Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Question on comic book artists

For those of you who are artists or know about the process - why do different people do the pencils, the inks, the colors, the letters? Is an artist so specialized that they are master ink-line tracers, but can't draw?

It seems like a production line. I know there are awards given separately for all these categories, but I don't really understand why the art work preparation is so broken up. You don't get people writing dialogue and others writing descriptions - or do you?

Are there any artists (outside of independents) who do all these tasks themselves?

I think the production line process was something Marvel started. Simply put, it would take too long for one person to do it all on a monthly schedule -- we see how hard it is for some to keep a monthly schedule just doing pencils.

Inking is definitely a refined skill in its own right apart from the storytelling and compositional skills needed to be a penciler. It ain't easy drawing a smooth line, that's all I gotta say. And then there's the matter of creating texture and form with line weight etc.

There are some that sometimes do both occassionally -- Miller, Byrne, Davis, Seinkevicz etc. I think Guy Davis always inks his own stuff, but I'm not sure. Coloring is a whole other animal, especially with the computer skills needed nowadays for most books.

Don't forget Steve. He did the penciling and the inking on the upcoming Umbra spotlight.

Yeah, Drake's right, it's basically a time thing. Most artists just aren't quick enough to pencil and ink (let alone letter and colour) a full monthly title. Hell, some aren't even quick enough just to pencil them.

Pencils and inks are actually quite different disciplines though. From my own experience it's clear that some pencillers just aren't as good at inking their work as possibly they should (believe me, I know. My inks are very much my weak point). Really good inkers basically take the pencils and... well, not so much refine them as define them I guess. Some inkers are very good at almost hiding any influence they might have on the stylistic look of a title. They really bring out the pencillers work. Others are more... well, they tend to add (or sometimes detract) something to the pencils. You only have to look at the way that some artists work can look drastically different when inked by different people to see what I mean for example John Byrne's ugly art when inked himself compared to the quite nice work when inked by George Perez).

There are quite a few artists who do ink as well as pencil (the ones mentioned by Drake and LL as well as others like Phil Jimenez) but just because of the time restrictions involved with putting out a 22 page comic on a monthly basis they don't often do it. I think possibly that's why arvel is moving so much more towards digital inkng. It means the pencils have to be much tighter (with some artists that's not a problem mind) but it's also a lot quicker to do. Same with digital colouring of course.

So the inks are just to copy over the original art?

Someone on DCMB brought up that comment about Bryne. A page of his pencils for GIII was on the internet and it was spectacular. The book however, uugh. I downloaded the original pencils and ran it through an edge detector on an image processing program and it looked much better than what was on the book.

Now my question. From an interview, a artist referred to "flatting" I think. What is "flatting?"

Is there someone that actually takes the inked pictures and paints them by hand (or computer nowadays) and how does that image get copied to be a comic page?

I'm gonna guess a lot of the shops in the 40's split up the art for time purposes. The earliest example that comes to my mind is Jack Kirby's pencils being inked by Kirby, Joe Simon, Al Avison & Al Gabrielle on BLUE BOLT (1940-41). This group stuck together on CAPTAIN AMERICA (1941-42) until Simon & Kirby moved to National, where they picked up some new inkers.

Of course, the period I'm most familar with is the 1960's-up. It becomes very easy to see that each inker who worked at Marvel during that time brought so much of their own style to the finished work as to almost smother the pencillers' work! Compare Kirby comics as inked by Dick Ayers, Steve Ditko, George Roussos (GAG!!), Chic Stone, Vince Colletta, Bill Everett, Frank Giacoia, and Joe Sinnott.

The general concensus seems to be that Mike Royer was the most faithful inker of Kirby's pencils-- but at the time he was working with Jack, I'm not so sure that was a good thing! Especially as the years continued to roll on and Jack's art got looser (possibly his eyesight was getting worse).

By the way, any fans of the Giffen-Gordon team during the TMK period of the LEGION should realize that they were "DOING" Kirby-Roussos. the rendering is almost identical. What a thing to aspire to mimicking-- the absolute WORST Jack's art ever looked!

I've got a lot of admiration for inkers. It's not easy to take something like pencil art, which allows some difference in tone, and turn it into something that's completely black and white. Not to mention the fact that ink work is not easy to correct if you make a mistake.

I do wish that colourists were forced to take lessons in drawing noses. I've seen more good art ruined because a colourist didn't have a clue what the bridge looks like...

Blockade Boy asked: "Now my question. From an interview, a artist referred to "flatting" I think. What is "flatting?""

A flat is like a base painting. The flatter selects and fills all the shapes with one flat color, and the colorist comes along after and replaces the colors with ones of their choice, and adds the modelling/rendering. Most colorists use a flatter to save them some time.