Inker

Last updated

The inker (sometimes credited as the finisher or embellisher) [1] is one of the two line artists in traditional comic book production.

Contents

After the penciller creates a drawing, the inker interprets this drawing by outlining and embellishing it with a pencil, a pen or a brush. Inking was necessary in the traditional printing process as presses could not reproduce pencilled drawings. Another specialist, the letterer, handles the "inking" of text, while the colorist applies color to the final art submitted by the inker. [2]

Workflow

While inking involves tracing pencil lines in a literal sense, it is an act of creative interpretation rather than rote copying. Inkers fine-tune the composition by adding the proper weight to lines, creating visual contrast through shading, and making other creative choices. A pencil drawing can have many shades of grey depending on the hardness of the graphite and the pressure applied by the artist, but an ink line generally can be only solid black. Accordingly, the inker has to translate pencil shading into patterns of ink, for example by using closely spaced parallel lines, feathering, or cross-hatching. The result is that the final look of a penciller's art can vary enormously depending on the inker.

An experienced inker paired with a novice penciler might also be responsible for correcting anatomical or other mistakes, modifying facial expressions, or changing or improving the artwork in a variety of other ways. Alternatively, an inker may do the basic layout of the page, give the work to another artist to do more detailed pencil work, and then ink the page themself (as Joe Simon often did when inking Jack Kirby, [3] or when Michael T. Gilbert collaborated with penciler P. Craig Russell on the Elric of Melniboné series).

The division between penciller and inker described here is most frequently found where the penciller and inker are hired independently of each other by the publisher. Where an artist instead hires their own assistants, the roles are less structured; an artist might, for example, ink all the faces of the characters while leaving the assistant to ink in the backgrounds, or work with the inker in a more collaborative fashion. Among Neal Adams' Crusty Bunkers, one inker may have been responsible for the characters' heads, another doing bodies, and a third embellishing backgrounds. [4] The inking duo Akin & Garvey had a similar arrangement, with one inking the figures and the other the backgrounds.

Digital inking

One can ink digitally using computers, a practice that has started to become more common as inkers learn to use powerful drawing and editing tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Inkscape, Corel Painter, and Manga Studio. A graphics tablet is the most common tool used to accurately ink digitally, and use of vector-based programs precludes pixelization due to changes in resolution. However the process is more time-consuming.

As of 2015 some companies put scanned pencils on an FTP site. The inker downloads them, prints them in blue, inks the pages, scans them in and loads the finished pages back on the FTP site for the company to download. While this procedure saves a company time and shipping costs, it requires artists to spend money on computer equipment.

History

For a long time, inking was considered a minor part of the comics industry, only marginally above lettering in the pecking order. In the early days of comic books, many publishers hired "packagers" to produce entire books. Although some "star" creators' names (such as Simon and Kirby or Bob Kane) usually appeared at the beginning of each story, the publisher generally did not care which artists worked on the book. In the early days, the creator of the feature would get credit for as long as they worked on the feature, but when they were replaced by other artists, no name credit would be given to them. Packagers instituted an assembly line style method of creating books, using top talents like Kirby to create the look and pace of the story and then handing off the inking, lettering, and coloring to largely anonymous – and low-paid – creators to finish it.

Deadline pressures and a desire for consistency in the look of a feature led to having one artist pencil a feature while one or more other artists inked it. At Marvel Comics, where the pencil artist was responsible for the frame-by-frame breakdown of the story plot, an artist who was skilled in story-telling would be encouraged to do as many books as possible, maximizing the number of books they could do by leaving the inking to others. By contrast, at other companies where the writer did the frame-by-frame breakdown in script form, more artists inked or even lettered their own work. Joe Kubert, Jim Aparo and Alex Toth would usually pencil, ink and letter, considering the placing of word balloons as an integral part of the page, and artists such as Bill Everett, Steve Ditko, Kurt Schaffenberger, Murphy Anderson, and Nick Cardy almost always inked their own work (and sometimes the work of other pencilers as well). Most artists, however – even experienced inkers of their own work like Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Will Eisner, and Alex Toth – at times hired or allowed other artists to ink their drawings. Some artists could make more money by pencilling more pages and leaving the inking to others; different artists with different working methods might find it more profitable to both pencil and ink, as they could place less information and detail in the pencil drawings if they were inking it themselves and could put that detail in at the inking stage.

Due to the absence of credits on most Golden Age comic books, many inkers of that period are largely forgotten. For those whose names are known, it is difficult to compile résumés. Inkers like Chic Stone, George Papp, and Marvin Stein embellished thousands of pages during that era, most of which are still unidentified.

Crediting

In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics began giving the inker credit in each of their publications and other publishers began to follow suit. This allowed finishers like Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Mike Esposito, John Severin, Syd Shores, and Tom Palmer to earn a reputation as inkers as well as pencillers. In addition, penciller–inker teams like Kirby and Sinnott, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, Gene Colan and Palmer, and John Byrne and Terry Austin captured the attentions of comic book fandom.

Industry awards

In 2008 Marvel and DC inker Bob Almond founded the Inkwell Awards, which is an award established to celebrate the craft of inking and to lift the profile of the art in general. The Inkwell Awards has gained much publicity and counts notable inkers such as Joe Sinnott, Nathan Massengill and Tim Townsend as members and associates.

Notable inkers

Notable penciller–inker partnerships

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Sinnott</span> American comic book artist (1926–2020)

Joseph Leonard Sinnott was an American comic book artist. Working primarily as an inker, Sinnott is best known for his long stint on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, from 1965 to 1981, initially over the pencils of Jack Kirby. During his 60 years as a Marvel freelance artist and then remote worker salaried artist, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders, and Thor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dick Giordano</span> American comic book artist and editor, 1932-2010

Richard Joseph Giordano was an American comics artist and editor whose career included introducing Charlton Comics' "Action Heroes" stable of superheroes and serving as executive editor of DC Comics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Klaus Janson</span> Artist

Klaus Janson is a German-born American comics artist, working regularly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics and sporadically for independent companies. While he is best known as an inker, Janson has frequently worked as a penciller and colorist.

<i>Western Gunfighters</i>

Western Gunfighters is the name of two American Western-anthology comic book series published by Marvel Comics and its 1950s forerunner, Atlas Comics.

Scott Williams is an American comic book artist, best known for his work as an inker, and for his decades-long partnership with artist Jim Lee, both of whom began their career with Homage Studios, collaborating on books including The Uncanny X-Men, WildCATs, Batman, Superman, WildC.A.T.s/X-Men, All-Star Batman and Robin, and Justice League. Williams has also inked the pencils of Whilce Portacio and Marc Silvestri, and books including Gen13.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Severin</span> American cartoonist

John Powers Severin was an American comics artist noted for his distinctive work with EC Comics, primarily on the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat; for Marvel Comics, especially its war and Western comics; and for his 45-year stint with the satiric magazine Cracked. He was one of the founding cartoonists of Mad in 1952.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Ordway</span> American comic book writer & artist

Jeremiah Joseph Ordway is an American writer, penciller, inker and painter of comic books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dick Ayers</span> American cartoonist

Richard Bache Ayers was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chic Stone</span> American comic book artist (1923-2000)

Charles Eber "Chic" Stone was an American comic book artist best known as one of Jack Kirby's Silver Age inkers, including his landmark run of Fantastic Four.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vince Colletta</span> American comic book artist

Vincent Colletta was an American comic book artist and art director best known as one of Jack Kirby's frequent inkers during the 1950s-1960s period called the Silver Age of comic books. This included some significant early issues of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, and a long, celebrated run on the character Thor in Journey into Mystery and The Mighty Thor.

Sydney Shores was an American comic book artist known for his work on Captain America both during the 1940s, in what fans and historians call the Golden Age of comic books, and during the 1960s Silver Age of comic books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tartaglione</span> American comic book artist (1921-2003)

John Tartaglione, a.k.a. John Tartag and other pseudonyms, was an American comic book artist best known as a 1950s romance-comics artist; a Marvel Comics inker during the Silver Age of comic books; and the illustrator of the Marvel biographies The Life of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the first of which at least sold millions of copies worldwide in several languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Klein (comics)</span>

George D. Klein was an American comic book artist and cartoonist whose career stretched from the 1930s and 1940s' Golden Age of comic books until his death in 1969. He was best known as an inker for DC Comics, where he was an integral part of the Superman family of titles from 1955 to 1968, and for Marvel Comics, where he was the generally recognized, uncredited inker on Jack Kirby's pencil art for the landmark comic book The Fantastic Four #1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Abel</span> American comic book artist

Jack Abel was an American comic book artist best known as an inker for leading publishers DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He was DC's primary inker on the Superman titles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and inked penciler Herb Trimpe's introduction of the popular superhero Wolverine in The Incredible Hulk #181. He sometimes used the pseudonym Gary Michaels.

Thomas John Palmer was an American comic book artist best known as an inker for Marvel Comics.

Paul Ryan was an American comic artist. Ryan worked extensively for Marvel Comics and DC Comics on a number of super-hero comic book titles. He is best known for his 1991 to 1996 run as penciler on Fantastic Four, which represents his longest association with an individual comic book series. From 2005 until his death in 2016, Ryan penciled and inked the daily newspaper comic strip The Phantom for King Features Syndicate.

<i>World of Fantasy</i> Comic book series

World of Fantasy was a science fiction/fantasy comic book anthology series published by Marvel Comics' 1950s predecessor company, Atlas Comics. Lasting from 1956 to 1959, it included the work of several notable comics artists, including industry legends Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Bill Everett.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josef Rubinstein</span>

Josef "Joe" Rubinstein is a comic book artist and inker, most associated with inking Marvel Comics' The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and the 1982 four-issue Wolverine miniseries by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. He is also known for giving artist Art Adams his first professional work.

John Costanza is an American comic book artist and letterer. He has worked for both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He was the letterer during Alan Moore's acclaimed run on Swamp Thing. The bulk of Costanza's art assignments have been for anthropomorphic animal comics and children-oriented material.

<i>Daredevil</i> (Marvel Comics series) Multiple comic book series

Daredevil is the name of several comic book titles featuring the character Daredevil and published by Marvel Comics, beginning with the original Daredevil comic book series which debuted in 1964.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.