Category: Joltin’ Joe Sinnott

Only an hour after my last post, there came the stunning news that Neal Adams has died at age 80.

Jack Kirby was the most influential comic book artist of the 1960’s, and Neal Adams was certainly the most influential of the ’70’s.

After Gil Kane left DC to work for Marvel full-time, Adams took over drawing Green Lantern in a series reboot with Green Arrow.

About five years ago I was at a convention in Rhode Island with Joe Sinnott, his family, and a group of our friends. By then Joe needed a wheelchair to cover longer distances, and I enjoyed wheeling him around. (I was doing the same thing for my father in Arizona.)

Joe was scheduled to appear on a panel, and as we were heading to the end of the hall, Joe and Neal spotted each other. Joe wanted me to take him over to see Neal at his table, and once those two old pros got started talking, there was just no stopping them.

As reluctant as I was to break up their mutual admiration society, after I-don’t-know-how-long, I started to pull back on Joe’s chair to hint that we needed to go. Joe gave me the okay, he and Neal said their good-byes, and we were on our way to a late arrival at the panel discussion. As we entered the room everybody applauded and Joe waved to his fans. This is probably my all-time favorite fanboy memory.

Adams… was honored in the Inkwell Awards Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame in 2019.

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/neal-adams-dead-dies-comic-book-artist-1235254617/

I’m going to direct you over to Mark Evanier’s widely-read News From ME blog. He has inside information and interesting insights regarding DC’s bosses assigning an inker for Jack Kirby after he moved there from Marvel.

ASK me: Wally Wood on New Gods

My Economics advisor at the small college I attended liked teaching there because he could express his views on Political Economy without getting in trouble. Avoiding trouble is also the reason I prefer having my old weblog to posting on fan forums.

Some of the controversies regarding classic comic books concern the various combinations of pencil artists and inkers. Here is an excellent comparison of original pencil art to finished inks.

Frank Giacoia was a top-notch professional. His direct and distinctive inking style was unmistakable, while adhering to the original pencils. Stan Lee often credited Joe Sinnott as “Embellisher,” rather than as an inker. On the left is a face drawn by Jack Kirby that Frank inked, and on the right is the same character as inked by Joe.

A few years separate these two examples. In that time Jack had adjusted his drawing to accommodate the switch to smaller original art — from 12″x16″ to 10″x15″ — but I think it’s still a valid comparison.

Joe said he sometimes felt he put too much of his own style on Jack’s faces. But Stan brought Joe back to Marvel to ink “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” for a reason. As I liked to tell Joe, his “friendly faces” were the very thing that got me started reading the Fantastic Four. Here’s a picture I took looking over Joe’s shoulder as he drew Superman for a fan five years ago. As you can see, Joe inked exactly the same way that he drew.

Stan said he liked to see how artists handled mundane, everyday scenes. Here’s a panel from a Captain America story, half of it taken up with Stan’s dialogue, that shows how perfectly Joe enhanced Jack’s art, adding expressive subtlety to the faces.