Basil Wolverton was a devout Christian, an apocalypse aficionado, and MAD magazine's most prominent creator of 1950s grotesquerie. And—now—a fine artist.

Wolverton's style is familiar to everyone—whether you saw his original bad-acid-trip stylings in MAD, or any of the scores of later cartoonists influenced by him. It would have been hard to imagine then, when he was whipping the ideals of Ozzie and Harriet with a rusty bike chain, that he'd become a darling of the art world half a century later.

But here he is, with a retrospective show at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, being dubbed "The Van Gogh of Gross-Out" by the New York Times. His mama would be proud. As would Jesus:

A devout churchgoer, he hoped to be remembered for his Bible illustrations, not his cartoons.

His series of apocalyptic images are...memorable. Christians are the freakiest ones of all!
[NYT]