Inker - History

History

For a long time, inking was an under-appreciated 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 didn't care which artists worked on the book. Packagers quickly 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. In 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 he 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 and Jim Aparo 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, and Nick Cardy almost always inked their own work (and sometimes the work of other pencilers as well). Most artists, however — even expert inkers of their own work like Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Will Eisner, and Alex Toth — all 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, finding that they needed to 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.

Sadly, 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.

The advent of the Marvel era in the early 1960s finally gave the inker proper credit. It soon became obvious that the inking was the second-most important visual element of a comic book, and finishers like Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Mike Esposito, John Severin, Syd Shores, and Tom Palmer began to get their due. These inkers are experienced pencillers in their own right. When a penciller/inker team clicked, the synthesis of these talents elevated the parts beyond what they could achieve individually. Notable penciller-inker teams like Kirby and Joe Sinnott, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, Gene Colan and Palmer, and John Byrne and Terry Austin (particularly on The Uncanny X-Men) proved that comics could truly became a collaborative art.

In 2008 Marvel and DC inker Bob Almond founded the Inkwell Awards, which is an award established to celebrate the craft of inking and also 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.