Wally Wood

Wally Wood
Self-portrait by Wally Wood
Born	Wallace Allan Wood (1927-06-17)June 17, 1927 Menahga, Minnesota
Died	November 2, 1981(1981-11-02) (aged 54) Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist Writer Penciller Inker Publisher
Pseudonym(s)	Woody
Awards	List National Cartoonists Society Comic Book Division awards, 1957, 1959, and 1965. Alley Award, Best Pencil Artist, 1965 Alley Award, Best Inking Work, 1966 Angoulême International Comics Festival, Best Foreign Cartoonist Award, 1978 The Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, 1989 The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 1992 Inkwell Awards Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame (2011)

Wallace Allan Wood (June 17, 1927 – November 2, 1981) was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work on EC Comics's Mad and Marvel's Daredevil. He was one of Mad's founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he claimed to dislike. 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' 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.

Wally Wood was born in Menahga, Minnesota, and 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.