The Assembly Line
Part 2
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 4/11/97
Comics Buyer's Guide
Most comic books are illustrated in a three-stage process: The pages are completely drawn out in pencil…then the lettering is inscribed in ink…then the art is finished in ink. One, two, three. Lately, computer lettering has slightly amended the routine on some books but it still remains a procedure of three separate, distinct phases, usually involving three separate craftspersons.
A few columns back, we discussed the fact that comic book companies often supply drawing paper to their artists. This, we noted, is less due to generosity than to a desire not to have quarrels. The general rule of thumb is as follows…
If the penciller picks out the paper, the inker won't like it and if the inker picks out the paper, the penciller won't like it, and even if the penciller and inker agree on a stock, the letterer won't like it.
I mentioned here weeks ago that, when I worked for Jack Kirby, it took us a while to find a paper stock on which he could draw. The pencils he liked to use did not like the paper that DC supplied…but when we bought a kind that worked for Jack, it presented problems galore for Mike Royer, who inked n' lettered the books. Well, I'd forgotten (but Mike has since reminded me) that even the paper stock we ultimately selected wasn't ideal and, in order to do his best work, Mike found it necessary to iron the pages before inking them.
You read that right: Iron them. As in, he took a plain, old-fashioned iron — the same kind your momma used to press your dungarees — and ran it back and forth over all those Kamandi pages.
No, they weren't wrinkled. You don't have to be Bill Nye the Science Guy to figure out the heat did something to the graphite and/or paper, making it more conducive to ink. Mike wore out three or four General Electric irons in the service of the King of the Comics.
To ward off squabbles, many companies buy a ton-weight of one kind of paper, imprint it with blue lines to denote the margins, and make everyone draw on it. Yes, it can be more convenient for some artists — the ones who like the paper — but it also makes it easier for an editor to hand a pencil job to any inker. For the same reason, they usually insist that everyone draw their artwork the same size. As we will be noting here ad nauseum, artists are all different. Some like to work smaller…some, larger.
Some even like to work as small as possible. Alex Toth drew some of his stories for Warren the same size they were printed. Dick Briefer is said to have drawn his classic Frankenstein series close to the published size. John Severin, who now prefers to work as large as possible, did a few of his EC stories only slightly larger than they'd appear in the comics. Pat Boyette has done some of his comics close to printed size, as has R. Crumb.
A few artists have also worked smaller for a different reason: Back in the mid-to-late sixties, Dell Comics was paying next-to-zip for art in books like Ghost Stories and Outer Limits. Some of their illustrators. including Frank Springer and Jack Sparling, didn't figure they should be putting a lot of drawing on pages that paid so poorly. To cut down on the space they had to fill, they adopted a smaller-than-usual size. Not every artist lessens his drawing time working smaller — it takes some longer — but it apparently allowed these guys to give Dell their money's worth, and no more.
But these are all special cases. Most original art is drawn notably larger than the size it is printed. Oddly enough, the artist is usually given little or no say as to just how much larger. Some guy with a title like Production Manager decides what size everyone will work and that, usually, is that.
Over the years, the size of the original art has often impacted the design of what was drawn on it. Back in the forties and fifties, many of Western Publishing's funny animal comics (Disney, Looney Tunes, etc.) were drawn so large that most artists couldn't fit an entire page on their drawing tables. Carl Barks, among others, cut the pages in half and would work on one piece, then the other.
This, of course, made it impossible to do a full-page panel or to have a panel cross the center of the page. Later on, Western went down to a more functional size, with an image area around 12 1/2" by 18 1/2". (The paper itself was larger, to allow for margins. But the art itself was to those dimensions.)
Up until 1967, DC and Marvel artists worked at that size. That was the year one of our great artists, Murphy Anderson, drew a few stories for The Spectre and pestered DC into letting him work smaller. He selected 10" by 15" as a comfortable size. Since Murphy was doing both pencils and inks, DC Production Manager Sol Harrison acquiesced and okayed the smaller size, probably after being assured by letterer Gaspar Saladino that he could handle the different scale.
When Anderson's pages were going through the engraving process, someone at the color separator's plant called up DC and said, "You know, we could save you some money if you drew all your comics this size." With the smaller size, it was possible to fit four pages under the camera at once, as opposed to two of the old size. It also saved the strippers lots of work.
(Strippers are not what you think. In a printing operation, stripping is the handling of the negatives and the work necessary to get them prepped and positioned to make printing plates.)
So the smaller size saved film and manpower, which meant that it saved money. For the first forty years of its existence, the comic book business never passed up an opportunity to save money on printing, no matter how it cheapened the product or inconvenienced the artists.
And many artists were inconvenienced. Over the next year or two, the 10" by 15" art size became the industry standard. While some artists (Gene Colan, Neal Adams, Joe Kubert) liked it or came to like it, many (Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck) did not. Kirby really disliked the change, especially at first. He said, "The first time I finished a page, I picked it up and half the art was on my drawing table."
Most of the Marvels changed within a month or two of the issues dated November, 1967. Jack's first work on the small size was the Captain America story in that month's Tales of Suspense (#95) and you can see everyone experimenting: The lettering is too big, the inking is too bold, and Jack's panels are filled with head shots and sparse backgrounds. Within a few months, everyone had learned how to accommodate the page proportions, but Jack still longed for the larger canvas.
Many artists did. A couple of guys who retired at about that time (especially inkers) blamed the smaller size for harming their work. One of them told me that he complained to his editor that a page now took him twice as long, and that the results weren't nearly as good. The editor's response, he claimed, was: "Yeah, but the pages are easier to mail now."
Still, most got used to it. Interestingly, throughout the seventies, Gold Key Comics and Charlton both gave their illustrators the choice of which size to draw, and most picked the larger. Most of their artists inked their own work, so this caused less ruckus than it might have at DC or Marvel, where most work was then by penciller-inker combos.
It changed comics. Whether it was for better or worse is arguable but it certainly changed the manner in which most artists would approach the composition of their pages.
Comic books, as we all know (and will discuss more, next week) started by reprinting newspaper comic strips. The syndicates furnished stats (or in some cases, the originals) of old strips to the funnybook companies. There, some lowly-paid assistant would chop the stats — or originals — up and repaste them into the then-new comic book page format.
Syndicated strips are all drawn to the same height: Every panel of Dick Tracy had the same vertical measurement, so when someone had to jigsaw Dick Tracy into page layouts, there weren't a lot of decisions to make. They could paste them up in three-tier format (three rows of panels across the page) or four-tier format (four rows). Three-tier made the panels larger and made the supply of reprints last longer…so most pages were divvied up that way.
Soon, the then-new comic book publishers began commissioning new material instead of buying stats from syndicates. There were a couple of reasons for this, probably all of which had to do with money. The syndicates wanted more, wanted to be paid promptly, and were even considering publishing their own comic books. For a publisher like Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who sired the company we now know as DC, it was simpler to hire kids to draw original comics.
Most of the first materials created expressly for comic books aped the newspaper material, often to the nth degree. That included the same page layouts for comics.
Comic book artists in the forties and fifties didn't deviate much from the basic three-tier format — or four, in some funny animal comics. The opening (or "splash" panel) would be larger, of course, and if the scene involved some vertical action or object, they might make one panel span two tiers. Innovative artists — most notably Simon and Kirby — might dare a full-page panel or even a double-spread, but it was always as a deviation from the three-tier grid.
In the sixties, more and more, they started to break away from a simple "grid" of panels and to work for more unusual page layouts. I believe that the smaller page size encouraged this.
If you sit down at a drawing board with a page that size, you can see why this was. If you are close enough to a 12 1/2" by 18 1/2" piece of illustration board to be able to draw on it, you are too close to be able to view the page as a whole. There is therefore the tendency to look at one part of the page at a time — to rule the page off into panels and then to design things, panel by panel. You cannot get a good view of the page as a whole.
My friend/collaborator Dan Spiegle came up with a novel way of dealing with this problem, and he's the only artist I've ever heard of doing this. He worked standing up. He would pin the page on an easel and do his inking in a standing position. Thus, he only had to step back to view the page as a whole. And that's how he worked…how he was able to so expertly design a page when he worked on the larger size. He would ink a little, then step back and look at the entire page. Then he'd ink a little more and step back. If he'd been sitting down, he wouldn't have been able to easily view the page in its totality.
Today, when he draws comics, it's on the smaller size so he can sit down. With the smaller size, you can easily see the entire page without having to move back from it. So you naturally tend to design the entire page at once, instead of focussing on panel one, then moving on to panel two. Most artists today design pages broken up into individual panels, rather than to design individual panels that happen to form a page. (Also, of course, drawing on smaller paper encourages the division of a page into fewer panels.)
There were other reasons for the increase in free-form page layouts, most notably the influence of a number of artists like Neal Adams, Jim Steranko and Carmine Infantino. But I believe that the mere change in the original art size was highly conducive to getting away from the standard six-square-panels-per-page format. It surely helped nudge a lot of artists to follow the lead of the layout innovators.
It also changed things for inkers. With the smaller size, their linework wasn't being reduced as much for reproduction; therefore, inking had to be a bit more precise, a bit cleaner, and a bit subtler. A rough ink line looks rougher on the smaller size.
Also, the tendency to look at the entire page, rather than individual panels, has caused inkers to spot their black areas more to balance the design of the entire page. It also became easier to apply zip-a-tone — or other "screened" black line patterns — to the pages, and many inkers added these tools to their repertoire.
Today, few artists work larger than 10" by 15". (Those who draw comics where the image bleeds off the page have to work on larger paper so they can draw into the margins…but the reduction is essentially the same.)
And today, few artists divide their pages into simple rows of same-height panels. You can decide for yourself if there's a connection.
While you're mulling that one over, I'll return to my central thesis, which is that the comic book industry has too many arbitrary, treat-everyone-the-same ideas about how comics have to be created. Having everyone draw the same size and on the same paper are but two of them. The only advantage to it is that it makes things modular for the editor: He can have one guy pencil a story and then he can give it to any other guy to ink.
I think that's also a very bad idea. Which means it's a very good topic for next week's column.