Joe Sinnott

Joe Sinnott
Sinnott at the November 2008 Big Apple Con in Manhattan.
Born	October 16, 1926 (1926-10-16) (age 82) Saugerties, New York
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Inker
Notable works	The Fantastic Four
Official website

Joe Sinnott (born October 16, 1926, Saugerties, New York, United States) is an American comic book artist. Working primarily as an inker, Sinnott is best-known for his long stint on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, from 1965 to 1981 (with a brief return in the late 1980s), initially over the pencils of industry legend Jack Kirby. Years before, he had inked Kirby's The Fantastic Four #5 (July 1962), the issue introducing Dr. Doom, plus a science fiction monster story in Strange Tales #94 (March 1962).

During his fifty-plus years as a Marvel freelancer and then salaried artist working from home, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders and The Mighty Thor. Marvel impresario Stan Lee in the mid-2000s cited Sinnott as the company's most in-demand inker, saying jocularly, "[P]encilers used to hurl all sorts of dire threats at me if I didn't make certain that Joe, and only Joe, inked their pages. I knew I couldn't satisfy everyone and I had to save the very most important strips for [him]. To most pencilers, having Joe Sinnott ink their artwork was tantamount to grabbing the brass ring".^[1]

Early life and career

One of seven children to Edward and Catherine McGraw Sinnott (Frank, Leonard, Anne, Edward, and two who predeceased him, Jack and Richard),^[2] Joe Sinnott grew up in a boarding house that catered primarily to schoolteachers, some of whom inspired in the young Sinnott a love of drawing.^[3] His childhood comics influences include the comic strip Terry and the Pirates and the comic book characters Batman, Congo Bill, Hawkman and Zatara.^[4] In high school, he took what few art classes were offered and became editor of the yearbook and of the school newspaper, the Ulsterette.^{[citation needed]}

Following the death in action of his brother Jack, a member of the United States Army's Third Division, in 1944, Sinnott acceded to his mother's wishes not to be drafted into the Army himself, and he enlisted in the Navy in the autumn of that year.^[4] After serving with the Seabees in Okinawa during World War II,^[3] driving a munitions truck, he was discharged in May 1946.^[4] After working three years^[2] in his father's cement-manufacturing plant,^[4] he was accepted into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York City in March 1949, attending on the GI Bill.^[5]

There, school co-founder Burne Hogarth suggested that Sinnott's style might be suitable for comic books,^{[citation needed]} and instructor Tom Gill asked Sinnott to be his assistant on Gill's freelance comics work. With classmate Norman Steinberg, Sinnott spent nine months drawing backgrounds and incidentals on, initially, Gill's Western-movie tie-in comics for Dell Comics.^[6] Sinnott recalled in 2003, "Tom was paying us very well. I was still attending school and worked for Tom at nights and [on] weekends. ... He was mainly drawing Westerns, like Red Warrior and Apache Kid for Stan Lee", editor-in-chief of the successive companies, Timely and Atlas, that became Marvel Comics. "I have to give all the credit to Tom for giving me my start in comics".^[7]

Sinnott's first solo professional art job was the backup feature "Trudi"^[8] in the St. John Publications humor comic Mopsy #12 (Sept. 1950). Later, during a two-week school vacation in August 1950,^[9] he married his fiancée Betty (March 7, 1932 - November 1, 2006),^[10] to whom he remained married for 56 years.

Timely/Atlas

Branching out professionally, Sinnot in 1951 met with editor Stan Lee at the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics, at the time transitioning between the names Timely Comics and Atlas Comics. Sinnott was ghost artist on a Tom Gill-credited story for the company's Kent Blake of the Secret Service comic, and reasoned, he later recalled, "'Gee, Stan can't turn me down because he's accepting all the work we bring in'. So I went over to see Stan and he gave me a script right away...."^[11] Due to creator credits not generally being given at the time, sources differ on Sinnott's first Atlas assignment, often given as the four-page Western filler "The Man Who Wouldn't Die" in Apache Kid #8 (Sept. 1951).^[12] Regardless, Sinnott would go on to draw a multitude of stories in many genres for the company throughout the decade.

"I used to go up [to the office, at the Empire State Building] and sit in a little reading room with four or five other artists. It got so that every week I went up, the same guys would be in the room. Bob Powell, Gene Colan, people like that. I got to talking to them. Syd Shores was [freelancing] there, too",^[13] The pattern, Sinnott recalled, was for assistant art director Bob Brown to call each in turn to meet with Lee for "maybe ten or fifteen minutes.... There'd be a stack of scripts on the left side of his desk, typed on legal yellow paper. He'd take one off the top and didn't know what he'd be handing you. It could be a war story or a Western or anything. You took it home and were expected to do a professional job on it".^[13]

During a 1957 economic retrenchment when Atlas let go of most of its staff and freelancers, Sinnott found other work in the six months before the company called him back. Like other freelancers there, he had taken sporadic cuts in his page-rate even before the company implosion. "I was up to $46 a page for pencils and inks. and that was a good rate in 1956, when the decline started. I was down to $21 a page when Atlas stopped hiring me".^[14]

He began doing such commercial art as billboards and record covers, ghosting for some DC Comics artists, and a job for Classics Illustrated comics. A friend at Watson-Guptill Publications connected him with a writer with whom Sinnot collaborated on an unsold Navy-frogman comic strip. Former EC Comics artist Jack Kamen, now the art director of Harwyn Publishing's 12-volume, 1958 Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia for children, had Sinnott join a roster of contributors that included such celebrated EC artists as Reed Crandall, Bill Elder, George Evans, Angelo Torres and Wally Wood. Sinnot also began a long association with publisher George Pflaum's Treasure Chest, a Catholic-oriented comic book distributed in parochial schools. With Bob Wischmeyer, a Treasure Chest writer-editor, Sinnott collaborated on an unsold college-athlete comic strip Johnny Hawk, All American).

The Amazing Spider-Man Sunday strip from 2004. Pencils by Alex Saviuk, inks by Joe Sinnott.

Later life and career

Sinnott went into semi-retirement in the early 1990s but continues to ink The Amazing Spider-Man Sunday strip, do recreations of comics covers and commissioned artwork.

Awards

Sinnott won the 1967 and 1968 Alley Awards for Best Inking Artist. He was a 1995 Inkpot Award winner.

Less officially, Sinnott is named the #1 inker of American comics by the Chicago retailer Atlas Comics, on its list of the medium's top 20.^[15]

Quotes

Joe Sinnott on the Atlas Comics "implosion": "Stan [Lee] called me and said, 'Joe, Martin Goodman told me to suspend operations because I have all this artwork in-house and have to use it up before I can hire you again.' It turned out to be six months, in my case. He may have called back some of the other artists later, but that's what happened with me".^[14]

Notes

References

External links

• Official website
• "Joe Sinnott, 'Spider-Man' 'Fantastic Four' comic book artist (interview, part 1; print and audio), MrMedia.com (July 25, 2007)