Classic and Dud Inkers

Jimmy Palmiotti is a real dud to me. Though he hasn't been able to ruin Amanda Conner's pencils.

What about control freaks like Nowlan and Sienkiewickz? I love them because everything they put a hand into ends up looking much better than what those pencils must have been before, but it should also be said that they have never shown too much faith to the original artwork....

I love Kevin Nowlan. Terry Austin has scores of beautiful inking jobs to his name. Tom Palmer on Colan or John Buscema. Klaus Janson when given reasonably tight pencils. Dick Giordano when not sleepinking.

Worst would probably be late-Kirby inkers like Theakston and Thibodeaux.

More pictures please.

Nowlan on Gil Kane is divine.

Kane is one of the least-fuckupable pencillers ever though. Sure, a Kevin Nowlan or Jim Woodring produces extra-gorgeous work, but I can't think of anyone I've seen who's actually made him look rub.

Yeah, I feel Nowlan can differentiate when he has been given bad art and it's out to him to improve it (Superman Aliens by Jurgens, for example) from when pencils are good enough not to need a lot of retouch (Kane'd be a good, if not the best, example, Kit Brash OTM)

Terry Austin has done great inking jobs in the past, but his style has been steadily looking worse lately. ¿Could it be related to his natural ageing process? His strength used to be detail and I suppose that's not something that's gonna improve the older you get.

I've grown to dislike most of Perez' recent inking stuff. It's like he takes over just the worst of his pencilling style to his inking duties (too many tiny traces without sense or taste, etc)

i still don't really understand the artistic process of comic drawing/inking

What part of it confuses you?

What's everybody's opinion on Mike Royer over Kirby? I used to hate his inking, but I'm starting to change my mind after looking at some mid 70s stuff. So bold, like he was inking with a paint roller, but somehow it works.

Vince Colletta: Classic AND Dud.

Classic and underrated: Dan Adkins. I'm also very fond of Alfredo Alcala, although he's not to everyone's taste

Contemporary classic: Mick Gray--love his stuff with both J.H. Williams and Ryan Sook.

Royer was probably the inker most faithful to Kirby's pencils - he didn't 'streamline' the figures as much as Sinnott or some of the other Marvel inkers, and as Jack's work began to deteriorate towards the end of the seventies this kind of fidelity didn't always best the artwork. The recent Kamadi hardcover, printed on excellent paper, really shows just how good and elegant an inker Royer could be.

Great call on Dan Adkins, Douglas - he's one of those Marvel inkers you wished had done a lot more, and Vinnie Colletta a lot less.. I particularly like the delicate line that Adkins used on John Buscema's Silver Surfer

Echoing slocky, why is it that pencilling and inking have become such specialised skills? Why don't more artists do the whole job? What does inking involve, more than going over the lines drawn by the penciller?

The inker decides which lines stay, and sometimes they'll add new lines, and sometimes they'll get an edict from the editor to change some of the art. It's a very bizarre dynamic that is different in almost every case. The first issue of GLC: Recharge, for eg, has two inkers handling Patrick Gleason's pencils. One of them gives the lines a real thick and sharp going over, making the art look a little like the Mahnke/Nguyen stuff, but the other one (most noticeably in GLC: Recharge #1 when Guy Gardner busts in to the Guardians' chamber) is looser, and it looks closer to Sam Kieth almost.

Just from having gone through a whole schwack of the original Who's Who, I dig Theakston on Kirby.

Greg Theakston??? Fuckin' hell, he wld rate as just abt my least favourite Kirby inker of all time!

In ye olden days comics were v. often produced by a 'shop' of artists, each of whom wld perform a specific function - pencilling, inking, lettering, colouring etc. This was designed to increase productivity and also improve the finished product - many inkers were formerly pencillers who weren't fast/dynamic enough. It also made economic/creative sense for superstar pencil artists like Kirby to concentrate their energies on producing layouts, designing characters etc., rather than having them spend time on the less creatively demanding task of inking. An old pro like John Buscema cld knock out rudimentary layouts where all the basic storytelling functions were in place without getting bogged down in the detail of drawing in every blade of grass etc. Of course pencil art is very very difficult to reproduce, hence the practical need for inkers in the first place.

I remember reading that Al Williamson developed penciller's block — he just froze up at the prospect of doing layouts, but he could ink just as well as ever, so that's why there was plenty of (X)/Williamson but no Williamson/(X) over the last 20 years.

Giffen's Legion of SH work in the 80s is a good thing to see how inkers leave their mark (though Giffen's style in that era was pretty mercurial, if I'm using that correctly, ie, it changed quite a bit/often), Mike DeCarlo rounded everything and gave the whole world doe eyes (see also his inks on Aparo in Batman of the same era), while Al Gordon's presence was less announced.

Actually my favorite Dan Adkins stuff was w/ Don Newton on various DC things in the '70s/early '80s (Shazam!, Mister Miracle, Aquaman, and most enduringly Batman in Detective Comics).

Mike Esposito: Classic, Dud or Cipher?

Esposito was rubbish. Yeah, I really liked Adkins too, and Williamson was a glorious inker a lot of the time.

More Dan Adkins love: over Paul Gulacy on Master of Kung Fu. The Gulacy of MOKF had some really high highs (Adkins, Pablo Marcos, Gulacy inking himself on the most excellent #40) and some low lows: Esposito on #50, and Tom Sutton on one issue, a mismatch of epic proportions.

I feel bad, I never notice inkers' names unless the art looks truly awful.

That should be "Gulacy run on MOKF" above.

I guess the question is, how can you tell what is the work of the inker and what is the work of the other people involved?

This is sort of like sussing out who deserves the Academy Award for Best Editing.

It can be difficult - but one set of clues derives from seeing the penciller and inker with different partners. If such opportunity hasn't existed, we don't much need to separate. Also, you can always credit the greatest part of composition and panel-to-panel flow to the penciller, and most of any beauty or energy in the line to the inker. Things like the facial expressions generally demand both, that it takes a brave inker to make a big change, and a poor inker can lose any precision or subtlety.

When I was at home yesterday, I was looking through random back issues of Uncanny X-Men and found one illustrated by Silvestri that just looked way better than usual, much more refined and rounded. I thought "huh, reminds me a little bit of Steve Leialoha. I checked the credits and Leialoha was indeed the inker.

He and Silvestri should've teamed up more often!

Yesterday, I read just over two years of Green Lantern comics in one sitting. Vol. 2, from #170 through #196 (then I HAD to take a break, but rest assured, I will finish the whiz bang, Millennium crossovers and all, tonight). Mike DeCarlo "guest inked" one of the Dave Gibbons issues, and, um, it barely looked like Gibbons at all. It looked like Mike DeCarlo. Is he still active? He has one of the heaviest inking styles around. Everything he touches becomes DeCarlo art.

I think DeCarlo was an assistant to Dick Giordano before striking out on his own - his inkline is certainly a more clumsy version of Giordano's definitive pen rendering.

I realised the other day that I'm interested in inkers in the same way I'm interested in drummers on John Coltrane recs - the penciller/musician may stay the same, but different supporting players can sometimes radically alter the surface sound/detail

!!!

Jimmy Cobb = Joe Sinnott
Ed Blackwell = Terry Austin
Roy Haynes = Giordano
Elvin Jones = Dan Adkins
Rashied Ali = Pablo Marcos

Obviously I'm pulling comparisons out of my ass here.

I was looking at a TPB of the old Marvel Star Wars series the other night. Howard Chaykin inks himself for the first few, but really looks stellar with Leialoha's inks, whereas Frank Springer sends Howard's pencils to dudsville.

it's v. hard on rashied ali, comparing him to pablo marcos, he's more like alfredo alcala

sparkle you have nicely encapsulated the diff btwn classic and dud inkers, ty, i share yr distate for frank springer's thick brushy coatings, whereas steve leialoha is such a gd consistent inker, up there w/ tom palmer or klaus janson, love love love the lush stuff he did on gene colan's early howard the duck issues

Danny Miki's recent work (on David Finch's New Avengers art, & on Billy Tan's promo piece for Brubaker's upcoming X-run) has been boffo.

And KLAUS JANSON! I used to hate his inks (or his pencil / inks, actually), but what he's done lately has made me weak.

In a good way, obviously.

Links to samples?

Hopefully better than his work on Batman: Death & The Maidens?

Yeah, KJ on himself doesn't do it for me. This "sneak peek" of the last issue of JLA: Classified, however, is the stuff. [WARNING - PDF FILE]

Some examples of other folks mentioned (for, um, Casuistry):

Kirby / Sinnott:

http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/niven/142/img/rb0405.jpg

Byrne / Austin:

http://www.universomarvel.com/usa/portadas/uxm141.jpg

um, Nowlan / Nowlan:

http://www.universomarvel.com/esp/portadas/cpnl11.jpg

That last one is WOOT!

¿You can never go wrong with Dagger Punal, si?

Wow, I wouldn't have spotted that as Janson in a thousand guesses. Are you sure you didn't misspell "Terry Austin"?

PS -- I don't remember Garcia Lopez being that good.
PPS -- NICE booty-gram from WW, pg. 3 panel 1.

Hmmm... I'm gonna go along with those late Kirby inkers, and if I have to pick one, it'd be Thibodeaux. Most of the work he inked was still pretty fine (if a little wobbly round the egdes), where much of what Theakston inked was quite poor. (Mind you, I think Theakston would've screwed up prime Kirby too, but, in assessing the quality of what was lost...)

I used to like Dick Ayers but I find him moderately intolerable these days. Especially on Ditko. It's no better than throwing great art in the trash.

I love Joe Sinnott, yet, with reservations. There is a slightly artificial edge to his work that I'm not 100% crazy about. In more modern terms, people like Mark Farmer strike me the same way. Terry Austin, too, in his earliest work. He was losing that quality by the time he started inking Byrne on X-Men, which was obviously a wonderful run.

Klaus Janson is another one. He was very tight in the '70s, almost nauseatingly. By the time of the Miller Daredevil books he was doing great work. Later, he was at times horribly, horribly slack and careless. I haven't seen his stuff for a few years, though.

I've grown to appreciate more the self-inking artists. If I look at some of my fave artists, who else would I like to see inking them? No one, really. Keep it pure! Klaus Janson on Ditko? No thanks. (I bet it happened at least once, but maybe I've blanked it.) Even worse, imagine Joe Sinnott on Jaime Hernandez! Eeek. P Craig Russell did okay on Ditko, though I would still pick SD himself if I had a choice. Gil Kane -- all those '70s books inked by bloody Nestor Redondo and Rudy Nebres. *shudder* I love Kane, but life's too short to bother looking at those. Nebres infected Ditko & Buscema on various books too. Nice artist in his own right, just keep him the hell away from artists like that...

Somewhere I read some Legends of the Dark Knight or something with Sienkiewicz inking Aparo, and it's like, OH NO. Oil, meet water. Water, oil.