Sally Forth (Wally Wood)
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- Sally Forth is also the name of a later comic strip by Greg Howard.
Sally Forth, a comic strip created by Wally Wood for a military male readership.
Wood's sexy action-adventure character, who is often seen nude, began as a recruit in a commando outfit. She first appeared June, 1968, in Military News, a 16-page tabloid from Armed Forces Diamond Sales. The title is a play on words - "to sally forth" means to set out on an adventure.
In 1976, Wood recalled:
- It all started in 1968, when I was asked to do a complete comic section for a proposed tabloid newspaper for servicemen, four pages of full-color, service-oriented humor strips... There was a high-flying lowlife named 'Wild Bill Yonder,' a couple of others that for some reason escape my memory... (such an embarrassment) and one that I felt, and still feel, had a great name for a comic heroine... Sally Forth.
Sally returned July 26, 1971, in Overseas Weekly, a tabloid targeted at U.S. military men serving outside North America. With Wood getting an assist from writer-artists Nick Cuti, Paul Kirchner and Larry Hama, Sally Forth continued in Overseas Weekly until April 22, 1974.
Wood collected the strip in a series of four oversize (10"X12") magazines. In 1993-95, writer-editor Bill Pearson, Wood's friend and an associate in the Wood Studio, reformatted the strips into a series of comics published by Eros Comix, an imprint of Fantagraphics Books. In 1998, Pearson edited the entire run into a single 160-page Fantagraphics volume.
Towards the end of his life, two completely pornographic Sally Forth stories featuring Sally and Bill Yonder were produced and published by Wood in the adult comic magazine Gang Bang. While the first story is comparable artistically to his previous work on the strip, the second exhibits his declining powers, being crudely done, with gags derivative of earlier work. Neither of these stories have been packaged with the collected reprints of the main run of the strip.
