Wallace Allan Wood (June 17, 1927 – November 2, 1981) was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, widely known for his work on EC Comics's titles such as Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and MAD Magazine from its inception in 1952 until 1964, as well as for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and work for Warren Publishing's Creepy. He drew a few early issues of Marvel's Daredevil and established the title character's distinctive red costume. Wood created and owned the long-running characters Sally Forth and Cannon.
He wrote, drew, and self-published two of the three graphic novels of his magnum opus, The Wizard King trilogy, about Odkin son of Odkin before his (Wood’s) death by suicide.
Much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood; some people call him Wally Wood, a name he disliked. Within the comics community, he was also known as Woody, a name he sometimes used as a signature.
In addition to Wood's hundreds of comic book pages, he illustrated for books and magazines while also working in a variety of other areas – advertising; packaging and product illustrations; gag cartoons; record album covers; posters; syndicated comic strips; and trading cards, including work on Topps's landmark Mars Attacks set.
EC publisher William Gaines once stated, "Wally may have been our most troubled artist ... I'm not suggesting any connection, but he may have been our most brilliant".
He was the inaugural inductee into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1989, and was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992.
Wallace Wood was born June 17, 1927, in Menahga, Minnesota. He began reading and drawing comics at an early age. He was strongly influenced by the art styles of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, Will Eisner's The Spirit and especially Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs. Recalling his childhood, Wood said that his dream at age six, about finding a magic pencil that could draw anything, foretold his future as an artist.
Wood graduated from high school in 1944, signed on with the United States Merchant Marine at the close of World War II and enlisted in the U.S. Army's 11th Airborne Division in 1946. He went from training at Fort Benning, Georgia, to occupied Japan, where he was assigned to the island of Hokkaidō.
In 1947, at age 20, Wood enrolled in the Minneapolis School of Art but only lasted one term. Arriving in New York City with his brother Glenn and mother Alma (of Finnish descent), after his military discharge in July 1948, Wood found employment at Bickford's restaurant as a busboy. During his time off he carried his thick portfolio of drawings all over midtown Manhattan, visiting every publisher he could find. He briefly attended the Hogarth School of Art but dropped out after one semester. In 1948, he enrolled in the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now known as the School of Visual Arts), staying less than one year (although he made a number of professional contacts which helped him later).
By October, after being rejected by every company he visited, Wood met fellow artist John Severin in the waiting room of a small publisher. After the two shared their experiences attempting to find work, Severin invited Wood to visit his studio, the Charles William Harvey Studio, where Wood met Charlie Stern, Harvey Kurtzman (who was working for Timely/Marvel) and Will Elder. At this studio Wood learned that Will Eisner was looking for a Spirit background artist. He immediately visited Eisner and was hired on the spot.
Over the next year, Wood also became an assistant to George Wunder, who had taken over the Milton Caniff strip Terry and the Pirates. Wood cited his "first job on my own" as Chief Ob-stacle, a continuing series of strips for a 1949 political newsletter. He entered the comic book field by lettering, as he recalled in 1981: "The first professional job was lettering for Fox romance comics in 1948. This lasted about a year. I also started doing backgrounds, then inking. Most of it was the romance stuff. For complete pages, it was $5 a page ... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day".
Artists' representative Renaldo Epworth helped Wood land his early comic-book assignments, making it unclear if that connection led to Wood's lettering or to his comics-art debut, the ten-page story "The Tip Off Woman" [sic] in the Fox Comics Western Women Outlaws No. 4 (cover-dated January 1949, on sale late 1948). Wood's next known comic-book art did not appear until Fox's My Confession No. 7 (August 1949), at which time he began working almost continuously on the company's similar My Experience, My Secret Life, My Love Story and My True Love: Thrilling Confession Stories. His first signed work is believed to be in My Confession #8 (October 1949), with the name "Woody" half-hidden on a theater marquee. He penciled and inked two stories in that issue: "I Was Unwanted" (nine pages) and "My Tarnished Reputation" (ten pages).
Wood began at EC co-penciling and co-inking with Harry Harrison the story "Too Busy For Love" (Modern Love #5), and fully penciling the lead story, "I Was Just a Playtime Cowgirl", in Saddle Romances No. 11 (April 1950), inked by Harrison.
Working from a Manhattan studio at West 64th Street and Columbus Avenue, Wood began to attract attention in 1950 with his science-fiction artwork for EC and Avon Comics, some in collaboration with Joe Orlando. During this period, he drew in a wide variety of subjects and genres, including adventure, romance, war and horror; message stories (for EC's Shock SuspenStories); and eventually satirical humor for writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman in Mad including a satire of the lawsuit Superman's publisher DC filed against Captain Marvel's publisher Fawcett called "Superduperman!" battling Captain Marbles.
Wood was instrumental in convincing EC publisher William Gaines to start a line of science fiction comics, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy (later combined under the single title Weird Science-Fantasy). Wood penciled and inked several dozen EC science fiction stories. Wood also had frequent entries in Two-Fisted Tales and Tales from the Crypt, as well as the later EC titles Valor, Piracy, and Aces High.
Working over scripts and pencil breakdowns by Jules Feiffer, the 25-year-old Wood drew two months of Will Eisner's Sunday-supplement newspaper comic book The Spirit, on the 1952 story arc "The Spirit in Outer Space". Eisner, Wood recalled, paid him "about $30 a week for lettering and backgrounds on The Spirit. Sometimes he paid $40 when I did the drawings, too".
Feiffer, in 2010, recalled Wood's studio, "which was at that time in the very slummy Upper West Side [of Manhattan] in the [West] 60s, years before it was [the] Lincoln Center [area]. It was a cartoonist and science-fiction writers' ghetto – just a huge room where the walls were knocked down, dark, smelly, roach-infested, and all these cartoonists and writers bent over their tables. One was [science-fiction writer] Harry Harrison."
Between 1957 and 1967, Wood produced both covers and interior illustrations for more than 60 issues of the science-fiction magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, illustrating stories by such authors as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Jack Finney, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Robert Sheckley, Clifford D. Simak and Jack Vance. He painted six covers for Galaxy Science Fiction Novels between 1952 and 1958. His gag cartoons appeared in the men's magazines Dude, Gent and Nugget. He inked the first eight months of the 1958–1961 syndicated comic strip Sky Masters of the Space Force, penciled by Jack Kirby.