Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > Silvestri On New X-Men

L.M., I think it's pretty safe for me to guess that you probably don't have much experience with drawing yourself, right? I think you're fixating on very superficial aspects of drawing without really looking at why drawings work. For example, your idea of 'detail' seems to be focused on how many lines and pieces of visual information can be stuffed into a page, with little regard to how that can negatively effect important things like composition and design. I think Frank Quitely does a very nice job of packing in a lot of details in his drawings - he renders every bit of relevent information, but he never allows his pages to becomed cluttered the way that Ethan can. I think Ethan's come a long way in design sense since #117, but those first three issues did have a lot of needless and graceless clutter.

Characters in X-Men have had the same faces for 30 years, so i suppose any artist should know by now how to draw their faces

That's just a BIZARRE thing to say. The way that John Byrne drew the X-Men looks absolutely nothing like how Jim Lee drew them, or Chris Bachalo, or Carlos Pacheco, or Marc Silvestri, or Neal Adams, or Art Adams, or John Romita Jr., or the Kuberts, or Rob Liefeld, and so on. I just can't even begin to understand what you're talking about - if anything, I'd say that Frank Quitely is being a lot more true to the characters original designs and the characterization as written by Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison. I mean, are you really upset that Frank draws Cyclops as the tall, thin man he was originally meant to be rather than the hulking musclebound freak of the post-Claremont/pre-Morrison era? Should Jean Grey look like a stripper, as many of the hacks of the post-Claremont era have drawn her?

I think you're missing my point about body language and clothing, it's not nearly as obvious or simplistic as "Emma is a slutty bitch in white". And you're completely missing the point about the 'sexy' thing - of course Emma is drawn to be an over the top sexual woman, that's a major part of her character. But Frank does NOT draw her to look like some generic soft porn bimbo as most superhero comics artist do. I would say that the way that Frank draws Emma is respectful, and not exploitative and tasteless.

The inker is the artist who takes pencil drawings and finishes them in ink - it's not as simple as tracing, either. The inker gives weight and depth to the drawings, controls line quality, spots the blacks, simplifies or adds detail when necessary, among other things. The inker's focus is mainly on technical craft, and it is a job that requires a lot of skill and intelligence, not to mention a lack of ego, since the inker is trying to make the penciller's work look good. It's a crucial job; a good inker can make a weak penciller's art look competant or a talented penciller's art look even better; and a bad inker can wreck a good artist's work.

In some instances, the inker draws more the penciller - if you ever see credits that list one artist as doing the 'breakdowns' and another doing 'finishes', that essentially means that the breakdown artist plotted out the story from the writer's script and blocked out the drawings on the pages, while the finisher completed and fleshed out the drawings, and inked it. A good example of this would be the issues of The Invisibles series 3 that Warren Pleece layed out, and Phillip Bond finished. On the surface, it looks like the work of Phillip Bond, but if you compare the differences in storytelling between that and comics that Bond has done on his own, the stylistic differences are apparent.

I've also read about some cases in which the art handed in by the penciller was so poor that the editor deemed the work unprintable, and the inker is asked to extensively rework/redraw the pages over the penciller's pages. I'm pretty sure that's sort of rare, though.

Many artists prefer to ink their own work, since it gives them complete control over their art. For example, Frank Quitely clearly prefers to ink his own work, and Igor Kordey absolutely refuses to let anyone else ink his drawings. Kordey apparently does most of his drawing with ink directly on to the page over his loose breakdowns, so he's quite the purist, and it explains why he's able to finish so pages as quickly as he does. It's fairly rare to find penciller/inker teams in independent comics, it's mostly a way of speeding up the production of pages for mainstream publishers which print on a rather unforgiving monthly schedule.

We have a thread somewhere around here in which we discuss inking in depth, and Cameron Stewart wrote a lot in that thread about his experiences as an inker - I'll try to dig that up later on.