The Assembly Line
Part 3
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 4/11/97
Comics Buyer's Guide
This is another in my series of articles (collect the entire set!) in which I argue for breaking down the "traditional" rules of how a comic book must be created. Many assume that it must be done via one, highly-compartmentalized procedure, passing the work from writer to penciller to letterer to inker to colorist. This week, I intend to talk mostly about artwork.
Artists, as you'll soon be sick of hearing me say (assuming you aren't already) are all different. Some work best when they do a tight pencil rendering and then slavishly inscribe it in ink. Others work better with pen or brush…so they tend to pencil their figures in loosely, primarily for placement, then do the bulk of the actual drawing in the inking phase.
The late Doug Wildey was one of those (amazingly) rare comic artists who almost always did it all by himself. If he was ever inked by another artist, it was a rare exception that I don't remember. Doug could not in his mind, separate the process into two separate stages of pencilling and then inking.
He just sat down and drew. He had pencils there and he had pens and brushes and he would create his work on the paper in one unified burst of creativity. He'd rough-pencil in some figures, then maybe ink part of them in, then pencil part of another panel, then draw the backgrounds directly in ink, and so on. He'd wield pencil, brush and pen in rotation, as his muse decreed.
The results were, I thought, always splendid…and certainly as fine as Doug Wildey art could ever be.
And yet, in the sixties and seventies, when some of the New York publishers wanted Wildey to work for them, they initially didn't want him to work in the manner that best suited his talents. At first, they asked him if he wanted to pencil or if he wanted to ink. He actually tried inking another artist once: Alex Toth had pencilled a gothic ghost/romance book for DC and Wildey inked about a page and a half before declaring himself ill-suited for the task. Frank Giacoia finished off the job.
Doug had to both pencil and ink…but even when he could make publishers understand this, they wanted those functions segregated. They wanted Doug to pencil the entire story out, then send it in for lettering and editorial scrutiny…and then, weeks later, ink it. That was, again, not how Doug worked. Fortunately, there was one editor at DC who understood how to get the best out of Doug Wildey and who allowed him to just draw his comics. That editor was Joe Kubert who, as an artist, usually did it all and at his own pace. Joe was, alas, a rare exception in the industry.
As you'll recall from your college classes in the History of Panelology, comic books evolved out of many sources but mainly out of newspaper strips. The first comic books contained reprints of strips and it was only when that supply ran out — or became too costly — that publishers began commissioning original stories.
Well, they weren't that original, at least at first. Most of the early features were rather slavish imitations of the newspaper strips. A kid named Bob Kane simulated Alex Raymond's Jungle Jim and called it Clip Carson. Two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster aped Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and called it Slam Bradley. Later, Bob, Jerry and Joe would have a couple of more original ideas.
There were plenty of artists around — kids reared on the newspaper funny pages who dreamed of someday contributing to them. Then as now, the field of syndicated comic strips wasn't an easy entrance business. The newly-emerging comic books, however, would hire almost anyone — and did.
Almost to a man, the kids aped the work of five syndicated cartoonists — Chester Gould, Roy Crane, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff. Most imitated their favorite, though a few had portfolios stuffed with unsold strip ideas in all five styles and one or two even combined sources, often managing to steal from all five on every page they drew.
So when they started drawing for comic books, they worked pretty much as did their syndicate counterparts. DC made a deal with Siegel and Shuster to generate lots of stories of a strip called Superman (that was their "more original" idea and not a bad one). Jerry and Joe did the same thing that newspaper strip creators did: they hired assistants and worked with them to produce the material.
They employed artists like Wayne Boring and John Sikela. And Siegel even — not many know this — bought script ideas from other writers. He put his brilliant touch on everything, of course, as Shuster did with the artwork.
Meanwhile, Bob Kane did his equally-fine idea — some weird guy in a cape — with a crew that quickly included folks like George Roussos and Jerry Robinson and, of course, a superb writer by the name of Bill Finger. It was not unlike the way Al Capp operated on Li'l Abner: A team of writers and artists worked under the direction of the creator of the strip, who figured out how best to combine his talents with theirs.
(Quick note to myself: As we all know, a lot of the creators of early comic books lost all title to their characters by signing some pretty rotten deals. A topic for future discussion is to what extent they accepted these deals because they believed them to be the equivalent of the deals that the syndicates were making with the creators of newspaper comic strips.)
Most of the early comic book companies bought their material like that, or from "shops" of artists that functioned in much the same manner. Soon though, the publishers decided they needed more control of both the material and the people who created it. An outside supplier might, they feared, ask for more money or put their best people on someone else's books.
Martin Goodman was the founder of what we now know as Marvel. He bought the stories and artwork for his first titles from a company called Funnies, Inc. until he decided he wanted the writers and artists working directly for him. He hired an editor (Joe Simon) and others away from Funnies, Inc., and thereafter, the work was produced out of Goodman's offices.
Over at DC, they similarly wrested creative control from outside entities, like the Siegel and Shuster studio, redirecting it to DC's own, in-house editors. And almost from the start, DC started steering control of Batman away from Bob Kane's studio. Eventually, Kane would merely be one of the artists on Batman. True, he was the one whose name was signed to most everything, and he was the artist whose style the others were ostensibly simulating. But, for good or ill, most Batman stories never passed under his gaze; the creative nucleus of the process was in the DC offices.
Producing comics out of an office like that meant breaking down the process into simple, uniform steps…
- The editor would buy a script from a writer.
- The script would be pencilled by a penciller.
- The penciller's pages would be lettered by a letterer.
- The pages would then be inked by an inker —
- — and colored by a colorist.
Someone might wear two hats — be, say, the penciller and the inker, or the writer and the penciller — but it was always done in these clearly-defined stages, with the editor as the nexus of it all. The writer usually did not ever speak with the penciller. The penciller almost never chatted with the inker. (Jack Kirby never met Joe Sinnott, who inked him for years on Fantastic Four, until long after their collaborations.)
The colorist customarily worked completely apart from them all; he or she would get the pages and would color them without the foggiest notion of what the artist(s) had in mind. Some companies didn't even employ colorists; they just worked out color schemes in the office for the recurring characters. Then, when an issue was shipped to the color separator, someone there would decide what color to make everything.
Why was it done this way? From what I can tell, there were several reasons and all of them were to the publishers' advantage — never to the creators' and often not to the material's. It expedited production and spread around the weaknesses in the talent. True, wonderment could sometimes result when the right people were paired but that wasn't why publishers broke down the process. They weren't assembling teams to stimulate creativity so much as to facilitate output.
If the best artist available was John Doe, and he could draw one comic per month on his own, then you could get more work out of him by bringing in Richard Roe to ink him. Instead of one comic by an "A" artist like Doe and a "C" artist like "Roe," you got two "B" grade comics by Doe and Roe.
It also made the artists more interchangeable: If your comic was written by Moe, pencilled by Larry and inked by Curly, no one of them seemed especially indispensable. If Curly died — or, worse, asked for a raise — you could replace him with Shemp without totally altering the product. At least, they wanted to believe that.
And — key point — if you, as a publisher, wished to own all rights to the material, it helped to dissuade its creators from believing they were creating anything. Convince them instead that the assembly line creates the work, and that they're just stops along the conveyor belt…cogs in the machine.
Question: Has this worked? (I mean, in a creative sense. Obviously, it worked in a business sense, at least for the publishers.)
Answer: Some of the time. Many fine comics have been produced under this system…and many artists prefer to pencil only, some to ink only.
Their reasons are not always creative. Comics often do not pay that well and often, an artist who might prefer to do the complete art has found himself at a financial disadvantage by doing so. This is not an exact quote, but I once heard Harvey Kurtzman say, approximately, "The main problem with comics [in my day] was that the only way you could improve your income was to spend less time on a page."
A lot of artists favor working in a team: Some pencillers like having an inker who will come along and compensate for their artistic shortcomings. Some inkers like the artistic education they feel they receive working with a talented penciller. Some artists have trouble facing the blank paper (or just plain can't draw too well) and so are more comfortable as inkers. Some simply like working with a pencil more than with a brush, or vice-versa. There are many reasons an artist might prefer to be a penciller only or an inker only.
And when one of each is cleverly paired, the result can be wonderful — possibly superior to what either could produce alone.
Actually, from what I can tell, matching the perfect inker to a penciller has, throughout comic book history, often been a happy accident of availability. A few editors have been extremely gifted at sensing that Penciller A would go well with Inker B. Frequently though, it's been a matter of Inker B calling up and seeking work when someone was needed to ink Penciller A.
By accident or design, it does work…sometimes. But it also works — with some artists on some projects — for one artist to simply draw the comic at his own pace, pencilling and inking as he sees fit. And when two or more artists are to be involved, it also works — as per most newspaper strips — for them to decide themselves how to divvy up the task.
Just so we're clear: What I am arguing against here is the automatic assumption that comic art should be pencilled by one person and inked by another. A lot of people enter into comics under the assumption that this is the normal — or even the preferred — method.
How do they get this idea? Well, here's one place: Just when I was looking for a finish for this piece, I received a copy of The New, Improved Marvel Try-Out Book. This is a guidebook, printed mostly on illustration board, which purports to teach budding talent how they can arrange for their talent to bud — for big bucks! — on Marvel Comics.
The book has a chapter on how to pencil. It has a chapter on how to ink. It has one on how to color and another on how to letter. If there is any suggestion that these don't have to be four separate steps done by four separate people, I sure didn't spot it. An aspiring artist is told that if he wants to draw comics, he has to pick a slot and fit into this assembly line approach.
With all due respect to the folks who cobbled up this book, I think this is very bad advice to give to new artists. In fact, it's doubly bad — bad for the artists and, in the long run, bad for Marvel. Assembly lines are a great way to make Buicks but they're no way to make comic books.
The book also has a chapter on how to write a plot, and there's another section that teaches you to "script" (write the dialogue), as if this two-step process is the only way a comic book can be written. It isn't. In fact, it isn't even the only way to write a Marvel Comic and it probably isn't the best way for beginning writers to begin. We'll get to the many methods of writing comics in an upcoming column.
For now, let me just say that there are many projections out there as to where the future of comics might lie, and I don't know which, if any, are correct. But I do know that it's going to involve new kinds of comic books with new characters and new concepts and new sensibilities, chockablock with some new takes on the old characters, concepts and sensibilities. At some point, somewhere, someone has to create something new in comics.
Encouraging everyone to work in the same manner, and to adjust their talents to a rigid, assembly line process, is a great way to prevent that from ever happening.
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 focusing 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.