Joe Sinnott and Jack Kirby, 1975.
Now that everybody knows that I'm working on a book on Jack Kirby--see the bottom of this post for an explanation--I thought I'd share a little of the book with TB readers. Below is a passage I wrote that sums up how I feel about Joe Sinnott's contribution to the Lee-Kirby issues of The Fantastic Four. Let me just mention that (a.) this excerpt is greatly indebted to several terrific articles from The Jack Kirby Collector; and (b.) I begin with much-maligned inker Vince Colletta's departure from the FF title after #43 (October 1965).
Why did Joe Sinnott replace Vince Colletta as the inker on The Fantastic Four? According to Mark Evanier, Colletta lost the FF assignment when Marvel publisher Martin Goodman looked over Colletta's work and asked Stan Lee, "How come our lead book looks like shit?" When production manager Sol Brodsky mentioned that with more money he could find a better, more appropriate inker for the FF, Goodman came up with a few extra dollars per page, and Lee hired journeyman artist Joe Sinnott to embellish Kirby's pencils.
Sinnott was born in Saugerties, New York on October 16, 1926. Growing up, he avidly read newspaper comics, and was especially fond of adventure strips like Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, and Lyman Young's Tim Tyler's Luck. After serving in the Navy in World War II and working for three years at the rock quarry of a cement plant, Sinnott enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and was encouraged by Tarzan artist and SVA Dean Burne Hogarth to specialize in cartooning. One of Sinnott's teachers was Tom Gill, a freelancer for Fawcett Publications and artist of the Lone Ranger comic strip. Gill liked Sinnott's art and hired him as one of his assistants.
In 1950, Sinnott asked Stan Lee, editor at Atlas (later Marvel) Comics, for work, and received crime and western stories to illustrate. When the downturn of the comics industry in the mid-1950s prompted Atlas to fire artists and reduce the page rates of the still-employed, Sinnott left the company and found work with the publisher of Classics Illustrated, and with Treasure Chest, a comic distributed exclusively to Catholic schools. In 1958, when Atlas' finances marginally improved, Lee rehired Sinnott to draw pre-Marvel monster comics, and until the mid-1960s Sinnott labored for several clients simultaneously, including Marvel, Charlton, Dell, and Treasure Chest. Although Sinnott both penciled and inked many of these assignments, he also began inking other artists' pencils for Stan Lee. As Sinnott explained in an interview with Jim Amash published in Alter Ego 26 (July 2003):
Stan called me out of the blue and said, "I got a western story here that Jack [Kirby] can't ink. Can you fit it into your schedule?" I told him to send it up; I wasn't going into the city [NYC] anymore. I did everything by phone. A couple of weeks later, Stan called me and asked me to ink another Kirby story. Jack didn't want to ink his stuff, and Stan needed someone to do it. Of course, you know Jack didn't ink the way he penciled. Not to belittle his inking, but it detracted from his pencils. Those pencils were so good, but his inking wasn't--at least, not in my opinion. Jack needed good inkers to make his work look the way it should.
The first Fantastic Four comic Sinnott inked was issue #5 (July 1962), featuring the first appearance of Dr. Doom, although this would be his only real work on the title for the next three years. He returned with #44 (November 1965), stayed on for almost all of the remaining issues of the Lee-Kirby run (through #102, September 1970), and continued to ink the FF for several years after both Lee and Kirby left the comic.
Sinnott's only penciling for Marvel in the 1960s is a handful of undistinguished stories that he drew and inked for Journey into Mystery starring Thor. In 1963, Marvel paid some of the worst rates in the industry, so it's not surprising that Sinnott drew the Thor tales as fast as he could, quality be damned. When the money was reasonable, however, Sinnott slowed down and displayed several artistic strengths, particularly a detailed naturalism and textured inking style, that were best on display in his low-key stories for Treasure Chest. Below is a page he penciled and inked for a biography of Benjamin Banneker published in Treasure Chest in 1969:
Most notable about the art is Sinnott's brush inking. In the first panel, Banneker's coat is mostly a pool of solid black, but Sinnott's brush teases out thin lines from the darkness and guides the reader's eyes towards the center of the panel. The same feathery inking is in panel two, where Sinnott renders Banneker's lower leg as a silhouette, and finishes off the shadow with lines that become thinner as they travel upward and end around Banneker's waist. Sinnott's facility with ink is also clear from his stippling with the brush in panels two and four. In panel two, the tree next to the cabin is a dense arrangement of short, thick ink marks, while the plants in panel four combine representational shapes (black silhouettes of leaves) with amorphous ink blobs that nonetheless signify tree foliage.
Sinnott brings similar skills to his inking of Kirby's FF pencils. Here are the original pencils and the final inked version of the first panel of page 19 of FF #89 (August 1969):
Sinnott adds details and softens Kirby's pencils. Kirby draws Sue's hair with uniform wavy lines; Sinnott inks in a fatter, more undulating line around the hair's outline that identifies a definitive shape for the colorist and adds lines of various width and length to indicate individual strands. As a result, Sue's hair flows more. Sinnott also adds texture to fabric. The line that begins on Reed's chest (near Sue's finger) and extends to his shoulder is, in Kirby's pencils, unbroken and of consistent width, but Sinnott breaks the line up, turning it into a band of razor-thin brush marks that culminate in a thick loop curving around Reed's collar.
In a craft talk with Amash in The Jack Kirby Collector #38 (Spring 2003), Sinnott refers to these panels and explains his reasons for some of these embellishments:
The pages should always hold up in black-&-white. It's not enough to have two "colors," meaning black-&-white. You need to have midtones, which is why I'd feather out of black areas, turn slashes into feathering, and vary my line weights so much. Using thin lines and thick lines for wrinkles creates a gray area. Using thin groups of lines in Reed's hair, then spotting a few black places makes a great contrast to the lower half, where Reed's hair is white.
The thinner lines in Sue's hair, then, show (even in black-&-white) that she is blonde rather than brown-haired like Reed. Techniques like this--and Sinnott's overall attention to craft and his cultivation of realistic textures and marks--are legacies of his affection for adventure cartoonists like Caniff and Raymond, and his training at a realistic illustrator at SVA.
Ironically, the signature visual effect the Kirby-Sinnott team brought to The Fantastic Four is neither realistic nor rendered in midtones. "Kirby Krackle" is the term fans have coined to describe the thick black dots, surrounded by white space, in Kirby's superhero and science-fiction comics. Kirby and Sinnott sometimes pepper their drawings of outer space with these dots, to emphasize the alien nature of their celestial vistas, but their most common use is in situations where a character or object is releasing unusual and powerful energy. In the following panel from Fantastic Four #61 (April 1967, as reprinted in The Essential Fantastic Four volume 3), the dots serve both functions, as Reed Richards plunges through a gateway of wild energy into the other-worldly Negative Zone:
The origins of Kirby Krackle are elusive. In a piece in TJKC #38, Ger Apeldoorn traces the technique back to an obscure science fiction story penciled and inked by Kirby in 1959, while Sinnott claims that he used the dots even before he inked Kirby. (Sinnott's solo crackle, however, typically denotes real-life textures and objects, like the surface of water or the cluster of marks in Benjamin Banneker's tree.) Shane Foley points out that the amount of Kirby Krackle in the FF increases exponentially beginning in late 1966, and from this moment on, both Kirby and Sinnott made the dots a permanent part of their visual vocabularies, even when they weren't a pen-and-ink team.
Kirby's great gifts as an artist were his dynamic compositions, his visual invention, and his uncanny ability to visualize people and objects from any angle in a 360-degree space. His pencils, however, were never pretty in a conventional sense. Kirby never seemed interested in realistic depictions of the human form; both Sinnott and inker Mike Royer note that Kirby would usually draw faces with eyes askew from each other, and it was up to them to fix this mistake. Sinnott's supple brush line, however, made Kirby's characters human, and I wonder if Kirby himself fully realized this. Although he always said kind words about Sinnott, Kirby could be uncomfortable with inkers who changed too much of his source material. During his last tenure at DC (1970-75), Kirby's resented that his drawings of Superman were retouched by other artists to resemble DC's "official" version of Superman, and he also requested that Vince Colletta be removed from his Fourth World titles. When Mike Royer inked his first Mister Miracle comic, he tried to "pretty up" the face of Kirby's female powerhouse Big Barda. Kirby took an X-Acto knife, sliced the face out of the surface of the paper, and instructed Royer to remain faithful to his pencils. I hope, though, that Kirby appreciated how Sinnott's inks complimented his art in all the right ways.
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