How To: Draw Conclusions
Swimming for meaning in comic book ink.
So I asked around. I listed every angle I could come up with. Every perspective anyone’s ever had on comics, and then, I tried to find a representative to bother. I talked to philosophers, theorists, writers, editors, historians, artists, designers, biographers and educators. But now, I realize, there is one perspective I’m still missing: the point of view of the page. So I set myself up to interview the mark the only way I know how: by making it. If Malcolm McCullough is right and “the meaning of our work is connected to how it’s made, it’s not just ‘concepted,’” then, we, the makers, are accountable for the process. I’m hoping that picking up the brush and performing the act of inking will bring me closer to knowing.
I set up an inking workspace in the kitchen. I’ve managed to secure some pages penciled by Jack Kirby, the Kirby in Kirby Krackle. He was a pioneer: one of the medium’s major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators, playing a large hand in defining the core narrative and aesthetic tropes, from the Golden Age comics starting in the mid-’30s, to his last comic book 60 years later, Phantom Force.¹
Jack Kirby had a violent upbringing in NYC’s Lower East Side tenement buildings. Literally and metaphorically, he drew his salvation. American comics prophet and award-winning artist Art Spiegelman best summarizes Kirby, and his class’ impact on the industry and culture: “The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic — almost god-like — secular saviors to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the Great Depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war.” Jack Kirby’s aspirational stories were riddled with average, honest people given superpowers they would then use to help those in need. “Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy,” writes Spiegelman, “by projecting themselves onto invulnerable heroes.”²
I have to be careful about keeping my priorities straight. I’m not collaborating with Kirby. This isn’t about him. I’m not here to read beyond the graphite. I need to remember this isn’t a seance. The sketches aren’t ectoplasmic. My job isn’t to retrace a ghost’s intent. After all, the pencils were a mere step in the process.
Superhero comics in the US, starting in the late 1930s and until early 2000s, were traditionally produced by some version of what is known in the industry as the Marvel Method, originally employed by its namesake publisher. It was put in place by perhaps the most divisive figure in comics fandom. Part hero, part villain, Stan Lee was known as a boisterous marketer and delirious savvy. In 2009, 15 years after Jack Kirby died of heart failure, his estate started a series of legal battles attempting to stop Marvel from claiming copyright ownership over Kirby’s creations. There are complications in how the legal system understands and organizes itself around complex creative practices, especially considering the power dynamics of a work-for-hire labor force negotiating ownership over their creative production. In 2010, Stan Lee gave a very insightful deposition — quite possibly his definitive interview. He is asked to describe the Marvel Method. He goes on to explain that demand forced him to devise a system that would allow for several projects to be developed at once: “I would just give them an idea for a story, let them draw it any way they wanted to. Because no matter how they drew it […] I was conceited enough to think I could fix it up by the way I put the dialogue and the captions in. […] And I was able to keep a lot of artists busy at the same time by using that system.” The method would work much like a production line. The writer put together a loose story arc for the penciller to sketch out, leaving blank word balloons and narration frames along the way. Those pages would go back to the writer to write against. Then that would be handed down to a letterer, who’d hand letter the writer’s copy, and to an inker, who would turn the pencil drawings into production-ready artwork. Finally, a colorist would, before the digital revolution, painstakingly prepare plates for each color. Historically for Marvel, most of these people would be working on a freelance basis remotely, meaning that in the course of a book’s production, pages would have to be mailed back and forth. Conveniently for Marvel, they’d be doing so as work-for-hire, rarely negotiating any claim for ownership before the late 1980s. Conversely, in a radio interview in 1971, when asked what it was like to work with Stan Lee, Kirby replied, “Well, I didn’t exactly work with Stan Lee. I worked at home and I wasn’t at the office much. […] Stan Lee would usually be pretty busy […] I’d deliver my stuff and that would be all there was to it. I’d tell Stan Lee what the next story was going to be and I’d go home and do it.” Depending on who you ask, Lee devised the Method either to maximize production or exploit artists.³
A wet brush, rich with black. Now I’m ready to talk to the page.
Within the method’s hierarchy, an inker’s impact is hard to measure. While the artist’s graphite and the writer’s script inform the subsequent steps, only the lines drawn by the inker are ultimately available in the printed product for retinal consumption. Today many methods of production are available, primarily due to more advanced and flexible technological tools. In turn, these tools allow for more variety in the means of producing the work in the first place. Any historical process is still possible, and in use, but technological innovation has made it possible to reproduce artwork without the need to develop separate workflows around each aspect of the book or simplification in the graphic gestures to accommodate for limited resolution in printing. Modern printers do not necessitate work that exists in explicitly differentiated layers to be translated into plates, meaning multimedia and painted work can be reproduced without issue. Hybrid traditional methods, like watercolor, oil or photo collage, are more viable today due to modern scanners and digital printing. It is also true that a comic book can be done by one individual on a personal computer and printed on demand. An entirely digital process in developing comics and distributing them is also possible, bypassing the need for printing and distribution altogether. These shifts in material and logistical imperatives allow for more flexibility in the business models behind the books. Meaning perhaps simpler dynamics of authorship and ownership. Though today’s artists have the entire course of the comics medium’s history readily available to leverage and reinvent, the aesthetic of their work is still, even if loosely, tethered to its material origins. Even without a literal page and ink, comics are always connected to what the page and ink have meant to the development of the tradition’s mechanics. But right now I only need to focus on what is in front of me: one page. One of many from the graphite-edition reprint of Pacific’s Silver Star.
I don’t have a drafting table anymore. Most rooms in our apartment are slash rooms: Kitchen slash entrance. Office slash storage. Living room slash bedroom. It’s what you get living in a Brooklyn brownstone. One slash is enough, though, which is why we got rid of the drafting table. So I take a tabletop-sized piece of eighth-inch plywood, leftover from a long-forgotten project, and with it bridge my lap and the kitchen table. The plank has a generous bow, but it’ll do. It’s got a big enough working surface, and if I adjust my chair’s distance I can get my makeshift situation to a decent angle. I open the softcover book face down and gently massage the spine. I do it carefully and delicately. It’s a precious book but I need it to submit. Once it begins to relent, I do my best to clamp it, open to my spread of choice, down onto my surface. I overlay page 133 with a sheet from a pad of technical vellum.
The cover designates the vellum as translucent, which feels like a stretch. It’s frosty and milky, has grain and a legible, marbled organic fiber. The sheet doesn’t conform to the cadence of the page beneath it as it goes from margin to gutter. For the most part, the action on the page below stops at the vellum. I push up against it. From the weight of my finger, the image below sharpens into focus, softly piercing through the vellum’s opacity and radiating out in a faded blur. I can’t really see through it very well, so as I work, I need to direct my attention with the pressure of my left hand. The page is waxy and smooth to the touch. Now I’m doubtful of how well it will receive ink. Regardless, I have my setup.
I sit on an armless chair a foot away from the kitchen table. Plywood scrap is perched on my lap and table. On it, a softcover book is clamped down, open, overlaid with vellum. I’m holding a Windsor Newton, Series Seven, Number Two brush that I’ve dipped into a thoroughly shaken container of India ink. The same industry standards that would have been yielded by Mark Royer, Silver Star’s original inker and frequent collaborator of Jack Kirby in the prime of his career. A wet brush, rich with black. Now I’m ready to talk to the page.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Read: How to Read Nancy by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik.
- Read: The Comics Form by Chris Davaler.
- Read: Philosophy of Comics by Sam Cowling and Wesley Cray.
- Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire. 2011.
- Spiegelman, Art. “Golden Age Superheroes Were Shaped by the Rise of Fascism.” The Guardian. 2019.
- Marvel Worldwide, Inc. et al v. Kirby et al. 2010.
