I think the first Wallace Wood art I ever saw was in a 1976 issue of All-Star Comics, where his inking totally dominated young pencilers like Ric Estrada and Kieth Giffen, in service to mind-bending stories reviving the Justice Society of America on an alternate world where Superman, Green Lantern and The Flash were greying icons of a previous era and hot young heroes like Power Girl (Superman's cousin on this strange new world) and The Star Spangled Kid were joining up with all these alternate old heroes.
Even at the age of 10, Wood's art was captivating -- looking back on that exciting, if more naive era now I see that Wood was, deliberately or not, evoking the look of decades previous, especially in his portrayal of Superman; Wood was clearly trying to bring Joe Shuster's original squinty-eyed design to mind, giving the stories verisimilitude for older readers and suggesting a world of exotic artistic possibilities for younger ones. In retrospect, discovering Wood's lush, highly stylized art was a formative experience in my then-developing sense of what is possible in comic art. 
My appreciation of Wood reached its apex with the serialization of The Outer Space Spirit in Denis Kitchen's 1980s Spirit reprint magazine (stories recently collected in DC's Spirit Archives). There I saw Wood illustrating science fiction environments filled with all-too-human protagonists and their shifty enemies. From there I was only too ready to begin exploring Wood's EC art of the 1950s, his brief but glorious Daredevil run (some of the most beautiful Marvel comics ever created, available in Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Vol. 1), and even his witty, naughty adult comix of the late 1970s.
Wood was usually credited as "Wally" in the work he did for companies like EC and Marvel, but it's said he hated that nickname and preferred to be called Woody. There's a hint in there, somewhere, that he sought validation and respect, but also a suggestion that no matter how much he received, it was never enough.
Wood died by his own hand in the 1980s. Whatever demons haunted him, and anecdotally it appears they were many, he left behind a legacy of comic art that will be studied and appreciated for centuries. Whether it was prehistoric dinosaurs, socially revelant suburban horror stories, or slam-bang '60s superheroes, Wood could do it all -- and he did.
