Gary Picariello wrote…
I might have read it on your site or within the pages of Jack Kirby Collector but somewhere it was noted that Wally Wood was lobbying to be the inker of New Gods and maybe the other Fourth World titles as well. Obviously, that never happened. Was it a matter of reliability on Wood's part? Lack of control on DC's part? I think that would have been a great match!
Wood applied to be Jack Kirby's inker at DC in 1970 but he applied too late. Vince Colletta already had the job. Even if Wood had applied earlier, I don't think he'd have gotten the position for a number of reasons, one being that Wood was more expensive than Colletta. For a time there, DC liked to try and balance the cost of a high-priced pencil artist with a low-priced inker.
The savings were not great — just a couple bucks per page — but they tried to do this whenever they could. For a while there, the work of Curt Swan (high page rate penciler) was inked on stories (not covers) by low page rate artists. It seemed to be hurting sales so they gave up on that idea and assigned Murphy Anderson (higher page rate inker) but that didn't mean they stopped trying to do that wherever they thought they could get away with it.
So there was one reason I don't think they'd have given the job to Wood. Another was that the two main people at DC who determined who drew or inked what at DC — Editorial Director Carmine Infantino and Production Manager Sol Harrison — both thought Colletta was terrific at inking Kirby. They could have had Frank Giacoia do it. (Giacoia told me they said he could ink as much of Kirby's art as he could handle…then gave it all to Vince.) They could have stolen Joe Sinnott away from Marvel but they didn't want him. There were other choices.
They wanted Colletta. After Mike Royer replaced Colletta, Sol Harrison kept telling Kirby that Colletta was better…an opinion, I believe, that had everything to do with the fact that having Royer ink Kirby circumvented Sol's Production Department. And I think they had other books they would rather have had Wood handle.
Matter of fact, I think if Carmine had called Jack and said, "We're going to have Wally Wood ink your comics," Jack might well have said, "Don't waste him on that. Wally Wood is a great talent. Let him create, write and draw a new comic on his own!"
Would Kirby/Wood have been a great match on Jack's DC books? I dunno. The more I look at their 1950's collaborations on Challengers of the Unknown and the Sky Masters newspaper strip, the less I like the teaming. I know some people think it was the greatest match-up of penciler and inker ever in comics and I used to love it. But my tastes have evolved and I prefer the inkers who let more of the Kirby through.
Interestingly, the first time I met Wally Wood in 1970, he told me he didn't think he'd done right by Kirby's penciled art. He felt he'd "overinked" and that what Joe Sinnott had been doing over Kirby on Fantastic Four was more the way Jack's art should be inked. Wood said that if he'd gotten the job of inking Jack at DC, he'd have tried to do it more like Sinnott. (He meant after Joe's first year or so inking Jack. Sinnott also decided he'd been changing Jack too much and dialed it down.)
Wood only got to ink Jack once after that…Sandman #6 in 1975. It was not an impressive pairing but it may not have been a fair test. It was a comic Jack hated drawing and Wood's work was quite variable at the time based on his health and who he had assisting at any given moment. Wally Wood was such a great talent and I don't think the industry usually knew what to do with him or how to treat a guy like that.
