as “Oh I See! The World!”–because he owns a huge collection of Japanese science-fiction and monster-movie toys, which he began accumulating as a student at the Art Institute in the 70s. “I realized that Japanese kids had access to lots of cool stuff that just wasn’t coming over here,” he says. “I was determined to get my hands on it.” Wald developed contacts with Japanese fans who were just as hungry for American SF paraphernalia, and today his collection of monsters, robots, and superhero figures numbers close to one thousand.
But at the Art Institute, representational painting wasn’t encouraged. “If you were a real artist you did performance art, or landscape art, or minimal art, or electronic art. They had a painting department and you would do abstract art. I would go in and paint monsters and they would look at me like, ‘Shouldn’t he be in the special ed division?’” Wald graduated nonetheless, and in 1983 he got a job at First Comics, a local independent publishing company that put out superhero comic books. Wald says that while he didn’t much care for the material First was publishing, he rediscovered his childhood appreciation for the medium. “Comics went through a relevancy phase in the 70s where they were bringing in subjects like racism, drug abuse, and other social issues. There came a point at which they were burdening fantasy with issues that defeat the purpose of fantasy. I was more interested in seeing Superboy turn into a dog for an issue.”
