I discussed the basics of Simon & Kirby’s inking method in the first chapter of my serial post “Jack Kirby’s Austere Inking Style”. I am not sure exactly what unfinished Stuntman art you are referring to but all the unfinished art I have seen adhered to the methods I wrote about. Jack’s pencils would indicate outline and simple lines for things like clothing folds, no indications of spotting or shadows. And yes Jack’s pencils were generally very tight. This was followed by someone, generally not Jack, inking the outlines. Then someone else, or in some cases more then one person, would do the spotting. In a recent conversation with Joe, he described it as an almost assembly line approach to the inking involving more then one person. Carmine’s interview statement seems to confirm that, as do some other artists who talk about groups of people inking at the same time. When in this blog I say I think someone inked a particular work, what I am saying that I can detect that artist’s hand, not that he was the only inker. I do not believe it was always Jack that did the spotting, sometimes Jack would only ink the splash page and someone else would inked the rest of the pages, as for example in “Backseat Driver”.

I agree that Jack’s pencil method had much to do with the Austere Style. That style seems to be an attempt to speed up inking while still providing quality results.

I do not like to discuss S&K art in this blog without providing some images to illustrate what I am writing about. Unfortunately I do not have a scan of that Lincoln cover and copyrights prevent me from using the one in TJKC. If I ever get an image of it, I am sure I will discuss it.

The lythe figures on page 3 of Combat Photographer are very Simon-like to me. Also the folds (and the number of them) on the sitting figure in the last panel are very similar to stuff you would find in the half-inked pages of Stuntman.

In fact, I hope you will adress that two-stage inking style showed in those unfinished Stuntman pages at some point. Carmine Infantino mentioned in his A/E interview that Jack and Joe would have someone do line inking first and than have Jack go over it with a brush. I see some evidence of that in the excellent Backseat Driver (a story that blew me away the first time I saw it, because of it’s then not yet named ‘austere’ style). I have the idea that the austere style evolved from the line inking first method Jack adopted in the late forties. Many times Joe Simon has said that Jack seemed to see an image before he drew it. But what did he see? A full blown image or lines? If he taught himself to create interesting images without shadows and folds, he was only a step away from the austere style. All he had to do was simplify the inking. You also see it in his pencils. They were so sharp, that anyone could ink them. As Roz later proved.

If you are going to look at those line only pages, you should include those two hunting comic pages ‘from an unknown source’ that TJKC published some time ago along with the Abraham Lincoln comic cover.