Nobody understands inking. It seems like some ancient art practiced by unclean hands in dark places while the wailing of the damned filters through the overhead PA system. Making straight lines with a brush requires a level of witchcraft that baffles laymen like myself. Since I don't understand it and can't do it, I chalk it up to Satan. Works for me.

  The Mission
  Writing: Selling The Story
  Pencilling: The Dance
  Lettering: Balloons Are Round
  Inking: Satan
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Inkers are often misunderstood as failed pencillers or art school washouts who have nowhere else to turn. Some pencillers insist on inking themselves, 'lest one of these artistic misfits should ruin their fine work. This is almost always a mistake. I can think of only a handful of pencillers who are better at inking their own work than anyone else (John Buscema, Stan Drake and his clone Neal, Michael Golden, Jim Aparo, off the top of my head). Outside of a small group, nearly everyone else could benefit from having someone— anyone— ink their work.

Inkers are people who specialize in a specific area of comics. Like dentists. Not all dentists aspire to become brain surgeons anymore than all inkers aspire to become pencillers. Some inkers are actually better pencillers than the people they're inking. Dick Giordano, Dave Simons, and Rudy Nebres are all extremely gifted artists who could go toe-to-toe with some of the industry's top talent. Inking is where their efforts are concentrated, and for their own reasons.

I got an angry phone call from Joe Rubinstein the other day. Joe heard that I was running around telling people inkers are interchangeable drones performing an ostensibly mechanical task. Well, that wasn't quite what I said. I had an aspiring inker in my office with samples over Joe Quesada. Joe, who has a heavy Mike Mignola influence, is so specific and so stylized in his approach that there are basically two ways to ink him, the right way and the wrong way. Showing me ink samples over Mike Mignola or Jim Lee is an incredible waste of time. Those guys are very specific. If the pencils are tight, then the inker's choices are limited to what I would define as either a passive or an impostive (don't bother looking it up; I probably invented the word) approach to the work.

A passive approach is to become fluid or transparent. Much of Rubinstein's contemporary work is passive. He lets the work breathe through his ink line, and tailors his approach to support the personality of the penciled work. An impostive approach might be Klaus Janson's. Klaus has a very stylized approach that he melds with that of the penciller to create a new collective work. Klaus will approach the work with an eye to what the work can become, and make decisions to change the penciller's work as he goes along to make the collective work representative of both the penciller and himself. Tom Palmer works in this way. So, to a certain extent, does Terry Austin. Impostive inkers usually prefer to work with breakdowns or less.

Taking an impostive approach on Lee or Quesada or Mignola tight pencils is pretty risky, and you can end up shooting yourself in the face. Changing Jim Lee just to be changing Jim Lee doesn't impress me nearly as much as showing me ink samples over John Buscema breakdowns. John's work (like John Romita Jr. and dozens of others) is real solid, but he leaves a lot for the inker to work with. Leaves the inker all the lighting. All the stylistic decisions. How an inker solves those problems is far more indicative of the inker's strengths than tracing Whilce Portacio. Or Joe Quesada. With those guys, there's the right way and the wrong way. An impostive approach is, in my opinion, the wrong way.

Which leaves the passive. And my quip about all inkers being the same. I looked at the guy's folio and said, "Yep, looks like inking to me. I guess you're an inker." What I meant was there was very little difference between this aspiring artist's inking and, say, Joe Rubinstein's. On that specific piece. It was a bad sample piece, one so tight and so specific and so stylized. Quesada had taken all the choices away and sucked up so much of the available creative input that the inker was left with a handful of nickel-and-dime choices (which could make or break the piece, but I digress....). When you approach something like that, you either do the job, or you chew it up trying to impress folks. Hint, if you do the job, you'll probably get another.

What was different between the new guy and Rubinstein, was the line itself. The black magic stuff. The creative stuff that flows out of the right side of your brain into your wrist and tells your hand how to make that damned Windsor Newton work. No two inkers' lines are exactly alike. They are as specific as fingerprints. They also reveal as much about your personality as a handwriting sample. If you're a boring person, your line's probably not much better. If you're nuts, you can probably ink like a moefoe. Most inkers are somewhere in between.

The reason editors pick one inker over another has more to do with an intuitive sense of the personality in the inker's line, and how it complements the story and the penciller's work. The new inker hadn't the experience to make the dozen or so nickel-and-dime choices that Rubinstein made correctly on the same piece. Little details in the faces. Texture on the clothes and hair. New Inker was just fine. Rubinstein was Rubinstein. That's why he gets top rate. But, on the face of things, in this specific instance, an inker was pretty much an inker. For either of them to have wandered away from what Joe put down there would've been wrong. Gives New Inker a leg up on his competition; the hotshots with the rapidiograph "interpreting" Jim Lee.

One other thing; most pencillers can't spot blacks to save their lives. They establish depth with shades of gray by varying the amount of graphite on the paper. Of course, once an inker comes along, it's either black or white. Yes or no. And, how the inker determines where the black stuff is and where the white stuff is is how the illusion of depth is created. Lines that vary from thick to thin create illusions of weight and depth by responding to a light source. Down around the bottom of the barrel, keeping the rapidiograph company, is zip-a-tone. Well below that is kraft tint or whatever the hell you call that stuff. Looks like crap. A skilled craftsman will use whatever he or she feels necessary to TELL THE STORY, but shortcuts and colorforms shouldn't be a first line of defense. The first is the skill it takes for you to make the important decisions in how you approach each individual work that crosses your table.

The second is that intangible, undefined mojo that comes from the guy with the pitchfork.

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