Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work!!

Happy birthday to comic book artist Wally Wood (1927 - 1981)

 Everyone needs to see this, and even if you have seen it all ready, it's always worth a revisit. Twenty two great solutions by Wally Wood to make a dialogue-heavy comic page work graphically.

Via Wikipedia:

"Panels That Always Work

"Wood struggled to be as efficient as possible in the often low-paying comics industry.^[47] Over time he created a series of layout techniques sketched on pieces of paper which he taped up near his drawing table. These 'visual notes,' collected on three pages,^[48] reminded Wood (and select assistants he showed the pages to)^[49] of various layouts and compositional techniques to keep his pages dynamic and interesting.^[47] (In the same vein, Wood also taped up another note to himself: 'Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.')^[48]

"In 1980, Wood's original, three-page, 24-panel (not 22) version of 'Panels' was published with the proper copyright notice in The Wallace Wood Sketchbook (Crouch/Wood 1980).^[50] Around 1981,^[48] Wood's ex-assistant Larry Hama, by then an editor at Marvel Comics, pasted up photocopies of Wood's copyrighted drawings on a single page, which Hama titled 'Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work!!' (It was subtitled, 'Or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!') Hama left out two of the original 24 panels as his photocopies were too faint to make out some of the lightest sketches.^[50] Hama distributed Wood's 'elegantly simple primer to basic storytelling'^[51] to artists in the Marvel bullpen, who in turn passed them on to their friends and associates.^[49] Eventually, '22 Panels' made the rounds of just about every cartoonist or aspiring comic book artist in the industry and achieved its own iconic status.^[51]

"Wood's 'Panels That Always Work' is copyright Wallace Wood Properties, LLC as listed by the United States Copyright Office which assigned the work Registration Number VA0001814764.^[52]

 

"Homages and tributes to '22 Panels'

"In 1986, Tom Christopher, who had been given a copy by Larry Hama at the DC office in 1978 light-boxed the pages, incorporating a non-linear dialogue, and asked Par Holman to ink it. Holman inked and lettered the piece, and the completed art was distributed through Clay Geerdes' Comics World Co-Op, whose members produced mini- and digest-sized comics. In 2006, writer/artist Joel Johnson bought the Larry Hama paste-up of photocopies at auction and made it available for wide distribution on the Internet.^[49] In 2010 Anne Lukeman of Kill Vampire Lincoln Productions produced a short film adapting the "22 Panels That Always Work" into a film noir-style experimental piece called 22 Frames That Always Work.^[53] Artist Rafael Kayanan created a revised version of '22 Panels' that used actual art from published Wood comics to illustrate each frame.^[54] In 2006, cartoonist and publisher Cheese Hasselberger created 'Cheese's 22 Panels That Never Work,' featuring bizarre situations and generally poor storytelling techniques.^[55] In 2012, Michael Avon Oeming created a Powers-themed update/homage to "22 Panels," making it available for distribution.^[56] In July 2012, Cerebus TV producer Max Southall brought together materials and released a documentary^[57] that featured Dave Sim's homage to Wallace Wood and a focus on his 22 Panels, including a tribute that features a creation using the motif of one of them, depicting Daredevil and Wood himself, in Wallace Wood style – and the Wallace Wood Estate's official print of the panels."