Mark evanier
Jack F.A.Q.s
A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby by Mark Evanier (below) A pretty punchy example of Syd Shores’ inks over Kirby from Captain America #101 (May 1968). This image was shot from a copy of the original art, showing the detail that Shores put into his inking. Captain America TM and ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.
We start this time with the following query from Michael Wohl: I’ve seen you write about which Kirby inkers were your favorites but I’ve never seen you give your opinion of Syd Shores, whose work I loved. I’d also like to hear whatever you know about his return to Marvel after years away and what Jack thought of his inking. was not a big fan of what Shores did to Jack’s pencil art on Captain America. I liked him better embellishing Gene Colan but even there, I thought there were plenty of inkers who were more sensitive to the task. That said, I will add that I liked Kirby/Shores a little better
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when I saw some of the original art. Shores was using a lot of fine lines—some, apparently executed with a ball-point pen of some sort—at a time when comic book printing was especially noxious, and a lot of what he put in went muddy. This was also a period when Marvel’s colorists were being influenced by what DC was doing with color in their books—darker colors, less reliance on bright primary tones, less yellow on the page. Kirby once described it as: “Everything being colored like it’s a war comic.” (It is said that a few months later, Stan Lee happened to leaf through a pile of their comics—like Jack, he didn’t look at the printed books all that often—and said something like, “This isn’t how I want our books to look!” And with that, Marvel went back to brighter, lighter colors... and a better approach, I thought, at least for their super-hero titles.) Still, even given those excuses, I thought Shores was miscast... not just as a Kirby inker but as an inker at all. And his stint inking Jack is a good example of, as you occasionally see in comics, an inker not being sure of his goal. Shores’s natural drawing style was quite different from what Jack was then doing... so was the end product supposed to look like Kirby or Shores? There are panels in those issues that skew in both directions and I don’t think either approach is particularly effective. Inking another artist is not something that comes naturally to some folks who know how to draw, and I don’t think Shores was really suited for the chore. Once upon a time, Syd Shores was Marvel’s star adventure artist. He held the post for a period after Kirby and Al Avison but before Bill Everett, Joe Maneely and the return of Kirby. No less than Gene Colan and John Buscema would later cite him as a powerful teacher/influence, and you could see a lot of other guys who drew for Stan Lee back then wishing they were Shores. Shores started at Marvel as an inker, working with Simon and Kirby on their first Captain America books. In an unpublished interview with Shores that recently came my way, he explained: “I had been assisting Mac Raboy and it didn’t pay enough. I’d just gotten married and I was desperate for a real paycheck. So I wrote and drew this strip called “The Terror” and I took it up to Timely Comics, just picking them at random. The whole office consisted of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and we sat around talking for a 11