It's interesting to hear opinions about the various inkers who collaborated with Gil Kane and the rest of the artists working for Schwartz during the early "Silver Age".  But while we're on the subject of inkers. what were Kane's own views about the quality of the artists tasked with finishing his penciled work?  Here are excerpts from two conversations with him which address the subject; the first is posted at the Comic Art and Graffix Gallery in which he briefly discusses his original sales pitch of The Atom to editor Julius Schwartz, and his desire to ink his own work.

Gil's interviews are always worth reading, and he's quite candid in his evaluations.


COMIC-ART.COM: How did you happen to do Green Lantern?

GIL KANE: Well, Carmine (Infantino) and Joe Kubert were doing The Flash for Showcase and they decided they had so much success with The Flash that they would try a second character. So they decided on Green Lantern and they picked me to do it.

COMIC-ART.COM: You designed his costume didn't you?

GIL KANE: Oh, yeah. And I, in fact, I did another book for them called The Atom, which I pitched to them myself. I designed the character and the costume and everything else, and showed them my drawings and sketches and they decided to build a magazine around it.

COMIC-ART.COM: What inspired you to rework the Atom character?

GIL KANE: Well, first of all it was very much like characters done by my favorite artists Louie Fine and Reed Crandall, and they owned the title, The Atom, and it just seemed to me it would be a perfect situation, so I suggested it and the book was, you know, successful for a very long time, and as was Green Lantern, but I must admit that I, it was sort of boring doing it. I really didn't enjoy it.

COMIC-ART.COM: Oh, really?

GIL KANE: No. First because I longed to ink my own pencils, which they wouldn't let me do, and, the only time they would let me ink pencils is when I did westerns. It just so happens I like westerns better than superheroes, so I started to ink more and more of my westerns and then finally when the opportunities came, they would let me ink and just little by little, and I finally went over to Marvel...

[end of excerpt]


The second, longer segment is from FA: The Comic Fanzine: a 1986 interview conducted by Steve Whitaker; Dave Proctor and Dale Coe.  The discussion posted below picks up where Kane is talking about the artists who inked his work at DC during the 50s and 60s:


GIL KANE: Well, [Bernard Sachs] left comics to go into advertising early on. He was always concerned with making money, and he made, as an inker, more than a great many pencillers. We were quite friendly for a while – despite the fact that I found him one of the worst inkers that I ever encountered. Bernie wasn’t without drawing skills but he was so unsympathetic to what I or Carmine presented him.

SW: The notable team-up is Sachs and Mike Sekowsky…

GIL KANE: In fact, you know, when Bernie was assigned to Justice League he almost dropped dead because of all those crowd scenes that you’d have to go through, but fortunately Sekowsky pencilled so simply, without any backgrounds, that Bernie found it suited him even better!

DP: A marriage made in heaven.

GIL KANE: That’s right. Unfortunately I also had Joe Giella for years. I thought that Giella was, generally speaking, a nice guy – but he was probably the most inept single inker that ever worked professionally in comics.

SW:  Well, we could probably go into an extended bitching session about that…

GIL KANE: No, that’s probably my last word on the subject.

SW:  It’s puzzling, then, that you worked with Giella so much.

GIL KANE: I had absolutely no choice, it was an inflexible situation. Jobs were hard to get at that time and whilst we all tried to assert our personalities the people who had the most luck were people like Carmine because he was Julius Schwartz’s favourite artist. So Carmine had his pick of assignments and tended to drift in the direction of his strengths. Meanwhile most of us were assigned material that we felt totally unsuited to – but that was the kind of ass-backwards quality of the business. Everyone had vested interests in doing as little as possible as quickly as possible – the inkers, the writers, so it was the artist who was left with the need to make something out of the material – he was the only one in comics by choice. The editors were failed in every other level of editing and publishing: the writers were all either ex-pulp writers or people couldn’t make any other kind of place for themselves professionally, and colourists were just the kind of marginal craftsmen that comics were made for.

SW:  That’s a shame. I think that letterers and colourists should be thought of as something more than marginal craftsmen.

GIL KANE: Yes of course and they very often are but that was the way of the publishers – they made everything into a General Motors assembly line and institutionalized everything in order to get the work out expediently. The truth of the matter is that they never had to worry about content because, for years, everything sold.

SW  Getting back to the subject of inkers and assignments…

GIL KANE: Yeah, I was doing a thing called 'Space Cabby' for a while with Bernie Sachs and even when I got material in the science fiction books (Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space) that I liked, I would find Bernie just changing everything line for line.

DP: All the faces were changed?

GIL KANE: Everything. As a matter of fact once, on Rex the Wonder Dog, I had Rex coming out of a plane onto the tarmac of an airport and I left it completely open because I was becoming aware of open space and pattern in my work then… and this will show you how indifferent he was – he put tufts of grass all over this open space, absolutely oblivious to the fact that it was an airport runway. That’s the extent to which he rode roughshod over everything. The inkers had pencillers so controlled that they would complain. Bernie, in particular, would complain to Julie about the fact that Carmine and I were giving him too much to ink and Schwartz gave him permission to cut out what he thought was not essential.

SW: Rather like the old Vince Colletta approach to Jack Kirby’s Thors where he’d just rub out a background figure or reduce figures to silhouette…

GIL KANE: Colletta did exactly the same thing. He never worked on anyone without deciding what was going to appear and what was not.

DP: Talking about various inkers over the years, one person you haven’t mentioned is Murphy Anderson.

GIL KANE: Well, Murphy is a good friend of mine and I certainly liked his inking better than Bernie Sachs or Joe Giella. The only thing is that Murphy had a very determined style of his own and I felt that he always looked very good on Curt Swan.

SW: George Klein I prefer…

DC: I think the combination of your pencils and Anderson’s inks are beautiful.

GIL KANE: I never thought that Sid Greene was as good an inker as Murphy but I felt that he was more faithful to my penciling, so I always preferred his rendering – even though there was a kind of scratchiness, a wooliness about it that I didn’t like. The fact remains that I saw everything that I had put down in pencil.

DC: There was more liveliness in it, I think.

GIL KANE: That’s the one reservation I always had about Murphy’s stuff.

DC: Yes, it’s very polished.

GIL KANE: But also kind of static – I thought there was a kind of stiff, upright quality about the material. You hardly ever saw diagonal shapes or conflicting shapes, you just saw verticals and extending gestures… it lacked any kind of spontaneous quality.

SW: Looks like we’ve covered most of Julius Schwartz’s roster of inkers for the first half of the sixties. It sounds far more “know your place” than I’d imagined.

GIL KANE: Julie knew very little about our act but was rigid and authoritarian because he was terrified that the publisher would come down on him for some infraction. He was difficult in that regard. He was a nice guy in that he kept his group together as much as he could, giving us all the work that we required.

[end of excerpt]


Kane's mention of Reed Crandall as one of his favorite artists brings to mind something that I mentioned years ago on this forum: Although I understand the "house loyalty" that Schwartz felt to artists like Sachs, Giella and Greene, I think it's a real shame that at least by 1964 he didn't contact Crandall and somehow begin to phase him into his titles and phase out one or two of the other three. Crandall inking Kane's pencils would have been dynamite, and no doubt a real treat for Gil to have one of the greatest comic book artists of the 1940s and 50s inking his work.  And Reed Crandall penciling and inking his own art would have been a real eye-opening experience for DC fans who were used to seeing the more simplified drawing of the early 60s era at DC.  I'd love to have seen him take a crack at a "Time Pool" story in The Atom, which would have been ironic since Crandall was one of the artists who drew Doll Man, "The World's Mightiest Mite", for Quality whom Gil's concept of The Atom was largely based on.

If you're curious to see what Crandall was doing exactly at this time, below are three pages from the historical tale "The Pirate and the Patriot" from the October, 1963 issue of Treasure Chest magazine::



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Whenever I think about this, it's disappointing that Schwartz couldn't find something for this guy to draw at DC during the 1960s.