In addition to Wood's hundreds of comic book pages, he illustrated for books and magazines while also working in a variety of other areas – advertising; packaging and product illustrations; gag cartoons; record album covers; posters; syndicated comic strips; and trading cards, including work on Topps's landmark Mars Attacks set.

He was strongly influenced by the art styles of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, Will Eisner's The Spirit and especially Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs.

Recalling his childhood, Wood said that his dream at age six, about finding a magic pencil that could draw anything, foretold his future as an artist.

[2] Wood graduated from high school in 1944, signed on with the United States Merchant Marine at the close of World War II and enlisted in the U.S. Army's 11th Airborne Division in 1946.

[5] Arriving in New York City with his brother Glenn and mother Alma (of Finnish[6] descent), after his military discharge in July 1948, Wood found employment at Bickford's restaurant as a busboy.

[7] By October, after being rejected by every company he visited, Wood met fellow artist John Severin in the waiting room of a small publisher.

[8] Artists' representative Renaldo Epworth helped Wood land his early comic-book assignments, making it unclear if that connection led to Wood's lettering or to his comics-art debut, the ten-page story "The Tip Off Woman" [sic] in the Fox Comics Western Women Outlaws No.

[9] Working from a Manhattan studio at West 64th Street and Columbus Avenue, Wood began to attract attention in 1950 with his science-fiction artwork for EC and Avon Comics, some in collaboration with Joe Orlando.

During this period, he drew in a wide variety of subjects and genres, including adventure, romance, war and horror; message stories (for EC's Shock SuspenStories); and eventually satirical humor for writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman in Mad including a satire of the lawsuit Superman's publisher DC filed against Captain Marvel's publisher Fawcett called "Superduperman!"

"[12] Between 1957 and 1967, Wood produced both covers and interiors for more than 60 issues of the science-fiction digest Galaxy Science Fiction, illustrating such authors as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Jack Finney, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Robert Sheckley, Clifford D. Simak and Jack Vance.

He inked the first eight months of the 1958–1961 syndicated comic strip Sky Masters of the Space Force, penciled by Jack Kirby.

[14] Wood additionally did art and stories for comic-book companies large and small – from Marvel (and its 1950s iteration Atlas Comics), DC (including House of Mystery and Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown), and Warren (Creepy, Eerie, 1984), to such smaller firms as Avon (Eerie, Strange Worlds), Charlton (War and Attack, Jungle Jim), Fox (Martin Kane, Private Eye), Gold Key (M.A.R.S.

[25] In circles concerned with copyright and intellectual property issues, Wood is known as the artist of the unsigned satirical Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, which first appeared in Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist.

[26] The poster depicts a number of copyrighted Disney characters in various unsavory activities (including sex acts and drug use), with huge dollar signs radiating from Cinderella's Castle.

[35] Wood penciled and inked All Star Comics and contributed to the creation of Power Girl[36] by exaggerating the size of her breasts.

In one of his final assignments, Wood returned to a character he helped define, inking Frank Miller's cover of Daredevil #164 (May 1980).

Associates and assistants included Dan Adkins,[38] Richard Bassford, Howard Chaykin,[39] Tony Coleman, Nick Cuti,[40] Leo and Diane Dillon, Larry Hama,[41] Russ Jones, Wayne Howard,[42] Paul Kirchner, Joe Orlando, Bill Pearson, Al Sirois, Ralph Reese,[43] Bhob Stewart, Tatjana Wood,[5] and Mike Zeck.

Wood offered his fellow professionals the opportunity to contribute illustrations and graphic stories that detoured from the usual conventions of the comics industry.

Wood additionally collected his feature Sally Forth, published in the U.S. servicemen's periodicals Military News and Overseas Weekly in 1968–1974, in a series of four oversize (10"x12") magazines.

Pearson, in 1993–95, reformatted the strips into a series of comics published by Eros Comix, an imprint of Fantagraphics Books, which in 1998 collected the entire run into a single 160-page volume.

[44] In 1969, Wood created another independent comic, Heroes, Inc. Presents Cannon, intended for his "Sally Forth" military readership as indicated in the ads and indicia.

Artists Steve Ditko and Ralph Reese and writer Ron Whyte are credited with primary writer-artist Wood on three features: "Cannon", "The Misfits",[45] and "Dragonella".

I wrote the main Sally Forth story in the first reprint book, which is actually dedicated to me, mostly because I lent Woody the money to publish it".

[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.

[52] 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.

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.

[53] Artist Rafael Kayanan created a revised version of "22 Panels" that used actual art from published Wood comics to illustrate each frame.