The Wisdom of Wally Wood

One particular saying of comics arts genius Wally Wood has always stuck with me:

"Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up."

I worked in comics for several years, and then — as in Wally Wood's day — creators were mostly paid by the page. There was a minimum quality bar you needed to hit, but quantity was the thing. As a writer, I could manage about eight finished script pages per day. That meant I wrote a comic in three days. To make my rent, I needed to write four or five comics a month. It’s largely because of those days that I still think of myself as a pulp writer at heart.

(I envied writers who went faster — still do).

In that kind of environment, you need outlines, structures, reliable starting places, formulas. And you need to work fast.

Wood's quote hits to the heart of those requirements. If it worked before, it should work again. Don't reinvent the wheel. Use your tools to tell the story, then tell the next story, and the next. Most of all, don't worry about starting with a copy. By the time you finish the work, it will be your own.

One of the artists Wally Wood copied ... was himself. His "22 Panels That Always Work" was a toolkit of poses and composition for injecting variety into boring panels from "some dumb writer (who) has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!" (Ahem).

Those panels -- originally 24 -- would be copied, traced, and pasted up by comics creators for generations to follow. That's because there's real wisdom in starting any creative endeavor with a good guide in hand, and if you are going to copy -- copy the best.

I think about Wally Wood a lot. How his work transcended his genre and his era. I think about his health miseries and professional frustrations, and of how he summed up his life as an artist by saying "If I had it all to do over again, I'd cut off my hands" before taking his own life at age 54.

I look at his work most every week. I still read comics and follow comics accounts on social media, and Wood's work shows up regularly, 75 years past his EC Comics hayday. It's brilliant, detailed, and optimistic in a timeless midcentury modern style. Wood's work is far -- far! -- better than many of his contemporaries, arguably much better than it needed to be. By Wood's own admission, it is formula work, but it's the top of the mountain.

Tools aren't destiny. Mass production is its own kind of genius. Wally Wood was a genius who used mass production, or at least tried to do it. (His attempts at publishing tell me his methods didn't scale, no matter how hard he worked to create bulletproof processes).

Don't fear formulas. Embrace them, make them your own, make something great.

Formulas didn't hold Wally Wood back -- they lifted him up. Fly with him!