50 years ago, an artist named Wallace “Wally” Wood (or Woody to most people) changed Daredevil’s costume from his original yellow suit to the iconic red and black outfit he still wears to this day. (Even in the Daredevil Netflix show.) But Wally Wood did a lot more than redesign Daredevil and had a long career doing newspaper strips as well as horror and sci-fi books for EC Comics and humor for the immortal MAD. At East Coast Comicon, comic book artist and philanthropist J. David Spurlock, who co-founded the Wally Wood Scholarship Fund and co-wrote a biography of Wood, and veteran comics creators Larry Hama (G.I. Joe) and Bob Wiacek (Uncanny X-Men) swapped stories and chatted about Wood’s life, work, and legacy.
Larry Hama began the panel by saying he learned about Wally Wood during the mid-1960s through a friend at High School of Art and Design, who was a huge comics fan and had original art by Frank Frazetta (Conan oil paintings) and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant). He would later work for Wood helping him with scripts as well drawing basic, proportional figures for Wood to ink. J. David Spurlock said this was a pivotal time for Wood as he transitioned from drawing for MAD to Marvel. He laid out Wood’s credentials as the artist who brought science fiction comics to EC, which mostly published horror books. He later worked for MAD magazine and was the only artist who worked on each issue of MAD for its first ten years. Back then, MAD sold 1-2 million copies, which was ten times the amount regular comics sold. But the tight deadlines for MAD gave Wood migraines, and he worked for Marvel and later created Thunder Agents for Tower Comics.
Bob Wiacek became a fan of Wood through his work on Daredevil and said that he was one of the three most influential artists of the 1960s along with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. He later went to the School of Visual Arts and studied under the legendary Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. After being turned down by DC, Wiacek went to Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios where Adams said he was a bad penciller, but a good inker. Hama helped him get a job with Wally Wood doing backgrounds and helping inking. One of his projects was inking a page of Steve Ditko’s Stalker, which freaked him out as he didn’t know to ink outside or inside the Stalker’s rope he was using to climb a tower. But Wood said he did a good job.
These origin stories led to a discussion of Wally Wood’s art style. Hama talked about how Wood would tell 
him not to linger on his backgrounds too much, asking sarcastically, “Is it art yet?” Spurlock talked about how Wood bridged the gap between realism and cartooning better than anyone, and Hama talked about his dense black rendering while throwing in another “Woodism”, “When it doubt, black it out.”
This one-liner transitioned to a chat about Wally Wood and his relationship with Marvel and superheroes, especially Daredevil. Wood worked with Jack Kirby on his newspaper strip Skymasters and also inked his run on DC Comics’ Challengers of the Unknown. He decided to join Kirby in the Marvel bullpen where he drew Daredevil. Wood got rid of Daredevil’s yellow costume, which sported a V-neck and a single “D” with a sleek red costume featuring the “DD” that has will probably always be Daredevil’s logo. However, he didn’t like doing the Marvel Method with Stan Lee, who would sometimes show up to a story meeting without any ideas so Wood had to plot the whole comic with Lee putting in dialogue later. When Wood asked for a writing credit, Lee said he had to write every word to get one. So after getting a single writing credit, he went over to Tower where he had a lot more control over his Thunder Agents series, which was a sci-fi/superhero comic with sophisticated plotting and humor.
After this superheroic side path, the panelists return to an in-depth discussion of Wood’s art style, which Spurlock described as “beautiful clutter”. Spurlock said his art was busy because Wood was putting his energy into his art and not his marriage.. Larry Hama shared a story about how mad Wood was after reading a Peanuts strip where “that damn [Charles] Schulz” was “getting away with murder” because he only used 27 line strokes. Hama and Spurlock also talked about how Wood’s figures had character and a 
“magic charm” as he put a lot of work into even his MAD work, like a joke panel with a little kid covered in super detailed snot.
In reference to Wood’s inking, Bob Wiacek called him the “great collaborator”. Jack Kirby kept his work on Skymasters framed in his studio, and the wife of late Blade co-creator and long time Daredevil artist Gene Colan said his inking really tightened up her husband’s pencils on Captain America. He even inked Will Eisner’s later Spirit strips (while working on 5 monthly comics for EC) in which the Spirit went to space. Wood also was one of the artists considered to take over Prince Valiant from Hal Foster, which was a big deal because this was when newspaper comic strips had more prestige than comic books. He unfortunately turned down the job, and Wiacek said that with his heavy workload for EC, MAD, and his mental health that this stressful gig could have killed him.
The panel ended on a bittersweet tone as Spurlock talked about how Wally Wood was the pioneer of underground comics with his book Wit’s End and that big time artists like Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson looked up to him when they worked together at EC Comics. But Spurlock talked about how he didn’t like to be called “Wally” because it reminded him of a youthful personality that he didn’t want to have any more. However, I learned a lot about the works, art style, and personality of the great cartoonist Wally Wood, and how he did so much more than draw that great issue of Daredevil where haughty Namor the Sub-Mariner calls him the most courageous hero of all.