For anyone who still thinks that inkers are merely tracers, I invite you to compare the above page taken from the forthcoming first THE HANGMAN story appearing in THE WEB, published by DC Comics, with the exact same page as posted sans inks, yesterday.
The inking was provided by one of my favorite illustrators of all time, Bill Sienkiewicz . I was privileged to get to spend a bit of time around Bill back in my early days at Marvel when he was working on ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN. Now, I'm even more excited to have him contributing to something I'm writing. You can see that he's really taken Tom Derenick's pencils and made them into something that really melds both their abilities, and is surprising and exciting. I'm impressed by Tom's ability to anticipate some of what Bill brings to the page by leaving a lot of open areas for Bill to drop in shadows and highlights. This work really suits the mood of the series to a t.
The fine lettering is by Travis Lanham. Guy Major will be providing colors, the only step I haven't seen yet.
I'm very proud of how this series is coming along, and really looking forward to the next batch of artwork to make its way to me. THE HANGMAN is the regular backup feature in THE WEB. The first issue goes on sale September 23rd at a comic book shop near you.
4 comments:
I have immense respect for inkers. Are you finding that inkers are being used less in the printed comic business nowadays?
Not at all. You'd think that could be the case since inking became necessary due to the limitations of printing technology for decades. Now with high resolution scanners and so forth, the pencils can be reproduced pretty easily with inking embellishments. I know I've seen a few instances of artwork being run as pencils with digital coloring, but it's definitely not a widespread phenomenon.
I don't think anything can substitute that deep black ink for evoking mood, shadow, or darkness.
Thanks for sharing both this and the art in the previous post. Always inspiring to see work in progress and how it evolves.
sweet! It looks wonderful. I fondly remember Bill's run way back on the FF; he was constantly stretching Reed's neck in a very undignified "Plastic Man" fashion (pretty much everyone else followed the King's lead of Reed only stretching his arms, legs, overall body, etc, but almost never just the neck....which is way off-topic, I know)
Anyhoo, it sure looks great!
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