Quite all right, MG. In cyberspace we sometimes come off more intense than we mean to be 😃

I know what you said with your post MG, but I thought you meant it as frustration of recognizing and appreciating those people's work.

Knowing the writer and artist is fairly easy, but as MWGallagher's excellent post shows, fans gradually get to know those professionals more and appreciate them.  Their contributions aren't as easy to identify, but without any one of them, it's not the comic we like.

As others have pointed out, lettering can enhance mood and characterization.  Think of when The Demon speaks.  It's often been in a different font.  Or The Spectre or Sandman.

Inkers enhance the pencils, sometimes slavishly conforming to the pencils, and sometimes adding their own zest for more of a blended look, or even overpowering the pencils to look more like the inker did the entire job.

Colorists certainly add a lot.  I've seen pencils and inks without color and it seems they're lacking another dimension and just seem flat and lifeless.  Color, especially with the extreme degree of variant shades, hues, and tones that are able to be achieved with a computer, can very much affect the story.

When you said all you needed to know when you were younger was the writer and artist, that's all that fans decades ago pretty much knew or cared about.  That was then.  Now, as much attention is put on our hobby, we learn more and appreciate more along with it, but those are often specialists who don't write or pencil and it's a whole new group of professionals to learn about.  Two just got expanded to 5, or even 6 if you include an editor.

A good inker complements the pencils. A bad inker will overpower the pencils so much that you almost don't recognize the pencils.

A good letterer also enhances the art & affects the flow of the story. A bad letterer will place balloons in places that obscure the art or make it hard to follow the story.

The colorist role has changed with computer coloring. Before they had only a limited amount of colors to choose from & had to work with ratios & patterns to achieve a certain color. Today's colorist has a variety of colors & shades to work with but is responsible for a lot of effects that were not possible a few decades ago.

A lot with the inker depends on the level fo the pencils too, whether the penciller is doing just layouts, just breeakdowns, or full pencils, or some mixture of full pencils on the figures and layouts/breakdowns on the pencils. If the penciler doesn't do full pencils, it is a lot harder for the inker to not dominate the pencilsbecause so much of the detail work is in the inker's hands, and he would essentially have to finish the pencils in the style of the penciler who only did layouts/breakdowns before doing the inks to retain the original character of the pencils.

This would especially true in the John Buscema/Alacala lcase where Buscems would often do only breakdowns because he was churning out pages for Marvle leaving a lot of the detail work to the inker/finisher and then expecting them not to dominate his style, when he has mad eit more difficult for them. Finishing hte pecils in the original pencillers style requires an extra step and a lot more time, and if the inker is up against deadlines himself, just going tot he inking stage and finishing the art in that stage is more time efficient, but also leads to the inker's style being more dominant.

The looser the pencils turned in by the penciller, the more likely the inker's style is going to be dominant because the inker winds up doing the bulk of the work on the page, not only having to shade and determine line thickness, but often having to finish facial expressions, anatomy of limbs, background details and people in the background of the panel, etc. If the penciller didn't account for enough space for the letterer to do what was required in the panel, it also often falls on the inker to redraw portions of the panel rather than send it back tot he penciller because the inker gets the pages after the lettering is done usually, and sending them back to the penciller to make corrections because of lettering needs adds time deadlines don't allow for.

There are a lot of reasons why an inker's style might dominate a penciller's work and not all of them fall on the inker. Sometimes it's because he has to make up for shortcomings or errors in the pencilling or for changes made after the pencilling was done and make up time in the deadline schedule. This is especially true if books are done Marvle style and the scripter is trying to dialogue after the pencils are done but doesn't allow for the space left in panels or if the penciller in laying it out didn't leave rom for caption boxes or dialogue balloons when they drew the panels or drew too many smaller panels to account for the space needed to dialogue and/or caption the page properly.

There are a shitload of variables that arise in producing the book that readers looking at the final product never even consider and credit quality to the writer and/or penciller when it was the support crew of letterers/inkers/ production staff who were doing the heavy lifting to fix the shortcomings or the gaffes of the writer and penciller or when those 2 creators were not in synch when creating the book but the rest of the creative team has to make it work anyways because there is no time left before the deadline for either the writer or the penciller to go back and redo what needs to be done.


Sometimes you get things like a script calling for character A to speak first, character B second and character C third,so they need to be in the panel in that order form left to right, but penciller draws them in the wrong order so the word balloons can't flow in the proper way for the dialogue to work. The letterer, not knowing who A, B and C were letters it the way it was supposed to be done according to the script but now the inker and editor are left with a page where thew wrong characters are saying the wrong things and the inker has to correct the pencillers art, or on page 2 the penciller drew a character holding the gun in his right hand but on the next page in an action shot he is firing the gun with his left hand, so the inker had to go in and redo the art to correct it because there's no time to send it back to the penciller to fix.

The reader will never see these things, except if the inker doesn't fix them and then they'll blame the editor for not catching it, or the inker for altering the style of the penciller in the panel where the hero shoots the gun, but not the person who made the mistake that caused the need for all that to begin with.

It's easy to rush to judgement on the final product when you don't see the progression of each step and what and why each member of the creative team does what they did.

-M

I'll chime in, though I one of youngins and not as eagle eyed as others.

I started comics in the 90's. Marvel had Deluxe and newsstand editions when I started, though Deluxe with gloss stock paper was almost exclusive by then. Batman and GL were pretty much the most I was reading at DC and they were both gloss stock paper too. It was also the age of digital color separations and inking. Digital Chameleon being one of the most popular Marvel used. So I spent the majority of my life reading comics after colorist and inkers, at least in the traditional sense, started to become obsolete. Even though I was buying back issues and older comics a few years into reading comics, my eyes were use to the digital colors and inks.

Richard Starkings under his company label Comicraft were also the prevailing lettering in Marvel's comics in the 90's as well. And I am sure others, but going by memory, because Marvel was were I read more comics than DC, DH or Image. And I could recognize familiar fonts that the company would use for certain products. Age of Apocalypse employed many different ones, some exclusive to one title, or a specific character's word or thought balloons.

So with this in mind it, different for me to go back and recognize how different and how much work colorist, inkers, and letterers did in the pre-digital age. I can recognize art in of itself that I may not like, but it's not always easy to distinguish if it's just the penciller from the start or if it's the inker that over rode the art. I can recognize artist that I know and have seen a lot of their art of.

Like Starlin always looks best with Milgrom inks to me. Liam Sharp's art can be heavily changed by an inker. I don't recall who it was, but his work on Death's Head II is one of my favorites. While his run on Incredible Hulk was up and down even though I believe it was the same inker. So I am not sure all the time, even with artists I recognize a lot as to what the changes in the art are that make it good or bad. Or at least not as good as others. Travis Charest doing WildCATS with Troy Hubbs in the first series was phenomenal. But then seeing him do all the art chores in Wildcats/X-Men: Golden Age, you can really see his talent.

Letterers I am pretty indifferent too. The only thing I can say about that, as a negative, is when say there is a handwritten letter in story, and instead of showing a character reading it, and the reader is reading it along with the character in their thought balloon; they show the face of the letter and the font or handwriting is near unlegable. I remember random comics doing that in the 90's stuff, and it being kind of annoying if it makes it difficult to read.