The inker (also sometimes credited as the finisher, embellisher, or tracer)[1] is one of the two line artists in a traditional comic book or graphic novel. After a pencilled drawing (or copy of the pencilled drawing) is given to the inker, the inker uses black ink (usually India ink) to produce refined outlines over the pencil lines. The ink may be applied with a pen or a brush — many inkers use both — or even digitally, a process gaining in popularity. The inker is usually responsible for every black line on the page, except for letters, which are handled by a letterer. In many comic strips, as well as Japanese manga and European comics, a single artist takes responsibility for penciling, inking and sometimes even lettering, either doing it all (e.g., Charles M. Schulz) or hiring assistants. For comics printed in color, there is usually a separate colorist.
Inking was a necessity of the printing process used in comic books and other print publications; the presses could not reproduce pencilled drawings. It is now a recognized art in itself. As the last hand in the production chain before the colorist, the inker has the final word on the look of the page, and can help control a story's mood, pace, and readability. A good inker can salvage shaky pencils—while a bad one can obliterate great draftsmanship and/or muddy good storytelling.
All the same, inking is often seen as more technical and less glamorous than penciling, and many inkers go unrecognized. This perception was parodied in the Kevin Smith movie Chasing Amy, where Banky Edwards is accused of merely "tracing" the images drawn by penciler Holden McNeil.[2]
Contents |
While inking can involve tracing pencil lines in a literal sense, it also requires interpreting the pencils, giving proper weight to the lines, correcting mistakes, and making other creative choices. The look of a penciler's final art can vary enormously depending on the inker. A pencil drawing can have an infinite number of shades of grey, depending on the hardness of the graphite and the pressure applied by the artist. By contrast, an ink line generally can be only solid black. Accordingly, the inker has to translate pencil shading into patterns of ink, as for example by using closely spaced parallel lines, feathering, or cross-hatching.
Some inkers will often do more than simply interpreting the pencil markings into pen and brush strokes; depending on how much detail the penciler puts into the pencil drawings, the inker might add shading or be responsible for the placement of black spaces and shadows in the final drawing. An experienced inker paired with a novice penciler might 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 himself (as Joe Simon often did when inking Jack Kirby,[3] or when Michael T. Gilbert collaborated with penciller P. Craig Russell on the Elric of Melniboné series).
The division between penciller and inker described here is most frequently found where the penciler and inker are hired independently of each other by the publisher. Where an artist instead hires his 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. Neal Adams' Crusty Bunkers worked like this, with say one inker 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.
It is possible to digitally ink using computers, a practice that is becoming 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 if it is done in a vector-based program, pixelization due to changes in resolution are no longer an issue. However, the process is considered by many to be more time-consuming.
Some companies now 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 for computer equipment.
For a long time, inking was an under-appreciated 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 didn't care which artists worked on the book. Packagers quickly 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. In 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 he 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 and Jim Aparo 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, and Nick Cardy almost always inked their own work (and sometimes the work of other pencilers as well). Most artists, however — even expert inkers of their own work like Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Will Eisner, and Alex Toth — all 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, finding that they needed to 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.
Sadly, 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.
The advent of the Marvel era in the early 1960s finally gave the inker proper credit. It soon became obvious that the inking was the second-most important visual element of a comic book, and finishers like Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Mike Esposito, John Severin, Syd Shores, and Tom Palmer began to get their due. These inkers are experienced pencillers in their own right. When a penciller/inker team clicked, the synthesis of these talents elevated the parts beyond what they could achieve individually. Notable penciller-inker teams like Kirby and Joe Sinnott, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, Gene Colan and Palmer, and John Byrne and Terry Austin (particularly on The Uncanny X-Men) proved that comics could truly became a collaborative art.
In 2008 Marvel and DC inker Bob Almond founded the Inkwell Awards, which is an award established to celebrate the craft of inking and also 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.
Collector: What's that mean—you "ink it"?
Banky: Well, it means that Holden draws the pictures in pencil, then he gives it me to go over in ink. Next.
Collector: So basically, you trace.
Banky: It's not tracing, all right? I add depth and shading to give the image more definition. Only then does the drawing truly take shape.
Collector: You go over what he draws with a pen—that's tracing.