Inker

The inker (sometimes credited as the finisher or embellisher) is one of the two line artists in traditional comic book production.

The penciller creates a drawing, the inker outlines, interprets, finalizes, retraces this drawing by using a pencil, pen or a brush. Inking was necessary in the traditional printing process as presses could not reproduce pencilled drawings. "Inking" of text is usually handled by another specialist, the letterer,
the application of colors by the colorist.

As the last hand in the production chain before the colorist, the inker has the final word on the look of the page, and can help control a story's mood, pace, and readability.

Workflow

While inking can involve tracing pencil lines in a literal sense, it also requires interpreting the pencils, giving proper weight to the lines, correcting mistakes, and making other creative choices. The look of a penciler's final art can vary enormously depending on the inker. A pencil drawing can have an infinite number of shades of grey, depending on the hardness of the graphite and the pressure applied by the artist. By contrast, an ink line generally can be only solid black. Accordingly, the inker has to translate pencil shading into patterns of ink, as for example by using closely spaced parallel lines, feathering, or cross-hatching.

Some inkers will often do more than simply interpret the pencil markings into pen and brush strokes; depending on how much detail the penciler puts into the pencil drawings, the inker might add shading or be responsible for the placement of black spaces and shadows in the final drawing. An experienced inker paired with a novice penciler might be responsible for correcting anatomical or other mistakes, modifying facial expressions, or changing or improving the artwork in a variety of other ways. Alternatively, an inker may do the basic layout of the page, give the work to another artist to do more detailed pencil work, and then ink the page himself (as Joe Simon often did when inking Jack Kirby, or when Michael T. Gilbert collaborated with penciler P. Craig Russell on the Elric of Melniboné series).

The division between penciler and inker described here is most frequently found where the penciler and inker are hired independently of each other by the publisher. Where an artist instead hires his own assistants, the roles are less structured; an artist might, for example, ink all the faces of the characters while leaving the assistant to ink in the backgrounds, or work with the inker in a more collaborative fashion. Neal Adams' Crusty Bunkers worked like this, with say one inker responsible for the characters' heads, another doing bodies, and a third embellishing backgrounds.Michael Netzer
"The Lives and Time of Crusty Bunker," Michael Netzer Online, September 17, 2007
. Retrieved July 5, 2008. The inking duo Akin & Garvey had a similar arrangement, with one inking the figures and the other the backgrounds.

Digital inking

One can ink digitally using computers, a practice that has started to become more common as inkers learn to use powerful drawing and editing tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Inkscape, Corel Painter, and Manga Studio. A graphics tablet is the most common tool used to accurately ink digitally, and use of vector-based programs precludes pixelization due to changes in resolution. However, many regard the process as more time-consuming.

some companies put scanned pencils on an FTP site. The inker downloads them, prints them in blue, inks the pages, scans them in and loads the finished pages back on the FTP site for the company to download. While this procedure saves a company time and shipping costs, it requires artists to spend money for computer equipment.

History

For a long time, inking was considered a minor part of the comics industry, only marginally above lettering in the pecking order. In the early days of comic books, many publishers hired "packagers" to produce entire books. Although some "star" creators' names (such as Simon and Kirby or Bob Kane) usually appeared at the beginning of each story, the publisher generally didn't care which artists worked on the book. In the early days, the creator of the feature would get credit for as long as he worked on the feature, but when he was replaced by other artists, no name credit would be given to them. Packagers instituted an assembly line style method of creating books, using top talents like Kirby to create the look and pace of the story and then handing off the inking, lettering, and coloring to largely anonymous — and low-paid — creators to finish it.

Deadline pressures and a desire for consistency in the look of a feature led to having one artist pencil a feature while one or more other artists inked it. At Marvel Comics, where the pencil artist was responsible for the frame-by-frame breakdown of the story plot, an artist who was skilled in story-telling would be encouraged to do as many books as possible, maximizing the number of books he could do by leaving the inking to others. By contrast, at other companies where the writer did the frame-by-frame breakdown in script form, more artists inked or even lettered their own work. Joe Kubert, Jim Aparo and Alex Toth would usually pencil, ink and letter, considering the placing of word balloons as an integral part of the page, and artists such as Bill Everett, Steve Ditko, Kurt Schaffenberger, Murphy Anderson, and Nick Cardy almost always inked their own work (and sometimes the work of other pencilers as well). Most artists, however — even experienced inkers of their own work like Lou Fine