The Thin Black Line: Perspectives on Vince Colletta by TwoMorrows Publishing

THE

VINCE OLLETTA C Perspectives On

Comics’ Most Controversial Inker

By Robert L. Bryant, Jr.

THE

VINCE OLLETTA C Perspectives On

Comics’ Most Controversial Inker

By Robert L. Bryant, Jr.

THE THIN BLACK LINE: Perspectives on Vince Colletta, Comics’ Most Controversial Inker Written by Robert L. Bryant, Jr. Title page illustration by Michael Netzer Inside front cover: Stan Lee’s note to Sol Brodsky, from a Thor #139 page (1967) Book Design by John Morrow Proofreading by Eric Nolen-Weathington and John Morrow

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • July 2010 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-028-1

Special thanks to the following whose contributions and research helped make this book possible: Dick Ayers • Rich Buckler • Franklin Colletta • Gerry Conway • Tom DeFalco • José Delbo • Daniel Best blog (www.ohdannyboy.blogspot.com • Hy Eisman • Mark Evanier • Mike Gartland • Mike Grell • Fred Hembeck • Heritage Auctions • Rand Hoppe • iFanboy (www.ifanboy.com) • Richard Howell • Stuart Immonen • Carmine Infantino • Tony Isabella • Jack Kirby Estate • Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) • Pete Koch • Tom Kraft • Joe Kubert • Alan Kupperberg • Erik Larsen • Stan Lee • John Lustig • Bob McLeod • Michael Netzer • Michelle Nolan • Trina Robbins • Steve Robertson • Mike Rockwitz • John Romita Sr. • Mike Royer • Jim Salicrup • Arlen Schumer • Steve Sherman • Joe Sinnott • Lada St. Edmund • Joe Staton • Roy Thomas • Herb Trimpe • The Apocolyte (www.theblogattheendoftime.blogspot.com) • The Beat (www.comicsbeat.com) • COPYRIGHTS: “Machine Age”, “Tales of Asgard”, Absorbing Man, Android, Avengers, Balder, Black Knight, Captain America, Captain Mar-Vell, Dazzler, Defenders, Don Blake, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Fandral, Fantastic Four, Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe, Galactus, Ghost Rider, Grey Gargoyle, Guardians of the Galaxy, Him, Hogun, Howard the Duck, Hulk, Human Torch, Illyana, Invaders, Invisible Girl, Kang, Karnilla, Loki, Love Romances, Mad Thinker, Mandarin, Marvel Fumetti Book, Medusa, Mighty Marvel Comic Convention Book, Mr. Fantastic, Odin, Sandman, She-Hulk, Sif, Spider-Man, Storm, SubMariner, Super Skrull, Team America, Thing, Thor, Tigra, Trapster, Volstagg, Wizard, Wrecker, X-Men TM & ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. • All-Star Squadron, Angry Charlie, Aquaman, Batman, Black Lightning, Black Racer, Brainiac, Challengers of the Unknown, Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Flash, Forever People, Freedom Fighters, Girl’s Love Stories, Glorious Godfrey, Goody Rickels, Guardian, Heart Throbs, In The Days of the Mob, Jimmy Olsen, Mister Miracle, Morgan Edge, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, Orion, Robin, Shazam!, Super Friends, Superman, Warlord, Wonder Woman, Young Romance TM & ©2010 DC Comics. • Little Orphan Annie TM & ©2010 Tribune Media Services. • Soul Love TM & ©2010 Jack Kirby Estate. • “The Precious Years” ©2010 William M. Gaines Agent • G.I. Joe and Transformers TM & ©2010 Hasbro.

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CONTENTS Introduction: THE DEBATERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Chapter 1: THE CONTROVERSY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chapter 2: LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Chapter 3: INKING ASGARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Chapter 4: RIVETS AND TREES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Chapter 5: THE FOURTH WORLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Chapter 6: THE GUY ON THE ASSEMBLY LINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Chapter 7: “YOU COULD ALWAYS USE VINNIE” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Postscript: FLICKERS ON THE WEB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Appendix: TWO YEARS IN THE LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 NOTES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

Colletta inks Sal Buscema; detail from Defenders #26 (1975). 3

Vince Colletta’s offici al I.D. card, issued by Cadence Industries, (left) Detail of inks fro one-time parent com m Journey Into Myste pany of Marvel Com ry #123. ics.

Introduction: THE DEBATERS n May 2007, Eddie Campbell stepped on a thin black line. Campbell, the Scottishborn, Australia-based comics artist behind such works as From Hell, was blogging about his “favourite 1960s inker,” the late Vince Colletta. Campbell was arguing that one reason for Colletta’s tattered reputation among fans was that his inks on the late Jack Kirby’s Thor and other key Silver Age comics never reproduce well in reprint editions—the fine lines either vanish or congeal into each other. You could only see Colletta’s talents in the original comics or in the original art pages, Campbell said. Inkers like “[Joe] Sinnott and [Frank] Giacoia and all the others never suffered in the same way; perhaps they knew how to make their lines indestructible,” Campbell wrote. “All Colletta’s charming qualities, the softening lines and subtle textures, tended to go blank [in the reprints].” A reasonable argument, reasonably presented. Almost immediately, the comments started coming in. “[Colletta] wasn’t that bad an artist when he wanted to be, and when he didn’t have a deadline of two days for an 18-page book,” offered one poster identifying himself as “Danny.” “BobH” weighed in: “You’re right there, no reprint has ever done that work justice. On the other hand, while there is more detail there, I find the detail to be empty noodling, detracting... from the power in Kirby’s art.... There’s just no good excuse for some of the shortcuts [Colletta] takes, cutting out whole characters... taking nicely rendered buildings and turning them into rectangles with some quick hash lines.”

“Patrick” wrote: “I’ve never seen anything slapdash about Vinnie’s Kirby work.... It looks like he put a lot of thought into his interpretation of the pencils.” “Dave” argued: “The guy erased huge chunks of Kirby’s pencils to make his job easier. That’s just wrong.” “Batfink” put in: “As a kid growing up in the ’70s, I always avoided Vinnie’s work because it was horrible.... I could always tell [it was him] by the way he inked characters’ eyes. Those blank little circles.” “Anonymous” offered: “Unfortunately, the Church of Kirby does require demons as well as saints.... Colletta on Fantastic Four was unfortunate; on Thor, he was a revelation.”

The replies go on for several printed pages before fading out. Finally, nearly a year later, came the clincher— an e-mail from someone describing herself as a member of Colletta’s family. “Vincent Colletta was my grandfather,” wrote the woman, identifying herself only as “Katherine.” She added: “It greatly disturbs me to see the unnecessary, unkind things people have to say about the most wonderful man I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.... This man was entirely dedicated to his work and was passionate about it to the very end.... I was there—watching him... in his basement at his drawing table, putting forth everything he had.... “I ask all those with their negative comments to try and exude some class and respect for a man that truly loved his family and worked so incredibly hard to create works of art for millions of people to enjoy,” she continued. “Let’s not forget that no one, including yourselves, [is] perfect.” If you could hear dead silence on the Web, you would have heard it then. Until “Anonymous” wrote in a few days later: “I’m sure that he was a great guy to her, but another inker mentioned to me once, ‘Colletta’s got a pool at his house for the work that he’s hacked out, while I can barely make rent because I want the work to look good.’” All in all, just another year in the never-ending Colletta Controversy.

(above) 1982 inks ov er Win Mortimer penc ils, to Marvel’s Annie (left) Colletta inks Ge comic (1982). orge Tuska on Girls’ Love Stories #152 (1 970). 7

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Chapter 1: THE CONTROVERSY his was Vincent Colletta (1923-1991). He swooped in to save comics publishers on deadline hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. He raced through the work of artists whom fans say he should have worshiped. He was loved. He was hated. If he had been a character in a Marvel comic, the cover would have screamed, “The MYSTERY of VINCE COL-

RY of E T S Y M The TTA! E L L O C VINCE r VILLAIN? HERO o E!

D I C E D YOU

LETTA! HERO or VILLAIN? YOU DECIDE!” This is the Colletta Controversy. A freelancer nearly all his career, he was one of the busiest and quickest inkers the industry had ever seen, and was penciler Jack Kirby’s frequent collaborator during ten of the most amazingly fruitful years of Kirby’s legendary career, the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Fantastic Four, Thor, New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, Kirby’s soupedup version of Superman in the new Jimmy Olsen, his experimental magazines Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob—all passed under Colletta’s fine-tipped pens, which he often preferred to the traditional inkers’ brushes. Our first glimpses of Darkseid, one of comics’ greatest villains? Colletta inked them. The first time we ever saw the modern gods Orion the warrior and Lightray the planner? Colletta. Our first Scott Free, struggling to escape from some eye-popping super-trap? Colletta. Our first looks at fiery Apokolips and sunlit New Genesis? Colletta. He was a midwife for the Fourth World, Kirby’s explosion of characters and concepts that never caught fire with readers in the 1970s, but that now get reprinted in luxurious $50 hardbacks and that now enrich the current DC universe. Yet many, perhaps most, Kirby fans revile Colletta’s work, and comics histories

(left) Colletta inks Kirby on Jimmy Olsen #139 (1971). Ironically, another inker, Murphy Anderson, was commissioned to re-ink the Superman and Jimmy Olsen heads to have them match the “company look.” 9

“Hey, lookit this Thor. Looks sort of scratchy. Why ain’t it good as Fantastic Four?” “Nah, you dummy, what you got against Colletta? Thor looks neater than FF ever did.” “What does the ‘inker’ do anyway?” “He, like, helps the artist, y’ dope.” It is an ancient feud. “He’s become a favorite whipping boy.... The fan attitude toward Vince Colletta has totally crossed the line,” said columnist and comics writer and editor Tony Isabella, who became friends with Colletta in the 1970s. “Half the time, they’re not discussing the work, they’re discussing the man personally. And they don’t have the information to do that. They didn’t walk in his shoes.” DC and Marvel penciler Rich Buckler (Deathlok the Demolisher) calls Colletta one of the comics industry’s giants. “Vinnie always kept his word,” said Buckler. “Always. And as an artist, I always had the highest respect for him. And nobody could keep up with his enthusiasm and energy level.” Buckler added: “I think he was the only inker at Marvel who inked just about every penciler that ever worked there. Whoever said he was [the] ‘worst inker in history’ was off by a long shot. “His ink artistry over Kirby was memorable and much of it was beautiful. Maybe he was the fastest (inker). Maybe the most prolific.... He worked on so many important and groundbreaking comic books that I wonder why, along with Dick Ayers—another of my favorites—he is not considered some kind of national treasure.”

either ignore him (Duin and Richardson’s Comics Between the Panels) or dismiss him (“Ignored most of the line work of the pencilers he worked over,” says Jones and Jacobs’ The ComicBook Heroes). “Vince Colletta’s name has become synonymous with bad inking,” publisher and penciler Erik Larsen (Savage Dragon) wrote in a 2008 online column. “For many, Vinnie is the gold standard of bad inking—a veritable poster boy for hacking. To many, he is the worst inker to ever put pen to paper. But that’s overstating it, I think.” If you look up Colletta on the Internet, you’ll quickly find him linked to words like “hack” and phrases like “cut corners” and “erased backgrounds.” Many comics fans are vocal in their dislike for Colletta’s work; a minority are just as vocal in their defense of him. Before the Web, the debate flourished at comics conventions and in fanzines. And before that, it flourished on schoolyard playgrounds: 10

For writer Mark Evanier, a Kirby assistant who helped kick Colletta off Kirby’s Fourth World books for DC in the early 1970s, Colletta was simply a product of the comics system, the New York assembly line that printed both gems and junk with once-a-month efficiency. Colletta made everything look “average,” Evanier said, whether he was inking Grade A art or Grade D art. Under Colletta’s hand, bad art got better—but to Evanier, good art got worse. “I think I’m more likely now to blame the editors and the system [than Colletta himself],” Evanier said. “Colletta, after all, kept delivering a rather consistent product, and editors kept saying, (below) Buckler/C ‘Fine, Vince... Here’s olletta c over for another issue to ink.’” Wonder Woman #244 (19 Colletta rarely 78). lacked for work from the 1950s through the 1980s. The late Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who of American Comic Books listed at least 50 titles that Colletta worked on for Charlton, at least 90 for the DC line, and nearly 100 for Marvel/ Timely. And the Grand Comics Database, an Internetbased effort to compile pretty much everything known about the medium, has as

(opposit e) K 1971 So irby/Colletta pa n u l L o ve magazin el from Kirby’s unpublis e. hed 11

(above) The story “Don’t Play At Love” from Popular Romance #29 (1954) is credited as a solo Colletta art job. He worked with numerous uncredited inkers in that era, but this is as close to early “pure” Vince as we’re likely to see. ©2010 the respective owner. (opposite) A much later job credited as Colletta pencils and inks: an unused BJ And The Bear comic for Marvel, circa 1979. BJ & The Bear TM & ©2010 Christopher Crowe and Glen A. Larson. 12

Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, in an interview that was published as one of Shooter’s “Bullpen Bulletins” in 1983. “And I never had to ask for a single one of those jobs.... I never let an editor down. I never let a company down. I always give my best work, and on time.” The Colletta trademark? Fast work and fine lines. Texture. Mood. A rough and scratchy look, which worked well on natural environments: Forests, deserts, cratered battlefields, tears falling from the eyes of a slim and heartbroken teenage girl. (Nobody did women’s eyelashes quite like Colletta; he could have been an illustrator for Maybelline. His eyelashes were as lush as Amazon rain forests.) He used “a softer inking style than

many as 3,580 listings for Colletta, either as artist or inker, or both, from the ’50s through the ’80s. (A somewhat misleading figure, since the database lists all Colletta reprints—both foreign and domestic—as separate and unique works, and counts, say, a dozen two-page stories as a dozen separate listings.) Colletta worked hard, and he worked on everything, according to Bails’ listings. For Dell, there were inks on movie adaptations (Beach Blanket Bingo; Die, Monster, Die; Jason and the Argonauts). For Charlton, Colletta variously did art or inks for war comics (Army Attack, Army War Heroes, Fightin’ Air Force); love comics (Career Girl Romances, First Kiss, Romantic Secrets); science fiction (Outer Space, Space War, Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds). For DC, Colletta inked the big players (Batman, Superman) and the small ones (Lois Lane, Isis, Supergirl). He’s credited with a nearly unbroken 1973-80 run on DC’s Wonder Woman. For Marvel, the inking list ranged from Tomb of Dracula to Iron Man to Shanna the She-Devil to SpiderMan to a long run on Thor during the 1960s. He inked the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm in Fantastic Four. He inked the wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man. “I never had a day without work,” Colletta told his then-boss,

his father as always outgoing, “always smiling and in a good mood. He loved life and was quite a philosopher when it comes down to it. Everything interested him. He learned something from everyone he met. You’d be surprised at how many people used to seek his counsel.” Colletta never had much time for TV, movies or books, his son said, but always made time for good food. “He was a great chef, mostly Sicilian stuff,” Franklin Colletta recalled. “My dad loved New York, especially midtown, because everything was first-class, done right. Even in tony Bergen County (New Jersey), he used to get annoyed at having to wait for a table or poorly prepared meals.” DC and Marvel inker Mike Esposito, in a 2005 interview with Jim Amash in Alter Ego magazine, remembered Colletta’s “prematurely gray hair that had been beautifully styled, like he had just come from a beauty parlor. He was a good-looking guy, very Hollywood in his style and manner.... Vinnie was good and friendly in a lot of ways, but he was a really strange guy. He wanted my [inking] jobs.” Some friends describe Colletta as being built like a fireplug, stocky but not fat; some say he was built like a bull. Evanier remembered Colletta as a handsome man with a long list of friends in the industry, always meeting and greeting, “like a charming insurance salesman,” always juggling non-comics jobs, including photography for men’s magazines and for actors’ portfolios. He knew a lot of models. Most comic-book inkers didn’t have models in their Rolodexes. One of the models was Lois Chiles, an elegant brunette who went on to co-star in the 1979 James Bond movie Moonraker. Actress Shelley Winters, early in her career, is said to have been another friend. Colletta also was a longtime friend of

a lot of the other guys,” Isabella said. Colletta was a classic “utility player,” Isabella said—always pinchhitting, jumping into books that were about to miss deadline. “You weren’t going to get the best inking in the world from Vince,” Isabella said. “He did take shortcuts. “I can’t defend individual bad jobs.... He never had the financial opportunity to do great art. Nobody ever said to Vince, ‘We want this really good.’ They said, ‘We want this Tuesday.’ “Vince was very valuable to editors,” Isabella said. “When these jobs were coming in late... Vince would turn them around quickly. Vince pulled a lot of butts out of the fire.” (Isabella wasn’t referring to books by Kirby, who was famed for meeting or beating deadlines, but to other books late for other reasons—usually, Isabella said, because of their writers.) Isabella was about 21 and working as a Marvel editorial assistant when he met Colletta in 1972. Colletta, already silver-haired, “was like this Italian uncle,” Isabella said. “He was always real decent to me.” “He was like an Italian uncle to a lot of people,” said former Marvel editorin-chief Tom DeFalco. “By that I mean he was very effusive, you know? I don’t want to deal in stereotypes, but I’m Italian myself.... If we like you, we love you. And if we hate you, we hate you. He went with his emotions. He had big emotions. But he tended to be more friendly than not friendly.” DeFalco added: “He was always, ‘Come on, let’s go out! Let’s go out to dinner!’ Then he would pick up the check and make grand gestures—‘Hey, I know this great restaurant, I know this great place—let’s go out and party, let’s have a good time.’ ...He enjoyed good meals, fine restaurants.” Colletta’s son Franklin, who works in real estate in Florida, remembers

Rich Buckler is inked by Colletta on the cover of Black Lightning #3 (1977). 15

Colletta was the photographer. “He was just a terrific guy,” St. Edmund says. “He saw in me what I didn’t even see.” Colletta asked her to come back for more photos, which she used for years in her modeling and acting work. “He knew how to photograph me,” St. Edmund said. “Every good picture that I ever had in my whole life came from Vinnie.” “He lived life; he enjoyed life,” St. Edmund said. “He could charm the pants off anybody, and I’m sure he did.” Colletta helped her get modeling jobs; she would stop by the Marvel offices for lunch; he would have dinner with her parents; she would have dinner with his family. She and Colletta were friends for 15 years or more. In his 1983 “Bullpen Bulletins” interview, Colletta said that his photography work led to friendships with both actresses and actors. Colletta said he knew Columbo TV actor Peter Falk and actors such as George Maharis (Route 66) and James Farentino (The Bold

Lada Edmund Jr., an actress/model who appeared as a caged go-go dancer on TV’s Hullabaloo, a 1960s dance show. Edmund, who now is known as Lada St. Edmund and who works as a personal trainer in New Jersey, said she met Colletta in the early 1960s, when she was about 15 and appearing as a dancer in Broadway shows like West Side Story. She recalled that she went to Jersey City, New Jersey, to try out for a magazine modeling job.

(top) Lois Chiles. (lower left) Shelley Winters. (lower right) Lada Edmund Jr. ©2010 the respective owner. (next page) One of the few published photos of Colletta, from the pages of a Marvel comic book. 16

Ones). “Because I photographed a lot of actors, actresses and beautiful models for magazines and for their portfolios, I met a lot of people who became famous,” Colletta said. Sometimes Colletta would tell coworkers he had friends in the Mafia. Some people believed it; some didn’t. Some whispered that he might be in the Mafia. “He liked... to let everybody think he was connected with the Mob or something,” said DC, Marvel and Charlton penciler Joe Staton. “He wanted you to think he was connected.” “Vinnie let people think that,” Esposito told Alter Ego. “Even if there was no [Mob] connection, he figured he could use it as a weapon to scare people into giving him work.... It seemed as if he used that attitude to keep people off-balance.... ” To DC editor and penciler Joe Kubert (Sgt. Rock, Tarzan), the Mafia talk was “a big joke.” Kubert said: “I used to make the biggest jokes in the world with him about that.... Every time somebody mentioned it to me, it just made me laugh. If he had those kinds of connections that guys said he had, I don’t know what the hell he was doing in the comic-book business.” In their 1983 “Bullpen Bulletins” interview, Shooter asked Colletta: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a Mafia boss?” Colletta replied: “Back when Stan Lee was doing your job, he once printed photos of all the artists in the comics one month. After he saw how my picture came out, he called me up and asked me to come back and get another picture taken. He thought I looked too much like a gangster. He didn’t want me to scare the kids... or their parents.” Colletta didn’t look like an artist, Lada St. Edmund said—he looked like the Central Casting image of a Mafioso, a “wiseguy.” But it was just an image,

she believes. “He looked like a wiseguy; he might have known wiseguys, but no.... I knew a lot of wiseguys, and he wasn’t one of them. He looked the part, and I think he liked looking the part.... He was right out of Goodfellas.” It was all part of the Vinnie mystique. Mafia, models, mystery. And a big, impressive home in New Jersey. “His house was lovely,” said Kubert, who once visited the Colletta home in Saddle River. He said Colletta was “very proud” of the house—“all excited about it... He was able to afford it, and got a good deal on it, and was happy with his family there. It was a beautiful place... A huge house with a full-size swimming pool—had a beautiful cabana, which was like a small house, next to it—[and] beautiful grounds.” Saddle River was, and is, an upscale area—“Sports figures, entertainers and CEOs,” said Franklin Colletta—and so was the house at 3 Old Woods Road. It was on four acres of land. “The house had everything,” Franklin Colletta recalled. “Swimming pool, cabanas, clay [tennis] courts, huge patios, stately oaks in stone wells, landscaping galore.” Colletta bought the place around 1962 and the family lived there for about 25 years. (According to public records, the home’s tax value today is set at

lot of debt.” The house in Saddle River was a finanPOOL/CABANA cial obligation that shaped Colletta’s career for decades, according to his son. Colletta bought the house “even though [he] didn’t have 50 cents to his name,” Franklin Colletta said. “Once he bought Saddle River, his fate was sealed. We lived on four acres in the richest town in New Jersey, and he worked his ass off to make certain we stayed there. He never figured to be working in comics for almost 40 years, but that’s how it worked out.” But the house! The models! The photo work! It Courtesy of Google Earth, here’s an overhead shot of Colletta’s all made Colletta look more former home in Saddle River, New Jersey, showing the pool and like Austin Powers, Internacabana where Vince often inked pages. tional Man of Mystery, than a guy who cranked out $3,589,000.00—that’s a lot of pages of 12-cent kids’ comic books for a living. inking!) “Vinnie was always a star,” said Colletta would invite friends out for Marvel and DC artist Alan Kupperberg. pool parties, and the house never “He was a sharp dresser.... Cool turtlefailed to make an impression on them. necks were big with Vinnie. Vinnie It all added up to a certain amount of smoked, drank and often had a model star power in the narrow (and poorly on his arm. Vinnie was cool, quiet hip, paid) world of professional comics. whereas (Marvel writer/editor-in-chief) Former Marvel writer and editorStan Lee was hot, noisy hip.... Vinnie in-chief Roy Thomas says that on one was a seriously cool dude, a man of occasion, Marvel writer Gary Friedrich mystery.” and production man/sometime inker Colletta “lived in a cool house with John Verpoorten visited Colletta’s a big pool and cabanas,” Kupperberg house. “One of them wanted to take said. “He photographed... beautiful pictures of the other one by the pool,” women.” Colletta was a startling conThomas said. “And Vinnie comes running trast to many comics writers and out of the house, yelling, ‘No pictures! artists, who tend to be “fairly nebbishy, No pictures!’ Like he didn’t want people inwardly directed people,” Kupperberg knowing that this inker in New Jersey added. His wardrobe alone set him had this palatial estate.” apart from most comics pros, Franklin People eyeballing the house tended Colletta said: “My dad always dressed to think, “Wow, Vinnie has a lot of well, which probably contributed to money.” A more accurate conclusion rumors that he was a ‘made guy.’ By might have been, “Wow, Vinnie has a 18

and finding Colletta conked out on the floor, exhausted and asleep. “I witnessed this,” Kubert said. “...He would fall asleep on the floor of the office, and I would find him the next day, sleeping on the floor, because he worked right through the day and night, the day and night.... I have found him on the floor, fast asleep... simply because he had pulled not one, but several, all-nighters.” All-nighters were not unusual, according to Colletta’s son Franklin. “Pretty much every weekend during the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. “Editors, at least after Stan [Lee] left [Marvel], weren’t very adept at making sure important things got done on time, so there were always fires to put out.” How did Colletta feel about the load he was carrying? “I can’t honestly get into his head about that,” his son said. “There were so many other things he would have rather been doing. I do know he was proud of the fact that nobody could do what he could—which was turn out a professionally done job overnight. I often wonder why there weren’t any other inkers the publishers could turn to besides him, because he pretty much inked every late book for 20 years.” Joe Kubert says Colletta “would knock his brains out in order to meet the kind of deadlines that the editors had on this work. Now, when the work

comparison, most everyone else working at Marvel Comics looked like refugees from Woodstock.” “Artists very often let their work stand as their persona,” Kupperberg said. The ultimate example of that philosophy would be Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, intense and reclusive, devoted to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Colletta was the anti-Ditko. “Vinnie’s persona was as distinctive as his inking. And cool, at that,” Kupperberg said. Colletta usually would greet Kupperberg with a “Hallo, Handsome!” Kupperberg remembers Colletta as “a sweet-smelling, well-groomed gentleman.... Vince was a person, not a guru and self-styled font of all knowledge.... Vinnie was sincerely Vinnie. If he liked you, he would josh and kid you. And if he liked you, you could josh and kid him back. You would not make a toupee joke to Stan or a bald joke to [DC boss] Carmine Infantino. But you could kid Vinnie about being a hack or about his having Mob affiliations.” Joe Kubert, who knew Colletta in the 1970s, remembers him as a good guy who everybody liked. “He was as straight as an arrow, as far as I was concerned,” Kubert said. “...He knew people. He really knew people. He knew the insides of people. He could be with a person a couple of minutes and talk to them, and he could size them up pretty, pretty good.” The Colletta that Kubert knew was constantly swamped, constantly fighting deadline on this comic or that comic. Editors would “call him in any hour of the day or night in order to get the job done,” Kubert said. The books often were so late and the deadline pressure so “terrible,” Kubert said, “that nobody else would touch them.” Colletta would have to do all-nighters not just once, but for several days at a time, Kubert said. He remembers coming to work in the morning at the DC offices

k from Heart Th Solo Colletta wor

. robs #133 (1971)

was so complex that Vinnie knew himself that no matter what he did—if he stood on his head and tried to do it, he’d never be able to finish this stuff, and the stuff would never be printed—he took drastic measures. One of them was to cut out a lot of the detail that the artist would put in—[detail] which he would be only too happy to do, if he had the time, if they gave him the time to do it. “But they handed him the stinking job of having to cut out stuff in order to get the stuff done.” 20

said, ‘You’re crazy, that will never work.’” Colletta’s massive workload had to But later on, someone did launch a take a toll on him, Kubert says. “I’m restaurant in the spot Colletta had his pretty sure that’s what cut his life short, eye on, and it was successful. Lee said because that guy did it incessantly, and they would kid each other about that not because he wanted to, not because for years. it felt good to him, not because he liked Former Marvel staffer Jim Salicrup working [all] night—the stuff had to be remembers that Colletta at one point finished, and he had no choice. And did get involved with a fried-chicken once he took the commitment of finishing restaurant in Manhattan—“I ate there that book, he finished it. once!” Another co-worker says Colletta “I’m not talking about the quality of would sometimes set up his art board work now,” Kubert added. “Put any on Pepsi crates in the chicken restauartist under the kind of pressures that rant’s basement and ink freelance jobs Vinnie had to work under, I would defy while rats peeked out at him. any of them to do any kind of work that Marvel penciler John Romita Sr., in even came up to what Vinnie was finally John Romita... And All That Jazz! able to do... and that goes for any pro(TwoMorrows, 2007), remembered fessional in the business today.” Colletta as gregarious but strange—an Marvel’s Stan Lee inker who’d typically work remembers Colletta as all night, deliver his pages, “a hell of a nice guy—a then “go socialize” at talented guy, a very interplaces like Friar Tuck’s esting guy.... I liked him restaurant. “He was always very much.” Lee gave there, always buying Colletta truckloads of work drinks.... He always had during the 1960s, partly very salacious stories to because Lee liked his tell at Friar Tuck’s.” inking style and partly “[Colletta] was a fun guy because Colletta was so to be around,” recalled unfailingly reliable. longtime Marvel inker Joe “He was one of the Stan Lee, early 1960s. Sinnott. “He stood out. He guys you gave a rush job was flamboyant. Not shy to,” Lee said. “He was the at all. He’s the type that would stand go-to guy when you had a rush job.... out in a crowd.” He had a lot of personality. He was alLiterally. In 1975, Sinnott and his ways excited about something going on wife attended a New York comics conin his life.” And most of the time, it vention being organized by Colletta. was something other than comics. “He At that time, Sinnott had never met had a lot of other interests,” Lee said. “I Colletta, never even seen a photo of him. don’t recall him being fanatical about When Sinnott walked into the main comics.” ballroom of the hotel where the con An example of that, Lee said, would was being held, he saw a sea of about be the tale of the restaurant. Lee recalled 1,000 people. Sinnott spotted a guy that on one occasion, Colletta had gotten interested in the idea of opening a in the middle of the crowd. The guy restaurant in the Long Island area. He wore a white suit, white shoes, a black scouted out the perfect spot. He had it shirt opened to reveal the chest and figured out. He could make it work. a “big medallion” around his neck, “I talked him out of it,” Lee said. “I Sinnott recalled.

and Vinnie let it drop.” Roy Thomas remembers Colletta as an adroit politician, closely tuned into his own image and others’ personalities. Like Fred Astaire, “He could tap-dance or soft-shoe over anything... and emerge looking like he had planned it all along. “He may not have been a great artist,” said Thomas, “but he felt like he was in control of his own destiny.... He was very much one of those kind of larger-than-life characters.... We started getting along well after the time he threatened to throw me out the window.” (More on that later.) Most of all, Colletta was fast. Very fast. Fast enough, in the early 1970s, to ink the 15 pages a week that Jack Kirby was penciling for DC, plus inking a load of other books such as DC’s Lois Lane, Evanier said. Colletta sold editors his speed far more often than he sold them his skill, Colletta’s critics say. “On any given day, he could do a beautiful job,” Romita recalled in John Romita... And All That Jazz! “But most of the time— you know his famous slogan, don’t you? He said to the editors many times, ‘Do you want it fast or do you want it good?’ ...Vinnie was the kind of guy who increasingly was given work because of his speed.” The Colletta secret: He used assistants, and tended to trade quality for volume, according to his critics. The higher the volume, the higher the pay. Such as it was, anyway. Colletta wasn’t being paid well by comics publishers, Evanier noted—really, no one was. “I think everyone in comics was drastically underpaid back then,” said Evanier. “To some extent, the question is not why Colletta spent so little time on a page, but why anyone spent more.” According to Evanier, Colletta was among the inkers getting the lowest page rates at DC during the period he

Sinnott knew instantly that had to be Colletta. He walked over to the man. “Vinnie?” Sinnott asked. Colletta smiled in answer. Of course, Vinnie. “A permanent tan, well-groomed hair and gold chains”—that’s the Colletta that Marvel penciler Herb Trimpe (The Incredible Hulk) remembered from the inker’s visits to the Marvel offices. “Vinnie was an awesome guy.” “A somewhat larger-than-life character,” said Jim Salicrup, who worked as an editor for Marvel in the 1970s-90s. “But who wasn’t, at Marvel?” Salicrup, who’d started working for Marvel in his teens, remembers shyly watching a lunchtime poker game in Marvel’s bullpen in the early 1970s. “Vinnie was speaking,” Salicrup said, “and something he said struck me as funny, so I must’ve laughed a little.” Colletta “suddenly got very serious, and wanted to know if I was laughing at him,” Salicrup said. It was a scene right out of the movie Casino, he recalled. “I must’ve looked like a deer frozen in the headlights,” Salicrup said, “so Mike Esposito quickly came to my defense, saying something silly, like how I’m just like that—that I laugh for no reason! Whatever Mike said worked, 22

“He’d talk you to death.... He was a con was working on Kirby books. Then-DC man in his own way, you know?” publisher Paul Levitz shed some light Some DC artists, like fan favorite on the pay issue in a 2000 letter to The Neal Adams, who had revitalized Batman Jack Kirby Collector magazine. and Green Lantern with gracefully “Vinnie was receiving a lowerrealistic pencils, didn’t want Colletta to than-usual rate for inking Jack’s work,” touch their work, Evanier said. Didn’t Levitz said. even want him in the same room with “The reasoning for this,” Levitz their work. Colletta got a Brave & the said, “was some combination of the Bold that Adams had penciled. Adams ‘ease’ of inking Jack’s work... the high hated the inks, according to many volume of work being guaranteed accounts, so he did something about it. under the arrangement (a rarity in the On his blog in 2007, Evanier wrote: handshake deals of the period), and the “Adams took the one job of his [that] amount DC was paying Jack, motivating Colletta inked and personally retouched the company to squeeze the budget about 80 percent of it without compenelsewhere. None of this is justification sation. That was in the early ’70s, at a for any corners Vinnie cut, just backtime when artists rarely demanded ground.” [that certain inkers were out]... But Like all inkers, Colletta set for himwhat Vinnie did drove Jack [Kirby], Alex self a time limit to get the work done, [Toth] and Neal to break precedent.” but to his critics, his timer was set too low. “He rushed everything,” Sinnott said. “He knew all the tricks to make the workload [lighter]. He took a lot of shortcuts.” Colletta had talent, no question about that, said Sinnott. “Vinnie could be a great inker when he wanted to be,” Sinnott said. But in Sinnott’s view, he often didn’t want to be. “Vinnie could be as good as you wanted him to be,” said former DC editor, publisher and penciler Carmine Infantino. “He could be a hell of an inker.... But he was not one of the top players, you know what I’m saying? Not one of the top inkers.” (The top tier, for Infantino, would include Murphy Anderson, Frank Giacoia and Wally Wood.) In 1975, Colletta took on the task of organizing a Marvel Comics Colletta was “a good Convention. These pages show the cover and Stan Lee’s intro page talker,” Infantino said. for the program book; we assume Vince took the photo of Stan. 23

(On an Internet discussion board later, Evanier expanded on that: “My only interest here is that a couple of folks... have this idea that they can best defend the good name of Colletta by making out like it’s all a conspiracy I’ve launched to defame the guy, and that I’m lying when I say Kirby didn’t like his work, Neal Adams didn’t like his work, [Alex] Toth didn’t like his work, etc. Anyone who’s sat in panel rooms at San Diego or other cons... has heard some of the field’s greatest artists say how much they didn’t like being inked by Vince.”) “I like to see good work,” Adams told The Jack Kirby Collector in a 1997 interview. “I’m one of those people who think that Vinnie Colletta ruined more comic books than any five artists could have drawn in a lifetime.” Did Kirby like Colletta? Kirby “tolerated” him, Evanier said. Others have told stories of fans approaching Kirby at conventions and complaining about Colletta’s inks, with Kirby sort of shrugging his shoulders and saying, in effect, “Well, that’s Vince.” In a 1969 interview that appeared years later in The Nostalgia Journal, Kirby was asked whether he

had any preferences about who inked his pencils. “I like some styles over others,” Kirby replied. “I feel they’re all good men, I really do.” Interviewer Mark Hebert pressed him: “But don’t you prefer one inker over another?” “Well, I won’t identify any names, but there are some styles that are too graceful for adventure-type stuff,” replied Kirby, who at that time was primarily being inked by Colletta and Sinnott. “...A fellow may be inking romance strips for years and suddenly be given an adventure strip to do. This is unfair. I feel he’s being taken out of his element. There’s always a chance that if he draws adventure strips long enough, or inks them long enough, he’ll adjust to it... ” (Both Colletta and Sinnott had worked extensively in romance comics prior to working with Kirby, and Kirby himself had been a pioneer in the romance genre... but Colletta had been “typecast” as a romance specialist. Kirby and Sinnott had not.) When The Comics Journal’s Gary Groth pressed Kirby about Colletta in their famed 1989 interviews, the artist seemed reluctant to dump on his former inker. “Colletta was a good, professional inker, but I didn’t care too much for his particular style,” Kirby told Groth. “...There was nothing I could do about these

om X-Men

a inks fr , and Collett ils c n e p th uts, Alex To o: Kirby layo A rare comb 24

#12 (1965).

Neal Adams re-inked most of this story from Brave & The Bold #81 (1968). 25

things, at any rate.” More popular inkers, like Sinnott, viewed Colletta with a combination of respect for his massive workload and disdain for what they saw as his corner-cutting. “Colletta’s first goal was to produce, and that he did,” said Sinnott, Kirby’s inker on Fantastic Four during that title’s 1965-70 wonder years—the years that would spawn characters such as world-eating Galactus, his exiled herald the Silver Surfer, the secretive Inhumans, and the proud Black Panther. Sinnott said Colletta “had a prodigious workload, and could turn out work like no one before or after.... The most important thing in the comic-book business was to meet your deadline; no one did this better than Vince. Of course, the next step was to do it as well as you could in the time that you had.” That was where Colletta failed, according to Sinnott. He rushed even when he didn’t have to. That gave him more time for more work, so he constantly

Perhaps because of the better pay rate, Colletta would turn in more distinguished inks on covers, such as this Gil Kanepenciled one for Sub-Mariner #50 (1972).

he didn’t feel like inking. And, later, another complaint: He farmed out background work to assistants of varying skill. It all made for lots of variables in the equation that was Colletta’s inking. One page might look great; the next one might look rushed. One panel might look beautiful; the next might look hastily sketched. “There are panels you can point to where the textures [Colletta] pulls out and comes up with are just really pretty great,” says Erik Larsen. “And at the same time, there are other panels where it just looks like he could not have cared less.” “Vinnie’s inking style wasn’t compatible with me,” recalled veteran artist and inker Dick Ayers. “I always felt something was missing; his interpretation of my pencils lacked dramatization. “I would get frustrated trying to pencil... if I knew he was to be my inker,” Ayers said. “I had a saying: ‘If I draw seven trees in a panel, he’ll do one and erase the others.’” Illustrator and comics historian Arlen Schumer (The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, 2003) sees Colletta as nearly the equivalent of the “union inker”—“It’s almost like the publishers had to use him.... Love him or hate him, publishers hired him. Love him or hate his style, he had style... and it was his style. I don’t think there are other inkers out there today who are trying to ‘do’ Vince Colletta.” To Schumer, Colletta was much like the scrambling “journeyman player” of pro baseball—the man who goes from team to team, position to position—“the comics equivalent of the utility infielder.” And Schumer sees a parallel in the story of one baseball player in particular. “Colletta’s like the Pete Rose of comics art,” said Schumer. “He’s done a lot of bad things that keep him out of the Hall of Fame. We can’t really let Colletta in because of the erasings.... [so] you’ve got a real paradox.”

took on more work. “He was over the drawing board all the time, really,” Sinnott said. You needed a book inked over the weekend? Or even quicker than that? You gave it to Colletta. Editors needed Colletta the same way they needed coffee and cigarettes—sometimes, you weren’t going to publish without him. Colletta was often being called in on a book at the last minute—or beyond the last minute, says Tom DeFalco. “He would come in and he would practically kill himself to get a job done overnight,” says DeFalco. “...It was really a question of whether or not that book would ship. “In those days,” DeFalco said, “if you missed shipping, you were dead. The odds were pretty good that title would take a serious hit... in terms of sales, in terms of everything else. “If you missed your spot on the printing [run], and somebody else took it, then who knew when you’d get back?” DeFalco said. “In those days, it was all newsstand distribution, so you had to make that shipping date. If you missed that shipping date, who knew when they’d be able to slot you in again? Then maybe your next issue might be on sale for only two weeks, instead of the four weeks that it was supposed to be. “So it was a whole different attitude about making deadline.... And Vinnie, to his credit, a lot of times, put everything else [to] the side to get the job done.... He would just work like a savage to get it done.... If he didn’t, there might not have ever been another issue of that thing.” But artists often saw him in a different way. Penciler Gil Kane (Green Lantern) is often reported to have described Colletta as his second-favorite inker. “Who’s the first?” fans would ask. “Anybody else,” Kane would grin. The constant complaint about Colletta: He ignored parts of the panel 27

THE

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Chapter 2: LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE ut first, there was Casteldaccia. Casteldaccia is a picturesque little town of about 9,000 people in the province of Palermo, Sicily. It’s only a few miles from the Italian coastline. One tourism-oriented Web site calls the town “a quaint village on a hill.” Vacation rental deals abound. The town has always been known for the fine wines produced in the area. The Duca di Salaparuta winery is based there. The company can trace its history all the

photography work, “shady characters” were in the minority: “Most were just artists, actors, models, restaurant people and the like. I met a bookie or two, but never any hit men or truck hijackers, you know?”) Meanwhile, the young Vinnie Colletta was thinking about art, and making art. “My dad could always draw,” Franklin Colletta said. “It wasn’t really something he had to learn—it was just there.” What influences would have shaped Colletta’s art, and his thinking about art? The first comic books did not appear until he was about 15. A bigger influence on him might have been newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines. But which ones? What fed the fine lines he was sketching in his head? Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant seems a possible influence, but Colletta wasn’t simply aping the Foster look. (Decades later, Colletta would tell Joe Kubert that some comics artists he particularly admired were Golden Age great Lou Fine and Jack Kirby. “He always loved Kirby,” said Kubert. “Always. That was top honcho to him. He loved the older guys, I guess like Lou Fine and Reed Crandall, people like that.”) Colletta served in World War II, according to his son: He was in the South Pacific and at Guam, and “his art graced the sides of many USAF bombers.” After the war ended, his son said, Colletta attended art school and started doing portrait work and landscapes around New Jersey. “After class each night,” Franklin Colletta said, “he earned extra money selling his drawings and paintings to the other students.” By the early 1950s, when Colletta was about 30, he was married (his wife was named Viola) and was building a growing career in comics. He specialized in one kind in particular: Romance. Girl meets boy. Girl goes out with boy for a malt or a dance or a country drive. Girl loses boy to another girl.

way back to 1824, when one Guiseppe Alliata, the Duke of Salaparuta, decided to embrace the grape. The label is called Corvo di Salaparuta—literally the Crow of Salaparuta—because of a magical incident involving the Duke and the peasants who worked his vineyards, according to a “local legend” (the kind of legend popular with summer tourists). According to the legend, the peasants were constantly being annoyed by the endless cawing of a big crow that had roosted in the vineyards. Someone called in a local monk who could communicate with animals. The monk and the crow talked it over and made a deal. The crow would shut up if the Duke would call his wine the Crow of Salaparuta. About 100 years after the monk talked with the crow, Vincent Colletta was born in the village of Casteldaccia. It was 1923. His mother was Rosa; his father was Frank. Rosa was “a pretty girl who got swept off her feet” by “this boy on horseback,” says Franklin Colletta. The horse-riding kid, Frank Colletta, would become Rosa’s husband and something of a power broker in the region—he was “a tough guy, a pretty high-level Mafioso,” says Franklin Colletta. “...We were a Mafia family in Sicily.” Vinnie’s father “ran afoul of the law,” Franklin says, “and wound up in Brooklyn, New York,” where he had family. Rosa and the young Vinnie “waited 10 years to join him” in the United States. “Rosa soon whisked them out of Brooklyn to a much nicer Jersey City, where they opened an Italian market,” Franklin says. Rosa made Frank abandon the Mob life after she and Vinnie arrived here, Franklin says. “Thanks to my grandmother’s insistence that Grandpa quit ‘the life’... our connections to the underworld officially ended.” (Franklin says that despite the vast number of people he met via his father Vinnie’s art and 29

“Romance comics were generally produced by middle-aged men who thought they knew what teenage girls wanted to read,” says Nolan. “The vast majority of them were drawn very well. You couldn’t get away with drawing bad art on romance comics. “They cried out for people that could draw real human bodies.... They cried out for fashion to be done accurately.... Not only clothes, but hair, makeup. You rarely saw girls portrayed in jeans—most of the time, they were wearing what Beaver Cleaver’s mom wore: dresses and pearls.” The arrival of the Comics Code around 1954, Nolan says, removed the romance books’ racier edges. Dresses got buttoned higher. Heaving bosoms no longer heaved quite so much. “Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable,” the Code commanded. “...The treatment of love/romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.... Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.” Goodbye, you rotten “baser emotions.” “They forbade cleavage,” Nolan says. “They forbade any kind of controversy.... The pre-Code comics had the occasional crime story involving romance, or sports story—they had themes—but the look was pretty much the same. And after the Comics Code came in, the look was even more the same.” The romance books “became more hearts and flowers, more tears,” Nolan says. “The covers were pretty stereotypical after the Code. They usually showed a smiling girl and guy in a romantic clinch, or maybe two girls and a guy, and one of the girls is saying, ‘I’m gonna get Joe back!’” Colletta worked on hundreds of 1950s romances, either as penciler or inker or sometimes both—and many

Sometimes, girl learns a lesson. Sometimes, boy learns a lesson. Sometimes, they get back together. Sometimes not. The romance revolution had begun about 1947, and like many of the revolutions in comics, Jack Kirby was there. Comics historian Michelle Nolan, author of Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics (2008), says things were ripe for a new genre to bloom. “It was a postwar atmosphere,” says Nolan. “It was the end of the Golden Age, the end of the relevance of [the first wave of] superheroes. People were tired of superheroes, and comic-book publishers were looking for other genres.” They found one in Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Young Romance comic in 1947, but the boom didn’t happen overnight. “It took a long time, over a year, to pick up,” Nolan says. “There were only, as I remember, 15 issues of romance comics published in ’47 and ’48. Then in ’49, the first six months, there were like 42 issues, and in the last six months, there were like 250 issues. There was a monstrous explosion in the second half of ’49 and the first half of ’50.” After the glut came a bust, then another slow boom, and by 1952, one in five comics was a romance. Romance was the hot new dance, and if you could draw or ink, you were dancing. Colletta was out there on the floor, but the floor was so crowded, it was tough for one man’s moves to dominate the scene. Simon and Kirby had already staked out their turf. Other rising stars popped up, Nolan says: Matt Baker, Alex Toth, Lev Gleason, Kurt Schaffenberger, Chris Rule, Syd Shores, Ogden Whitney, John Romita Sr. “The romance people tended to have short-lived [runs],” Nolan says. “Most of the artists that did romance did it only for a few years. It was basically a stepping-stone to better stuff, like heroes or Westerns. 30

First Love Illustrated #89 (1962). This is credited as Matt Baker pencils, Vince Colletta inks.

argue that they stand as Colletta’s best work in comics. No superheroes, no exploding volcanoes, no gotta-save-the-planet-right-now plots. No raging monsters tearing up cities. Just young couples trying to figure out how they feel. (Not having sex, though. No one had sex in the ’50s. Not allowed under the Code.) “It’s the way he drew females that will always stand out as his best work to me,” said Colletta’s son Franklin. “If you compare Colletta girls to those drawn by anyone else, the leap from ‘cartoony’ to realistic is noticeable.” As an example of Colletta’s best romance pencils, he cites a 1954 Atlas Comics story titled “Frankie and Johnny”: 31

“As good as any in the romance genre.” Sometimes Colletta signed his ’50s books, sometimes not; sometimes the particular company he was working for at the time didn’t want the artists to identify themselves. The lack of formal credits makes it hard to tell who did what. One sample of romance work attributed to Colletta as both penciler and inker is “Dungaree Doll,” a 1958 tale from Harvey Comics’ First Love Illustrated #89. But when the original art from that story was offered online by Heritage Auctions, the pencils were tentatively attributed to Matt Baker and the inks to Colletta. “Dungaree Doll” is about a girl who runs her ailing dad’s gas station. She’s cute, but all the guys just see her as a handy mechanic. Can she ever find love among the

Lo More from First

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very many anonymous pencilers” on the Charlton books; together, he and Colletta churned out about 1,500 pages of tearful romance stories for the company. Eisman recalls that he made about $10 per penciled page. Colletta “was an excellent artist when he wanted to be,” Eisman says. “He had great ability. He was very fast, facile with a brush.... I’ve seen work that he did very early on that was fabulous,” both penciling and inking. But, Eisman says, “When he found he could ink faster than he could pencil... then he had it made, as far as he was concerned.” Eisman liked Colletta, but found him very different from most comics artists—far more production-oriented, far more pragmatic. “I wanted to be better than Hal Foster,” Eisman said. “When I tried to sell my own work, I tried to be as good as Hal Foster.... Most cartoonists that I know have that feeling about their work. Vinnie didn’t.” “Heavy production” was Colletta’s goal, according to Eisman. Colletta would sometimes ask Eisman rhetorically: “Whatta you wanna do, go down in history?” In other words: We’re here to make money now, not history later. (When Eisman quotes Colletta, he imitates Colletta’s voice, speaking in a slow monotone that’s all but impossible to reproduce in print.) “He was into it for the money,” Eisman said. “It was strictly a job.” (Charlton also published magazines like True Romance—all prose, illustrated with photos. Handy with a camera, Colletta would also shoot photos for the Charlton mags, Eisman said. One photo spread called for Colletta to illustrate a crime scene—a man’s body spilling out of a car, with a woman standing over him, pistol in hand. Eisman said he played “the body” in that scene.) Eisman said he adapted to the Colletta system of doing comics after

oil cans? “I’ve got dirt under my nails and grime in my heart! I’m as unglamorous as an old tire! Oh, goodbye!” she tells a suitor whose car she’s fixing. (She’s fixing his car very slowly, to keep him around town for what seems like weeks.) One of Colletta’s collaborators on some of his romance books was Joe Sinnott. And for him, it wasn’t all that romantic. “When Marvel [Atlas] suspended operations in ’57-58, Vince and I did hundreds of romance stories for Charlton Comics,” Sinnott recalled. “I did the pencils and Vince the inks.” At the time, Colletta worked out of a studio at Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey. Sinnott estimated that he drew 2,700 pages of romance stories for Charlton, with Colletta handling the inks on virtually all of them. The stories had the usual purple titles of the period: “The Girl Who Lost Everything,” “My Heart Cried Out,” “Bad Girl,” “Jilted.” Sinnott recalled that he worked hard on those comics. “I did a good pencil job [on them],” Sinnott said. “Very clean, very detailed.” But Colletta cut corners, according to Sinnott. “He didn’t do me justice.” There wasn’t much he could do about it, Sinnott said: Colletta held the account with Charlton to produce the work, so technically, Sinnott was working for him. Another artist who worked with Colletta on Charlton romance comics in the late 1950s/early 1960s was Hy Eisman, a journeyman penciler who now draws the Popeye and Katzenjammer Kids comic strips for King Features Syndicate. Like Sinnott, Eisman was working for Colletta on those Charlton books. It was a simple arrangement. Charlton needed pages. Colletta needed pencilers to draw them so he could do the inks. Eisman needed some extra money. So he signed on as “one of Vinnie’s 33

Anonymous internet blogger “The Apocolyte” brought to light this fascinating comparison of a 1953 Wally Wood story for EC Comics’ Weird Science #19, May-June 1953 (above), and an early Colletta story from 1954 for Atlas Comics’ Uncanny Tales #18, March 1954 (next page), showing how Colletta was heavily influenced by Wood. See both complete stories at http://theblogattheendoftime.blogspot.com/2009/10/under-influence-vince-colletta-and.html ©2010 William M. Gaines, Agent.

was that he tended to overpower an artist’s pencils more so than complement them. “He used your pencils merely as a springboard for his [inking] style,” Eisman said. “...No matter what you drew, when he finished inking it, you knew it was Vinnie’s inking. Your style disappeared.” Colletta gave everything a “middle America” look, Eisman said. “His men were all middle America. His women were all middle America. There’s nothing ethnic in the men or the women.... It was the same face on women, or men, and the hair was a little different.... It was always a pretty guy and a pretty woman.” Still, Eisman says, he wasn’t complaining. Colletta’s inking style “wasn’t something that I liked or disliked” at the time, he said. “I was producing—I was making some money at a time when I needed it, so I had no problem with Vinnie. We got along. I never complained.... As long as I produced, he had no complaints. And I had no complaints as long as he paid me.” Colletta, though, never let Eisman in on his secrets for picking the ponies. “He had a talent... to always pick a winning horse,” Eisman said. “Whenever he needed money, he was able to make a phone call and get a winning horse. I would ask him, many times, ‘Could you also allow me to participate in this talent you have?’ He said, ‘No, it would bring the odds down.’” Folks at the tracks used to call Colletta “The Artist,” according to his son Franklin. “He was a great handicapper.... You asked what made Vince Colletta the happiest? Those $40 winners sure used to make him smile.” (When Joe Kubert knew Colletta in the 1970s, Colletta was still playing the horses. “He was a gambler, no question about that,” said Kubert. “He played the horses, and he knew which ones to bet on. He’d often come in and say, ‘Joe, I got a good one this time.’

the two men began collaborating on the romance stories for Charlton. “At the beginning, I would pencil very carefully,” Eisman said. “But he’s the one that taught me how to work quickly” and produce. “Because I didn’t have to sign the work, I was willing to do it his way. But it isn’t work that I’m very proud of.” Colletta showed Eisman how to work faster, take shortcuts, design pages more quickly. One example: picture frames. Eisman would detail his panels with framed photos and the like. During the inking, Eisman said, Colletta tended to get rid of the picture frames. “[If] he didn’t feel it was a necessary element in a romance story, he’d ignore it,” Eisman said. “Some cartoonists... would work out the [women’s] eyebrows the way you would draw them, with single strokes,” Eisman said. “And he would take about a #4 brush and do it in a single sweep, which is a lot faster.” Another trick Colletta showed him was the crying eye. “Love stories always involved a woman crying,” Eisman said. “You would do a panel where the woman would be sitting on a bed, perhaps, with her head in her hands. And then there would be a medium closeup as you got closer. And then there would be a panel with just an eye, with a tear coming out. That would be a way of doing a page very quickly.” They both were cranking out the pages. “I was able to get to the point where I was actually penciling about seven to ten pages a day,” Eisman said, “and he was inking seven to ten pages a day, also.” Colletta “inked very quickly,” Eisman said. “He didn’t need a lot of sleep.” There were times, Eisman said, when Colletta could plow through pages for a week on not much more than cat naps. “He said he could do that because he had low blood pressure,” Eisman said. One reason Colletta could zoom through books so fast, Eisman said, 36

An early Kirby/Colletta collaboration, “By Love Betrayed,” from Love Romances #102 (1962).

Kirby/Colletta beginnings in “The Summer Must End” from Teen-Age Romance #84 (1961). 38

Colletta’s ’50s romance books are tough to find, even at the biggest comics shops. If you want to get an idea of what his romance work looked like, your best bet is probably Marvel Romance, a trade paperback collecting some of the company’s love stories from 1960-72. The index credits Colletta as inker on ten of the stories (and he may have done more; a couple of uncredited jobs look like him). The book includes four stories from Love Romances #89 (1960) penciled by Dick Giordano and inked by Colletta; two stories from Teen-Age Romance #77 (1960) with Colletta inks over an uncredited artist’s pencils; a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby tale from Teen-Age Romance #84 (1961) inked by Colletta; and a couple of stories from Love Romances #102 (1962) drawn by Kirby and inked by Colletta. Colletta’s influence is clear in all the stories: the crisp lines of the characters’ clothes, the women’s soft hair... and of course, the eyelashes. Always the eyelashes. The Lee-Kirby story from 1961 is particularly interesting in view of their future collaborations with Colletta. That story—“The Summer Must End!”— features a blonde bombshell who loves/hates/loves the local lifeguard at the beach. Turns out he’s engaged—to a girl who’s not even blonde! Colletta makes Kirby’s pencils look light and open, appropriate for this fluffy, summertime story. (Even though the pencils sometimes look sketchy enough to make you wonder about erasures. Kirby didn’t put any blacks on the bombshell’s car?) Among the fans of Colletta’s romance work is artist/writer Trina Robbins, author of Women and the Comics and From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics From Teens to Zines. Robbins said she loves Colletta’s romances: “Colletta contributed to a

“I’m not a betting man, simply because I’m a sore loser,” Kubert went on. “I don’t like to lose. I will take chances on things that at least I have some control over, but I don’t have any control over horses. But he’d often come in and he’d say, ‘You know, Joe, this one’s a winner.’ And I [would say], ‘Thank you, thank you, Vinnie, that’s not my game.’ Sure enough, he’d come in with a pocketful of dough that he collected from the bets that he had made.... Vinnie was the only cartoonist I ever knew who walked around with a pocketful of money.... He had a roll of bills, always, in his pocket.... I assumed he had been betting and made out well.” Eisman said he would deliver his penciled pages either to Colletta’s home at Saddle River or to a studio he used in New York City. “His studio was open day and night,” Eisman said. “A lot of my deliveries were made in the middle of the night, because there was no traffic and I could park right in front of his studio.” Colletta “was always there,” Eisman said. “Whenever I needed to deliver a job, he would be there. People would be there.” Cops working the late shift would stop by the studio to make phone calls, Eisman said. The place was always busy. “Wherever Vinnie was, it was like a club,” said Colletta’s model/actress friend Lada St. Edmund. Whether he was working out of studios in New York or New Jersey, she said, “He always had a crew there. People, hangers-on, friends... actors. He always had an entourage of people that just hung out.” Eisman sums up Colletta like this: “Vinnie was not a shrinking violet.... He was very unlike the average nerd that’s in this business.... Vinnie was a character. Many times, I thought if they made a sitcom, and they used Vinnie as the lead, they’d have a hit on TV.” What would they call it? “Vinnie,” Eisman laughed. 39

behind deadline.” Despite that, Lustig said, “Colletta is still one of my favorite romance artists.... He drew beautiful women. And when he put some effort into it, they were gorgeous. “It didn’t matter whether he just inked a story or if he both penciled and inked,” Lustig said, “the women always came out as Colletta women. And there was usually a quality to those women that made them stand out, especially at Charlton.” And Colletta was able to do this, Lustig said, even though he was working at a blistering pace. “Colletta was almost unbelievably prolific... in the number of romance pages he churned out for Charlton,” Lustig said. “Since Charlton paid one of the lowest page rates in the industry, he had to be fast to make a living. So did all the other artists. “Yet Colletta’s art was still noticeably more attractive than most of the other Charlton romance art. So yeah, there was quite a bit of talent there. The fact that Colletta was more concerned with speed than beauty doesn’t completely obscure that.” To John Romita Sr., who would become Marvel’s art director and SpiderMan penciler, Colletta’s romance work looked rock-solid. “Vince Colletta inked many romance stories well enough for Alex Toth’s taste. It should tell you how good Vince could be.” But at the dawn of the ’60s, comics readers’ romance with romance was cooling. The Eisenhower era was over. The Kennedy era had begun. Superheroes were taking over again. For romance, it was a long kiss goodnight. Marvel’s Stan Lee rode the rise of the superheroes to lasting fame and fortune, but Lee acknowledges that the changing comics climate did not work to Colletta’s best advantage. Colletta had cut his teeth on softer stories, romantic stories, more naturalistic

certain Marvel romance-comic style that was lush, warm and organic, and was why I far prefer the Marvel love comics to the DC ones, which were colder and kind of angular.” Robbins also admires John Buscema’s romance stories: “Just as beautiful an art style as Colletta’s.” To succeed in the romance genre, Robbins said, an artist had to “be able to draw handsome men and beautiful women, especially in closeup, in fashionable clothing, and not in an insulting way—in other words, not like today’s superheroines in their skintight spandex, thong bikini bottoms and gigantic breasts.” Colletta could do that, so he succeeded. Some of Colletta’s Charlton romance work has found a new life today—but as comedy, not heart-wrenching love dilemmas. Writer John Lustig bought the rights to about 40 issues of Charlton’s First Kiss comics from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and has been turning them into quirky humor pieces by adding new dialogue to the panels. Lustig’s Charlton treasure trove includes Colletta work, sometimes credited as “Vince Colletta Studio.” When Lustig is spinning the old Charlton panels into his Last Kiss Comics, his favorite artists are Colletta and Dick Giordano. “Both drew beautiful women,” Lustig said, “and romance art is all about the women.” “Yes, a lot of [Colletta’s] work was rushed,” Lustig said. “And I understand—particularly during his Marvel days—why so many pencilers complained about Colletta ‘simplifying’ their art.... At Marvel, where you had some great artists breaking new ground and creating gorgeous art, it’s entirely understandable that there would be some anger over Colletta’s minimalist approach to the inking. “Some of the changes Colletta made are heartbreaking. And they’re certainly not all because a book was 40

stories. And those stories were fading into the background, although they would not vanish completely; Colletta would still pick up some romance-comics work well into the 1970s. In retrospect, was it simply that Colletta might not have liked costumed superheroes? “He liked anything that was quick,” said Sinnott. “Superheroes took time.” If Colletta had been able to keep building his career on romance books—as a penciler, not just an inker—he probably would have been a smash, Lee said. “He drew beautiful women.”

Young Romance #176 (1971), credited as a solo Colletta work. 41

THE

Chapter 3: INKING ASGARD mong the gods, Colletta found a home. There are different kinds of stories as well as different kinds of inkers, and Colletta’s softer, moodier style worked well on one kind in particular: fantasy. Timeless fantasy. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Thor was a timeless fantasy (except when its characters sometimes wandered into New York City for a battle between gods or just a quick soda). Its elements were primarily natural elements: Rock, wood, leather, hair, horn, earth, air, fire, water. All the things that the Enchanted Forest is made of. Colletta landed on the title in 1964, as inker on the “Tales of Asgard” feature that ran in the back of Journey into Mystery, which later became The Mighty Thor. By 1965, Colletta was inking the whole book, and he remained the title’s regular inker through 1969 and, more sporadically, into 1970, Kirby’s final year on the book. (Bill Everett handled a string of Thor s in late 1969/early 1970, and Everett’s inks remain a favorite of readers such as Arlen Schumer and Mark Evanier.) It was on “Tales of Asgard” that Colletta’s offbeat style began to grow on readers. It was also on that backup feature, Arlen Schumer argues, that Kirby’s style began to mature, and he really began “giving gravitas to the Thor myth.” “I think that with Thor, Stan Lee wanted a Superman knockoff,” Schumer said. “I think Lee tried to standardize [Thor] with the secret identity and the whole deal.” (Thor strikes his

(left) Journey Into Mystery #123 detail.

(above) JIM #122; Colletta was a good fit for “Tales of Asgard.” 43

as the rest of the book. hammer on the ground and bang—he’s The story doesn’t even involve any transformed into hobbled Dr. Don Blake, of the regular Thor players. The tale goes who spends his time caring for the sick. like this: Haakun the Hunter stops his Clark Kent had his phone booth; Don horse to greet Iduna, who is traveling Blake had his cane. Blake/Thor also through the forest, on her way to Asgard had a mortal girlfriend, nurse Jane with a basketful of “golden apples of Foster, who often needed protecting immortality.” She intends to give them to from various super-threats, but mousy Odin. Haakun bids her a peaceful journey, Jane lacked the fire and grit of Superand Iduna goes deeper into the woods. man’s Lois Lane. Jane would go on to She’s being watched by a fierce wolf flunk Odin’s “godhood test” anyway, who is more than a wolf—he’s Fenris and Thor would hook up with the the wolf god. “Those apples graceful goddess Sif.) must be mine!!” he vows. It was artists like Kirby He shape-shifts into and Steve Ditko, Schumer said, human form, greets Iduna and who strained at the Marvel sneaks a look at her golden leash, who pushed beyond the apples. “What strange hands industry stereotypes, and who you have!” Iduna says. “So pulled the company into the grasping—so brutal! And future. You can see that what an odd voice you have!! happening in Thor, he said. Jack Jack Kirby, Kirby, 1973. 1973. Like the guttural snarl of a “You can chart Kirby’s wild beast!” development through Thor,” Fenris changes back into wolf form, Schumer said. In the beginning, it’s relaapparently intending to kill Iduna. But tively typical superhero stuff, but in some Haakun the Hunter has doubled back— stories, you can see the book’s past he hurls his battle-axe at the wolf god. bumping up against its future. Consider Fenris instantly shrinks himself to the Journey into Mystery #114 (1965). size of a kitten—the axe misses, but The lead-off story is “The Stronger boomerangs back, “slashes through the I Am, the Sooner I Die,” in which Thor very fabric of infinity itself,” and hurls tangles with Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Fenris into a smoky, rocky netherworld. Man. (He touches a rock—he becomes Haakun and Iduna continue their jourrocky!) The inks on that story are by ney—“a tale which has been handed Marvel mainstay Chic Stone, done in down through the ages.” his signature bold, thick blacks. Stone “The Golden Apples” is filled with was a popular inker of the era, and his tones and textures you don’t find elsestyle works well for the book’s main where in the book—the blurred sketchstory—standard superhero fare, more iness of the horse’s hooves; the rough or less. Bad guy gains superpowers. Bad lines of the forest; the patterning of the guy tangles with good guy. Nobody wins girl’s woven basket; the scritch-scratch right away. Come back next month. roughness of wolf god Fenris’ feral Then you turn to the book’s “Tales of mustache. All these help make Asgard Asgard” backup story, titled “The Golden feel like a different world, as if it’s Apples,” a loose retelling of “Little Red physically built out of different stuff Riding Hood,” only this time the characters are gods and goddesses. And than Earth is. it’s inked by Colletta. It’s a remarkable And “Tales of Asgard” was a perfect contrast, even though it’s all by the showcase for that world. Freed from same writer, Lee, and the same artist, the main Thor storyline, its tales could Kirby, and produced at the same time wander down all kinds of curious 44

paths. Who would have thought you could get so much drama out of a black horse wandering a village? (“The Dark Horse of Death” in Thor #132: “The fearful flee before the mighty ebony stallion—while those of stouter heart stand fast! Yet each man knows that the beast will stop before one warrior—the one who is fated to die!”) Some fans no doubt wish Lee had kept Colletta bottled up on the backup feature, rather than turning him loose on the main book. Colletta’s rough, raw, scratchy,

Thor #129’s “T ales of Asgar d”

back-up. 45

inked-with-a-pen look enhanced the book’s natural elements even as he erased, simplified or silhouetted some parts of Kirby’s panels—buildings, crowds, detailing—that he apparently didn’t want to take the time to ink. (Or that he might have felt were not necessary to the panel—a distraction?) Gone were a sword here, a rock there; detailed background characters and carefully crafted buildings sometimes vanished into silhouettes. Occasionally, even foreground characters became silhouettes. (To save time, or because Colletta felt that a full silhouette was more visually striking than an “open” figure?) “One of Vinnie’s favorite tricks was if something wasn’t absolutely necessary to the picture, it went into silhouette,” said penciler Joe Staton. “No matter how much time anybody put into drawing perspectives or something, if it could be blacked out, then it was. And if you had some black in the panel, you could erase a lot more. So Vinnie erased things; he blacked out things.” Erik Larsen owns some original

Thor pages, and he has studied them closely. In Thor #125 (1966), there’s a panel in which Hercules flings away the fallen sequoia that’s blocking a passenger train. (“One side, mortals, whilst Hercules clears the tracks!”) Colletta whited out, or erased, “the entire train” from the background of the panel, Larsen said. “He took the train out,” Larsen said. “Compositionally, the train wasn’t necessary. It did kind of look a little silly sitting there. It’s something of a distraction. So I can’t look at the final product and go, ‘That was a mistake to do that.’ I don’t think it was a mistake... but it’s still kind of a ballsy move.” In other cases, Larsen said, the stripped-down Colletta look brought with it some problems. One of them involved Asgard, home of the gods: In some Colletta Thor pages, Larsen said, Colletta seems to have deleted many of the background players, the gods on the street. Sometimes, Asgard looks “unusually deserted... it should have been kind of teeming with guys.” In a battle scene from a “Tales of

(left) Majestic inks from Thor #158. (above) Colletta routinely omitted figures, as seen here from Thor #166. 47

More pencils to inks comparisons, from Thor #166 (above) and #144 (below)—note the missing mace!

shortcutting abounds. When Thor and his pals spot the energy-crackling spirit of the Living Talisman at their window, Colletta deletes a framed document on the wall and a footstool on the floor, and “checkerboards” an elaborate little medicine cabinet. A cityscape gets checkerboarded a little later on, when Thor, Sif and Balder rush out into the street to face a couple of Enchanters. Later, in a closeup of the Thunder God’s hand grabbing an Enchanter’s ankle, Colletta deletes the bad guy’s mace—an

Asgard” story in Journey into Mystery #112 (1965), the leering head of the King of Jotunheim vanished sometime between leaving Kirby’s art board and arriving on Marvel’s printing presses. The revised panel became more of an over-the-shoulder shot, in which the King’s no-longer-visible head is blocked by his body. Done by Colletta or an assistant? Done for the sake of art or commerce? Nobody knows. In Thor #144 (1967), the showdown with the Enchanters in New York City,

startled glances!” The bystanders take element that took up a third of the panel off running. (They overreact just a little in the original pencils. bit, perhaps—Loki’s not that terrifying; (As it happens, this same issue of New Yorkers have seen much worse, Thor is the one that was to feature the even in the 1960s.) famous cover that reportedly was “too In the first panel, in Xeroxes of the detailed to be inked,” so Kirby drew original art, there’s a man in a hat another one. The original featured Thor standing just to Loki’s left, and his outhanging onto a floating chunk of New stretched fingers point to Loki’s shoulder. York street while one Enchanter bashed In the Colletta-inked version that was at him with a mace and another stood by with a sword. Above them, a sky full of Kirby Krackle; below them, a sprawling section of Manhattan. The simpler, revised cover showed Thor charging the villains from the Enchanters’ point of view.) Just to take a closer look at how Colletta would “edit” pencils: In Thor #154 (1968), we get two panels showing evil Loki appearing suddenly on the streets of New York and panicking a crowd of onlookers. “Begone, thou puny mortals!” rages Loki, resplendent in his horned helmet. “I have had enow of thy witless Innocent bystanders feel the wrath of Colletta’s eraser, in Thor #154. babbling and 49

actually published, the hat man is gone; where he stood is a bare wall. In the next panel, we see the Big Apple residents running away in fear from Loki. In the original pencils, Kirby drew a man scrambling to get up off the pavement, where he apparently has fallen. He’s gone in the published version, replaced by dead space. Two or three of the fleeing bystanders have also been silhouetted. Buildings in the background have been turned into simple checkerboards. The motion lines Kirby placed around Loki’s arms, to show that he’s throwing his arms wide in a gesture of threat, are gone. In the published version, Loki holds his arms outstretched, but unmoving. Does any of this change the story itself? Well, not really. Loki still appears in NYC and the locals still run away. Does any of this damage the art itself? Kirby fans would say yes. The intent of the art is the same, but the details are different. Something got lost in translation. And since Kirby was virtually never late turning in his pencils for his books, fans ask, why were the deletions necessary if Colletta didn’t have to ink the Thor books in a breakneck hurry? Franklin Colletta offers this answer: Because Thor wasn’t necessarily the only book in his father’s lap at the time. If Colletta were still alive, his son says, “Maybe, by now, he would have told the crazy Kirby fans who like to say, ‘Well, Jack’s stuff was never late,’ to take a retrospective peek at all the other uninked pages sitting there next to Jack’s stuff. In addition to there being only so many hours in the day, often Marvel’s priority was the late book, not the Kirby story.” Stan Lee, who was both writer and editor on Thor during the 1960s, said he had not been aware of any erasures on Thor pages and did not know there was a controversy about 50

(left and above) Missing/altered cityscapes from Thor #147 and #144, respectively.

monster Mangog’s giant horns looked like old bone. The wolf-god Fenris’ bristly mustache looked like it would itch like a bastard. Colletta subtracted detail from Thor, but added texture and mood. Maybe that was a fair exchange. Maybe it wasn’t. But Colletta stayed on Thor for about five years—six, counting the “Tales of Asgard” backups—and the book sold and kept on selling. (The sensuous eyelashes Colletta gave Thor’s girlfriend Sif couldn’t have hurt. Only a goddess could have eyelashes like those.) One example of the Colletta texturing that sticks with Erik Larsen is the sequence in Thor #127 (1966) when the Thunder God battles

the erasures. “I was pretty much unaware of it. This is a surprise to me,” Lee said in a mid-2009 interview. Lee said he had never noticed anything missing or changed when he looked over the pages after they were inked by Colletta. “When I got the inking back from Vinnie, it looked fine to me. Nothing seemed to be missing. I didn’t look at it under a microscope.” There’s some irony, and maybe tragedy, in the situation. Colletta “was inking Kirby at his most mature time,” said Arlen Schumer. For Schumer, Kirby was comics’ Michelangelo, at the peak of his powers. “There [Colletta] was, inking the Michelangelo of comics,” Schumer said—and taking shortcuts. These kinds of shortcuts were not common among inkers in the 1960s or later, according to Joe Sinnott. “Only with Vinnie. I can’t remember anybody else who took the kind of shortcuts Vinnie did.” Not all the inkers working in comics at that time were necessarily brilliant artists, Sinnott said, but they gave the work everything they had. Colletta, despite his talent, did not, according to Sinnott. But, at the same time... under Colletta’s inks, Thor’s golden locks looked like hair; his hammer looked like rock; its thong looked like leather. The

A note from production manager Sol Brodsky tells Vince to fix inconsistencies in Kirby’s artwork on Thor #156.

royal lackey Seidring, who temporarily possesses Odin’s power. During the battle, Seidring wraps Thor in “a vortex of liquefied wolfbane”—a floating ball of lethal water. As he struggles inside the watery wolfbane, Colletta shades Thor in fine, scratchy linework. “I was looking at those panels and going, man, if anybody else had inked that, it just would not have been anywhere near as cool,” Larsen said. Colletta deleted background detail, to the fury of the then-few Kirby fans with access to the original pencils, but that lack of detail gave Thor a timeless look and feel, just as a fairy tale about thee-thou Norse gods should have had. And by late 1966, by the time of the “Living Planet” storyline, Colletta had

found a formula that seemed to please most readers—not too heavy on the brush, not too light on the pen. A good example of this “sweet spot” would be the often-reprinted four-issue “Mangog” storyline. (To Larsen’s eye, however, Colletta never really recovered from Marvel’s decision to shrink their original art pages by a few inches around 1967.) Stan Lee still stands by the basic style that Colletta brought to Thor. “I liked it,” Lee said. “A lot of people didn’t. He inked with a very thin line. A lot of people thought it should be heavier. But Jack Kirby never complained.” Colletta “did a good job” on Thor, Lee said. “He didn’t ink the way Joe Sinnott did, and Joe was wonderful. But [Colletta] had his own style. I had

(previous page) Colletta’s own work could be inconsistent at times, as this rough inking from Thor #152 shows. (this page) Balder gets a break, as Colletta eliminates one of the warriors Kirby drew into this fight scene from Thor #157.

(above) Thor #154: the lefthand character is omitted here, and in the prior panel—Colletta’s choice, or an editorial decision? (below) Kirby drew a chair in the pencils, but it’s missing in the inks.

working at Marvel as a writer in the mid-1960s on titles like The Avengers, Lee’s support for Colletta was based on both Colletta’s professionalism and his personality. “He was one of the relatively few artists who socialized with Stan at various times,” said Thomas. “He had more access to Stan than most artists did.” Lee and Colletta loved each other, said Lada St. Edmund, one of Colletta’s actress/model friends. “He adored Stan Lee. He would always talk about Stan Lee like he was the Second Coming,” St. Edmund recalled. Lee, for his part,

no problem with Vinnie’s inks.” They looked good and they “colored up” well, Lee said. (But on at least one occasion while editing Thor, Lee expressed irritation with Colletta’s inks. In Thor #139 from 1967, there’s a sequence where Sif teleports herself and Thor from a New York City subway tunnel to Asgard. Colletta made the characters into smoky half-silhouettes—kind of a neat look, actually. In the margins on that original art page, Lee wrote a note to production man Sol Brodsky: “Sol, V.C. ruined this inking. Jack had much more detail— the figures were recognizable!” There were other occasions when Lee would write margin notes critiquing Kirby’s art or even the lettering on the book.) To Roy Thomas, an ex-schoolteacher who had begun 54

(above) More changes in Thor #154, leading one to believe this issue had a tighter than usual deadline. (below) A figure goes full-silhouette in Thor #144. Was it for expediency’s sake, or to simplify the design?

to Kirby’s art that gave Thor a really classy look that stood out from the other titles.” Colletta defender Eddie Campbell on his blog compares the feel of Thor

seemed “awestruck” by Colletta and “treated him like a rock star,” she said. “I remember Vinnie being very embarrassed by it.” “Stan saw Vinnie as a valuable artist,” Roy Thomas said. “He may have erased some of Jack Kirby’s pencil lines, which Stan wasn’t that much worried about; what Stan cared about was what he saw as the finished product that came in, and he was very happy with the finished product, and the readers were very happy with the finished product.” Despite the criticism Colletta gets now, “Vinnie was quite popular back in the ’60s as the inker on Thor,” Thomas said. “When [Marvel would] have these little contests and things in the early days, he would finish as one of the top inkers. So it’s not as if Stan was flying in the face of reader demand by keeping Vinnie Colletta doing Thor.” Jim Salicrup points out that in the 1960s, when Marvel was only publishing perhaps a dozen monthly books—barely enough to fill out the modest “Mighty Marvel Checklist” of titles—“Stan tried to give each title a strong identity of its own. So even though Stan might write most of the titles, or Jack might draw several, they didn’t all feel exactly the same. Vinnie’s inking added something 55

to Lord of the Rings—“that kind of oldworldly adventure”—a style unique in the era of NASA and the original Star Trek. “(Colletta) gave Thor a kind of Hal Foster look,” said Tony Isabella. The inks even matched the rough, cracked lettering on the book’s cover logo. Colletta’s son Franklin says: “Thor and ‘Asgard’ were miracles even more than they were masterpieces. You try inking one of those splash pages.” On Thor, Colletta also softened

some of the stylistic touches that were Kirby trademarks, such as the “Kirby squiggle”—the wavy lines that apparently started out as a way of designating reflections on shiny metal, but that soon began appearing on people’s bodies as well. Colletta consistently made the “squiggles” look more organic—like ridges of muscle—when they were used on characters’ bodies. When they appeared on metallic objects—such as Thor’s helmet— Colletta tended to turn them into thick black lines with just a hint of the “wave.” Another Colletta touch: Sometimes, he would let the patterns on an object define the object’s shape. For example, if he was inking a man’s tie, and the tie had horizontal stripes, Colletta might drop the vertical containment lines around the tie and let the stripes by themselves define the shape. Sometimes he’d drop the containment lines around Thor’s tiger-stripe leggings and let the striping alone do the work. Colletta brought a more naturalistic approach to Kirby’s highly personal Perhaps due to it being a full-page image, Vince inked this detailed shot from style. Some fans Thor #157 without omissions—a daunting task for any inker. liked it because it 56

looked more classical, more mainstream. Others didn’t because it wasn’t exactly what Kirby had drawn. (And in most cases, it would be many years before fans had access to published copies of Xeroxed penciled pages in order to know what Kirby had drawn.) This was the Colletta touch, and the Colletta touch worked on Thor, and it worked for years. It’s impossible to think of the series without Colletta’s thin black lines. (When they do the Thor movie, the Thunder God should be surrounded by a thin ink line, with crosshatching on his powerful arms.) Colletta’s “scratchy pen line” inking style “perfectly suited Thor’s world,” said Arlen Schumer. He added: “Thor dealt in mountains and forests and valleys—European, rural, in a

sense, which is where myths come from.” The finishes by Colletta, Schumer said, almost felt like “engravings.” You had a cover showing Thor sprawled in a pile of bricks, ravaged by the Wrecker (Thor #149)? Colletta made the Thunder God look as scratched up as the environment he was in, Schumer said. You had a cover showing Thor battling a Storm Giant (Thor #159)? Colletta made the giant look ancient, weathered, “grizzled,” Schumer said. And even when the book veered away from more organic environments into steel-and-plastic science fiction— the Colonizers of Rigel, Galactus— Colletta generally rose to the occasion, Schumer said. “I was pleasantly surprised at how slickly Colletta inked the ‘tech’ stuff,” he said. But for Schumer, if Colletta has a claim to fame, it’s Thor and nothing else. “Colletta’s whole career,” Schumer said, “is because he inked Kirby on Thor in Kirby’s mature phase.” In 1982-83, penciler Alan Kupperberg landed a run on Thor. Colletta’s fine lines from the ’60s stuck in Kupperberg’s mind. Thor, and especially the book’s “Tales of Asgard” backup feature, were Kupperberg’s favorite work from the Colletta portfolio. “I grew up with it at a special, very formative time of my life,” Kupperberg said, “and the work exists in my mind as a fact of life. Vinnie Colletta is hardwired into my brain, like a hundred other artists that influenced me.” So, here was KupperThis note on the cover art for Thor #148 emphasizes Vince’s berg, drawing Thor for “go-to-guy” status for deadlines. Marvel. And here was 57

(above) In Thor #157, this nicely rendered figure of Hogun was omitted, throwing the panel off-balance. (next page) The missing left hand doesn’t hurt the story, but there’s no credible reason to omit it.

pages, I always see comments of praise on Joe Sinnott’s inking, and hardly ever see any praise of your inking on Thor’s letter pages. I guess I would turn to Sinnott’s style myself if everybody seemed to like it, but believe me, your style was tops even though you don’t receive much praise and recognition on the letter pages.” Sadly, the bullpen did not reply to Alvin’s letter, or to another one complaining about the fact that “only the villains” have separate teeth in their mouths, while the good guys have “a solid block of white” between their gums. In Thor #164 (May 1969), another Pennsylvania reader, Gordon Matthews, wrote in to remark on what he saw as Colletta aping Sinnott—but in this case, he liked it. “Thor #159 was magnificent!” Gordon wrote. “...This is the first really great issue of Thor since sometime before you dropped the Journey into Mystery title.... The art was up to its old standards. With Colletta trying to imitate Sinnott and reprints of early Kirby art, it was a

Colletta, inking stuff for Marvel. Kismet! “I begged for Vincent as inker the entire time,” Kupperberg said. “I finally got him on my last issue. Finally, my Thor looked like the Thor. Vinnie was perfect on Thor.” Once 1960s readers bought into Colletta’s approach to the Thor material, they tended to stand by him. Some even complained when they thought he was changing his style, relying more on thicker, heavier “brush” inks, to be more like Sinnott. In the letters columns of Thor #158 (November 1968), reader Alvin Grinage Jr. of Pennsylvania wrote: “Jack’s pencils are as fine as ever, but Vince Colletta! Whew! Is he sick? Does he have amnesia and thinks he’s Joe Sinnott? His inks now are terrible! What happened to his beautiful, aweinspiring penwork? Please, Vince, go back to your magnificent ‘fine lines.’ Your style was unbeatable and part of what made Thor’s mag what it was. “But I guess I can’t blame you,” Alvin continued. “On the FF ’s letter 58

Klein and Bill Everett, said Larsen. “Yet they’d be keeping more of what Jack did.” You can debate this for years, and fans have. At the 1996 Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con International: San Diego, the talk turned to Thor and Colletta and fill-in Thor inker Bill Everett, who had been one of the Golden Age superstars:

refreshing change to see really great art on Thor again.” The Pennsylvania fans had a good point: Colletta was using more blacks and appeared to be using more brush inks by 1968 than he’d been using in his first 18 months or so on Thor. It was a more conventional, maybe more satisfying, look for most readers. But the thin black lines were always there, too. “When Stan Lee chose Vince to ink Thor over Kirby’s pencils, it was a successful team-up which never hurt sales,” said John Romita Sr. “...If fans didn’t like it, Stan probably would have changed inkers.” To Sinnott, Thor represented Colletta’s best work as an inker. Other inkers and artists felt the same way— something about the Thunder God’s world clicked with Colletta. When future Marvel penciler Herb Trimpe was serving in Vietnam with the Air Force, it was a Kirby/Colletta Thor that helped introduce him to Marveldom. “One of the guys got some comics in the mail,” Trimpe said. “That was my first introduction to a Marvel comic book. I had been an EC fan early on, but I was bowled over by the comic— the story, the art and the freshness of the presentation.... The comic was a Thor, and it was penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Vinnie Colletta. It looked great.” “I did like his work on Thor, and the romance stories he penciled and inked in the early ’50s,” said Dick Ayers. “Vinnie was like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead—‘When she was good, she was very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.’ Probably it was due to his use of assistants. The ‘pure’ Colletta was good.” When others inked Kirby’s Thor, Erik Larsen points out, you could see precisely what Colletta brought to the book, and what he took away. Colletta would “scribble in a lot of scritchyscratchy details, and there’d be less of that with other inkers,” such as George 59

(above) From Thor #144, this intricately rendered pencil panel is simplified through shortcuts and silhouetting. The basic feel remains, yet the inks don’t do justice to the art.

and actually giving it a look that I almost think was older. It was most appropriate for Thor in certain ways. It was scratchy; the armor had chinks.” SPURLOCK: “It was almost like Ernie Chua [a.k.a. Ernie Chan] inking Conan. A little roughness, a little antiquity.”

PANELIST DAVID SPURLOCK: “If you look at those Collettas, they look like they’re years older, where the Everetts are really a lot snappier and livelier, because they’re truer to Jack’s pencils, more like what he did on New Gods a couple of years later.” PANELIST MARK EVANIER: “....The editors were very happy with what Colletta did. He didn’t ink those books at gunpoint.... You can’t fault Vince Colletta for inking like Vince Colletta.” AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Talking about Vince Colletta, I think clearly there was an evolution in his inking as time went on.... If you look at the early work he did with Thor when he first came on the book, I think what he was doing was spending more time with it

A few minutes later, another audience member piped up: AUDIENCE MEMBER: “I hope I don’t get stoned for saying this, but I always liked Vince Colletta’s work better than [handpicked Kirby inker] Mike Royer’s.” PANELIST MARV WOLFMAN: “Where are the stones?” [laughter]

THE

Chapter 4: RIVETS AND TREES ut if Thor was Never-Never Land, Fantastic Four was Circuit City. It was science fiction, not fantasy. (What’s the difference? Recall SF writer Orson Scott Card’s definition: “Fantasy has trees. Science fiction has rivets.”) The FF was filled with the rivets of sci-fi. Except for the orange rocks plating The Thing’s hide, the FF ’s elements were all man-made, machines, plastic, metal, circuitry, electronics; it took place in a real city (New York) in a real time (the 1960s), and Colletta’s fairy-tale style never worked, could never have worked, during his several months on the FF during 1965.

c in Fantasti for the art le tt li o F. d F s ker on the ackground nd blank b ce was miscast as in a s k in y h thin, scratc kly realized that Vin Colletta’s uic Stan Lee q Four #41. 61

The change in inkers came just in Colletta’s FF stint spanned four time, to most fans. Colletta’s inks regular issues (mostly the Frightful might have eroded the epic Galactus Four storyline, in which Ben Grimm is trilogy, might have made the Silver brainwashed into hating his pals) and Surfer look like plaster, not living chrome, one Annual (a biggie, the wedding of might have turned Reed’s “energy bat” Reed Richards and Sue Storm). None weapon against Dr. Doom into just a of it is satisfying. vague playtoy. Sinnott believes Colletta The art screams for detail, and would have “wrecked” a visually opulent Colletta’s style was anti-detail. The art character like Galactus (although in wants to be specific—a particular weave fact, Colletta did some striking Galacon the carpet, a particular circuitry tus splash pages later in Thor). pattern on the wall—and Colletta Fussy details made the FF work, wanted to be more generic, more timeand Sinnott was the patron saint of less. The gears were grinding, all right, fussy details. If Kirby was going to draw but the book wasn’t moving. skyscrapers with each brick visible, The FF’s writer/editor, Stan Lee, then Sinnott was going to put cracks in “recognized right away” that Colletta the bricks, by damn. If Kirby was going was a mismatch on the book, said Roy to put all the buttons on Reed’s shirt, Thomas. “The kind of noodling he could do, which would add an illustrative approach to Thor, and which fit, especially on the Asgard sequences... didn’t really work on something where the importance was strength and, in particular, the kind of brute strength of The Thing.” Then came inker Joe Sinnott, and bingo. Sinnott was a perfect fit for the FF; he made Reed Richards’ wall-to-wall machinery look like it could really do something; he gave the series the polished sheen of Popular Mechanics and the exacting detail of the Sears catalog. “In the Fantastic Four, you wanted those machines to be really intricately done,” said Erik Larsen. “Those were almost secondary characters in the book. “[Colletta] was really good with textures,” Larsen said. “He was really awful with tech. He didn’t want to have to get out his ruler and get out his ellipse template and that sort of stuff. Anything like that kind Compare and contrast the styles of Kirby’s most prolific inkers. of slowed him down.” 62

then Sinnott was going to put button holes in the buttons. Each man raised the other to a higher level of detail. “I always used to add stuff to Kirby’s art,” Sinnott said. He did the same for everyone throughout his career, Sinnott added: “There’s not one page [I did] where I didn’t add to the page—not take away from it.” Kirby aide Mark Evanier said Lee used Colletta wisely, by letting him stay on Thor, where most felt that his style worked, and by taking him off Fantastic Four, where most felt that it didn’t. Evanier believes in “casting” certain inkers for certain projects, just as directors cast actors. But even at his best, Evanier said, Colletta was not a good match for Kirby: “Colletta inked

with fine lines material that required bold strokes.” In a critique for TwoMorrows’ Back Issue magazine, Marvel and DC penciler and inker Bob McLeod (The New Mutants) made the case that, perhaps, Colletta’s mind and those of some artists he worked with simply spun in different ways. “Colletta was a precursor of more popular inkers like Klaus Janson and [Ernie] Chan, who also added a lot of texture and linework to their inks,” wrote McLeod, who was editor of TwoMorrows’ Rough Stuff, a magazine about art and artists. “To Colletta’s eye, Kirby’s graphic style was too simplistic, flat and cold,” McLeod wrote. “He tried to soften it and add more interest and warmth by adding texture and rendering. Kirby was a designer and Colletta was a renderer.” In an interview, McLeod said: “I’m not a big fan of [Colletta’s] inking. The point of my article in Back Issue was just that I didn’t think he should be regarded as a bad inker, just an apathetic inker. He was more interested in making money than making art. “...Vinnie found that he made much more money by inking fast than by doing his best,” McLeod added. “In the ’60s and ’70s, editors often needed jobs inked in a matter of days rather than weeks, and quality was less important to them than speed. The fans were buying Kirby, regardless of who inked him. “Colletta became the ‘goto’ guy for editors in a pinch, and Marvel would have had to miss deadlines or use reprints if it wasn’t for him. It hurt him (left) Joe Sinnott inks Galactus in Fantastic Four #75 (1968) in the long run, but he made out and (above) Colletta inks Galactus in Thor #134 (1966). like a bandit in the short run.” 63

said, “he had a nice way of inking hair, and again, his fine line rendering was just more interesting than the thicker, simpler rendering of other inkers. His use of thick/ thin contouring was attractive. Fans uninformed about art are almost invariably attracted to lots of tiny little lines. After I learned how to ink, though, I saw how much of his linework was unproductive and sloppy, and how much his lack of anatomical knowledge caused him to misinterpret figure drawing and weaken it in many cases. “But his early work on the romance comics Colletta goes hi-tech in a solo story from Uncanny Tales #18 (1954). was still just fun Was Colletta the worst inker in to look at, because he had such a concomics? Not by a long shot, according fident flair to his brush work,” McLeod to McLeod. “To my mind, the title of said. “He was definitely on par with, or ‘worst inker in comics’ should go to above, many of his contemporaries in someone incompetent—of which there many ways, from what I’ve seen.” have been many—not someone who Even Colletta’s critics admit he had cut corners to make more money. his moments, although they say you “And there was certainly an attractive could never be sure when those moments quality to a lot of his work,” McLeod were going to happen. continued. “As a fan, before I learned “There was one Gil Kane job that about inking, I thought [Colletta’s] inkhe inked, with Hal Jordan and a puppet ing added a lot of texture and detail to from outer space,” said penciler Joe Kirby’s pencils on Thor, which looked Staton, recalling Green Lantern #70 much more simplistic and less interesting (July 1969), which featured a freckled, when inked by others. malfunctioning alien android named “On the romance books,” McLeod Hilar, programmed to entertain people. 64

Colletta’s style, Kupperberg said, Inking that issue, Colletta used an un“was different enough from the norm usually thick line around foreground to disquiet an artist.” Colletta’s crossfigures, keeping his thin lines around hatching techniques and penwork were background figures. sometimes dismissed as “inking with a “I loved that job,” Staton said. whisk broom” by critics, Kupperberg “Vinnie had this real lush ink line [on said, but he argues there was more to that], he really stylized Gil’s stuff, and the style than that. it was very design-y. That’s one of my “Vinnie’s ink work started out the favorite jobs forever. That particular same as most inkers of his era,” Kuplook didn’t turn up in too many more of perberg said. “Most inkers begin by his jobs. That one sticks with me... the outlining the figures. This allows you to really bold ink work. Gil’s shapes were define the composition and the focus of real nice, and Vinnie just kind of outthe panel. Generally, everything else is lined them in such a bold way, they subordinate to that.” really seemed to be 3-D.... I think if he “Then you go back and shade and had been able to concentrate on that add blacks to the figures, etc.,” he conline work, really put something into it, tinued. “It is in this second step that that would have been a real nice style.” Vinnie’s distinctiveness mainly shows up. Alan Kupperberg estimates that Colletta inked about 100 pages of his pencils over the time they worked together on ’80s Marvel books like Team America. Kupperberg, who described himself as “pretty green” in the business at that time, liked the work Colletta did. “I never felt that Vince ‘hacked out’ inking on my work,” Kupperberg said. “I feel that Vinnie saw my pencils, understood my universe, and he was easily able to finalize my vision in a way that I could understand and appreciate.... Vinnie didn’t diminish my efforts as many other inkers did.” “Like a doctor, the credo of an inker ought to be ‘First, do no harm,’” said Kupperberg. “To guys like me, Vinnie’s work did no harm. Neal Adams felt differently about Vinnie’s inking on his work. And in Colletta inks Gil Kane in Green Lantern #70 (1969). ©2010 DC Comics. his case, I’d agree.” 65

it,” Larsen said. “Taking your pen and kind of wiggling it back and forth a couple times is going to give you this illusion that, ‘Look at this—it’s like an old woodcutting.’” “He couldn’t resist putting a whole bunch of hatchwork all over the lines,” animator and Kirby-phile Bruce Timm told The Jack Kirby Collector. “That kind of defeated the purpose, but for the most part, I think Vince was a pretty decent inker on Jack.” Colletta, former Marvel editor Jim Salicrup believes, saw himself as, literally, the finisher for the art. “Vinnie’s approach was not unlike many former DC inkers, in that they felt they were hired to give the art its final look. With generic-looking pencils, that works very well. But with strong, stylized pencilers, that Tales to Astonish #76 (1966): Colan’s textured pencils turn solid black. doesn’t work too well.... If you’re picking up a “Most old-school inkers employed comic because you like the penciler’s the technique called feathering to art style, much of that would get lost achieve the effect of modeling, and/or with a very strong inker such as Alfredo light-into-shadow-into-darkness. While Alcala or Vince Colletta.” Vinnie employed a minimum of featherFor John Romita Sr., Colletta’s art ing, after he’d outlined his figures with techniques and style were never really a brush, he’d go back in with a pen, the issue: He had the chops to do the and hatch and crosshatch to achieve work he was doing. “I always thought that effect.” Vince was a solid pro,” Romita said, “but Sometimes, Colletta’s techniques more often than not, he chose speed could be used to create the “illusion” and volume [read “money”] rather than that he’d worked harder on a page than quality. This is why his reputation sufhe really had, according to penciler and fered during his latter days.” publisher Erik Larsen. Which raises a question: Did Colletta “There are a lot of things that you love comics? Or did he simply see them can add to a page which will make it as a job he had to do if he wanted to seem as though you really fussed over make money? Was there any joy in the 66

guts out on the page and into every inkwell? job, no matter how badly underpaid Stan Lee said that Colletta always they are. It is art. Their art. That they appeared to enjoy his work. But Lee get paid for it at all is merely a bonus. added: “To him, the comics were just a “Vinnie understood that he was job. He was in it for the money, and he providing a service toward an end. And got paid well.” (By the standards of the that end was not in creating art. That day, perhaps.) service was to meet a deadline so that “I don’t see how he could have the books could be printed, distributed loved his work,” said Joe Sinnott. “To and sold on time and without penalty. him, I think it was a job, that’s all. He “And at that, Vince was the indiswould have taken more pride in his pensable man.” work [if he’d loved it]. I have pride in Colletta “really considered himself my work. I could just knock it out—but a serious artist,” says Tom DeFalco. I can’t do that.” “But he also understood that this was Joe Staton reflects: “You would a commercial medium, and that somethink that at a certain point, the shorttimes you were not in a position to do cuts [Colletta] took would kind of grate if he actually was concerned about anything other than a meal ticket. I can’t see him being really committed to comics. Maybe at some point, because there were some good things in [his career].” Colletta’s son Franklin says: “I suspect that most comic-book artists will tell you that they only see comics as a job. How can you not, when it’s what you do every day?” Still, he says his father’s true passion was for oil painting. “If you gave him a brush and four tubes of color, he could duplicate any sky or any sunset exactly. He could paint your face as lifelike as what you see in the mirror.” Alan Kupperberg thinks Colletta was just pragmatic. “I think he understood that his work, his business, was art. And it was all relative. “Some guys,” Kupper- Fantastic Four #42 (1965): These pages cry out for Sinnott’s heavy, berg said, “will spill their more dramatic linework. 67

your best work. “He would do whatever it took” to get a book out on deadline, DeFalco said. “Sometimes it meant not doing all the backgrounds. Sometimes it meant cutting out a couple of things. “Vinnie also really cared about the art,” DeFalco said. “So sometimes he’d look at a panel layout and say, ‘You’ve got three figures here, but you only really need two. You’d actually have a better composition with the two than with three.’ And he would make those decisions.” Roy Thomas says he can understand how artists might get frustrated with the quality of the finished Colletta work. “But sometimes,” he said, “if they had the Fantastic Four #43 (1965). Much of Kirby’s power is lost without bolder inks. inkers they wanted, connected with the mag’s production or had [inked] it themselves, the book misses his deadline, it sets the whole simply would have ended up being late, kaboodle back like a set of falling and it would have cost hundreds of dominoes.” dollars in late charges [from the printMuch of the time, that was Colletta’s ers] at the very least.” job: Stop the dominoes from falling. And Stan Lee, in a spring 1970 installment his editors say he never failed at that task. of “Stan’s Soapbox,” described the Marvel (Colletta might have been No. 1 on production process like this: “We turn editors’ list of Who To Call When Your out an average of 20 merry masterworks Book Is Running Late, but he wasn’t the a month.... The work is done on a glorionly inker on that list, and he wasn’t the fied, nervous-breakdown-inducing, only inker who was ever required to production-line basis. We start a new put speed ahead of quality. In 1974’s title every day and take about a month Fantastic Four #152, the Marvel editors till it reaches completion.” ran a “special note” that more or less “If any one book is late,” Lee wrote, apologized for the “slightly rushed” “or if any writer or artist or anyone 68

give the image more definition. Only then does the drawing really take shape.” “You go over what he draws with a pen—that’s tracing!” the fan says. They settle the debate by clobbering the tar out of each other. The inker’s craft is a more subtle one than the penciler’s. “It is an art,” said Arlen Schumer. “It’s not just the robotic tracing of pencils.” Some pencilers see inking—even excellent inking—as a necessary evil. The late Marvel and DC penciler Gil Kane saw inking as, mostly, an evil. Kane once said: “Inking is an invention of the publisher. It’s not an invention of the penciler. The penciler’s interest is to do the complete job, and no matter how good the piece of inking is on your penciling, if it isn’t yours, it’s inconsequential to you. It hides everything you’ve done. “You have no way of knowing who’s made the mistakes that you’re looking

look of the Rich Buckler/ Jim Mooney artwork. “There almost wasn’t a 152nd issue of our fabulous foursome,” the note said. “[Inker] Jim Mooney saved us at the last minute!”) Bob McLeod, who began his comics career in the 1970s, said Colletta might have loved comics “in the beginning, but it was mainly just a business to him by the time I met him. “Fans think it’s romantic to work in comics, but it quickly becomes a job,” he said. “Particularly for [Colletta’s] generation, as opposed to today’s comics artists, who grew up wanting to draw Spider-Man. “Vinnie more likely grew up wanting to be a newspaper-strip artist,” said McLeod. “Illustration work outside comics was much harder to get for artists like Vinnie, and most of the time, there was very steady work in comics that paid fairly well, particularly if you could do several pages a day.” And that all comes back to the work itself—the art and craft and discipline of being an inker. Some are better at it than others. Some like it more than others. In Kevin Smith’s 1997 film Chasing Amy, there’s a classic scene in which an insulted inker explodes after a sneering fan asks him to explain exactly what he does. In the scene, penciler Ben Affleck and his inker, Jason Lee, have stopped by a comics convention to sign autographs. “You draw this book?” A fan asks Lee. “No,” Lee replies, “I’m the inker and the colorist.” “What’s that mean—you ‘ink’ it?” the fan demands. “Well,” Lee replies, “it means that [Affleck] draws the pictures in pencil, and then he gives it to me to go over in ink.” “So you just trace!” the fan sneers. “It’s not tracing,” Lee explains calmly. “I add depth and shading to

Kane/Colletta from Detective Comics #403 (1970). 69

Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965) featured an extra-length 23-page story, which penciler Jack Kirby populated with every major Marvel character of the time. It undoubtedly had a crunch deadline, as it stands as some of Colletta’s most rushed-looking inking ever. 70

a great place to hang out, do my homework, have lunch.”) She was also kind of fuzzy on exactly what an inker did. “What do you do?” St. Edmund remembers asking Colletta. “If you don’t draw it, how do you call yourself an artist?” “I ink,” Colletta told her. “Yeah?” St. Edmund remembers asking. “You mean you go in between the lines that are already there?” Watching Colletta ink pages, St. Edmund soon understood how it all worked. “You could not take your eyes off him,” she said. “...You would watch him literally take a flat piece of artwork and totally transform it, give it shading and depth. It was amazing to watch.... His hands would go so fast, and it was so beautiful.... But it was just so easy for him, it was like a joke.... It looked like it [had taken] him hours, and he would always just laugh at that. I’d go, ‘Gee, they’re paying you a lot of money—don’t you think you ought to take a little time?’” “Don’t need to!” Colletta would tell her. In half an hour, Colletta could whip through material that might have taken another inker days, St. Edmund said. “He would sometimes do it so fast,” she said, “he would wait a while to bring it in.” For Colletta, inking was not much tougher than breathing, according to his son Franklin. “He did it as easily as you or I could peel a potato.... Inking is an exact science. Unlike penciling, where you can change things that you screwed up, once that India ink is on the page, it can’t be easily redone. So he was pretty much perfect, and that was impressive. You don’t find much White-Out on his pages.” When he was inking, Franklin Colletta says, his father was relaxed and talkative. “We carried on great conversations while he worked, and those were wonderful times for both

at, and in the end, it’s simply a matter of convenience for the publisher, who in effect has arranged an assembly style of manufacturing his comic books.” But it’s also a skill that can be learned, and that can become a job, even a career. “Inking is difficult to do well, as most things are,” said McLeod. “...You have to gain skill with the brush and pen, and in my day, you really had to know where to add blacks and where not to put feathering, etc. “Today, so much of the art is done in the pencils that inking is almost all just control rather than embellishment. For me, it’s much easier than penciling, though drawing is an important part of good inking. I never thought of [inking] as hard work in my day.” Inking a book is work, but not the same kind of work as penciling it, says Joe Kubert, who runs a New Jersey art school and who inked virtually all of his own pencils at DC. “I don’t like anybody [else] inking my stuff,” Kubert said. “Most artists who do the kind of work we do have a freer mind during the inking process than during the penciling process,” Kubert said. “During the penciling process, we’re doing a lot of thinking, because you’ve gotta plan out and make the sequences work. “If the inker is taking on a job where he’s merely tracing the pencils,” Kubert said, “that’s not difficult at all. But if the inker is taking on a job where he’s really analyzing the pencils, and perhaps adding wherever he feels something should be strengthened, and so on, that takes a little more doing.” An example of this type of “thinking inker,” Kubert said, would be Mike Esposito, especially when he worked on partner Ross Andru’s pencils. Colletta’s actress/model friend Lada St. Edmund “was not into comic books” and didn’t know who Stan Lee was when she started visiting Colletta’s New York studio in the 1960s. (“It was 71

me and my sisters. Other than that, he would mostly listen to whatever talk-radio program was on while he [worked].” When Colletta was working out of a studio, his son says, the family might not see much of him for a while. After the Collettas moved into the Saddle River house, he’d often do his inking in the cabana near the pool. “Once he started working in the cabana,” Franklin Colletta says, “we actually saw how much time he put in.” When working out of his house, a typical day for Colletta might go something like this, according to Franklin. In the morning, Colletta would “go out early” and have coffee with friends in town. One coffee buddy, according to Franklin Colletta, was pro football coach and New Jersey native Bill Parcells. (“I’m sure Coach Parcells really appreciated my dad’s advice first thing in the morning.”) After coming home, Colletta would ink pages for four or five hours. “Then people would come over, we’d

(right) More heavy blacks abound on this 1968 Gene Colan cover to Captain Marvel #8. (next page) Look closely between the Human Torch and Invisible Girl in this panel from Fantastic Four #40. You’ll note a lightly penciled figure of Reed Richards that was omitted in the inking, but wasn’t fully erased. 72

(Arlen Schumer also feels that most fans simply don’t have the analytical tools to really critique the art in comics. Most published comics criticism, he said, is verbal—focused on the plot and the dialogue. Then, at the end of the review, Schumer said, the reviewer will note, “The art chores—it’s always the art ‘chores’—were handled beautifully by...”) McLeod thinks that Colletta would find a much different world now. “Penciling styles have changed, and his inking wouldn’t look at all the same today, because he wouldn’t be able to take over as much as he did then. The pencils are too tight and require much more tracing now.” Erik Larsen puts it like this: “What people are looking for in an inker these days is just somebody who’s going to go over the lines and make it look pretty... make those lines darker.... An inker becomes, really, a tracer. That did not used to be the case. It used to be the case that they were actual collaborators, and a different inker could make a huge difference.”

eat, Dad took a nap, and then he usually went back to inking most of the night.” Did Colletta have favorite pencilers he liked to work with? “Vinnie... was going to interpret the stories the way he wanted to anyway,” Franklin Colletta says. “Obviously, no inker likes having to actually draw the stories from rough layouts, and then ink them as well, but most pencilers’ work was pretty detailed. It made a difference to me, though. I had to erase the pages after the ink dried. Used to take twice the time to erase a Gene Colan page. Everything he penciled was dark and shady, like a Dracula book.” But decades later, the comics world has changed. Are today’s inkers tempted to cut corners the way Colletta sometimes did? “You really can’t do that anymore,” Bob McLeod said. “Inkers are required to follow the pencils now, and most of them are trying so hard to impress the fans and their peers that they’d never think of cutting corners. “On the contrary,” McLeod said, “[inkers] now spend many more hours than necessary ‘doodling’ superfluous lines just to impress. I really think it’s gotten ridiculous.” What if Colletta was working in comics today as an inker, using the same style he used in the Silver Age? Would he be popular with the fans? “Colletta always had a lot of fans,” McLeod said, “and I think he would still have some fans today. “Some fans are more sophisticated now, but I think the vast majority of fans still know nothing about inking,” McLeod said. “The constant praise of mediocre inkers easily confirms that to me.”

THE

Chapter 5: THE FOURTH WORLD n 1970, the word was out: Jack Kirby was leaving Marvel and heading to DC. The King was changing kingdoms. New ideas, new books, were right on the horizon, glittering like the spires of Oz. DC ran house ads. They didn’t even need to use Kirby’s name. Fans were excited. So were inkers. “When it came out that Kirby was moving to DC,” Mark Evanier said, “a number of inkers went in and asked for that work.” They included Frank Giacoia, who had recently filled in for Joe Sinnott on Fantastic Four, and Wally Wood, a ’50s legend who had teamed with Kirby on Challengers of the Unknown. But Colletta edged them out. He got all three of Kirby’s new books (New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle) and also Kirby’s new take on an old book, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. The new Olsen would often wear military-style jumpsuits and smart-looking windbreakers, not bow ties and plaid pants. And he would no longer be begging Superman for help and frantically pumping his “signal watch,” but adventuring right alongside the Man of Steel. (Kirby’s take on Supes likewise was daring for its time. “He is alone,” Kirby told the fanzine Train of Thought in 1971. “That’s the way I see him. If I were a Superman among two billion people... I’d feel pretty insecure.... Superman faces three billion inferior people—and not only inferior, but Superman has to make sure they don’t feel insecure about the fact that they’re inferior to him.”)

Four titles’ worth of Kirby art. For an inker, like striking gold... four times over. How did Colletta snag all those jobs? There were several reasons, Evanier said. “One was that he needed work because DC was then cutting back on its romance comics. They canceled a couple of them, and added reprints to the remaining ones, which were also overbought with inventory material. So Colletta went from inking around three love comics a month for DC to more like one.” Another reason: “There were folks up at DC who liked [Colletta] personally and wanted to see him get work,” Evanier said. “[And] there were folks there who felt Kirby’s work needed to be softened to make it less like that Marvel look that they’d long disliked up at DC, and Colletta seemed like a guy who could do that.” And yet another reason: “Jack was getting DC’s top page rate,” Evanier said, “and it seemed like a nice bit of bookkeeping balance to have his work finished by an inker getting the lowest rate. That effectively lowered the budget a little on each book. “Wally Wood and Frank Giacoia, who also sought the assignment of inking Jack, were each getting a few more bucks per page,” Evanier said, “and neither had

(this spread) Vince inked these custom-drawn Kirby masthead art spots, used atop the covers of his Fourth World comics. Above is an unused one for Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.

Colletta’s track record for reliability.” Colletta seems to have been glad to get the work and glad to be teamed with Kirby. Franklin Colletta says his father “loved” Kirby “from day one.” “I think he felt that Kirby was a little nutty, but a genuinely good guy,” Franklin Colletta said. “During the era they grew up, Italians and Jews were treated the same, so they developed a natural bond, I think. Vinnie mentioned Jack often, and always insisted that we look at the stories they did together.” How did Kirby feel about all this? “Jack didn’t care who they assigned,” Mark Evanier said. “In later years, he developed some stronger opinions about how his work should be inked. But at the time, his attitude was that any 75

professional inker would suffice.” “Jack considered inking a production issue,” said Steve Sherman, who also served as a Kirby assistant, along with Evanier. “...As long as the person inking was professional—in that he made the deadlines and it was printable— Jack was happy. He really didn’t distinguish between a Wally Wood ink job or a Chic Stone ink job.” Early on, Kirby seemed more concerned about the coloring than the inking, Sherman said; he remembers sitting around the kitchen table with Kirby and Evanier, debating the hues of Mister Miracle’s

green, red and yellow costume. And there was probably another reason Colletta got the Fourth World books: These new characters were gods. New gods. And Colletta had a years-long track record on Kirby’s old gods in Thor. Gods are gods, right? But Kirby’s great experiment plugged these New Gods into the real world, and the tone was sharp-focus science fiction, not soft-focus fantasy. Rivets, not trees. Inking the Fourth World pages, Colletta must have felt right at home. He must have thought, “Ah, New Genesis is Asgard... Ah, Highfather is Odin.... Ah, Kalibak is Ulik the troll.” Archetypes are archetypes. At his best, on Thor, Colletta broke Kirby’s thick blacks into feathery grays, giving the art an almost antiqued feel. On the Fourth World, Colletta was not at his best. Clumsy, clotted blacks obscured much of Kirby’s line work. Colletta wasn’t serving Kirby’s pencils, and he wasn’t serving his own style, either. The result was so middle-of-the-road, it couldn’t help but get run over. Not really Kirby, and not really Colletta, either, it was a generic superhero look. This particularly hurt Jimmy Olsen, the Fourth World Heavy blacks nicely complement this spooky splash from Forever People #3. book most grounded 76

in the standard DC reality. We needed to see the rivets in the walls of the DNA Project, the spilled oil on the engines of the Whiz Wagon supercar, all the little touches a Joe Sinnott or a Wally Wood would have obsessed over. (And, yeah, DC’s clumsy reworking of the Superman and Jimmy Olsen heads didn’t help the book, either. Besides looking freaky, it was a “slap in the face” that angered Kirby and his wife, Roz, according to Sherman.) But Colletta did shine brighter with his inks for Jimmy Olsen’s two-part Count Dragorin story, as if moody, vampire shtick tickled him somehow. Monsters! Mood! Women by moonlight! Those were right up Colletta’s alley. His rougher inks also made Jimmy Despite the redrawn Superman and Jimmy heads (by Murphy Anderson), Olsen’s Four-Armed Colletta evoked some chilling atmosphere in 1971’s Jimmy Olsen #142. Terror, the destroyer manufactured by the was more concerned about the abrupt Evil Factory, seem even more alien and shift in direction that Kirby had brought. creepily unformed. It almost seems to “Why is everyone suddenly on a ‘new’ be mutating a little from page to page. kick?” Gregory Kent wrote in Jimmy An accidental effect, maybe, but it Olsen #136 (March 1971). “...I just worked well. don’t like this—uh, different look Jim Some fans didn’t quite know what has now.... Give me the old Olsen, to make of the new Jimmy Olsen, but square as he was, any day.” there were few if any public complaints In New Gods and the other new about Colletta’s inks in the letter columns books Kirby had created, Colletta’s inks after Kirby “rebooted” the series. In seemed hit and miss—but they also the first batch of letters reacting to the seemed to be improving as the series changes Kirby had wrought in Jimmy went on. In Forever People #4 (SeptemOlsen #133 (1970), one Texas fan ber 1971), there was a sinister and termed Colletta’s inks “capable.” sexy splash showing busty Beautiful Another fan, this one from California, Dreamer helpless before Darkseid’s 77

hired to help Kirby with the art, but to handle other things so he’d be free to pencil without distractions.) Evanier was a 17-year-old comics fan when he first met Kirby in 1969, and even then he didn’t like Colletta’s work. After he began working with Kirby at his home in Thousand Oaks, California, Evanier liked Colletta even less. Evanier was now getting to see original Kirby pencil pages and Xeroxes of pencil pages. “I was amazed how powerful it was,” Evanier recalled, but “the more I saw of Colletta’s work, the less I liked it.... Everything Jack put on a page was there for a reason. If you

lackey, Desaad. In the same issue, a shadowy tableau featured an Apokolips “executioner”—his back hair as stiff and thick as a bristle brush—about to murder a Mother Box. In New Gods #4 (September 1971), there was a darkly rendered splash page of Darkseid standing in the shadows as he thinks: “Oh, how heroes love to flaunt their nobility in the face of death! Yet they know better than most that war is but the cold game of the butcher!” And Colletta vividly inked Metron’s flyover of a “primitive planet” in the same issue. Look at the dinosaurs chasing him—their hide isn’t sleek and reptilian, it’s rough and gnarled, like ancient wood. The double-splash page that follows— a battle between proto-humans pounding each other with rocks and clubs—shows off Colletta’s “roughness” to good effect. (“Grizzled” is the word that Arlen Schumer prefers. Colletta could make things look “grizzled.”) Still... changes were coming. No one was more aware of a developing Colletta issue than the teenaged Mark Evanier, who had begun working as a Kirby assistant in 1970, around the time Kirby jumped from Marvel to DC. (Evanier, a word man, wasn’t 78

(this spread) Kirby experimented with photo-collage techniques for backgrounds—a move that likely pleased Colletta, since it meant he was only required to ink the main figures. Shown here are the published cover for New Gods #2 (left), and the original cover art (above), sans background collage, for #3. 79

left something out, you were leaving out part of the story.” Colletta’s inks routinely lost intricate Kirby details, turned elaborate cityscape balconies into “checkerboards” of straight lines, Evanier said. A comparison of pencil Xeroxes to published pages confirms this. Carefully drawn brick buildings wind up looking like smooth glass skyscrapers. Manhattan winds up looking like LEGO® City. (You could argue that some of those changes were sometimes for the better, just in terms of the storytelling, according to Erik Larsen. “In some cases,” he said, “it’s kind of distracting in a way that we’ve got these buildings

[where you can] count every single window on them and every single brick on them in the background, when really, those shouldn’t be the focus.... The focus is the action.” Or as Alex Toth put it, “Simplify, simplify, simplify throughout!”) As he compared pencil pages to published pages, Evanier said, he would gasp, “Oh my God, this is missing, look at that!” The bottom line for Evanier: “A lot of stuff had been shortcut—the backgrounds had been simplified. The energy in the work was being lost.” Fellow Kirby assistant Steve Sherman and Evanier told Kirby at various times that Colletta should go. So did Wally Wood, who’d wanted the Kirby assignment himself. So did fans visiting the Kirby studio and eyeballing the original pencils. “More than a few said, ‘Gee, Mr. Kirby, I see now that Colletta is ruining your work,’” Evanier said. “It was quite a jarring thing for a comics fan” to see the pages preand post-Colletta. “Mark and I were probably more critical of the inking than Jack was,” Sherman recalled. “He liked Vince Colletta and didn’t see anything ‘bad’ about the inking. It was only later, when Vince got kind of sloppy and rushed, that Jack started to grumble.” Inch by inch, page by page, “Jack grew to the point of starting to feel that Colletta was a problem,” 80

Evanier said. And since Kirby was editor on his books, he had—at least on paper—the power to do something. Why did it take so long? There was Kirby’s Depressionbred reluctance to take work away from anyone, Evanier said, and there was Kirby’s belief that a good story carried the day under almost any circumstances. “Jack didn’t look at the printed books that much,” Evanier said. “To Jack, a comic was done when it left his drawing table.... When I first met Jack, he told me it didn’t matter who inked a comic... the important part was, how was the story being told on the page?” But these Fourth World books were (this spread) As the Fourth World progressed, Kirby—perhaps knowing of new and risky and Colletta’s propensity to use shortcuts—began to include fewer background complicated—four details, as in this page from Jimmy Olsen #143. Note how Colletta used the interlocking titles, opportunity to spot some heavy blacks in the background to add weight and counting Jimmy contrast (as a good, professional inker should). Olsen. A whole new according to Evanier. More than cautious, mythology. And Kirby was doing them says Steve Sherman: “Jack was very, for a new company, DC. And there was very paranoid about Marvel—Stan the geography issue: Kirby was working Lee—getting any advance look at the on the West Coast; Colletta, on the new books for DC. Jack really felt that East. Kirby wanted more control over if Stan got a look at them, he would use his books, Evanier said, and this some of the elements in Marvel books.” 3,000-mile gap wasn’t helping. Now, here was Colletta, always a And finally, what was maybe the last freelancer, always picking up work from straw: the “security” issue. both of the Big Two comics companies Kirby was “super-cautious” about in New York. Besides handling the new keeping his DC creations away from Kirby books for DC, Colletta was also Marvel eyes until they were published, 81

doing jobs for Marvel and stopping by the Marvel offices. Sometimes he had Kirby pages with him. Marvel staffers were curious: What is this stuff that Jack is doing now? Colletta would show them. (Franklin Colletta says his father did this because he was proud of the work, not because he was trying to blow Kirby’s secrets.) Copies got made. They floated around the Marvel offices. On one occasion, the Kirby camp reportedly found itself asking the Marvel guys to send them one of the “bootleg” copies for reference when DC couldn’t provide a copy of the original pencils fast enough. Embarrassing. Might as well let Marvel

print the damn books themselves. Kirby “went ballistic” when he heard Marvel staffers were getting an eyeful of his top-secret DC projects, according to Sherman. He called up DC boss Carmine Infantino “and wanted to know what the hell Vince was doing with his pages at Marvel,” Sherman said. Kirby took action. On a visit to New York, Kirby met with Colletta, Evanier said. “Jack talked to Vince,” Sherman said. “And it got ugly.” “He confronted Colletta about two things,” Evanier said. “Taking too many shortcuts on the work and leaving things out; and also [the] reports Jack was getting that Colletta was showing Kirby pages around the Marvel offices when he went there to pick up work.” Journalist Ronin Ro, in his 2004 book Tales to Astonish, reports that Colletta essentially blew off Kirby, telling Kirby that he should start simplifying his art to make life easier for both men. Evanier says only: “They discussed these matters, and afterward, Jack went into [Infantino’s] office and demanded Colletta be replaced.” Infantino remembers it as a phone call, not an office visit. He says it was the first time a DC artist had gone on the warpath against Colletta or even complained about him. “Jack called me and complained,” Infantino said. “He said, ‘I don’t like this guy’s inking. 82

Olsens as well, Evanier said, simply because of scheduling issues; Royer needed work when those books needed to be inked, so DC gave Colletta some substitute books to make up for losing a couple of Olsens. Colletta wound up doing the first four issues of New Gods and the cover (but not the interior) of #6. He handled the first four issues of Mister Miracle. He inked the first five issues of Forever People, although Royer handled the cover of #5; and on #6, there’s a Colletta cover with interior inks by Royer. The Kirby camp was pleased with the change. “Mike got very, very close to what Jack was penciling,” Evanier said. “I thought it was an enormous improveMike Royer eventually inked a couple of Jimmy Olsen issues. This pencil- ment... unexpurgated to-ink comparision from #147 shows Royer’s slicker, more faithful Kirby.” approach. Like Colletta, he had to keep pace with Kirby’s prolific output. Inking three Kirby books was no small He’s leaving out backgrounds. He’s workload for Royer, Sherman said. “It leaving out figures. He’s leaving out was grueling work. Mike had to keep everything. I want to get my own inker up with Jack’s speed. And Jack worked on that.... I’m knocking myself out, and seven days a week, at least 10 hours a this guy is erasing my stuff. I won’t day.” (At the time, Kirby was in his stand for it.’” mid-50s and wasn’t even thinking about Infantino told Kirby: “Do what you slowing down.) Lettering the books want, Jack. You’re running that thing.” was an extra chore Royer took on for a Kirby asked for, and got, a young few bucks per page. “He offered to ink California inker named Mike Royer as the books for what Vinnie was getting,” inker and letterer on his new Fourth Sherman said, “and I think he got $3 a World books. Colletta would keep Jimmy page to letter.” Olsen, the title that had already been Royer says he was never a Colletta around for decades. fan, but says he “can’t fault his work Royer wound up inking a few Jimmy ethic.... He had a family to support and 83

Bill Everett handled Thor for several months late in Kirby’s run, and these Everett inks from Thor #172 (1970) show a style much more akin to what Royer later brought to New Gods than to Colletta’s style.

Looking back on it, Sherman says, Colletta’s Fourth World inks were okay. “Over the years, there’s been this controversy that Colletta was a lousy inker on the New Gods, and that isn’t the case. I think that [Joe] Sinnott’s style was just so perfect for Jack that anything else was considered lesser quality. “Jack’s style of penciling was getting tighter and more elaborate,” Sherman added. “He was very aware of the changing styles in comics—Neal Adams—and knew he had to adjust to keep up. I think that’s where Vince got sloppy. His light, fine line style just didn’t really match the bold images that Jack was going for.” Losing the Fourth World was a blow to Colletta. Three books gone. And he’d worked with Kirby for several years on Marvel’s Thor. They were friends— weren’t they? Colletta let loose when Infantino—whom Colletta had nicknamed “Goombah,” Italian for “cousin”—told him about the change. “Vinnie blew his top,” Infantino said. “He got very upset.... He complained like hell.... He yelled at me. He was blaming me. Vinnie was incensed. He says, ‘I’m too good for him.’ ...I said,

worked by the mantra that was taught to me by Sparky Moore: ‘You get your first job by your ability and every job after that on your dependability.’ Editors knew they could count on Vince to get the job to them when, or before, it was due....” But, Royer says, Colletta “weakened every thing of Jack’s that he touched. I think that he approached each assignment as a ‘job of work’ and did it as fast as he could. I don’t feel he had any empathy for what he was doing.... Did I like his inking on Jack? Nope. But you can find a lot of people who didn’t like my inking on Jack.” Colletta had known that “Jack was being pressured” to switch inkers, according to Franklin Colletta. He also felt, according to his son, that Kirby had “lost his way somewhat, both personally and artistically,” on the new DC books. The inking shortcuts that angered the Kirby camp were minor, in Franklin Colletta’s view: “No more prevalent than what other inkers erased.” Steve Sherman says: “I think if Vince had been a bit more aware of the situation, he probably would not have been [taken] off the books. But he had so much work, I don’t think he cared.” 84

‘Listen, don’t talk to me, talk to Kirby. Work it out with Kirby.’ He refused to do that. He blamed me for it. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ But that’s Vinnie.” Franklin Colletta says: “It always stings to get fired. But in the next moment, you notice the pile of pages you still need to ink that day. My dad thought Kirby was a great penciler, but no more so than Curt Swan or Wally Wood, for instance.” When Colletta left the Kirby books, readers howled—the familiar look, the familiar texture, were gone. Initially, readers and DC management “hated it,” Evanier recalled. “We got hate mail when Royer came in.” The hate mail generally didn’t make

it into print. In the letters column of New Gods #7 (March 1972), the reaction to Royer is positive. Comics convention guru Shel Dorf wrote: “I am delighted beyond belief at the job your new inker, Mike Royer, has done... His brush work brings the Kirby pencils to a level that has never been reached before. “My favorite inker on Kirby, up to now, was Wally Wood,” Dorf wrote. “However, Mr. Wood’s own style took over to a large degree.... Ever hear one of your favorite records played on expensive equipment? You’re amazed at how much there is that you never noticed before. That’s the feeling I get now at seeing [Kirby] inked by Royer.” Another California reader wrote in the same letters column: “Outstanding! I’m not sure if all that happened with issue #5 is [Royer’s] doing or not, but I’m all for whatever happened. The artwork seems to have a real feel of life to it.” In Jimmy Olsen, the Kirby title that Colletta had kept, things kept rolling along more or less as usual. “Colletta’s inking was pretty good this ish, too,” remarked a fan from Alabama, writing in Jimmy Olsen #146 (February 1972). The Kirby camp privately might have been seething with anti-Colletta sentiment, but Kirby was still capable of publicly showing affection for Colletta in the credits of Jimmy Olsen. In #143 (November 1971), Kirby impishly put the credits on a coffin: “Asking the valued indulgence of Vince Colletta, who inks in funereal black.” What might the Fourth World have looked like, had Sinnott inked it And in #144, in which instead of Colletta? Here’s a small example of Joe’s inks on Orion and Darkseid, the two main protagonists of the series. Olsen and Co. investigate 85

an underwater monster in Scotland: “...And that great Scottish inkie laddie, Vince Colletta.” The readers who followed the adventures of Mrs. Olsen’s orange-haired son didn’t get upset about the inking; they got upset about things like the two-part Don Rickles spoof that Kirby did. (Don Rickles? The guy our parents watch on Johnny Carson? Uhhhhh... and they want 25 cents for this? “DON’T ASK! JUST BUY IT!” the cover wisely advised.)

But the art changes did get noticed. In the letters columns of Mister Miracle #7 (April 1972), a Kansas City, Missouri reader noticed that the inks on the “Young Scott Free” backup feature in Mister Miracle #5 had looked very different than the inks on that issue’s main story. “Did Kirby ink the ‘Young Scott Free’ story himself?” the fan asked. It fell to Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman to answer the question— they were editing the letters columns. Evanier and Sherman replied: “No, Kirby hardly has time to pencil, much less ink, and the first ‘Young Scott Free’ had an uncredited ink job by Vince Colletta—which explains why it looked so different from the first story, inked by Mike Royer. “The drawings are the same in the pencil stage—the difference is two inkers with two different line styles.” And the Fourth World spun on.

(above) This rough photocopy of Kirby’s pencils from Jimmy Olsen #139 offers the opportunity to see how generally faithful Colletta could be to Kirby’s pencils, at least on that strip (his skillful use of brush on Morgan Edge’s suit stripes is particularly striking). An examination of Kirby’s pencil art from #139 through the end of his Jimmy Olsen run shows virtually no art omissions by Colletta—was it due to Kirby simplifying his art to an extent as the series went on, or more to the dust-up between Kirby and Colletta that brought in Royer as inker? 86

THE

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ob.

Chapter 6: THE GUY ON THE ASSEMBLY LINE ony Isabella couldn’t recall ever discussing with Colletta his ouster from the Fourth World—not unusual, since Colletta rarely seemed to chat about comics colleagues, Isabella said. They were more likely to talk about restaurants, sports, women. Comics professionals of Colletta’s generation “never really discussed each other,” Isabella said, “any more than the guy on the assembly line would discuss the guy three stations down. “These guys didn’t sit there, saying, ‘We’re turning out great art.’ ...They took pride in the craftsmanship, but they never thought they were turning out work for the ages.” In those days, you might see cheap paperback books reprinting a run of comics stories, with the panels chopped up and rearranged to fit the tiny format. Neal Adams’ and Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern comics had gotten that treatment, in a bright yellow paperback featuring the scene where the cosmic cop gets lectured by an elderly black man: “I been readin’ about you.... How you work for the blue skins... and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins... and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with—! The black skins! I

want to know... How come?!” Paperbacks like this were the publishing industry’s nod to comics that were seen as more adult, more respectable, than, say, Lois Lane’s latest plot to discover Superman’s secret identity. But hardback books reprinting dozens of issues, full size in full color, on slick paper? That was a pipe dream. Never happen. Kirby’s Fourth World, meanwhile, struggled along. It might have had a new inker, but it needed readers. The Fourth World, a spectacular godwar fought on Earth, was proving a tough sell to readers who missed the more fun and accessible Marvel books that Kirby had left behind. You could sell Fantastic Four with a bumper sticker of The Thing shouting, “It’s clobberin’ time!” Try doing that with Orion or Darkseid. Try even explaining Orion or Darkseid in fewer than 100 words. Try explaining a Mother Box: Well, it’s a living computer that’s linked to both you and the infinite, and sometimes it can be as big as a hatbox or as small as a pack of cigarettes, and it can channel your paranormal powers, and it pings like sonar... “In all honesty,” DC’s Infantino said, “the books didn’t sell anyway.” Two of the three Fourth World titles were canceled. “And they blame me for that!” Infantino said. Kirby was left with a dumbed-down version of Mister Miracle (Madame Evil Eyes! Shilo Norman! An issue-long dream sequence! Can you take the excitement?) and the far less ambitious new titles Kamandi and The Demon. The former was about a lost boy wandering a future Earth overrun by intelligent animals and animal-like humans; the latter featured an occult researcher whose body housed the spirit of ancient Merlin’s demonic defender Etrigan. Mike Royer’s inks went well with the slick science-fiction adventure of Kamandi, but The Demon—a horror fantasy rooted in magic, not science—needed the rough-and-tumble Colletta touch. Royer’s focus was too sharp, his “cinematography” too clear for the horror genre, where it’s what you can’t really see that scares you most. What should The Demon have looked like? It should have looked like the two-part vampire story in Jimmy Olsen. It should have looked like Kirby‘s genuinely spooky Spirit World Mike Royer’s Demon continued the faithful magazine, which Colletta inked quite effectively look he established on Kirby’s Fourth a few years earlier. It should have had the thin World. But would Colletta have been a better choice for this moody series? black lines. 89

Compare these Thor #179 inks (Kirby’s last issue), to (next page) #195’s inks (over John Buscema)...

Buscema wasn’t complaining about the inks, but Conway became adamant, Thomas said: “He decided he would only write the book if Vinnie was taken off it.” “I didn’t like Vinnie’s inking on Thor, or for that matter, on anything he did,” Conway says. “To me, it looked muddy and crude, and lacked any acknowledgement of the penciler’s original intentions or personal style. Vinnie’s primary asset as an inker, as far as I could tell—and perhaps his only asset—was speed.” Conway vs. Colletta. One must go. Thomas was inclined to bow to Conway’s wishes, since “he was the only one there besides myself—and of course Stan, who wasn’t writing anymore—who could really write the kind of Arthurian, Shakespearean, King James Bible dialogue that Stan had brought to Thor.” (An example of Conway’s goddialogue, from Thor #198: “Milord— prithee speak! Give thy son a sign that still thou dost live!! Monster, he be silent—and if that [silence] betokens death—not all thy power will protect thee! ...Still thou dost stand? Still thou dost threaten the power of the gods? Then thou hast cast thy lot—and thou must take thy due! Feel the living lightning, monster—feel, and die !”) Thomas decided to take Colletta off the book, but to give him another book

In 1972, Marvel launched a project that might have seemed a natural for Colletta—Tomb of Dracula, a classy horror/mystery book with sumptuous art by Gene Colan. Colletta inked a couple of issues. On one of them, someone erased chunks of Colan’s backgrounds. Dracula writer Marv Wolfman is reported to have confronted Colletta about it, and Colletta is reported to have denied any knowledge of the erasures. But he didn’t ink any more Tomb of Dracula stories after that. (Wolfman declined comment for this book.) In the early ’70s, there was always other Marvel work. Colletta reappeared on Thor for a nostalgic return match with Mangog, this time penciled by John Buscema and scripted by Gerry Conway. It actually felt a bit like 1968— they even worked in Tana Nile, the Colonizer from Rigel. And once again, Mangog goes for the dreaded Odinsword—and once again, gets stopped cold by Big Daddy Odin. Colletta looked to be settling back in for another long run with the Thunder God. But even here, there was trouble. Roy Thomas, who had become Marvel’s editor-in-chief in 1972, recalls that Conway, a rising star who then was about 20 years old, “just felt that Vinnie was not good for John Buscema.” 90

to make up for the loss. “Vinnie was not going to lose a dime,” Thomas recalled. “He was going to lose Thor, but he wasn’t going to lose any money, and that’s what Vinnie really cared about.” But before Thomas could tell Colletta about the change, Colletta heard that he was being pulled off the book—but he didn’t hear anything about the other part of the deal, the fact that he’d get another book in Thor’s place. Colletta headed for Thomas’ desk. It was late in the afternoon, not many people around. Thomas glanced up to see Colletta standing over him. “I’m thinking about throwing you out the window,” Colletta told him. “I heard about this thing about Thor. I feel you got your hand in my pocket... and I’m thinking about throwing you out

...the loo k is rema

rkably co

nsistent. 91

the window.” “Well, Vinnie, we should talk!” Thomas told him. Thomas explained what was going on and told Colletta he wouldn’t be losing income. “Vinnie accepted that, and from that time on, we were buddies. We never had another harsh word.” Thomas served as Marvel’s EIC for two years, until 1974, and Colletta would often invite Thomas over to his New York studio near the Marvel offices. “It was a fair-sized studio, with a lot of room to sit around and talk,” Thomas said. “He was always inviting me over, especially during my editor-in-chief days, and after that, when I was still handing out assignments.... He had these models coming around—there were always girls coming to New York, and they’d somehow wend their way to Vinnie’s place for a few [photos] and things like that.” Once, Colletta introduced Thomas to Darby Lloyd Rains, an adult-film actress who appeared in dozens of 1970s porn movies. Thomas says Colletta casually shot some quick photos of the two together. Thomas says he immediately told his wife, just in case the photos turned up later under less-than-friendly circumstances. (As it happens, Thomas

says, he never saw the photos or heard any more about them.) For Thomas, that was the Colletta studio in a nutshell—a place where you might meet anyone, get pressed into having lunch with anyone—just make sure to tell your wife about it. Colletta “would find ways to just happen to have some girl there whenever [Marvel production manager] John Verpoorten or I or probably some other people came by,” Thomas said. In the mid-1970s, Thomas created The Invaders, a retro superhero series set during World War II. Thomas wanted Colletta to ink it. “I felt that Frank Robbins, who was a very fine artist, needed some kind of smoothing over in order to look a little more like mainstream Marvel art, because his work was just a little too weird, his figures a little too rubbery, for the Marvel readership,” Thomas said. “With Vinnie’s inking, it brought it back just a little bit toward the Marvel mainstream.” Colletta inked the first seven or eight issues of The Invaders, then left the book when rival DC offered him the job of art director, Thomas said. Inker Frank Springer—“who made it look much more like Frank Robbins’ work”— took over the book. “Sales sank

Colletta’s inks on The Invaders over penciler Frank Robbins (above) softened the idiosyncratic artist’s style, making it more commercial. Sales fell when Frank Springer (next page) took over the inking. 92

working as art director. “Vinnie was a very nice, personable guy,” said Ayers, who would deliver work to the DC offices in those days. “[He] evidently loved plants—his cubicle was loaded with them.” Rich Buckler has good memories of Colletta’s days as art director. “I had penciled a Batman story for Detective Comics,” Buckler recalled, “and [Colletta] asked me who would be my choice to ink it, if I was given that choice. I said, ‘My first choice? Bernie Wrightson.’ He said, ‘You got it.’ “I was thinking no way; this would never happen. And Vinnie got Bernie for that issue. I think if I had said Frank Frazetta, he would have given Frank a call and talked him into it.” For the young Buckler, Colletta the art director was both a mentor and teacher. “I remember one particular day, I had a dispute with [editor] Julius Schwartz, whose office was next door to Vince’s. This was something that rarely happened. Well, I behaved badly and used the ‘F’ word to tell Julie what to do with himself. “Vince heard about it later,” Buckler continued, “and told me in private that that was really a bad idea, and I should go apologize. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should I have to? He was the one in the wrong.’ Vince told me, ‘It’s not about that. Julie is older than you, and he deserves more respect than that.’ “I felt ashamed. And of course, Vince was right, and I did apologize. Now, this advice came from a guy who, if he didn’t like somebody, to him that person was an [expletive] or a ‘creep.’ Very opinionated. Not everybody liked [Colletta].... They respected him, though. “I liked his honesty,” Buckler continued. “I always knew where I stood with him. The rough edges in his personality did not faze me.... He seemed to have,

immediately, and they never really recovered,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if it was coincidence or what.” But now, there was the DC art director job—a radical change for an inker who’d essentially spent his career freelancing, working from his studio or his house. This was an office job. A staff job. Colletta was in his early 50s, with nearly a quarter-century of comics under his belt. A nine-to-five job—it probably sounded pretty good. Colletta was “talked into” taking the post, his son Franklin said. Colletta held the DC job for about three years in the late 1970s. He’s credited by some with “discovering” the young Frank Miller, who would go on to become a superstar with his work on Marvel’s Daredevil and DC’s The Dark Knight Returns. Thomas credits Colletta’s energetic “schmoozing” for his landing the art director post. “He made it his business to be on good terms with everybody he could. We all do, to a great extent... but Vinnie worked at it harder and more relentlessly than most people.... I don’t think he really had any particular qualifications to be an art director, except to the extent that he knew who were the good artists, and who were the people who could get things done.” Dick Ayers recalled that he never met Colletta in person until Colletta was 93

Hembeck said, “I have no idea how I to some people, an ‘attitude.’ I always could’ve been caught so off-guard understood that to be a good thing, when I was informed that the interview because he was very individual and would be with Vinnie Colletta.” didn’t fit in at all with the ‘corporate’ Hembeck had never been a Colletta office types.” fan. “I never cared much for his muchWhen Colletta was DC’s art director, vaunted turn on Kirby’s Thor, and Buckler said, “Vince would always go thoroughly detested the few issues of to bat for the freelance artist. Inevitably, Fantastic Four he inked,” Hembeck enemies were made along the way. But said. “I’ll admit, when he took his time, I always knew Vince as a reasonable he showed some true talent, but one guy who would try to get everybody to got the impression that he rarely took work together and iron out their differhis time.” ences.... And amazingly, he managed to So here was Hembeck, cooling his keep his sense of humor about it all.” heels in DC’s offices, clutching his “There was usually a lot going on portfolio, about to be ushered in to around him,” said Franklin Colletta. “But he was never distracted—always pushing that ink, you know? And telling jokes.” Not everyone who passed through the DC offices got nurtured by Colletta the art director. Humor cartoonist Fred Hembeck, then a 24-year-old artist living at Long Island and searching for comics work, stopped in to show Colletta his portfolio in the summer of 1977. He still has some scars from the encounter. Hembeck remembers being “thrilled” at learning he would actually get face time with a DC executive. (At Marvel, they told him to leave his portfolio overnight and someone would look at it.) “Considering I was the sort of fan who carefully read the names in the indicia,” Black Lightning #6 cover (1978)—a rare Colletta use of zip-a-tone. 94

meet with “one of maybe only three artists whose work I just couldn’t abide at the time,” and knowing that this artist was going to “decide my fate.” It couldn’t have gone well, and it didn’t. Colletta, dressed like a company man in shirt and tie, greeted Hembeck. He went through Hembeck’s art samples—no pencils, but “about a dozen fully inked pieces, along with several fully colored copies of same.” Colletta asked at one point, “Why did you color this?” Hembeck “stammered out some answer Colletta has his own Challengers of the Unknown about wanting to cover all the moment. Detail from issue #68 (1969), with inks over bases.” Jack Sparling pencils. Colletta finished looking over car “with near-tragic results.” Hembeck’s samples, then reached over Hembeck remembers this as his to some shelves and brought down Challengers of the Unknown moment: pencil Xeroxes of some recent DC work, “From that point on, I too was living on some of which was by Rich Buckler. borrowed time.” Colletta “explained why the storytelling Even while he served as DC’s art in these randomly acquired examples director, Colletta never stopped inking [was] vastly superior to mine,” Hembeck comics. Colletta continued his run on said. “In retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.” DC’s Wonder Woman, often handling Colletta advised Hembeck to buy the pencil work of the book’s regular Andrew Loomis’ book on anatomy as a artist at that time, José Delbo. Colletta, study guide. according to Delbo, generally did good “By this point,” Hembeck said, “I work on Wonder Woman and other could clearly tell I wasn’t going to be projects they handled together. getting the Detective Comics assignment Colletta “was a prolific artist [who] anytime soon.... [But] instead of some could do excellent work if he wanted encouraging words—however hollow— to,” said Delbo. “If he felt pressed for he said something very close to the time, he sometimes ignored what was following: ‘I don’t want to tell you that you drawn in the background and inked have a future in comics, kid—that’d just only what he felt important.... His pen be jerking you off.’” Colletta illustrated work was very good, and he liked to that metaphor with the “appropriate do beautiful women!” (DC’s Carmine hand motions,” Hembeck said. Infantino agreed that Colletta’s Wonder End of interview. Some hand-shaking, Woman looked “nice.”) some thank-yous, then Hembeck found Other artists chafed under Colhimself heading back to the train letta’s hand. In 1975, Mike Grell had station for the trip back to Long Island. launched The Warlord, an Edgar Rice He was “stunned” by the meeting with Burroughs-style adventure book about Colletta. Hours later, Hembeck “was an Air Force pilot who finds himself still in enough of a fog” that, driving out stranded in a dangerous inner-Earth of the Long Island station on his way world. He had spun the series out of a home, he pulled out in front of another 95

Grell’s Colletta tale goes like this. When Colletta was assigned to the book, Grell was “excited”—Colletta was “an industry legend.” Grell had seen his portfolio— “the best of his best work—and it was impressive, to say the least.” But Grell said he soon found that under Colletta’s inks, his pencils often “bore little resemblance” to what Grell had put down on paper. The Warlord, Travis Morgan—an Oliver Queen goatee on his chin, a sword in his hand and a big pistol on his hip—also sported a winged war helmet. Colletta, maybe taking his cue from the helmet wings, appeared to be going for a look that was part Thor—lots of fine lines and feathering—with a A “nice” Wonder Woman cover (#256); José Delbo pencils, Colletta inks. touch of early-’70s Dick Giordano. Morgan was comic strip he’d been developing. It mostly naked, and Colletta feathered originally appeared as an issue of DC’s his musculature at every opportunity. First Issue Special and by 1976 was (There were also some mostly naked running as a stand-alone series. It was babes who got the full Colletta softGrell’s baby: He wrote it, penciled it and hair-and-lush-eyelash look.) inked the first dozen or so issues himself, But fans seemed to want the “pure” a rare trifecta for a young artist. Grell look the book had started out Colletta got put on the book as with, unfiltered by other inkers. “I first inker around 1978, during his tenure noticed something in Warlord #15,” a as art director. When asked to comment New Jersey reader wrote on the letters on his working relationship with Colletta, page of Warlord #21 (May 1979). Grell responded by issuing some e-mail “...Mike Grell’s art dropped somehow. comments he’d earlier sent to a fan What happened? You gave him an inker! writer. (“This... says everything I have I was thrilled to see Joe Rubinstein’s to say on the subject of Vinnie,” Grell inks at first, but it didn’t look as good said.) 96

about the quality of his own work, but as it had. Then Vince Colletta came it was worse that I had begun to feel along to prove my assumption: Mike the same way about mine.” Grell does not work well with an inker! Colletta apparently felt pretty good Those beautiful fine lines disappeared; about his work on Warlord—he would the effect had been lost! Grell must show some of those pages to his family work alone.” with pride, says Franklin Colletta. He The editors replied: “We’ve promised wound up having a fairly long run in Mike that he can ink the first issue of the savage empire of Warlord, where Warlord he turns in on schedule.” sword-and-sorcery mixed easily with Grell says deadlines had never been science fiction and straight adventure. an issue on the book. But he asked DC (In Warlord #21, for example, Travis to replace Colletta as the book’s inker. Morgan must battle a man he’s been Okay, as soon as you get two months told is the adult version of his young ahead on your deadlines, Grell was told. Grell believes the two-month lead time was pretty much “an arbitrary number” set by DC editor Joe Orlando. “I kind of figured he never expected me to make it.” But Grell made it anyway. “I worked like crazy,” Grell said. When he got two months ahead on interiors and four months ahead on covers, Grell said, “I asked that Vinnie be replaced. I was turned down.” Finally, a frustrated Grell held back an issue and inked it himself. He turned it in close enough to deadline to make sure they’d have to use it. “It was a hell of a risk,” Grell said, but one he felt was necessary. “It was bad enough that Warlord #26 (1979), as Colletta inks Mike Grell. Vinnie didn’t care 97

chips were down and a book absolutely had to be done in extremely short order. Was it his best work? I doubt it.... Was it done to suitable professional quality? No doubt.... Was it on time? You bet. That’s what Vince Colletta did better than anyone.” Grell said he now sees Colletta as “a great artist whose true talent was seldom seen by the public.” Some wondered if DC really wanted an art director, or just a very fast inhouse inker. “He seemed to be inking about half the books that DC was putting out,” said Joe Staton, who in those days was a 20-something penciler for DC, working on books like DC Comics Presents, a Superman team-up series. “Somehow they wanted him on staff,

son. Morgan can’t beat him in swordto-sword combat—he’s forced to the floor, bloody and defeated—the death blow starts to fall—then Morgan shoots his foe with his holstered pistol. The gunman versus the swordsman—Grell did it before Indiana Jones used the same trick in 1981.) In Warlord #44 (1981), there’s a scene where a gambler—a cheating gambler—gets his hand chopped off. Erik Larsen says the gambler was modeled on Colletta. Grell compliments Colletta on his speed, but he says that speed often took a toll on the books Colletta inked. Grell said Colletta told him that on one occasion, he’d inked an entire book over the weekend “and hadn’t a clue what title he had been working on.” “I still look at the Warlord books inked by Colletta and see what might have been,” Grell said. “For me, that’s pretty much it. However, for readers who never saw the original pencil version, there is nothing to judge by except what’s in print. If you liked what you saw, that’s really all that counts.” Aided by 30some years of hindsight, Grell said he now sees qualities in Colletta to appreciate. “Vince Colletta was the go-to guy when the 98

Colletta-inked pages from Warlord #30 (left) and #31 (above), both from 1980. 99

but he didn’t really have much of a function as an art director.” The Grand Comics Database confirms that Colletta was carrying a massive inking workload during his tenure as DC’s art director. The database, for example, credits Colletta as interior or cover inker on at least a dozen DC books cover-dated January 1977 or January/February 1977 alone. They ranged from Blackhawk to Batman to Shazam to Weird War Tales to Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter. He was inking as much as he had been during his years as a ferociously productive freelancer—or more. (See Appendix.) Colletta “considered the extra work a bonus,” said Franklin Colletta. “Some people don’t mind working for their bonuses.” “Everybody kind of lived in fear of

being inked by Vinnie,” Joe Staton said. “I kind of cringed when he inked my stuff. He really didn’t pay much attention when he was inking my Superman stuff in the team-up books.... I was much happier when, like, Jack Abel inked them or someone like that.” Colletta, according to Staton, “left out a lot of things. One of my Superman jobs had some pirate stuff. I went to a lot of trouble to draw the boat. There sure wasn’t a lot of rigging left [after the inking was done].” Other Colletta quirks that irked Staton: “He had kind of one woman’s face, with the mascara ropes [for eyelashes]—it didn’t matter how you drew a woman’s face, it always looked like that.... When there was rain or something like that, he really went heavy with the razor blade. It was a quick

Colletta inked nearly every DC artist in the late 1970s; here’s a Curt Swan page from 1977. Note the use of razor blade on the motion lines in the monster’s upper arm. 100

way to get that effect. Some of your pages were kind of slashed.” Staton said DC editor Joe Orlando “would kind of torment Vinnie” about spending most of his time inking when he carried the lofty title of art director. It was during this time that Orlando and Staton were developing a character called the Huntress, the daughter of parallel world EarthTwo’s Batman and Catwoman. A meeting about this character would crystallize Staton’s view of Colletta as a mostly inept art director. “When we were developing the Huntress... I had to Ramona Fradon page, inked by Colletta, for Freedom Fighters #5—a great go in and have a example of the kind of “stock” female faces Vinnie was known for. conference with Joe went over and sat down on the couch and we worked out the costume,” Staton and stretched out and went sound said. “When we were heading into a asleep. He very peacefully laid on the meeting room to spread out papers couch for the whole meeting. and get to work, Vinnie was sitting over “Joe and I had a very nice meeting, there doing some [inking]. And Joe we worked out our sketches, Joe told me hollered over to him, ‘Hey Vinnie, stories, and after a while we decided you’re the art director—we’re doing the meeting had done what it needed to. some designing over here—come on “Joe went over and poked Vinnie and be part of this.’ and Vinnie kind of snorted, sat up and “So Vinnie... talked to Joe a little bit, started to breathe. Vinnie says, ‘Hey, talked to me a little bit,” Staton said. “He we had a good meeting?’ Joe says, realized the Huntress was Bruce Wayne’s ‘Yeah, we had a good meeting. You did daughter and Bruce was the police good, Vinnie, you’re a good art director.’ commissioner [on Earth-Two]. And And Vinnie got up and shuffled off and Vinnie’s contribution was, ‘You know went back to his inking. That was our the commissioner doesn’t carry a gun.’ big meeting with the art director.” “There was a couch over in the corner of the meeting room, and Vinnie 101

THE

Chapter 7: “YOU COULD ALWAYS USE VINNIE” y the early 1980s, Colletta was out of the DC staff job, back to his roots as a freelancer, and back with Marvel Comics for the most part. He’d given the art director job a try, Franklin Colletta said, but “being an employee wasn’t for him.” It didn’t matter now. Colletta had found a friend who, like Stan Lee in the ’60s, was simpatico with Colletta personally and professionally. Marvel’s new editor-inchief Jim Shooter, who’d started out writing DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes when he was barely a teenager, liked Colletta and made sure he got inking jobs. Shooter was about 30 years younger than Colletta, a new generation, and a lightning rod for criticism himself. “They were two peas in a pod,” said Mike Rockwitz, a young editor at Marvel during the Shooter years. “They... bonded together,” Rockwitz laughed. “No one was a really huge Jim Shooter fan, either.” Erik Larsen, a young Marvel penciler in those days, said: “Jim Shooter was a big fan of [Colletta’s], a big supporter of his, went to bat for him on numerous occasions, and went out of his way to line up stuff for him to do.” Franklin Colletta says his father and Shooter had “a symbiotic relationship... Jim was ingenuous back then, and honesty meant everything to my dad.” Colletta “recognized that Shooter had zero people skills,” his son said. “...Shooter would probably still be running Marvel if he paid attention to Vinnie’s Colletta inks Frank Springer on Dazzler #26 (1983).

102

advice, but he was like a kid who knew it all. “Vinnie’s beeper used to go off any hour of the day or night,” Franklin Colletta said. “Always Shooter with a question or a problem.” Shooter declined to be interviewed for this book, saying he doubted that the final product would be fair to Colletta. But it’s clear that Shooter was enthusiastic about having Colletta on his team— so enthusiastic that Shooter did a Q&A interview with Colletta and ran it as an installment of his “Bullpen Bulletins” column in Marvel comics cover-dated May 1983. In the intro, Shooter described Colletta as “the man who has more copies of his work in print than any other human being in the history of the world, Marvel superpro inker Vince Colletta.” SHOOTER: “What’s your philosophy about inking?” COLLETTA: “Well, first of all, some inkers like to pick and choose.... They’ll only do certain jobs over certain pencilers.... And they’ll take their time, no matter what the deadline is, even if the editor is in a jam, or a colorist is waiting for pages to come in so they can earn a living, too. I can’t be that way. I like to feel that I’m part of the team and we’re all in the game together. “If the editor asks me to ink a story by, say, a young, inexperienced penciler who still has some rough edges to his work, I’ll do it and I’ll do the best I can. It might not come out quite as good as a job that I’d inked over John Buscema—it can’t. No way. But I’d rather give it a try to help out the new guy, the editor and the team than pick and choose jobs that will make me look good.” SHOOTER: “Explain how the pencils affect the way the inking comes out.” 103

COLLETTA: “The readers only see the ink. All the pencil lines are covered by the inker’s ink lines. Once the book is printed, no one can tell what the pencil drawings looked like before the inker inked them. They might have given you a tightly rendered face, for instance, or maybe just an oval shape with smudges about where the eyes and mouth go. If he gives you precise drawing, the finished, inked head will look like the penciler’s style. If he gives you an oval, you’re really getting the inker’s drawing.” SHOOTER: “It’s up to the editor to make sure that the penciler has held up his end. Still, I know that in a story which might have 150 separate panels, even the best pencilers might blow a few panels.” COLLETTA: “I think the inker should follow the penciler’s style and try to make it come through. A lot of inkers these days overpower the pencils, though. The penciler just gives them a framework and the inkers take over from there. That’s okay if it’s what the penciler and the editor want.” SHOOTER: “Sometimes it is. Frank Miller worked that way with Klaus (Janson) on Daredevil for a while... Walt Simonson did it with Tom Palmer on Star Wars, too. They really sort of stopped being penciler/inker teams and kind of melded together. Unless guys are working on that kind of basis, though, I think I agree with you—the penciler should bear

primary responsibility.” COLLETTA: “Right.... Since I’ve never worked with a penciler the way Klaus worked with Frank, I’ve always tried to enhance the pencils. It’s not easy. Pencil drawings often have a life and a charm that can’t be captured in the inking. Pencils give an infinite range of grays and tones. An ink line is either there or it’s not. Sometimes it’s frustrating. There have been times when I’ve tried to give editors jobs back. I told them, ‘These pencils are beautiful. Get someone better to ink them!’ But they always insisted that I do them.” SHOOTER: “Who’s your favorite penciler? And inker?” COLLETTA: “I have favorites, but I’d rather not say. Every guy in the business is good in his own way. They’re all pros. It’s like baseball—not every player can be a Reggie Jackson, but each one has a reason to be here.” SHOOTER: “You helped a passel of people get started in the business, right?” COLLETTA: “Michael Golden, Bill Sienkiewicz, Danny Bulanadi, Frank Miller, Marshall Rogers...

Colletta shot most of the photos for 1984’s Marvel Fumetti Book, featuring photo comics of the Marvel Bullpen. 104

and others. I forget.” SHOOTER: “Which of yours did you like best?” COLLETTA: “I’ve inked a lot of stories in 33 years. Too many to single one out. But I’ll tell you about the best day in my whole career.... It was the day I came back to start working at Marvel again after being with another company for a while. I’ll never forget the welcome I got here in the Bullpen—it was like coming home. I feel like I’m in the major leagues again. People care here, about each other and about the comics.”

om DeFalco was a writer and editor at Marvel who recalls giving Colletta what might have been his first, or one of his first, inking assignments in the Shooter era. DeFalco had first worked with Colletta, briefly, on Starfire at DC in the 1970s— DeFalco had been a freelance writer on that book. His editor on Starfire told DeFalco that Colletta “could ink a comic book in two or Howard the Duck #32 (1986), as Vince inks Paul Smith. three days if it was necessary. working off of,” DeFalco said. “Certain And I thought, ‘Yikes! It takes me pencilers, Vinnie enhanced and did a longer to write ’em! How could he ink great job on. Certain pencilers, he did an that fast?’” adequate job on. And certain pencilers, Now, at Marvel in the early ’80s, it was just not a match made in heaven.... Colletta “was looking to ink something All inkers have the same problem. with tight pencils,” DeFalco said. “I had Certain inkers work [well] with certain just gotten this Spider-Man job by John pencilers and not with others. Byrne, which I thought would be perfect “I remember [Colletta] did a Keith for him. So I assigned him the SpiderGiffen job which I thought was fantasMan job. I think he did a pretty good tic,” DeFalco said. “He also did a Paul job on it.” Smith job.... Paul loved Vinnie’s work Shooter “encouraged editors to give on the job, but hated his own work on Vinnie work,” DeFalco said. As editorthe job.” in-chief, Shooter “wasn’t actually in a Colletta often got assigned to position of assigning work.... He’d say rookie artists’ books. “Vinnie was kind things like, ‘Hey, you could always use of this trial by fire,” laughs Erik Larsen. Vinnie. If you need somebody, you “I know a lot of guys, when they would could always use Vinnie.’ first start out, [Colletta] would be the “Vinnie, like every other inker, guy they would give their stuff to. It’s depended upon the penciler he was

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point, that was like the biggest kick in the teeth.... Your first job [for Marvel] is going to be inked by Vinnie. How am I going to survive that?” When he first saw the completed inks on the book, Larsen “had trouble breathing for two days.” His pencils had become something... different. “I was not too taken with it,” Larsen recalled. Colletta “clearly had a background guy” assisting him on the book, Larsen said, “because it was a much different line going on in the background.” (Larsen isn’t sure who that assistant might have been, but he says Plastic Man artist Kyle Baker was among those who assisted Colletta on backgrounds at one time or another. Larsen tells an anecdote about Baker’s service with Colletta: Baker hadn’t inked a “dead guy” in one panel of one particular book, and Colletta asked why. Baker replied that he was only supposed to do backgrounds. “The guy’s dead— he’s a background,” Colletta told him.) Larsen also noticed that in some of

sort of like, if you can survive this, you can survive anything.” Larsen had his own Trial by Vinnie— an experience he now remembers with much more fondness than he did in the 1980s. Around the mid-’80s, when the 20something Larsen was a rookie penciler, he met Shooter at a Chicago convention. “He and I had kind of corresponded prior to that,” Larsen recalled. “He saw me at the show and said, ‘You’re a professional now?’ And I said, ‘Yes, yes I am.’ …. He asked me if I wanted to do something for Marvel Fanfare. I thought that meant, ‘Would you like to do something for Marvel Fanfare?’ ...What that really meant was, ‘Would you like to do an inventory job?’” An inventory job meant drawing a book that would be shelved—for years, perhaps—until it was needed. Larsen was willing to go for it. He and Shooter sat down in the lobby of the hotel where the convention was being held and plotted a rough story. Larsen was interested in doing a Thor versus Hulk story that would be more conclusive than earlier slugfests, in which something usually interrupted the combatants before one had really clobbered the other. The book was finally published in 1987 as an issue of Thor (see sample page at right). Shooter “got his favorite inker to ink it and his favorite scripter to script it,” Larsen said. His favorite inker? Vince Colletta. His favorite scripter? Stan Lee. Larsen was, in effect, subbing for Jack Kirby in a classic 1960s Marvel sandwich. Larsen was happy to be teamed with Lee. Not so happy to be teamed with Colletta. “As a kid growing up, I just never liked his work,” Larsen said. “I was just not a fan of his work. I just didn’t like what he brought to a page. I’ve since kind of grown to appreciate what he does bring to a page. But at that

Colletta inks Erik Larsen on Thor. 106

Don Perlin pencils, Colletta inks on Team America #12 (1983).

bers that it was kind of a kick for a dyed-in-the-wool Marvelite to spot Colletta, a big name from the ’60s. See that guy at the water fountain? He inked “Tales of Asgard”! “I was a huge Kirby fan,” said Rockwitz, who started at Marvel when he was about 18. “And then you get to work at Marvel, and there’s Vinnie Colletta walking down the halls. “Vinnie was always nice to me,” Rockwitz said. “He was decent to me; he was funny.... [He was built like] a little bull... Curly white hair slicked back... He looked like something out of an old gangster movie. “He would always say, ‘Where’s the work?’” Rockwitz said. “He’d call up: ‘Where’s the work?’ He’d say, ‘I’m pouring my ink down the terlet. I got no work!’” But Colletta was getting significant amounts of Marvel work—and many at Marvel weren’t happy about it. “No artist liked working with him, because

his Thor panels, Colletta had “taken some liberties to simplify stuff. There would be a guy with glasses, and he would take the glasses off.” In another panel, Larsen said, “There was a guy who had a full head of hair, and [Colletta] made him a bald dude.... Initially, my thought was, ‘This just makes things easier for him; it’s easier to do that than ink a full head of hair.’ But looking it over as a finished job... he kind of made the right call there, just because I think it was much easier to see what was going on in the background without the distraction of this guy’s head of hair.” It was the only time Colletta would ever ink Larsen’s pencils. Looking back on the issue now, Larsen is actually a little nostalgic about it. During the 1980s, Colletta was around the Marvel offices a lot. Mike Rockwitz, an assistant editor who worked with Colletta on Shooter’s “New Universe” books around 1986, remem107

he had a reputation,” Rockwitz said. “He erased pencils, he redrew things, he was sloppy.” Colletta would be roundly criticized around the office, Rockwitz said—as long as he wasn’t there. “The thing that bugged me the most about people trampling on him is that they would never say it to his face. ...No one would ever say to him, ‘Hey, Vinnie, you’re really doing a lousy job on these pencils.’ Because Vinnie’s answer [would be], ‘Why don’t you go [expletive] yourself?’ That kind of thing. “He would also say, ‘The pencils stink. The guy needs to learn how to draw.’ At some point or another, you could agree with him on some things—there were some shortcuts being taken by pencilers and whatnot.” No one at Marvel “was really honest” with Colletta during the 1980s, Rockwitz said. “If anyone had sat down and said, ‘Hey, Vinnie, instead of using a broken rake to ink the pages, have you tried a brush or a pen?’” Rockwitz said. “Sarcasm aside, if people actually sat down with him, instead of just fearing him or avoiding him, maybe his career would have lasted a little bit longer.” When Colletta’s friend and ally Jim Shooter was ousted from Marvel in 1987, that was a crushing blow to Colletta’s career. That, and maybe the letter. Sometime after Shooter’s exit, Colletta sent the Marvel brass the mother of all protest letters—

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had many, those that speared him and worse, those that watched. “I stuck by him and for that you’ve nailed me on the same cross. I thank you for that. It’s an honor to be crucified with Jim Shooter, a man who none of you will ever be.” The letter was signed simply, “Vince Colletta.” Colletta showed the letter to his son Franklin before sending it to Marvel. “It wasn’t the first time I heard about inept editors—not all, just most—and back-stabbing at Marvel, of course,” Franklin recalled. “But to read it described so graphically was shocking. I remember looking up at him after I read it. He was smiling. “No, he never regretted the letter. I think that it proved a pretty cool exclamation point to his comic-book career.” How did Marvel staffers react to the letter? “[They] just thought it was really funny and sad, at the same time,” said Mike Rockwitz. “That letter was really silly,” said then-Marvel editor Jim Salicrup. “Yes, people made copies, etc., but mainly because it was so outrageous. “I would’ve had no problem, even after he sent the letter, giving Vinnie work if I had something I thought he’d be right for,” Salicrup said. “Unfortunately, Vinnie was convinced that he wasn’t getting work because [he felt that] everyone hated Jim Shooter, and saw Vinnie as close to Jim, so he had to be punished, too. I don’t believe anyone actually felt that way. “The truth could just be, at that time, with comics finally paying royalties, everyone wanted their books to look the best they could—and Vinnie, at that point, was known, whether deserved or not, as a hack,” Salicrup said. “Also, in my case, I [was editing] a certain amount of titles, and I tried to keep regular art teams on those titles. So unless someone dropped out, I simply

a defiant and profane handwritten note signed by Colletta in a proud and sweeping hand. (As of 2009, scans of the letter were available on Internet blogs maintained by comics journalists Heidi MacDonald and Daniel Best.) “Marvel Editors,” the letter began, “You are the droppings of the creative world. You were destined to float the cesspool till urine-logged and finally sink to the bottom with the rest of the [expletive], but along came Jim Shooter, who rolled up his sleeves and rescued you. “He gave you a title, respectability, power and even a credit card that you used and abused. He made you the highest-payed [sic] editors in the history of the business. He protected you against all that would tamper with your rights, your power and your pocketbook. “He backed you against all prima donna freelancers no matter how big. His pockets were always open to you. No cry of help was too small for him to turn his back on. “As heard in the ‘Brass’ section of the company: ‘He never asked for anything for himself, always for his men.’ “The roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the car you drive and the trinkets you buy for your blind wives and girlfriends, you owe to the Pittsburgh kid. “For all he did for you, you repayed [sic] him by attacking him like a pack of yellow, [expletive] [expletive]. Ripping away his flesh from his body and laughing and pounding your chest like conquering ghouls, and long after his bones were dry, you continued to pour salt on them to squeeze every ounce of pain out of him. “Not the slightest whimper or cry or tear came out of this man. With you still biting at his ankles, he put on his coat and walked away. Displaying more class and poise in defeat than all of you did in victory. Jesus had one Judas. Jim 109

But by 1988, the database regishad nothing available for Vinnie. ters a huge drop in Colletta’s Marvel “Because I believe Vinnie truly assignments. Only six new Marvel thought he had nothing to lose—he books are credited to him for the year, wasn’t getting any [Marvel] work—he and most of them are clumped together was able to tell the Marvel editors early in the year. (They likely appeared what he thought,” Salicrup said. on newsstands in late 1987; cover “He was essentially blacklisted,” dates usually ran a few months ahead said Rockwitz. “Everyone just associated of publication dates.) There’s an him with Jim Shooter and with being a Amazing Spider-Man... a Spectacular ‘hack.’ ...The work stopped for Vinnie Spider-Man... a Web of Spider-Man... [with Shooter’s exit]. And it was tough. another Amazing Spider-Man... a “When you erase people’s backConan and a Savage Sword of Conan. grounds, you burn a lot of bridges,” Then the new Marvel work appears to Rockwitz said. “...And his style just stop for the year. didn’t mesh with the direction comics Somewhere around the time of were going in. You had guys like Arthur Shooter’s exit, Roy Thomas—who by Adams coming up, and Terry Austin [inking] over John Byrne was the hottest thing, and then you had someone from the romance period of comics looking for work. It was just not a good fit.” The dramatic drop-off in Colletta’s Marvel work can be tracked on the Grand Comics Database. The database lists Colletta as inker on at least 17 new Marvel books cover-dated 1986, during the Shooter regime. They ranged from high-profile titles in the Spider-Man family of books to lesser-seen comics such as Justice. The database lists Colletta as inker on at least 26 new Marvel books cover-dated 1987, Shooter’s final year. Those titles ranged from half a dozen issues in the Spidey family of books—including Spidey’s wedding to Mary Jane Watson—to eight issues of Justice to three Captain Americas to even Web of Spider-Man #1 (1985). Greg LaRoque pencils. a Thor. 110

Hembeck. But Colletta inked the book and handed it in. Hembeck looked over Xeroxes of the finished pages. “On more than one panel, little details like eyeballs were somehow overlooked,” Hembeck said. “I’m talking about the close-ups! How he could miss dropping a dot into the eye of one of my characters, I could not possibly understand.” Hembeck still doesn’t like the way those pages look. “They weren’t my best pencils, by far, but still, Colletta was no help.” After an Inhumans Special book Marvel published in 1990, Colletta seems to have done no more inking work for the House of Ideas. Penciler Richard Howell drew that Inhumans project, which had been in the pipeline for a long time, and he was glad to have Colletta aboard. “I think that the first time he inked my pencils—on the series of backups that eventually became 1990’s Inhumans Special—was also the only time,” Howell said. “As I recall, the series of featurettes which were collected together in the one Inhumans volume were originally intended to appear in some other title, What If? perhaps, but plans changed and [editor Mark Gruenwald] decided to issue them as a separate product. I think that the chapters were produced over an extended period of time, so Marvel didn’t have to rush into making any decisions. “Since the subject matter, and all of the characters, fit into a certain period of Fantastic Four continuity,” Howell

then was living in California—remembers getting a phone call from Colletta. Colletta wanted to know if Thomas would be interested in succeeding Shooter as Marvel’s top man, if anyone should offer him the job. “I guess he was trying to play power broker, and see if he could find a new Marvel editor who would be somebody he was in with,” Thomas said. Thomas wasn’t hot on the idea of moving back to NYC to take a job he’d already held. Nothing ever came of Colletta’s proposal. DeFalco succeeded Shooter as editor-in-chief, serving until 1994. “It was a madhouse,” DeFalco laughed. “...A lot of times, I used to feel like I was a second-grade teacher, ’cause I’d walk in and I’d find two freelancers fighting: “‘He touched my character!’ “‘No, I didn’t!’ “‘Did you touch his character?’ “‘No, I didn’t!’ “‘Are you sure you didn’t touch his character?’ “‘Well, he said I could touch his character!’ “‘But not in the way you touched him!’ “Those were the days,” DeFalco said. One of Colletta’s last known inking jobs for Marvel was the humor book Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe (1989), a project that first got launched under the Shooter regime. Yes, the same Fred Hembeck who’d had the bleak encounter with Colletta in the 1970s. Hembeck remembers that he’d originally been promised Terry Austin as inker on the book, but Austin turned out to be unavailable. Editor Larry Hama suggested Colletta. Hembeck “practically begged” him to use Chic Stone. “Stone’s thick brushstrokes would’ve been so much more effective on my somewhat flat artwork than Vinnie’s wispy lines,” said 111

recalled, “I suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to go with a ‘classic Kirby’ inker. Sadly, those were becoming more and more rare. I was probably hoping for Joe Sinnott (as I so frequently do), but Vince Colletta fit that description as well, after having inked probably as many Kirby pages as anyone else.” Howell felt that Colletta “did a good job on the issue. He didn’t fix any of my weaknesses as a penciler, but he

4 r art to Avengers #4 a on the original cove em . sc 7) Bu 96 (1 hn Jo s ink Colletta 112

ativity that went into those pages.... It seemed a bit sad that Colletta thought of his work as being so disposable.” Hy Eisman, who had worked with Colletta on Charlton romance comics and who had kept in touch with him, says Colletta was charging as little as $5 for at least some of those pages. “He had boxes of them—boxes,” Eisman said. “He saw no value” in keeping those pages around, Eisman added: “He turned it into money, period.” (Lada St. Edmund, Colletta’s model/ actress friend, says Colletta gave her “truckloads” of his original art pages over the years. After a Hollywood career as an actress and stuntwoman, she moved back east to New Jersey, and realized her garage was full of Collettainked comics pages. “My husband finally said, ‘You know, it’s gotta go.’ I remember throwing them all out one day.... I feel totally guilty about that.” There’s no way to know what the pages might have been worth. She remembers that some were romance and some were superhero books.) A few months later, Howell found, more classic art fell from the sky. Colletta had received another shipment of returned art from Marvel, so he called Howell. “We made a deal for about 30 pages, all twice-up, all from classic ’60s Marvel comics—it was strictly a ‘take it or leave it’ arrangement, with no cherry-picking allowed.” Howell wound up with “a selection of pretty nice Dick Ayers Ghost Rider pages, about 10 Kirby Thor pages—all great, of course—plus the inker’s share of Fantastic Four Annual #3, Reed and Sue’s wedding. Best of all, Colletta again dropped them off at my house, and this time I got to have a short conversation with him. “I complimented him on his work,” Howell said, “and he brushed it (so to speak) aside. There were, in my opinion, many issues of many comic-book series that profited from his decorative inking,

didn’t compound them, either—and he generally kept the aspects of my approach which made it work, when it did. I’m glad that we got to work together at least once.” Howell had a more personal encounter with Colletta involving other Marvel books—books that Howell hadn’t worked on, but Colletta had. Howell explains how it happened: Around 1986-87, “When Marvel was decommissioning the original art in its warehouse,” Howell recalled, “Colletta was getting large shipments of returned art—as was to be expected, since he’d done so much work for Marvel over the years—and I contacted him about perhaps purchasing some of it. “He was not unfriendly,” Howell said, “but the art was clearly not a priority for him—he didn’t seem to have any sentimental attachment to any of it. At that point, Colletta had so much art to sell that I couldn’t get near what he was asking, even at frankly bargainbasement prices—so I contacted a few friendly art dealers, and they formed an investment consortium, with me as the front man.” Before long, Colletta stopped by Howell’s house one night with a treasure trove of original art pages—“hundreds upon hundreds of prime Marvel classic artwork,” much of it drawn by Jack Kirby. Howell paid Colletta the cash he’d asked for the art—funds supplied by the investors. After Colletta had left for home, Howell recalled, “One of the investors showed up, and he and I spent the rest of the night in one of those Uncle Scrooge-like scenarios, all but diving through the classic artwork and tossing it up and letting it hit us on the head. “I’d never before seen such a concentration of Marvel magic right there in front of me, and it was wondrous,” Howell said. “I remember thinking that at least someone, if not Colletta himself, valued the enchantment and the cre113

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unforgettable. Those aren’t always positives, though.” Franklin Colletta said his father came to see the loss of his Marvel work as “a blessing in disguise.” Why? Colletta sold the family’s Saddle River house “for a ton of money,” Franklin said. He did not offer specifics, but other homes on the same street have been fetching more than $1 million in recent years, according to Internet data. Flush with cash from the sale of the house, with the door essentially closed on his Marvel work, Colletta turned to a new passion: writing movie screenplays. “‘Good riddance’ was pretty much

but he didn’t want to hear about it. “I don’t know if the praise embarrassed him or if he simply regarded his contribution as ‘just a job,’ but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it,” Howell said. “It’s too bad. I would’ve enjoyed hearing what he considered his working philosophy to be, but some people can’t be pushed into that sort of thing.” As Colletta faded away from Marvel in the late 1980s, some saw it as the end of an era. Others saw it as the end of an era that was overdue for an ending. Fred Hembeck said: “I’ll say one thing for [Colletta]—his work was unmistakable and he was personally 114

[Gil] Kane; Jack Kirby, particularly on Thor; Carmine Infantino; Frank Giacoia; and other leading pencilers. He also drew many of Marvel’s 1950s romance comics, and served as a DC art director in the late ’70s.” Lada St. Edmund said she was “devastated” to learn that Colletta had died. “He was the kind of guy who didn’t look like he’d ever pass away,” she said. Colletta’s death spawned another often-told tale passed around the comics industry. The story goes like this: After Colletta was buried, his widow stopped by the offices of a comics company—possibly Marvel, possibly another outfit he’d done some work for—to pick up Colletta’s last paycheck. The staffers there, it was said, quizzed her about the funeral; they hadn’t been able to get any details about when, where, etc. She said that Colletta’s funeral services had been kept “secret” because the family had been worried that his fans would mob the cemetery. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. Jack Kirby, his most famed collaborator, would not long outlive Colletta. Kirby died in 1994. The Colletta Controversy got ratcheted up a notch after both men were gone. Once they could no longer speak for themselves, fans felt they had to speak for them. But any discussion of Kirby and Colletta quickly tended to become Kirby versus Colletta, as if the co-workers had become opposing sides in a wrestling match. (A match that Kirby would always win, since Colletta never created characters or built universes from scratch.) Tony Isabella offered this perspective: “There were people in the comics industry who did far worse things to Kirby than merely not inking a background, perhaps... and that was never done out of malice. “These were guys making a living,”

how he felt” about Marvel, his son said. “...Who wants to work with a bunch of self-centered halfwits? ...Now he had plenty of dough, and he was entertaining himself immensely with his writing.” Colletta wrote four screenplays, shopped them around, promoted them, his son said. “He wrote those movies as fast as he used to ink comic books.” One was a “Mafia-based comedy” called Primo. That script, Franklin Colletta said, came closest to being filmed—he said actress Heather Locklear was lined up to appear in the movie. But, he said, problems cropped up. “The Hollywood people kept changing the dialogue—too authentic for U.S. audiences—and even wanted to remove his writer’s credit and assign it to a more famous writer. He ended up telling them to shove it.” (Primo wasn’t the first time Colletta had shown an interest in crime movies. Colletta once told Joe Kubert that he had tried out for the role of Sonny in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Kubert says Colletta might have been kidding about that. But, Kubert says, “He looked like he could have played the part.”) The screenplays poured out of Colletta near the end of his life, as it turned out. He had already recovered from an earlier heart attack, Franklin Colletta said. What finally killed him was cancer. “Pop wasn’t one to linger,” Franklin said. “Always on the move. Three weeks after they found the cancer, Vinnie checked out.” Colletta died at Pascack Valley Hospital in Westwood, New Jersey, in the summer of 1991. He was 67 years old. His obituary got a paragraph in The Comics Journal, the magazine of record for comics fandom: “Vince Colletta, 65 [sic], sometimes known as the ‘world’s fastest inker,’ died in late June of heart disease [sic]. Colletta, who once boasted that he could ink a comic-book page in an hour, was frequently teamed with 115

ate up the time, you could depend on Vinnie to come in under the deadline. That could have been on his tombstone: ‘He made deadline, even this one.’” Former Marvel staffer Mike Rockwitz argues that Colletta deserves a place in comics history. “Without some of the ’50s romance books, and the ’70s Kirby books, and the ’60s Thor, you really wouldn’t have what you have today,” he said. “As much as people want to deny it, [Colletta] was one of the forefathers of what’s going on now.... He was there at the beginning and helped usher in one of the ages of comics that people are basking in now.” DC’s Paul Levitz said: “[Colletta’s] technical command, skills and talent were undoubted at the time. It was his choices of how much of himself to put into his work on any given occasion that damaged his reputation.” Marvel’s Stan Lee said: “I always felt a little sorry for [Colletta]. Not all the time, but most of the time, he was given things that were rush jobs. He never had the time to make it as good as it could have been... I always felt that whatever he did, it could have been better if he had more time.” (“I know that the stuff that he had a little time to do looked a hell of a lot better than the stuff that he had to turn out immediately,” said Joe Kubert. “He was a good artist. He wasn’t perhaps what others might term a ‘fan favorite,’ which is another anomaly I just can’t understand.”) You can look at Colletta “as an object lesson,” said Isabella. “You have to weigh your own needs and reputation above the needs of the publishers and editors.... [Colletta] was a decent guy, but there wasn’t anything he did that other people didn’t do better. “He never created anything. He didn’t leave a real legacy behind.... All that anybody ever remembered is the bad inking jobs. They didn’t remember that he saved [publishers’] editorial butts.”

Isabella said. “The fans try to ascribe to them the same sensibility the fans have. They don’t understand the concept of comics as just a job.... [Colletta] was one of that generation—‘This is my job.’” Much like Kirby, a fellow child of the Depression, Colletta took the attitude that he had to produce X number of pages in X days to feed his family, pay the rent, fix the car, Isabella said. And the days of big money in comics, the days of Spawn-like profits from creator-owned comics, the days of blockbuster movies spun off from comics, were decades away, impossible, unthinkable. There was no big score, and reality was inking comics pages all night in a stuffy bedroom or a chilly basement. (“That is the discipline,” as Robert DeNiro said in the 1995 film Heat.) “Colletta was a hack,” argued Erik Larsen in his online essay. But, he wrote, “hacking was not only tolerated, but encouraged” by companies that had to get their books into print on deadline. (Bob McLeod wrote in Back Issue that Colletta was essentially a “shrewd, if slightly unethical, businessman rather than a bad inker.”) “Maybe he kind of got a rougher reputation than he deserved,” said Joe Staton. “... Vinnie really helped to just get huge amounts of books out. He came over from the older days in comics, when you weren’t thinking of it as art or anything, you were just getting it out.... Vinnie kind of hit at a time when things had to be done [quickly], but people were aware enough to know that what he was doing was not very positive.... There was good stuff, but there was a lot of bad stuff.... Except for Thor, people tend to remember the bad stuff.” Hy Eisman, who had collaborated with Colletta on Charlton romance comics, says: “When everyone else failed—the penciler, the writer, the inker, the letterer—when everybody else 116

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Postscript: FLICKERS ON THE WEB he rise of the Internet, of course, has been a godsend to the Colletta Controversy. Just mention the name and you can trigger a thread of passionate debate, as in the case of Eddie Campbell. The Internet is like a comics convention in a can. And when it comes to Colletta, the name-calling starts quickly—and goes on for a while. “It would seem beyond understanding that the little drawings in kids’ comic books from 50 years ago could inspire [this] kind of adult animosity,” Campbell wrote on his blog in 2008. As for the erasures—“the lines and figures left unseen”— Campbell wrote: “I didn’t see them when I was ten, and it’s too late to care now. I was influenced by the [lines] I did see.” Erik Larsen says: “I think there are guys who are making fun of Vinnie Colletta these days who may not have even seen his work. At least look at what he did.” Joe Kubert said he doesn’t surf the Web much, but said the Colletta sniping seems unfair. “For unnamed fans, whoever they are, to put him down for what he did, and under the circumstances under which he did [it], to me is so grossly unfair, it’s indefensible.... The other worst part of it is that Vinnie isn’t around to speak back. Because believe me, Vinnie was the kind of guy that would not hesitate to tell you just what the score was, up and down.” Here’s a sample of debate from one Colletta discussion thread that began in 2008 and stretched into ’09:

“Colletta the inker butchered every comic I’ve seen with his name on it. He basically redrew each comic page by page, panel by panel, and slapped his inks down in his own style. And his own style was scratchy, blotchy and unattractive.” “For [expletive] sakes, he erased Kirby’s pencils to make it go quicker. Kirby!” “I think the [Colletta] dislike is in response to a middle-of-the-road inker being assigned to top-flight material. Had Colletta been assigned only low-rung stuff, I doubt anyone would bother to complain about his work.” “Colletta isn’t all that bad. He makes a convenient whipping boy for all that was wrong with the comics industry, but he doesn’t deserve to be completely maligned or ostracized.” 117

“Colletta ignored his moral obligation to tell Kirby not to draw too detailed. Kirby was spending a lot of hours each week drawing things Colletta was going to erase. How many hours did it add up to?”

might be the way some fans vilify any professional or their heirs just for trying to get what is rightfully owed to them. And so many of these vicious, little thugs hide behind phony names.” “Fans on the Internet... say a lot of garbage,” said Rich Buckler. Colletta, he said, “was not an easy person to get to know. He was very private, but passionate—about art and life—and very outspoken and opinionated, which always makes you a target for critics.” (One aspect of Colletta’s privacy was that he rarely, maybe never, granted interviews with the fan press. “He had no interest in that kind of thing,” said Hy Eisman. “A lot of guys, their ego would be lifted if someone wanted to do a story about their career and so forth. He had no interest in that. He had guys coming into his [studio] in Jersey City, asking him for that kind of thing. One guy was really a

“He was the worst inker in history, and he was mind-bogglingly given the best artist in history to ink!” “I heard Vince Colletta erased big, complicated chunks from the Dead Sea Scrolls. That’s what I heard.” Tony Isabella doesn’t think the Colletta online controversy is necessarily that much different from the pounding that other comics pros, living and dead, endure on the Web. “There are many comics pros who get savaged by some online fans,” Isabella said. “The best case in point

Sparse on background, heavy on figurework: Colletta and Tony DeZuniga ink Arvell Jones on All-Star Squadron #59, 1986. 118

fan, who knew about his early work, and would come in there often to just visit with him.”) To Buckler, “The ‘controversy’ is there probably because so few people actually knew [Colletta]—but lack of knowledge never stops some people from having opinions anyway.” “Nobody in comics gets a fair shake,” said Marvel, DC and Top Cow penciler Stuart Immonen, who considers Colletta’s work to be “solid comicking, as good as anyone turned out in the ’50s-’70s. “Fans are fickle,” Immonen said, “or ignorant of the mechanA late Trimpe/Colletta pairing on GIJoe and the Transformers #4, 1987. ics of the business side of the industry (meaning Trimpe added. “You didn’t have to read no one outside the people involved the credits to know if Bill Everett, John knows what corners are cut and Buscema, Jack Kirby, Dan Adkins or why).... Inkers have historically addiVinnie Colletta did the work. The styles tionally suffered, because it’s generally were very distinctive, not the result of a more nuanced task than penciling corporate, homogenous thinking.” and difficult to explain, even to Mark Evanier thinks that the debate artists—and pencilers tend to be flows, in part, from the delicacy of prima donnas and protective of ‘their’ childhood memories. You don’t forget art, though this is more a modern-age the first comics you fell in love with, phenomenon.” and when people tell you that someFor Herb Trimpe, the Colletta debate thing was wrong with those comics... is mostly a mystery. “I have no idea “Certain works are simply somewhy the controversy today,” he said. one’s childhood fave,” Evanier said. “Then, I could understand. [Colletta] “Work they loved at the time. And they was producing; people had their opindon’t like anyone finding fault with it, ions; he had an effect on the business. or telling them it should have been He produced a significant amount of better. Among Kirby fans, there’s often work on very important books. a strong sentiment that the best Kirby “Vinnie’s work was not traditional,” work was the first [that] you read. If it Trimpe said. He took a “rough and was Thor... well, that work represents expressive... free-wheeling approach.” a magic time in your life. So it’s natural Which was by no means a bad thing, 119

publishing, deadlines, lazy writers, to be a little defensive about it. disorganized, half-stoned editors... ” “There’s also a sense,” Evanier If jealousy fanned the flame when added, “in which, since Jack’s death, Colletta was alive, what keeps it going there’s been a tendency to overpraise now that he’s dead? Some cite the him, and that’s raised the hackles of “before and after” page comparisons some folks who just don’t take to that have popped up in comics magaJack’s style. There are those who like zines—over here, the original pencils any inker that softened Jack’s edges preserved by Xeroxes, and over there, and made Kirby work look a little less the pencils as inked by Colletta. Check like Kirby. Colletta did a certain and see what’s missing, or simplified. amount of that.” But it’s the Internet that’s the Among comics pros, the Colletta pumping heart of the Colletta ControControversy originally evolved from versy today. Blogs and e-mailers pop “jealousy,” Alan Kupperberg believes— up to attack Colletta or to defend him, jealousy of Colletta’s lifestyle and his or to attack those who defend him, connections. And Colletta worked hard or to defend those who attack him. to get and keep his connections. Anything goes. Most comics artists and writers, A major Colletta blog over the past Kupperberg said, would “run the other few years has been run by the pseuway” when they spotted the publisher donymous “Dan McFan,” who said in or the editor-in-chief barreling down 2008 that he was spurred to create the the office hallway. Colletta, though, blog when he was “dumped” from an would rush to greet the boss. “Vinnie online discussion board for questioning always palled around with the top guy,” Mark Evanier’s sanity. Asked if he is Kupperberg said. “Vinnie cultivated the publisher or EIC.” Colletta’s son Franklin also believes that jealousy had a role in the way fellow comics pros saw the inker. “One of the things I most remember my dad telling me when I was young was that there are many jealous people in the world. Whether it was his entertaining and relatively opulent lifestyle, his charisma or his talent as an artist, I think a lot of the negative stuff was born of jealousy.” He also thinks that many fans who criticize artists’ work “have no real knowledge of Inking Keith Pollard pencils on Marvel Graphic Novel #15, 1985.

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Dan McFan, Franklin Colletta says only: “I do know who he is, but have been sworn to secrecy... ” The e-mailer describing herself as Colletta’s granddaughter—again only identifying herself as “Katherine”— popped up again in spring 2009 on another blog that was inviting pro/con debate on Colletta’s work. She wrote: “I love the critics that bash my grandfather, like they really know anything that they’re talking about. “Were any of you there? Did any of you witness the years he was employed, busting his ass every Fradon/Colletta splash from Super Friends #37, 1980. day in his studio Vince picked up occasional DC jobs in the 1980s. downstairs, sacrificsit here with a room of memories, those ing the time with his own family to that include letters of praise and picmeet his almost impossible deadlines? tures from those same people you claim That’s funny, I did, and all I can recouldn’t stand my grandfather inking member was an extraordinary man their pages. that dedicated himself entirely to his “Has Stan Lee ever been in your profession. living room with a big smile on his “Those of you that think you have face? Best picture I own. some authority to criticize his talents “Get over yourselves and try have no clue what you are talking spending your time on more worthwhile about. You state that other artists and things than bashing on someone that editors couldn’t stand him? Why is [it] isn’t even around anymore. Maybe then, he kept working and they kept that’s why you all do it. I suppose it is asking for him? far easier to be rude toward someone “Anyone can work fast enough to that won’t come back at you. meet a deadline. I would like to see how “Losers. well you manage to put out those “And for those that have respectful pieces of work. contributions toward my grandfather’s “As you sit there behind your work, I thank you for your kind words, computers, making your judgments, I 121

as I am sure he would. He loved what he did, and we were all very proud of his talent. “This wasn’t just a job to him; it wasn’t about making the deadline and getting paid or pawning his work off on others. I can say I witnessed first-hand this man down in his studio every day and night. Even had his own bed in there! His drawing table still stands in that room by itself now.” This e-mail, and the one posted on Eddie Campbell’s blog, are not hoaxes: Katherine is Franklin Colletta’s daughter, known to the family as Katie. Franklin Colletta said he was surprised to see her posting on the Campbell blog: “It was a lovely, honest and heartfelt letter.” He said that for the most part, the family doesn’t pay much attention to the controversy over Colletta that plays out on the Internet: “Vinnie was a good father and a hard-working artist. That’s all we need to know, I guess.” Bits and pieces of Colletta’s later life have also been surfacing on the Web. In addition to the Shooter letter, there’s also the Colletta tape. Comics journalist Daniel Best posted on his blog a transcript of a telephone conversation recorded in 1987 between Colletta and an unidentified party. (Alan Kupperberg vouches for the authenticity of the tape and transcript; he’s heard the tape and says it is in fact Colletta.) The Best transcript focuses almost totally on the ouster of Shooter and on Marvel office politics. But in a few passages, Colletta talks about himself. He says that he hated working 9-to-5, an apparent reference to his stint as DC art director, and that all he ever really wanted to do was freelance. And in other passages: COLLETTA: “I only took books that were late and nobody else would.”

And: COLLETTA: “Never was I on a regular book. Only when they couldn’t get somebody to do it. In other words, when I got the job, three guys turned it down already. You understand what I’m saying?”

And: COLLETTA: “As far as what my future is there at Marvel, I don’t know. I’m going to play it day by day. I’m not going to kiss anybody’s ass. If they send work to me, fine. If they don’t—you know.”

This was Vince Colletta about four years before his death in 1991. He was about 64 years old, still plugging away, still moving the pages, still asking, “Where’s the work?” Jack Kirby had essentially gotten out of comics. Stan Lee was an executive. Colletta was still in the trenches. arvel ork in the M w t a rd a h a Vince Collett ca 1985. Bullpen, cir

Where’s the work? The thin black line went on and on.

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A final comparison: Jack Kirby’s pencil art for the splash page of Thor #166 (1969)...

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Appendix: TWO YEARS IN THE LIFE ust to get an idea of Vince Colletta’s output as an inker throughout his career in comics, we went to the Internet’s Grand Comics Database and pulled the listings for inking jobs credited to Colletta for only two years: 1967 and 1977. We chose 1967 as one of the representative years because it was a fairly typical year for Colletta in terms of production and because it was near the zenith of the Marvel Age. We chose 1977 for the other year because it was more or less in the middle of Colletta’s stint as DC Comics art director, and shows the high volume of inking work he continued to do even while in that post. As far as can be determined, all this work for both years is fresh material, not reprints. It comes to about 640 pages of inking work for 1967 and more than 1,000 for 1977. All dates are the books’ cover dates.

Sweethearts #94, “The Golden Heart,” Charlton. 8 pages. Cover, Thor #143, Marvel. (Interior inks by Bill Everett.)

1967, AS A FREELANCER JANUARY ’67 Thor #136, “To Become an Immortal,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature. Two-Gun Kid #85, “Fury at Falcon Flats,” Marvel. 17 pages.

SEPTEMBER ’67 Avengers #44, “The Valiant Also Die,” Marvel. 20 pages. Ghost Rider #5, “The Tarantula Strikes Back,” Marvel. 20 pages. Kid Colt, Outlaw #136, various stories, Marvel. “The Intruders,” 9 pages; “Revenge Rides the Range,” 8 pages. Tales to Astonish #95, “The Power of the Plunderer,” Marvel. 12 pages. Thor #144, “This Battleground Earth,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

FEBRUARY ’67 Ghost Rider #1, “Origin of the Ghost Rider,” Marvel. (Cowboy adventurer, not motorcyclist with flaming skull.) 17 pages. Rawhide Kid #56, “Fall of a Hero,” Marvel. 17 pages. Thor #137, “The Thunder God and the Troll,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

OCTOBER ’67 Avengers #45, “Blitzkrieg in Central Park,” Marvel. 20 pages. Cover, Ghost Rider #6, Marvel. Tales to Astonish #96, “Somewhere Stands... Skull Island,” Marvel. 12 pages. Thor #145, “Abandoned on Earth,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

MARCH ’67 Thor #138, “The Flames of Battle,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature. Two-Gun Kid #86, “The Challenge of Cole Younger,” Marvel. 17 pages. APRIL ’67 Ghost Rider #2, “The Macabre Menace of the Tarantula,” Marvel. 17 pages. Cover, Tales to Astonish #90, Marvel. Thor #139, “To Die Like a God,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature. Young Love #60, “Girl with a Reputation,” DC. 14 pages.

NOVEMBER ’67 Avengers #46, “The Agony and the Ant Hill,” Marvel. 20 pages. Cover, Ghost Rider #7, Marvel. Kid Colt, Outlaw, #137, various stories, Marvel. “The Bounty Hunter and the Bullwhip,” 9 pages; “McClintrock’s Guns,” 8 pages. Thor #146, “If the Thunder Be Gone,” Marvel. 16 pages.

MAY ’67 Thor #140, “The Growing Man,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

DECEMBER ’67 Rawhide Kid #61, “Shotgun to Deadwood,” Marvel. 17 pages. Thor #147, “The Wrath of Odin,” Marvel. 16 pages. X-Men #39, “The Fateful Finale,” Marvel. 15 pages.

JUNE ’67 Ghost Rider #3, “Circus of Fear,” Marvel. 17 pages. I Love You #68, various stories, Charlton. “Why Kiss a Boy?”, 8 pages; “Wild Beauty,” 9 pages. Rawhide Kid #58, “When a Gunfighter Faces the Enforcers,” Marvel. 17 pages. Sweethearts #93, “A Mature Man’s Kisses,” Charlton. 8 pages. Thor #141, “The Wrath of Replicus,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

1977, AS ART DIRECTOR DECEMBER-JANUARY ’77 Starfire #3, “Arena of the Frost Dragon,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Witching Hour #67, DC. (Throughout 1977, Colletta is credited as inker on a series of Hostess ads featuring various heroes and running in various titles, as well as a series of public-service ads featuring DC heroes. These were printed in many DC books during 1977.)

JULY ’67 Heart Throbs #108, “A Kiss from a Stranger,” DC. 7 pages. Teen Confessions #45, “A Lie for an Old Love,” Charlton. 8 pages. Thor #142, “Scourge of the Super-Skrull,” Marvel. 21 pages, including a “Tales of Asgard” feature.

JANUARY ’77 Cover, Batman #283, DC. Cover, House of Mystery #249, DC. Superman Family #181, “The Secret Lois Lane Could Never Tell,” DC. 17 pages.

AUGUST ’67 Ghost Rider #4, “And Men Shall Call Him... Stingray,” Marvel. 17 pages. I Love You #69, “Sorrow Can Be Shared,” Charlton. 8 pages. Love Diary #50, various stories, Charlton. “Widow’s Walk,” 8 pages; “Go Away, I Love You,” 8 pages. Rawhide Kid #59, “A Man Called Draco,” Marvel. 17 pages. Romantic Story #89, “Lost Paradise,” Charlton. 8 pages.

JANUARY-FEBRUARY ’77 Batman Family #9, “Startling Secret of the Devilish Daughters,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Blackhawk #250, DC. Detective Comics #467, “Pickup in Gotham 2-4-6,” DC. 11 pgs.

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...Mike Royer’s inked and lettered version done in 2000 (working from a Xerox of the pencils)...

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Cover, Four-Star Spectacular #6, DC. Cover, Freedom Fighters #6, DC. Cover, Ghosts #51, DC. Cover, Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter #13, DC. Secret Society of Super-Villains #5, “Endgame,” DC. 17 pages. Shazam! #27, “Fear in Philadelphia,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Weird War Tales #50, DC.

Superman Family #184, “Visitors from the Void,” DC. 15 pages. AUGUST ’77 Amazing World of DC Comics #15, “The Day Time Broke Loose,” DC. 1 page. Batman #290, “Skull Dugger’s Killjoy Capers,” DC. 17 pages. Teen Titans #49, “Raid of the Rocket Rollers,” DC. 17 pages. Wonder Woman #234, “And Death My Destiny,” DC. 17 pages.

FEBRUARY ’77 Cover, House of Mystery #250, DC. Wonder Woman #228, “Retreat to Tomorrow,” DC. 17 pages.

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER ’77 Green Lantern #96, “How Can An Immortal Die?” DC. 17 pages. Isis #6, “The Ominous Ooze,” DC. 17 pages. Starfire #7, “Freedom Never Dies,” DC. 17 pages. World’s Finest #246, “The Baron’s Name is Blitzkrieg,” DC. 15 pages.

FEBRUARY-MARCH ’77 House of Secrets #144, various stories, DC. “The Man with Death on His Shoulders,” 6 pages; “Bide Your Time,” 6 pages. Isis #3, various stories, DC. “The Wrath of Set,” 12 pages; “Political Rally Panic,” 5 pages. Starfire #4, “Slaves of the Golden Queen,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Witching Hour #68, DC.

SEPTEMBER ’77 Black Lightning #4, “Beware the Cyclotronic Man,” DC. 17 pages. Wonder Woman #235, “The Biology Bomb,” DC. 17 pages.

MARCH ’77 Wonder Woman #229, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” DC. 17 pgs.

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER ’77 Superman Family #185, various stories, DC. “The Great Superman Locked-Room Puzzle,” 8 pages; “Sinister Secret of the Street-Stalker,” 12 pages; “The Voodoo Machine,” 12 pages.

MARCH-APRIL ’77 Batman Family #10, “Those Were the Bad Old Days,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Secret Society of Super-Villains #6, DC. Superman Family #182, various stories, DC. “Death on Ice,” 10 pages; “Reporter with the Radar Mind,” 7 pages.

OCTOBER ’77 Action Comics #476, “Attack of the Anti-Superhero,” DC. 17 pages. Green Lantern #97, “Mystery of the Mocker,” DC. 17 pages. Wonder Woman #236, “Armageddon Day,” DC. 17 pages.

APRIL ’77 Wonder Woman #230, “Claws of the Cheetah,” DC. 17 pages.

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER ’77 Aquaman #58, “Return to Disaster,” DC. 6 pages. Cover, Isis #7, DC. Starfire #8, “Dwellers of the Dark Domain,” DC. 17 pages. World’s Finest #247, “Man in the Doomsday Mask,” DC. 15 pages.

APRIL-MAY ’77 Isis #4, “Treasure of Lost Lake,” DC. 12 pages. Starfire #5, “Here There Be Monsters,” DC. 17 pages. World’s Finest #244, “Jeopardy Times Two,” DC. 15 pages. MAY ’77 Wonder Woman #231, “This War Has Been Canceled,” DC. 17 pages.

NOVEMBER ’77 Adventure Comics #454, “How Green Is My Hometown?” DC. 11 pages. Black Lightning #5, “Nobody Beats a Superman,” DC. 17 pages. DC Special Series #5, various stories, DC. “The First Coming of Superman,” 15 pages; “The Second Coming of Superman,” 16 pages; “A God Walks Among Us,” 13 pages; “The Fall and Rise of Sonzrr,” 19 pages. Green Lantern #98, “Listen to the Mockingbird,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Teen Titans #51, DC. Wonder Woman #237, “Secret Origin of Wonder Woman,” DC. 17 pages.

MAY-JUNE ’77 Batman Family #11, “Till Death Do Us Part,” DC. 18 pages. Shazam! #29, “Ibac Meets Aunt Minerva,” DC. 17 pages. Superman Family #183, various stories, DC. “Shadows of Phantoms,” 16 pages; “Whatever Happened to Perry White,” 4 pages; “The Day Lois Lane Walked All Over Superman,” 20 pages. JUNE ’77 The Flash #250, “One Freeze-Dried Flash—Coming Right Up,” DC. 17 pages. Teen Titans #48, “Daddy’s Little Crimefighter,” DC. 17 pages. Wonder Woman #232, “A Duel of Gods,” DC. 17 pages.

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER ’77 House of Mystery #255, “Small Wonder,” DC. 8 pages. Superman Family #186, “Gunfight at the Canine Corral,” DC. 8 pages.

JUNE-JULY ’77 Isis #5, “Perilous Pyramid Power,” DC. 17 pages. Green Lantern #95, “Terminal for a Tragedy,” DC. 17 pages. Starfire #6, “Citadel of Silence,” DC. 17 pages.

DECEMBER ’77 Green Lantern #99, “We Are on the Edge of the Ultimate Ending,” DC. 17 pages. Mister Miracle #21, “Command Performance,” DC. 17 pages. Cover, Super Friends #9, DC. Wonder Woman #238, “Assassin of a Thousand Claws,” DC. 17 pages.

JULY ’77 Batman #289, “Sign of the Skull,” DC. 17 pages. Black Lightning #3, “Every Hand Against Him,” DC. 17 pages. Wonder Woman #233, “Sea Death,” DC. 17 pages. JULY-AUGUST ’77 Batman Family #12, various stories, DC. “I Am Batgirl’s Brother,” 10 pages; “Rally ’Round Robin,” 12 pages. Shazam! #30, “Captain Marvel Fights the Man of Steel,” DC. 17 pages.

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...and finally, Vince Colletta’s original 1969 inked version, done over the original pencil art.

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THE

NOTES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An embryonic version of this book appeared in The Jack Kirby Collector (TwoMorrows) in Spring 2000 under the title “The Thin Black Line: A Rough and Scratchy Defense of Vince Colletta.” Tony Isabella was interviewed by phone 9/20/99 and by e-mail 7/11/09. Mark Evanier was interviewed by phone 8/10/99 and by e-mail 7/4/09. Joe Sinnott was interviewed by mail 7/29/99 and by phone 6/18/09. Dick Ayers was interviewed by e-mail 7/22/99. John Romita Sr. was interviewed by mail 7/31/99. Bob McLeod was interviewed by e-mail 6/12/09. Rich Buckler was interviewed by e-mail 6/17-18/09. Alan Kupperberg was interviewed by e-mail 6/18-22/09. Herb Trimpe was interviewed by e-mail 6/24-26/09. Fred Hembeck was interviewed by e-mail 7/10/09. José Delbo was interviewed by e-mail 7/22/09. Arlen Schumer was interviewed by phone 7/23/09. Stan Lee was interviewed by phone 7/31/09. Richard Howell was interviewed by e-mail 8/08/09. Erik Larsen was interviewed by phone 8/12/09. Joe Staton was interviewed by phone 8/19/09. Roy Thomas was interviewed by phone 8/25/09. Jim Salicrup was interviewed by e-mail 8/25/09. Stuart Immonen was interviewed by e-mail 8/27/09. Trina Robbins was interviewed by e-mail 8/29-9/01/09. Mike Rockwitz was interviewed by phone 9/08/09. Carmine Infantino was interviewed by phone 9/08/09. Michelle Nolan was interviewed by phone 9/09/09. Tom DeFalco was interviewed by phone 9/22/09. Hy Eisman was interviewed by phone 9/22/09. Joe Kubert was interviewed by phone 10/05/09. John Lustig was interviewed by e-mail 10/11/09. Shazam! #10 (1974), inks over Oksner. Mike Royer was interviewed by e-mail 10/16/09. Gerry Conway was interviewed by e-mail 12/28/09. Franklin Colletta was interviewed by e-mail 12/28/09. Steve Sherman was interviewed by e-mail 1/03/10. Lada St. Edmund was interviewed by phone 1/09/10. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this book are from interviews with the author. My thanks to all who helped out in ’99 and ’09-’10. Obviously, this was never intended to be the definitive “life and times of Vince Colletta” biography. That must wait for another writer and another time. But until we get that book, let’s hope this one will do.—RLB

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RY of E T S Y M The TA! T E L L O VINCE Cr VILLAIN? HERO o !

E D I C E D YOU

In the history of comic book art, Vince Colletta is perhaps the most prolific inker ever, and certainly the most controversial. He jumped in at the last minute to rescue hundreds of comic books about to miss their printing deadline, often racing through the work of artists who fans say he should have worshiped. In the 1960s he gave Jack Kirby’s Thor an atmospheric look many fans love even 40 years later, but got kicked off Kirby’s Fourth World comics in the 1970s for omitting details. Whether you loved his work or hated it, The Thin Black Line will enlighten, entertain, and expose a life and career as colorful as the four-color comic books Colletta labored on for decades. Join Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Joe Sinnott, Mike Royer, Carmine Infantino, Mark Evanier, and dozens of other comics pros as they recall the Vince Colletta they knew and worked with, and pull no punches in their praise and criticism of the most notorious inker in the history of the medium—all surrounded by copious examples of Colletta art, including numerous “before and after” pencil to ink comparisons. Did he save the Silver Age of comics—or ruin it? You decide!

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

$14 95 In The US

Softcover ISBN 978-1-60549-028-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-028-1 ISBN-10: 1-60549-028-8

51495

9 781605 490281