Klaus Janson
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Klaus Janson is an American comic book artist, working regularly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics. While he is best-known as an inker, Janson has frequently worked as a penciller and colorist.
Janson immigrated from Germany as a young boy and grew up in Connecticut, where in his teens he met and began working as an assistant to Dick Giordano. He first came to prominence as the inker over Sal Buscema's pencils on The Defenders in the mid-1970s, and since then he has worked on most of the major titles at Marvel and DC. He is probably most famous for his collaboration with writer-artist Frank Miller on an early 1980s run on Daredevil; another celebrated collaboration with Miller, on DC's Batman story Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, followed in 1986. Janson's long-time association with Miller broke down over scheduling and inking disputes during the production of Dark Knight, and the two have not worked together since. Janson has frequently pencilled and inked (notably over Gene Colan's pencils) for various Batman titles, including Gothic with Grant Morrison.
Janson's initial style was very similar to the fluidly high-contrast style of mentor Dick Giordano, but he quickly developed a much looser, highly textural and distinctive inking style. Janson occasionally pencils stories, like "Night Olympics." The similarity of his art to that of Frank Miller can mostly be traced to their collaboration, during which Miller refined his own style based on the artistic decisions Janson made as the inker of Miller's artwork.
Although he once told his students in the early 1990s that his writing was of a personal nature that he did not wish to share, he wrote one short in the miniseries Batman: Black and White.
Janson has taught sequential storytelling for over ten years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and has written both The DC Comics Guide to Pencilling Comics and The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics. He is also involved with the New York Museum of Comic Book Art.
