The late comic artist Wally Wood was one of those brilliant-but-tortured talents. When he was at his best, nobody was better…but he suffered for his deadlines and drank in self-destructive quantities. If you're interested in the sad story, Jim McLauchlin has written an overview of the man's life and too-soon death.
Wood struggled with his work and was rarely paid what it was worth. Like many comic artists, especially of his generation, he was always looking for ways to increase his output…to spend less time on a page and therefore make more $$$ per week. He often doodled out little staging tricks and pinned them up near his drawing board or shared them with his assistants. Years later, one of those assistants, Larry Hama, assembled the visual notes into a page called "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work." You can read the story of its invention here and download a copy of the page.
(You will notice references to "ben day." That's an outmoded term referring to a fine dot pattern that like a half-toned photo, reads like grey on the printed page.)
And once you've read the page, you can watch the movie…