Over the next year, Wood also became an assistant to George Wunder, who had taken over the Milton Caniff strip "Terry and the Pirates". Wood cited his "first job on my own" as "Chief Ob-stacle", a continuing series of strips for a 1949 political newsletter. He entered the comic book field by lettering, as he recalled in 1981: "The first professional job was lettering for Fox romance comics in 1948. This lasted about a year. I also started doing backgrounds, then inking. Most of it was the romance stuff. For complete pages, it was $5 a page ... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day".