Tatjana Wood
1926 – 2026
Long-time comic book colorist and artist. She was married to famed comic book artist Wally Wood.
She was born Tatjana Amalie Weintraub on March 2, 1926, in Darmstadt, Germany. Her mother was Elizabeth Hammel who had a women’s clothing store. Tatjana's father Mische Weintraub was a Jewish photographer born in Russia.
Tatjana Wood Obituary – The Comics Journal
Wood’s coloring on DC’s anthology titles, including the horror comic House of Secrets, military action series Our Army at War, and superhero team-up The Brave and Bold, showcased her versatility... her ability to enhance mood and atmosphere in the four-color world, tapped her to color the first issue of Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing... "Her crown jewel was Swamp Thing, ‘Shvampy’ as she called him in her gravelly German accent," said friend and editor Karen Berger.
Tatjana Wood Obit – NY Times
Anyone who laid eyes on a DC Comics cover from 1973 to 1983 was likely seeing an example of Ms. Wood’s work. She colored nearly every cover for the company, whether the image was for a horror title, a war comic or a superhero adventure. She also provided color guides for the engravers to follow on interior pages. In the days before computer-assisted production, that involved a painstaking process of creating hand-applied dyes and indicating color combinations — denoting the percentage of cyan, magenta or yellow to be used..."
...Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: "Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent."
The Times profile/obit of Tatjana Wood is a great overview, with several large examples of her work and a couple of photos of her, along with quotations from various comics folks who knew her. She had a truly long career in comic books, and if you'd paid much attention to the industry, hers was a name that came up again and again across the decades.
Tatjana Wood (1926-2026) – Comicsbeat
Karen Berger, Paul Levitz and Nancy Collins remember comics colorist Tatjana Wood – Bleeding Cool
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Original Page March 19, 2025