Pencils, Ink and Color: How Comics Were Created

Back in the day before computers were used to produce comic books, the artists involved in producing the book worked as part of a team.  The work you see in a finished comic book would not be produced by one person, but usually two or three people.  First off was the penciller...this was the guy who got credited with being "the artist" for the most part.  He would lay out the panels, the flow of the story on the page and placement and actions of the figures.  Shown here are some original pencils from one of my favorite artists, Darwyn Cooke.  These pencils are from his work on "The Spirit".

But the finished look of the pencillers work depended on who did the next stage of production; the inking.  Since four color printing was not capable of reproducing pencilled lines (even in the photo above it is hard to appreciate all the detail), the inker would take either the original pencils, or sometimes a full sized photo copy of the original pencils and go over them in India ink to bring a cleaner line and more definition to the work...often embellishing as he went.  In a finished comic, all the black lines you see are those of the inker.  As you might imagine, some inkers served to make marginal pencils better...some inkers muddled what was otherwise fantastic draftsmanship.  And sometimes the inker and penciller were one and the same guy.  At the end of the day, it was the inker who provided mood and shadow and gave the page it's finished quality.  Shown here is a Jack Kirby "The Mighty Thor" page from the mid 1960's that has been inked by Vince Colletta.  In this case, the inking was done on top of Kirby's original pencils.

Before we move on to coloring...I shouldn't forget to mention the lettering artist.  Lettering was it's own art form as well, as evidenced by the Thor page above.  These artists were credited in the front of the book along with the penciller and inker/embellisher as an integral part of the creative team.

At the end of the creative process was the colorist.  This person would use photocopies of the original inked pages (usually shrunk down to the same size as the comic page), and hand color each page as a guide for the printer.  Color would serve the obvious purpose of bringing a more realistic look to the book but also bring additional tone, shadow and mood to the book.  Here is a picture of a color guide that I have from "Our Army at War" issue 197 (that's Joe Kubert's artwork, by the way).  Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be given the complete color guide for this book.

These days comics are printed on much higher quality paper than they used to be, and production techniques are increasingly computerized.  Some comics are produced entirely on computer.  Others are still produced using a penciller and an inker working on paper...but color is mostly done by computer in those cases as well.  

I still prefer the look, feel and even the smell of an old four color, pulp paper comic.  Not to sound too much like a curmudgeon, but things aren't like they used to be!

Until next time...