Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

When we lost the great Joe Sinnott last month, I'm sure that you saw a lot of tributes to the legendary artist and a great deal of those tributes include celebrations of Sinnott's run on Fantastic Four with Jack Kirby. It was truly one of the greatest artistic combinations in comic book history, but I realized that for a lot of readers out there, all they really know about Kirby and Sinnott is that the end result looked amazing. So I though it would be nice to explain precisely what was so special about this specific combination of these two legendary artists.

Right off the bat, the main reason for why Kirby and Sinnott were so great together lied in Sinnott's artistic background. While is most famous for his inking, Sinnott was an accomplished penciler, as well. He did not get a chance to do a lot of it for Marvel during the "Marvel Age" of comics during the 1960s (and the few issues that he did of Thor's feature in Journey Into Mystery during the early 1960s were, as Sinnott himself noted, really rushed and not something that particularly looked back upon with pride. He later noted to John Morrow in TwoMorrows' Jack Kirby Collector #9, "Looking back I wish I'd done better work on Thor, but at the time it was just another job, and I certainly didn't think the character was going anyplace"), but when he first worked at Marvel, he was penciling and inking his own work and it was gorgeous.

It was not until the early 1960s that Stan Lee first asked Sinnott to do some inking, as well. Sinnott took to it quickly, but from that point onward, his biggest strength as inker was the fact that he was already an excellent penciler himself and he was extremely detailed. He knew how a page should be laid out and he knew from his own experience how to make the pencils of the artist he was working with look a little bit better based on his own penciler's eye.

What does that mean, though, in practice? Probably the most notable thing is that Sinnott was given carte blanche by Stan Lee to change anything he felt like changing in Jack Kirby's artwork. Anywhere that Sinnott thought that he could improve things, he was to feel free. It is important to remember that it was a big deal for Lee to get Sinnott to agree to become Kirby's regular inker. Lee had tried earlier (Sinnott had inked the fifth issue of the Fantastic Four, introducing Doctor Doom) and failed. I'll do a future Comic Book Legends Revealed about why that didn't work out. The reason, though, is not as important as noting that once Lee could actually get Sinnott on the book, it was a notable hire. The previous inker for Jack Kirby on Fantastic Four was Kirby's Thor inker, Vince Colletta. I am not here to knock Vince Colletta, but I think it is fair to say that Colletta and Sinnott had about a 180 degree different view on inking. Colletta would change Kirby's art, as well, but it was almost always to take things away from the art, not add to them. There is something to be said for the fact things can often be more powerful if you make them more sparse. It is more likely that Colletta, one of the fastest inkers in the business, was just making things simpler for the sake of making them simpler, but it is reasonable to argue that, whatever his motivations might have been, the end result was still strong, as that simplified style could make things "pop." Still, for the most part, the important thing to remember is that Colletta, when he wasn't taking something out of a page, was giving the reader close to unvarnished Kirby pencils. Kirby was an incredibly detailed penciler, so there's nothing wrong with that.

However, the big difference and what was clear to readers right away is that that was not how Joe Sinnott was going to play the game. If he felt that he could make a Kirby page better, he would re-draw whatever he felt like he needed to re-draw to improve the page. Again, Kirby as a brilliant and detailed penciler, so Sinnott rarely changed all THAT much of Kirby's work, since there was little reason TO change it, but he still made a number of notable alterations. Check out Jack Kirby's original pencils for the splash page of Fantastic Four #49...

Okay, now see the finished pages after Sinnott inked Kirby. You can see that Sinnott made dramatic changes to the faces of both Mister Fantastic, Invisible Girl and the Thing. Sinnott was a bit more used to drawing glamorous women and Sue Richards clearly got a bit of a face lift as soon as Sinnott was on the series.

The next big thing is, of course, the Thing himself. The inking on the Thing over the years had led to a wildly different depiction of the superhero by various inkers. It all depended on how you drew the blacks on the Thing's hide to show exactly how lumpy or rocky the character would be depicted. Sinnott, for his part, smoothed the Thing out. A great deal of what Sinnott did on Kirby's work period was to smooth things out. You weren't getting unvarnished Kirby when you saw Kirby/Sinnott, you were getting a combination of the two artists. Sinnott used broad strokes and a lot of black to mold Kirby's already excellent pencils into something with even more depth to it.

Here's the Thing in the original Fantastic Four #49 versus how he appeared once Sinnott inked him and smoothed him out a bit...

See how there's less of an edge to the Thing's rocks? That was all Sinnott and this speaks to the importance of Sinnott, like a number of other changes Sinnott made (like Sue's looks), they were changes that Kirby adopted himself in later issues. In other words, Sinnott's inks were so impressive that Kirby would alter his own depictions of the characters to come into line with Sinnott's depictions. There wasn't a character or page that didn't have Sinnott's imprint on it. He especially liked to draw backgrounds, like rubble or volcanic explosions or things like that, so he would really get in their with his brush to make them as detailed as possible. So you now had this incredibly detailed penciler matched with this incredibly detailed inker and the combination was a lushness that no other previous inker had come close to matching on the series (Chic Stone probably came the closest).

Hopefully that gives you a better sense of why Sinnott and Kirby were such a historically strong pair together.

If anyone has an idea for an interesting piece of comic book history, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!