The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics

233 Pages·2003·14.7 MB·English

by  Klaus Janson

The material in this book was first published in print in 2003. It has been reissued in eBook format, with no editorial changes,
in 2013.
Copyright © 2003 by DC Comics (print edition)
Copyright © 2013 by DC Comics (eBook edition)
All related characters and elements are trademarks of and © DC Comics.
TM
WB SHIELD: & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
(s13) Text copyright © 2003 by Janson Art, Inc.
For WatsonGuptill Publications:
Senior Acquisitions Editor: Candace Raney
Editor: Jacqueline Ching
Production Manager: Hector Campbell
Cover and Interior Design: Kapo Ng
Cover Illustration: Klaus Janson First published in 2003 in the United States by WatsonGuptill Publications, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Gruop, a division of Random House Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.watsonguptill.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
All rights reserved.
v3.1
Dedicated to my editor Steve Korté,
for his unending patience.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Frank Miller
PART ONE:
INKING
ONE • Ink and Paper
TWO • Brushes and Pens
THREE • Tools of the Trade
PART TWO:
STORYTELLING
FOUR • What Is Inking?
FIVE • To Trace or Not to Trace
SIX • How to Ink
SEVEN • Light and Dark
EIGHT • Textures
NINE • Feathering
TEN • How Far Can an Inker Go?
About the Author
Index
Drawing is a physical act. It isn’t pecking away at a keyboard like I’m
doing right now, trying to arrange a fixed, immutable 26 letters and a
handful of punctuation marks into coherent sequence. No. When you
draw, your every move is a first-time event. Something the world has
never seen before, big or small, for better or worse.
Drawing is a physical act. Sure, your mind must be fully engaged.
You must avoid distractions. But the same could be said of a boxer or a
basketball player.
And just as the point guard has to keep the basketball moving down
the court, dribbling, bobbing and weaving, the comic book cartoonist
should move vigorously across the page. Your reader is moving through
a story, not lingering in a museum. Use your wits and your smarts, but
don’t dither. Use them now.
Make a mistake? Fix it. Do something just plain stupid? Do it over.
But keep moving. The reader will.
Drawing is a physical act. If you’re drawing for reproduction, it’s a
series of physical acts, the most purely sensual of which is inking. When
it goes well, in those moments a cartoonist lives for, the black hitting the
bristol makes the page feel alive.
It’s the ink that makes the brick feel ragged, hard and cruel, the ink
that makes the flesh seem warm or cold, firm or soft.
As Will Eisner recently said to me, inking is sexy.
Inking is drawing. So draw. Don’t just dutifully, painstakingly
execute tapered lines somewhere between the eye and the jawbone. Feel
the cheekbone those lines are supposed to describe. Drawing is intimate.
Tactile. Especially when you’re drawing with ink.
As Klaus Janson will point out once I shut up, comic-book penciling
and inking are a single craft, separated shortly after birth. It was surely a
forced separation, and “inker” has the ring of a false distinction, making
this step in cartooning sound purely technical. Nonsense. It’s as
spontaneous and personal as any other. It’s just as much an act of
drawing as what we do with the pencil.
So, yeah. A false distinction. An artificial wall, set up to facilitate a
factory-style system. Yet the law of unintended consequence can cut
either way. Good can come of it.
I enjoyed a many-year collaboration with Klaus. I don’t think there’s
a chance either of us was, at that time, capable of anything approaching
the punch and verve of our partnership. As Klaus notes, a third artist,
neither and both of us, was created in our joyful, monthly game of
creative mumblety-peg.
Let Klaus take you through the paces, here. Then go take a brisk
walk, or go for a swim, or hit the gym. Get your blood up.
Then come back to your board and attack the page.
Frank Miller
New York City