WALLY WOOD AND HIS MASTERPIECE

In Wild Wood: 100 Pages of Art and Text (154 8x11-inch pages, b/w; Pure Imagination paperback, $25) edited by Greg Theakston, we have Woodwork that ranges from astonishingly good reproduction to complete desecration, lines lost and shading gone entirely awry. But the book is worth owning for a single legendary item: the Wood masterpiece of a comics art storytelling guide, “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work,” poorly reproduced in the book, brilliant nonetheless. Another rare artifact herein is Wood’s Prince Valiant try-out page, a stunning imitation of Hal Foster.

Adopting the narrative mannerisms of a hard-boiled detective, editor/publisher Theakston regales us with a story about how he met and disappointed Wood, then interviews several notables who began as Wood’s assistants — Joe Orlando, Ralph Reese, Dan Adkins, and Paul Kirchner, all of whom testify to Wood’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for work and his contribution to their own development as comic book artists. Kirchner is the most detailed on the latter topic:

“It wasn’t so much outright teaching: you just picked up things. ... I used to do rough pencils and layouts, and Woody would go over the job and make corrections. Watching him correct my work was the best kind of education: he would leave what was good and correct and alter my weak points. I could see exactly where my work needed help.”

The Wood work includes material from as early as 1950 and as late as 1975, but not all of the content here is dated or sourced. Sscattered throughout is pulp art from 1957 (wash drawings mostly); mildly risque girlie gag cartoons; unpublished humor art from the sixties; the entire 1967 comic book adaptation of the “Fantastic Voyage” movie; and The Destructor, No. 2, April 1975, penciled by Steve Ditko and inked by Wood.