Sally Forth began as a recruit in a commando unit in the June 1968 Military News, a 16-page tabloid from Armed Forces Diamond Sales.
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.[citation needed]
Sally returned July 26, 1971, in the Overseas Weekly, a tabloid intended for 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 the Overseas Weekly until April 22, 1974. The Sally Forth comics were translated into Dutch during the late 1970s. The character was named Doortje Stoot and it appeared in the male-oriented magazine Gummi.
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 of the Wood Studio, reformatted the strips into a series of comics published by Eros Comix, an imprint of Fantagraphics Books. During 1998, Pearson edited the entire run into a single 160-page volume also published by Fantagraphics.
Near the end of his life, two pornographic Sally Forth stories featuring Sally and Bill Yonder were created and published by Wood in the adult comic book series Gang Bang #1 in 1980 and #2 in 1981.[citation needed]
