22 Panels

Wally Wood's failsafe techniques!

On Instagram the other day Emily Joy Mehr posted her version of Wally Wood’s 22 Panels. This was something I first came across in Gainesville on the SAW Intensive Comics Year, but hadn’t thought much about since.

The 22 Panels are a series of layout techniques that Wally Wood (famous comics writer and artist 1927-1981) made, as a foolproof way to liven up “boring talking scenes”.

From Wikipedia:

Around 1981, 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!")

I loved Emily’s version and thought I’d have a crack at it - she suggested I use my nuns and Mr Rose, so I did! (Silh = silhouette, Ben Day = little dots that were used in the printing process to produce areas of grey or colour.)

I had a couple of takeaways from doing this. One is that, despite the fact that much of my comics is a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page, a lot of these panels feel too dynamic for the way I write. Maybe it’d be interesting to do an exercise of writing a comic with these compositions in mind to begin with, and see how different the vibe would be.

The other is that I really like the effect of the speech bubbles describing what is happening in the panels. It reminds me of those literal videos that did the rounds about ten years ago - the Bonnie Tyler one being a particularly good time! Maybe it’d be fun to do a literal comic - a few pages of characters just narrating whatever is happening in each panel…

Has anyone else tried this exercise? Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like Wally’s panels have given many other artists lots of ideas to play with!