Art For Art’s Sake #363 – 22 Panels & 1 Artist That Always Worked – Wally Wood

by Richard Bruton

When all else fails, there’s always great comic art. That ain’t running out any time quite yet. Case in point, Art For Art’s Sake …

We’re opening and closing this one on Wally Wood, one of the true legends of comics, beginning with this, his brilliant 22 panels that always work, his set of beautifully done, perfectly crafted panels.

The tale is that Wood, when he quit MAD Magazine, where he was the superstar and getting $200 per page for his art, and headed to Marvel in 1964 where the page rate was $20 for pencils and $15 to ink, it was a bit of a rate drop, even though Marvel paid him the princely sum of $45 for pencils and inks as a nod to his legendary status.

So, the always efficient Wood developed cheat sheets for his assistants, distilling the essence of all he knew, to get the work done faster and faster. These eventually, through tinkering and gathering them together, came together as the 22 panels that always work. The form most of us have seen them in (below) comes from one of his former assistants, Larry Hama, who, in his editorship days at Marvel, collected them together as a guide to give advice to newer artists.

And it works. Of course it works, it’s Wally Wood.

For more on the 22 Panels, see this fascinating piece on Wayback from Joel Johnson, who owns the original paste-up of the art.