Joe Frank wrote to ask about the teaming of Jack Kirby as penciler and Wally Wood as inker at Marvel in the sixties…
Questions about Kirby/Wood inks pre-Fourth World. He had instances of Jack and Wally coming together, at mid-'60s Marvel, on some very impressive covers.
But not on the stories. He inked Jack's Daredevil figures in Fantastic Four #39. He inked the Odin/Absorbing Man cover to Journey Into Mystery #122. But no full tales on those books. Was Stan not impressed with their previous collaborations? Or did he prefer to use Wally over other pencilers?
If not for starting the Tower line, would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?
Well, first you have to remember that Wood didn't work a lot for Marvel in the sixties. He was there about a year, during which time he was also producing a fair amount of advertising art and he also drew the first three issues of a Gold Key comic book known variously as Total War or Mars Patrol Total War. For Marvel (by my count), he inked or penciled and inked about ten covers, inked three issues of The Avengers, drew (with some help) seven issues of Daredevil, and he inked one 12-page story for Strange Tales and a few pages in a Captain America story in Tales of Suspense. Then there were those art fixes on Fantastic Four #39 which, Wood told me, he did in about an hour in the Marvel offices.
If he'd stuck around longer, he probably would have inked more covers and more stories and some of the stories might have been penciled by Jack. Wood told me Stan also wanted him to do some issues of X-Men over Kirby layouts but I suspect that plan went away, along with Stan's thought of having Wood as the artist of the new Sub-Mariner strip in Tales to Astonish, with the decision to up Daredevil and X-Men from bi-monthly to monthly. That was, of course, just prior to Wood's decision to get out of Marvel and never work, at least directly, for Stan Lee ever again.
But while Wood was there, Stan was happy with the inkers he had on the books Jack was drawing and he put Wood where he felt he needed him at that moment. Being the editor of a line of comics like that involves moving around a lot of chess pieces and you need to consider all of them with every move. If Stan had said, as some have wished he had, "I'll have Wood ink Kirby on Fantastic Four," then he'd have had to find someone else to ink The Avengers. He may have thought that book needed Wood's touch more than any of the Kirby books. Or Jack's books may have been so far ahead of schedule, as he sometimes was, that Stan wasn't assigning anyone to ink them at the moments when Wood might have had time.
Not long after, Marvel raised its rates for inking. That made it possible to engage Joe Sinnott to ink F.F., but in the years before that raise, they had a fair amount of trouble finding inkers. A lot of assignments were made based not on "Who'd be the best choice?" but rather "Who's available at the moment?"
As I understand it, Stan would have been much happier to have Wood pencil (only) for Marvel. Stan tended to judge artists by how well they functioned as plotters or co-plotters. Could they come up with story ideas? Could they take one of his sparse story ideas, go home, figure out all the details of the story and bring back twenty fully-penciled pages that he could easily dialogue? Some guys who could draw pretty-enough pictures couldn't do that.
Obviously, the two artists who were the best at it — who could figure out the whole story and all its twists and turns largely on their own — were Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Artists like Don Heck and Dick Ayers could do it decently if/when Stan (or someone) gave them more story input. But it didn't work so well with artists like Bob Powell or Carl Burgos…and when Joe Orlando was drawing Daredevil, he'd plot out and draw the story and then Stan would make him redraw a large hunk of every issue — without pay, of course.
It wasn't that Orlando was a bad artist. It was that he didn't plot the way Stan wanted stories plotted. It only took Joe three issues of Daredevil to decide to take a hike. Another person wrote me to ask why, of all the books Marvel was then putting out, Stan assigned Wally Wood to Daredevil. It was not a profound editorial casting decision. Wood walked in just after Orlando walked out and Daredevil needed an artist. Frankly, I think Wood could have drawn any comic in the place…
…and briefly, Stan thought he'd found another guy with the story sense of Kirby and Ditko.
You asked, "Would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?" Probably not exclusively. Comic book artists all have different ways of working and sometimes, they have different attitudes about penciling, inking or doing both.
Chic Stone wanted to do full art. For a while though, he let Stan turn him into an inker because that's what the company needed just then. Stone agreed because he didn't have any offers to do full art just then, plus he found it educational to ink Kirby. He told me Stan kept promising him the chance to pencil and after repeated nagging, Stan finally gave him a Human Torch story to pencil. Stone got a few pages into it and then Stan stopped him — the pages were never used — and tried to put him back to inking. I'll bet you the problem wasn't with the way Stone drew but what he drew in each panel…the plotting, not the artwork. That was when Stone went elsewhere.
John Romita, when he came over, wanted to only ink for a while…and then Stan pressed him into drawing Daredevil when Wood quit and a tryout of Dick Ayers didn't work out. There are other guys who at times wanted to pencil and at times wanted to ink, and at times wanted to do some of each or full art on some feature. They couldn't always get what they wanted.
Ditko liked to pencil and ink, especially on strips he considered "his" like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. He was pressured into doing pencils only for a while on The Hulk — a character he did not consider "his" — but he resisted Stan's requests to let others ink Spider-Man or Dr. Strange so he'd have time to pencil more for Marvel. (George Roussos inked a few Dr. Strange stories and did some uncredited inking on others when Ditko had some health problems.)
What I got from Wood is that once he became the official artist on Daredevil and did some redesigning of the feature, he wanted to pencil and ink that comic on a regular basis. When he realized how much he was expected to contribute to the stories as artist, he began pressing to also write the comic…and Stan did let him write one issue, then declared it a failure which was not to be repeated. That was when Wood decided to leave, which roughly coincided with when he got the offer to do T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He told me he did not decide to leave Marvel because of that offer. He decided to leave, then got the offer.
So when he was working for Marvel then, Daredevil was his regular assignment and then he did inking when he had time. He did not want to only ink and he didn't want to only pencil and he didn't want to commit to penciling another regular comic because that would have meant learning who its characters were and its past storylines and doing more of what he considered unpaid and uncredited writing.
And he certainly didn't want to commit to more regular assignments which might have forced him to turn down some of the more lucrative advertising jobs he was offered…and he still had some projects of his own he wanted to pursue. The quantity of work he could do for Stan varied depending on other assignments and who he had available to assist him at any given moment. So he was more comfy just committing to Daredevil and then taking on inking work on a "when I have time for it" basis.
Sorry for the long reply but I hope you found it of interest and I hope that somewhere in there, I answered your question.
