/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>3160994

The inker's role has diminished quite a bit in recent years.

Traditionally the inker did a fair share of the work. Pencillers would draw in the figures but stop short at details. A lot of what they drew was shorthand that the inker would translate. Often there would be no lighting at all in the pencils, it was created entirely by the inker.

These collaborations were more or less equal. The penciller did the first half of the drawing and the inker did the second half.

With the rise of the mega detailed Image artists that changed. The Image artists drew very detailed pencils that were less open to interpretation, even going as far as drawing in lineweights and hatching, details that were once at the discretion of the inkers and never make the printed page in penciled form.

Since then that mode of working has become standard. Pencils are tight and the inker is more of a technician who xeroxes the pencils into pure black and white images. But now with page rates dropping so low the growing trend is for pencillers to ink themselves to collect two rates, and they typically revert to the original ratio of 50/50 pencils and inks.

The same thing happened with writing. In the heyday of Marvel the writer would throw out a plot and it fell to the penciller to break it up into pages and panels. Now it's the norm for a writer to dictate every single panel, sometimes even the composition, reducing the artistry of the penciller.

You can see the trend. In the greatest period of American comics, the Silver Age, the writer, penciller and inker were all artists who worked in tandem splitting the work evenly. Starting in the worst periodv of American comics, the 90s, pencillers took on many duties of the inker and writers took on many duties of the pencillers. In a medium that had once been ruled by the artist, writers hold the most clout with artists being technicians to translate the writer's vision and inkers are an afterthought.