How important is inking?

how important is inking?

Very.

Pretty darn.

Much.

Very

Wish I had that gif of Jim Lee's art that shows like 6 or 7 different inkers inking his pencils
All of the drawings looked pretty different

I wish that floppies were just the inking. Save the high money colouring and glossy paper for the trades, and cut the price on the shit that should be disposable.

i gotcha senpai

Very

Wally Wood would hire assistants to pencil whole comic strips and then ink over them and his style would completely dominate theirs

Yeah the face and hair are hit with it most

I love the joe sinott one,it just pops immediatly, also scott hanna is terrible most of the time, if only al williamson was still around to ink romita jr, they were the best artist-inker team, at least janson is doing a good job with him on his batman projects

what are you trying to do kill the industry, the readers pretty much demanded high quality paper and ink because no one who buys comic books throws them away.

comic books are not manga.

Sometimes the inking and colorists deserve almost more praise than the ones that do the lines. They can totally change the whole appearance and impact of art in a book.

A good inker elevates the art tremendously.

Al Williamson made even the dullest pencils look amazing. And as great as John Byrne was in his heyday his art suffered when he started inking his own work instead of Terry Austin.

This, Wood's inking was so important that no mater who did the penciling it became Wood's art. I remember there was a great panel with Sterenko, Spurlock and Levitz discussing how amazing Wood was.

None of those looked as good as the uninked original

Very. See Dough Mahnke for reference

Byrne's inking is shit.

I wouldn't go that far, but it is definitely his weak point.

I agree with you, but I would be interested in seeing how a shonen jump type of book would perform in grocery/drug stores.

Same monthly books but only just inked on shitty paper for kids

Tom Palmer could make anybody look better. Tom Palmer once improved a Neal Adams story. Tom Palmer was one of the few inkers who could properly ink Gene Colan. Tom Palmer took John Buscema to an entirely new level.

Sadly there aren't a lot of Tom Palmers in the industry.

Archie Digests exist.

Here's a comparison of different EC inkers.

Tom Palmer is maybe the greatest Avengers artist. He was on the book from 85-96.

Some artists are either make or break depending on their inkers.

Just ink it yourself, Al. No one ever inked your stuff better than you.

Damn looking at his inks he is really good

Yeah but this would be for kids not baby boomers

Mostly, colored pencils look flat. It's better to ink if you want color.

Of course, this can not be generalized to every single comic. It depends on what you want to achieve. Something like Megg Mogg and Owl obviously gets along with pencils just fine.

I bought this up in a thread a coupla days ago, someone was dissing Vince Colletta....a great inker can save dull pencils, that's a fact, right? But what's more interesting to me are those inkers who have such a strong identity it obfuscates the penciller's style to a pretty severe degree. Like, Coletta got stick for erasing backgrounds and stuff and whilst he wasn't technically the best (Eddie Campbell, for instance, rates him, particularly his romance comics which he pencilled and inked) he gave Kirby, and the Marvel style, a different look. Nib, only using brush for outlines if at all, lots of small marks, thin hatching, not particularly slick-looking at all. Do I like his Kirby inks? Not too much but I don't HATE them.
Think of inkers like Giaordano, Janson, Terry Austin like user said--I think these guys really imposed their style on their pencillers to the extent (maybe not with Austin) that you'd recognise the inker first! It's an interesting area. Do you slavishly adhere to the pencils, almost "eradicating" evidence of your own hand or do you go completely the other direction and nearly destroy all evidence of the penciller's hand? Is the middle ground the best place to be--demonstrating the inker's visual handwriting but retaining that of the penciller's, too? There's a great Gary Martin guide book to inking (he inks Steve Rude a lot) with pencils inked by other inkers...he really respects Rude's pencils and is great, he knows how good Rude is so just lets The Dude do his thing and shine. As something of a wannabe cartoonist myself I think a lot about (analogue!!!) inking; I have two favourite nibs, a Hunt 102 and 108 and, of course, a Windsor & Newton Series 7 #3. I even inked a short comic with a 0.35 Rapidograph once. Which approach(es) do fellow Sup Forumsmrades prefer? Clean, simple and slick? Simple but rough and gritty, like Mazzucchelli's Rubber Blanket "fucked-up brush" style? Fixed-width inking? Lotsa crosshatching?

...(continued)Or are you into the Jim Lee/Liefeld loads of extraneous, micro-thin lines? I can appreciate most approaches but what I CAN'T stand is those pencillers who "ink in pencil" and do that thing in Photoshop where you massively turn up the opacity and blackness? Urgh, REEEEE, you can still fucking tell! I hate it! I love Gary Martin, or a sexy, slick, Dan Decarlo-style line but equally admire a rough, fucked up, splodgy, dry-brushey inking style like Jose Munoz or the aforementioned Mazzucchelli. Or a clean, simple, undetailed drawing with a unrefined, almost "nervous"-looking crowquill line. Jaime Hernandez to Charles Burns. What do you guys reckon?

I prefer Krigstein's, Frazetta's almost looks like it's "not there"......a problem I have with Al Williamson! Damn he could use a brush but his stuff looked so airy it'd blow away at any moment! Contrast that with someone like Mort Meskin, such gorgeous use of chiaroscuro, bold brush-work, just wonderful...That Williamson/Frazetta/Raymond incredibly thin brush crosshatching is a huge feat of craftsmanship but Frazetta was best inking himself and Raymond had a great command of spot blacks and chiaroscuro, too (which I feel Williamson and Frazetta lacked a bit)...

Extremely

It's strange that the books I think most about the inking are Miller/Klaus joints.

I do love like a Jaime or Burns some solid darks. That 90s hatching don't do much for me

I could read everything in pencil, fuck ink.