Wil Gregersen read this post, then sent me the following…
You wrote that John Buscema was okay with being inked by Frank Giacoia and that Giacoia was probably the inker most Marvel pencilers wanted inking their work, and I'm wondering why. I've always thought that Giacoia's inking is clear and clean and never overwhelms the pencils underneath, but his lines also seem delicate to me and less powerful than the lines of other inkers.
When I look at Buscema inked by Joe Sinnott, I'm overwhelmed by dynamism. Buscema inked by Giacoia seems less dynamic to me. I'm assuming pencilers at Marvel were focused on creating strong and potent images, but maybe they wanted other things to come through. What am I missing?
Well, Wil: Artists want strong and potent images where they intend strong and potent images. There are also spots when they intend humanity and expression and emotions and maybe even some subtlety. An artist's work is very personal to them and I don't think an outsider always understands what they intend or want to see in the finished product. It may not be what you or I want to see.
In the case of John Buscema, what I got in our conversations is that he looked at the output of most inkers of his work and did not see a lot of understanding of what he had put down in pencil. When an artist says that, I think we have to bow to his expertise in this matter.
Sometimes, it may be that lack of understanding. Sometimes, it may be the inker making deliberate changes…and that inker may be doing so at the direction of the editor. Or maybe it was the inker relying on a limited repertoire of inking tricks. Gil Kane used to complain about one of his inkers who had a certain way of rendering foliage and another who had a certain way of rendering hair. He said that no matter what he put down in the pencils, those men inked it the way they inked all foliage or all hair. It's like the way some comic book artists (pencilers and inkers) give every hero the same musculature. It's often "One physique fits all."
I would guess that if you'd asked all those artists who liked having their work inked by Giacoia what they liked, the answer would have been something like "Frankie understands what I do." That might mean thinner lines in some places than you want to see. I would think it would almost always involve capturing all the humanity and personality and expression in bodies and especially in faces. I think what most often goes wrong in awkward penciler/inker match-ups is a loss of expression in the faces.
Since you don't usually see the pencil art, you don't know what got changed or left behind in the inking process. Buscema knew what he'd put in and what he didn't see in the finished comics. You may love his work inked by Joe Sinnott — I did too, though I preferred Giacoia (or better still, John himself) but John didn't. Most pencilers loved what Sinnott did with their work but to John, I believe it was too uniformly slick.
On Fantastic Four and maybe Thor when he inked that book, Sinnott was usually under orders to keep the Kirby flair, To do so, he often overpowered the various pencilers who followed Jack. I don't think John liked that overpowering.
He greatly respected Joe Sinnott, as did everyone at Marvel, but there has always been a problem inherent in the penciler/inker breakdown of labor. Another noted penciler whose name I won't mention once complained to me about certain inkers he had. He said, "Most of them are inking me because they're not good enough artists to pencil. And since they're not as good as I am, they bring my work down closer to their level."
And then he added, "The results may be good but since the readers don't get to see what I did, they don't know how much the inker diminished what I did." You might not agree that certain inkers diminished certain pencilers but I think we can all understand that a pencil artist who cares about his work doesn't want to see it diminished. Or in the case of a Buscema/Sinnott Fantastic Four, made to look a little less like Buscema and more like Jack Kirby.
