I decided I’d try to post short scenes together to make this more pleasant to read. So now I’m inking and coloring everything. This was really being thrown into the deep end. I’ve never tried to ink someone else’s pencils, and as mentioned previously, John Romita, Jr.’s pencils here leave a lot up to the inker. Complicating matters, whoever owned my copy of this book before me took a stab at most of page 8!
Originally, I thought this one was mostly finished to ease you into the job, but I finally realized the inks were too amateurish to be Milgrom (Not to put you on blast, nameless person who did this). This forced me to go find a scan online and do my best with that.
Here’s the original page 9:
Comics were pencilled in what’s called “non-repro blue,” so only the inks would show up in the finished project (And still are, in the rare case of artists still drawing on paper). That makes original pages hard to show here (It’s kind of crazy they managed to print non-repro blue, when you think about it). I’ve darkened some of the bottom panels so you can see a little better. You can even see Romita, Jr.’s notes in the margins. In this era, Shooter would’ve given JR a plot, briefly describing what happens on each page. Then Romita would decide how long a scene should go, how many panels per page, the artist did a lot more of the heavy lifting on story than people would think. Then the writer would script the dialogue based on the finished pencils. So JR’s notes could be notes to the rest of the art team, notes to himself, or notes to Shooter suggesting dialogue or explaining a panel. It’s a very weird way to work, but it’s called The Marvel Method, and it was standard practice from the 60s to the 90s.
I must say, I’m off to a rocky start on inks. I was being way too precious at first, trying to preserve Romita’s work as exactly as possible, but he clearly expected you to do flesh out and tighten up things. I think I get a better handle on it as I go. See ya tomorrow.