Inker

The inker (sometimes credited as the finisher or embellisher)^[1] is one of the two line artists in traditional comic book production.

After the penciller creates a drawing, the inker interprets this drawing by outlining and embellishing it with a pencil, a pen or a brush. Inking was necessary in the traditional printing process as presses could not reproduce pencilled drawings. Another specialist, the letterer, handles the "inking" of text, while the colorist applies color to the final art submitted by the inker.^[2]

Workflow

While inking involves tracing pencil lines in a literal sense, it is an act of creative interpretation rather than rote copying. Inkers fine-tune the composition by adding the proper weight to lines, creating visual contrast through shading, and making other creative choices. A pencil drawing can have many shades of grey depending on the hardness of the graphite and the pressure applied by the artist, but an ink line generally can be only solid black. Accordingly, the inker has to translate pencil shading into patterns of ink, for example by using closely spaced parallel lines, feathering, or cross-hatching. The result is that the final look of a penciller's art can vary enormously depending on the inker.

An experienced inker paired with a novice penciler might also be responsible for correcting anatomical or other mistakes, modifying facial expressions, or changing or improving the artwork in a variety of other ways. Alternatively, an inker may do the basic layout of the page, give the work to another artist to do more detailed pencil work, and then ink the page themself (as Joe Simon often did when inking Jack Kirby,^[3] or when Michael T. Gilbert collaborated with penciler P. Craig Russell on the Elric of Melniboné series).

The division between penciller and inker described here is most frequently found where the penciller and inker are hired independently of each other by the publisher. Where an artist instead hires their own assistants, the roles are less structured; an artist might, for example, ink all the faces of the characters while leaving the assistant to ink in the backgrounds, or work with the inker in a more collaborative fashion. Among Neal Adams' Crusty Bunkers, one inker may have been responsible for the characters' heads, another doing bodies, and a third embellishing backgrounds.^[4] The inking duo Akin & Garvey had a similar arrangement, with one inking the figures and the other the backgrounds.

Digital inking

One can ink digitally using computers, a practice that has started to become more common as inkers learn to use powerful drawing and editing tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Inkscape, Corel Painter, and Manga Studio. A graphics tablet is the most common tool used to accurately ink digitally, and use of vector-based programs precludes pixelization due to changes in resolution. However the process is more time-consuming.

As of 2015^[update] some companies put scanned pencils on an FTP site. The inker downloads them, prints them in blue, inks the pages, scans them in and loads the finished pages back on the FTP site for the company to download. While this procedure saves a company time and shipping costs, it requires artists to spend money on computer equipment.

History

For a long time, inking was considered a minor part of the comics industry, only marginally above lettering in the pecking order. In the early days of comic books, many publishers hired "packagers" to produce entire books. Although some "star" creators' names (such as Simon and Kirby or Bob Kane) usually appeared at the beginning of each story, the publisher generally did not care which artists worked on the book. In the early days, the creator of the feature would get credit for as long as they worked on the feature, but when they were replaced by other artists, no name credit would be given to them. Packagers instituted an assembly line style method of creating books, using top talents like Kirby to create the look and pace of the story and then handing off the inking, lettering, and coloring to largely anonymous – and low-paid – creators to finish it.

Deadline pressures and a desire for consistency in the look of a feature led to having one artist pencil a feature while one or more other artists inked it. At Marvel Comics, where the pencil artist was responsible for the frame-by-frame breakdown of the story plot, an artist who was skilled in story-telling would be encouraged to do as many books as possible, maximizing the number of books they could do by leaving the inking to others. By contrast, at other companies where the writer did the frame-by-frame breakdown in script form, more artists inked or even lettered their own work. Joe Kubert, Jim Aparo and Alex Toth would usually pencil, ink and letter, considering the placing of word balloons as an integral part of the page, and artists such as Bill Everett, Steve Ditko, Kurt Schaffenberger, Murphy Anderson, and Nick Cardy almost always inked their own work (and sometimes the work of other pencilers as well). Most artists, however – even experienced inkers of their own work like Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Will Eisner, and Alex Toth – at times hired or allowed other artists to ink their drawings. Some artists could make more money by pencilling more pages and leaving the inking to others; different artists with different working methods might find it more profitable to both pencil and ink, as they could place less information and detail in the pencil drawings if they were inking it themselves and could put that detail in at the inking stage.

Due to the absence of credits on most Golden Age comic books, many inkers of that period are largely forgotten. For those whose names are known, it is difficult to compile résumés. Inkers like Chic Stone, George Papp, and Marvin Stein embellished thousands of pages during that era, most of which are still unidentified.

Crediting

In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics began giving the inker credit in each of their publications and other publishers began to follow suit. This allowed finishers like Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Mike Esposito, John Severin, Syd Shores, and Tom Palmer to earn a reputation as inkers as well as pencillers. In addition, penciller–inker teams like Kirby and Sinnott, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, Gene Colan and Palmer, and John Byrne and Terry Austin captured the attentions of comic book fandom.

Industry awards

In 2008 Marvel and DC inker Bob Almond founded the Inkwell Awards, which is an award established to celebrate the craft of inking and to lift the profile of the art in general. The Inkwell Awards has gained much publicity and counts notable inkers such as Joe Sinnott, Nathan Massengill and Tim Townsend as members and associates.