Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Brush Abuse

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This evening, I was paging through a compilation of the seventies Marvel comics superhero title THE DEFENDERS.  At the time, penciller Sal Buscema had a different inker every issue.  For the uninitiated, a comic book inker is an artist who goes over the penciller's pencils and renders them in (duh) india ink, in the process adding shading and texture.  If the penciller is the director, the inker is the cinematographer.  Anyway, the inker plainly had a tremendous effect on Buscema's art:  Even though the same guy was pencilling every issue, it looked slick and exciting one month, rough and blah the next.

All that led into the above-linked post on ace comics artist Colleen Doran's blog, in which she showed a Wonder Woman page she pencilled for DC comics; and then the inks added by Jackson Guice, a fine artist in his own right.  In the first panel, Colleen drew a shot of WW's left shoulder and back that displayed fine rendering of WW's body.  Inexplicably, in the inked panel, Mr. Guice chose to cover a particularly well-defined portion of WW's anatomy with solid black ink.  Why?  I'm sure it was a good idea at the time.

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