In 1977, Wood finally got the chance to work on Superman, a character he had long wanted to draw. In this case it was even better in that it was the Earth 2, Golden-age Superman. Wood had been inking this series over Keith Giffen and Ric Estrada. For one last brief burts of energy before his health issues hit soon afterwords, Wood took over the pencilling, too (assisted by A. L. Sirois) and magic occurred, as it often did.
The ALL-STAR COMICS revival (picking up with #58, decades after #57) was one of Gerry Conway's projects after he left Marvel. Ric Estrada did 2 issues, Keith Giffen the next 4, all 6 inked (or perhaps the more accurate description is "finished"-- pencils and inks over layouts) by Wood. Conway did 5 issues before going back to Marvel for his incredibly short-lived stint as EIC, apparently taking Giffen with him, as both got on Marvel's 2nd-tier team book THE DEFENDERS (but Klaus Janson was no Wood, and murdered the art before being replaced).
ReplyDeleteFunny enough, Joe Orlando took over as editor on ALL-STAR when Conway left, while future publisher Paul Levitz took over the writing. After Giffen's departure, Wood did full art (more or less) on 2 additional issues (8 total that he worked on), and if the credits are to be believed, he plotted the final one on his own, with Levitz merely doing the dialogue (or was it Wood on dialogue, and Levitz co-plotting? I'd have to look it up-- it's hard to be certain with comic-book credits).
I thought those last 2 issues were just about the most stunning comics DC put out in that period.
I first came into the JSA revival during its 2nd period-- Paul Levitz, Joe Staton & Bob Layton (Layton being a former Wood assistant, I get the feeling he's the one who did all those "flashy" circular zips). I loved what they did with the feature, but when I saw the earlier stuff with Wood, suddenly the later stuff seemed 2nd-rate by comparison.