Any list of "The Nicest People in Comics" would have to include Joe Sinnott in the top three or so. Joe is a gentleman in every sense of that oft-misapplied noun and to everyone who admires his work — a very large group of human beings — enormously generous with his time and talents.
And should you make up a list of "The Best Inkers Ever in Comics," you can start with Joe and go on from there. Inking is a peculiar institution that in the early days of comics was often the job description for those of lesser talent. You have some good artists and some not-so-good artists and what you did to maximize production was to have the good artists draw the comic in pencil and then have the not-so-good ones inscribe those pencil lines in ink. It may have harmed the work of the good artists but, hey, it got more pages out of them each month. Quantity over quality: That's how the publishers thought. It was only the devotion and pride of some artists that made any comics better than they absolutely had to be.
That was the original idea behind having one guy pencil and another guy ink…and it must be admitted that even before Sinnott, there were some inkers who were turning their job description into a true craft, elevating and truly embellishing others' pencil art so that the sum of the parts was greater than individual efforts might have been. Still, when Joe Sinnott moved from complete art to inking in the late fifties and early sixties, he took the job to a whole new level. All across the business, others gasped and said, "Oh, that's how it should be done." Good artists had inked others before but they usually either turned off their drawing skills and just traced or they kept thinking like pencillers and submerged what the first guy had done. Joe did a little of that before he figured out inking like no one before him. He got into what the penciller was attempting, understood it and then enhanced and finished the pencil art instead of either redrawing it or just making it reproduceable.
If the distinction I'm trying to make here is a bit fuzzy, try this example: Wally Wood was a great artist, one of the best ever in comics. When he inked Jack Kirby in the fifties, excellent art resulted but a lot of that was a matter of him overpowering what Jack drew, even to the point of losing some elements of the pencil art where it would have been better to have more Kirby and less Wood. A few years later, when Sinnott began inking Jack's work, he retained just about everything Jack did well and enriched it. Joe in particular had a way of separating the planes of a composition, inking the foreground layers with bolder strokes so they "popped" and the backgrounds with thinner lines that caused them to recede. You got a sensation of 3-D without having to wear those stupid glasses and get a headache. The art had more depth in many ways, for Joe also captured every expression Jack had intended. Plus, he trued up the perspective when Kirby cheated a bit for effect and he never once, not for one panel, took the quick and easy way out. If Jack drew thirty figures in a panel, Joe inked thirty figures, plus he put nice patterns and textures on their outfits.
And like I said, all across the industry, every other inker said, "Oh, that's how it should be done." Even Wally Wood said it. At the 1970 New York Comic Convention, I interviewed him and he said — this is an approximate quote — "Someone showed me what Joe Sinnott was doing and I realized that's it. That's how Kirby should be inked. It was so much better than what I'd done." (Joe was at that convention. I went up to him later and said, "Congratulations. Earlier today, you received the biggest compliment a guy in your line of work can receive.")
If all this sounds gushy, I'm sorry but Joe Sinnott is one of the great treasures in the field of comic art, both personally and professionally. He's eighty years old today and I sure hope that means he's middle-aged now. Because we need at least another eighty years of this man. Happy birthday, Joe. And it just dawns on me I should tell you this directly, so as soon as I post this, your phone will be a'ringing.