For years, comic book artists have handed around faded Xeroxes of a page called "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work." This was said to be a cheat sheet that the late, great artist Wally Wood had compiled for himself and his legion of assistants. Also known as "Wood's Lazy Layouts," it was said to be his repertoire of tricks to use in composing comic book panels, especially when the artist found himself stuck with long, talky scenes.
Turns out that, though Wood himself designed the components of this page, it was actually assembled by one of his assistants, Larry Hama, after Wood's death. This story is told on this page by Joel Johnson who — lucky man — is now in possession of the original paste-up of Wood roughs. But he's also a generous man because he shares some good scans of the material with us. Artists who have copied and recopied their bad stats for years can now rejoice in a fresh, first-generation copy of the page.
Whether it's a good idea for a comic artist to resort to these tricks is, of course, arguable. Wally Wood could get away with repeating compositions but few artists are Wally Wood. It would be interesting to see — here's a homework assignment for someone — if one could find panels in Wood's work (especially the stories that were largely unassisted) to correspond to each panel in the Lazy Layouts chart. And it would also be interesting to see if you could do it with the work of artists like Alex Toth, Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert, who've been famously praised for not repeating panel compositions.