A follower of this site who goes by "Joe Five-Oh" — please leave me real names, people — wrote to ask…
Like you, I love the work that Jack Kirby did for Marvel in the sixties but I wince at a lot of the inking it got. Because of the good inkers he got, we know how good his artwork was but I don't understand why he had some of the bad inkers he had.
I especially weep when I look at Avengers #4, the iconic issue that brought Captain America back from the dead. The only thing that stops this from being an absolutely perfect comic book is the inking which looks to me as sloppy and amateurish. How could anyone think that was good? For years, I thought it was inked by Jack Kirby himself because he is the only artist credited on it but I found out a few years ago that the inker was George Roussos, who went by the name of George Bell on many other Marvels he inked at the time.
I don't blame him for not putting his real name on that amateurish work but why did the editor hire such a person who obviously had no experience? Why couldn't that issue have been inked by Joe Sinnott, Wally Wood, Frank Giacoia or even Chic Stone?
Taking your last question first: At the time Avengers #4 had to be inked, Joe Sinnott, Wally Wood, Frank Giacoia and even Chic Stone were not working for Marvel, though Stone started a month or so later. Stan Lee, who with Production Manager Sol Brodsky made such decisions, had the following inkers available to him: George Roussos, Paul Reinman and then Dick Ayers, Don Heck and Brodsky could occasionally ink something but all three of them were pretty busy doing other things for the company. In a rare moment, Steve Ditko might also ink a job penciled by someone else but he was especially swamped with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.
And before you ask why Stan didn't hire some other guys, the answer was that Marvel didn't pay very well then. In the book I'm working on about Jack — yes, I'm still working on it — I have a long quote from Brodsky about how difficult it was then to find anyone to ink for Marvel for those rates. This had a lot to do with the budget the publisher, Martin Goodman, set for the comics but, Sol said, it also had something to do with how Stan allocated that money — this much to the penciler, this much to the letterer, this much to himself, etc.
I also asked Sol why after a certain point, his own inking was confined to occasional covers or stories for books like Millie the Model. He didn't hesitate in telling me he was not a fast inker and with his other duties, he would never have had time to ink a whole issue of one of the super-hero books. He also told me he really liked what Roussos did.
So did Jack Kirby. So did Steve Ditko, who was the person who recommended Roussos to Stan. They were friends and Ditko had called on Roussos to assist him with some uncredited inking on some of the early Dr. Strange stories. Later on at DC, there was a time when Carmine Infantino had Roussos inking Curt Swan on Superman and quite a few other artists' work. Carmine even selected Roussos to ink stories that he [Carmine] drew for the company.
George Roussos (aka "George Bell," aka "Inky Roussos") was in no way an amateur when he inked for Marvel in the sixties. He started in comic books in 1939, which was not long after comic books themselves started. In 1940, he was assisting on the art for Batman and in that decade, he penciled, inked and sometimes even lettered and colored some memorable stories and covers not just of the Caped Crusader but other comics, as well. In the fifties, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby considered him one of the key men in their operation and in the sixties, he worked constantly for DC…but moonlighted elsewhere under his pen name or without credit.
His career in comics was actually one of the longest ones ever — from 1939 until his death in 2000. He spent the last twenty years as one of the main colorists for Marvel, handling most of their covers.
For some reason on Facebook, there's a lot of hatred directed at artists on long-ago comics and with inkers, it often sounds like, "How dare you ink that comic since you weren't Joe Sinnott!" If you don't like a given artist's work, okay. Fine. I might even agree with you about certain people.
But I think we oughta remember that at the time, that person may have been the editor's best option…and as often as not, when the artist handed in that work you didn't like, the editor told him, "Great job! Here's the next issue!" In the theater when an actor is woefully miscast, people usually blame the person who made that casting decision more than they blame the actor.
There's also often on Facebook and in other forums, a lack of recognition that other people can have other opinions. A guy who writes me from time to time insists that Stan Lee, when he was the head guy at Marvel, could not possibly have liked the work of Don Heck. Well, yes, he did. He hired Don every single time he could. (And if I'd been in his position, I would have, too.)
People seem to get mad when someone likes something they don't. I don't get that.
I liked the inking of "George Bell" on Kirby more than you did, especially on some concurrent issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. Roussos told me he thought that the main thing someone inking Jack Kirby had to aim for was keeping all the "power" in the figures and faces. George wasn't my fave but I thought he caught the emotion that Jack put into faces and bodies better than a lot of so-called "better" inkers. I like that he did not try to "fix" Jack's anatomy or other elements of his style.
And maybe I liked Roussos' work more than you because I first read Avengers #4 in January of 1964 when it came out. I had not yet seen Jack's work inked by Frank Giacoia or Chic Stone and some others. Later, when Jack was inked by those guys or certain others and that became the norm, a lot of earlier work looked primitive. It's like how the special effects in a lot of the movies I grew up on looked pretty good at the time but to kids reared on movies with CGI effects work, those older films probably look pretty tame and unconvincing.
In comics, the idea of one person penciling and a different person inking is a concept that was largely invented for the publishers' benefit. Left to their own choices, a few artists might have chosen to work that way but most people who decide to become artists don't think, "Gee, I want to do half the work and have someone else decide who does the other half and what they'll do with it." Splitting it up made things easier for the publisher and editor. If Freelancer #1 produced "A" quality work and Freelancer #2 produced "C" quality work, you could have #2 ink #1 and get a consistent flow of "B" quality work.
It also reduced the artists' proprietary feelings about this work on which the publisher intended to hold the copyright. It made it seem less the work of Freelancer #1 or Freelancer #2 and more the creation of a team that the publisher assembled and on which he held "final cut."
Artists drawing newspaper strips didn't have to work that way and most of them didn't. If they needed help getting their strips drawn every day, they might employ other artists but they would decide who should do what and the creator of the strip would retain "final cut." Guys like Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Walt Kelly and Elzie Segar all employed assistants but the work remained under their control. And none of those artists — and few others — broke it down to one person doing all the penciling and another doing all the inking.
I've long thought that comic books as a whole would have been better off if the artists had retained the control that comic strip artists had and still have. Yes, Jack Kirby might have picked assistants or inkers that you didn't like…but editors also did that. On the whole, I think comic books would have been better off.
