Author: DOuG pRATt

Wading into Roe

Was Justice Alito’s first draft of an opinion that overrules Roe v. Wade leaked to Politico by someone who knows it is, in fact, the court’s decision? I’m going to guess yes. The Supreme Court’s complete removal of federal protection for abortion rights proves the court is now dominated by a “bunch of partisan hacks,” despite Justice Barrett’s denial.

On top of the revelations about Justice Thomas’ fanatical wife Ginni, Chief Justice Roberts has much bigger problems to deal with than finding out who leaked the opinion. Does he even have any power, now that his vote is no longer needed to serve the conservative agenda?

Joe and Jon and the Not “Marvel Stuff”

Joe Sinnott holding a splash page from Sabrina the Teenage Witch #15, October 1973

Joe Sinnott produced a huge volume of art in addition to his massive output for Marvel. Joe worked, without credit, on many pages of Archie Comics, helping his good friend Jon D’Agostino with inking jobs, as explained in an interview excerpt you’ll find here.

https://alphabettenthletter.blogspot.com/2022/04/comics-jon-dagostino-colorist-artist.html

Working from Joe’s own logbook, my best buddy Denro took it upon himself to identify all of Joe’s work for Archie. The catch? Joe was able to write down only the names of the stories he worked on. Not even the titles of the books, let alone the issue numbers could be noted. Why? Because the publisher took the stories into inventory and didn’t necessarily know where they would end up appearing. Denro provides more information.

Jon D’Agostino lettered the stories and inked the faces, to maintain his “look” and to keep the characters on model. Then Joe would ink the rest of the figures, in most cases, and ink all of the backgrounds. So, the page was mostly done by Joe, but the characters would have Jon’s look – and of course the look of the penciller. This was the 1969 to 1973 era, when Archie was putting out a ton of books. Jon D’Agostino took on a ton of work and called on Joe when he had too many pages to do.

Joe just recorded the name of the story and how many pages he did. That’s the list I worked from to find the stories in the various Archie titles. It would have been a lot easier today, as most Archies have been indexed in the Grand Comic Database. But back then, when I did it, there was not much info. They actually used my info in the database, as they took it from Joe’s [now deleted] website, which was my info. Technically, they are incorrect in the database, as they credit the inks solely to Joe. It should be Joe AND Jon D’Agostino. But there’s so many issues to correct.

This story was penciled by Stan Goldberg, who was more commonly known as Stan G.

I was tempted to start this post with, “An Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew walk into a bar,” referring to Joe, Jon, and Stan respectively. But I thought better of it. 😉