Who are your all time top five favorite inkers?

(This is in response to an interesting dialogue about Joe Sinnott and other inkers )

For me Klaus Janson, Mike Royer, Timothy Bradstreet, Alfredo Alcala, and Kevin Nowlin are my five, despite knowing full well there are plenty of great inkers that could be on my list.

1. Joe Sinnott
2, Tom Palmer
3. Dick Giordano
4. Terry Austin
5. on the other thread, I said Wally Wood, but here I will say Paul Neary.

I suspect Terry Austin will score highly for this...

I can't really rank them like that. My criteria is generally based on whether or not the person appears to be a "tracer." If they don't add anything to the work, I don't see the point of their job.

It probably comes from my reading about the work methods of Peter Paul Rubens at an early age. Rubens would do the preliminary drawings for his paintings, but his studio did the bulk of the labor putting those drawings on the canvas and the majority of the paint application. Rubens would then go over the whole thing and make it into his own work. The last guy in line owns it, and I never got that sense of ownership in the work of tracers like Jack Abel or Joe Sinnott.

I don't know enough about inkers to offer an educated Top Five list. As much as I know about comic books, many of you folks have read four or five times more of 'em than I have.

Still, I have mixed feelings about Wood as an inker.

Wood was a hugely talented artist, of course. No question. But he's one of those inkers who tended to redraw the pencils in the Wally Wood style. For instance, I've seen Wood's inks on Jack Kirby pencils. They look a lot more like Wood than Kirby. In fact, I'm not sure that I could identify the penciller if he wasn't credited.

And in Kirby's case, that was a good thing.

Boo, hiss!

Kirby was a good artist. As was Wood. But they had different styles. I prefer that inkers augment the pencils -- tighten or sharpen or smooth them -- but stay faithful to them. I think Jerry Ordway is good at this. I always can spot Ordway inks; but I also can tell who the penciller was, be it John Byrne or George Perez or someone else.

I heard a guy talking smack about Kevin Nowlan's inking once, going off about how he changed so much from the pencils. His argument was, how would you feel if the inker changed your pencils like that? My answer: I'd build him a shrine.

And in your case that might be a good thing. But that's probably not the point of the argument. And there is a difference between making an argument about and/or critiquing something and "talking smack."

Oh Yeah?