Although personally I doubt that the splash for the “Hip Sing Tong” story was by Kirby I can see where you are coming from. But I credit the story art to John Severin (and no I will not try to provide an inking credits). Check out the faces provided to Agent Hartley. They seem to have the square jaw and smile that was so typical of Severin. Although the story has a Charlie Chan aspect I do not believe Infantino had anythng to do with it. This is not surprising because Infantino last work for S&K was about 5 months previous and he as said that he that the only work he did was S&K was Charlie Chan.

As I said in my post, traces of Studio style inking can be found in Donahue’s art. As I said currently I believe this was due to Donahue’s art being touched up by Joe or Jack. For whatever reason, Donahue seemed to get more of this treatment then any other artist employed by S&K.

I think I’ll have to disagree also on Starr for “Unlucky in Crime”.

“Rat Trap” is certainly intriging. I do not know if I see Broderick in it but I certainly doubt that Meskin inked it. while the picket fence crosshatching is similar to that used by Meskin the inking on a whole does not. Most significantly it lacks the cloth folds made of close parallel lines that so typical of Mort.

That is why I called it a tentative conclusion. But it is reasonable that the directive came from the publisher. While S&K would make proposal for new titles, there is nothing to suggest, nor would it be expected, that they had anything to do with publication policies. Nor would they have anything to gain by paying their artists less. Their arrangement with Prize for the romance titles meant that they paid the artists and shared in the profits. But Joe describe that arrangement as unique and one that actually was not a good idea unless, as it turned out, the romance titles sold real well. There is nothing to suggest that S&K had a similar deal with Prize for the crime comics. Also Prize used the “made on the cheap” policy on other titles that Joe and Jack had nothing, at least initially, to do with.

I did not include the works that Stallman did with Guinta in my analysis of Stallman’s multiple styles. The stories I discussed were all signed by Stallman alone and were not in the same style as the Guinta/Stallman stories. If the explanation you are offering is that Stallman was adopting his inking style for different pencillers then effectively you are saying that Stallman used ghost artists. All the stories I am talking about were signed by Stallman alone.

I am familiar with Prize Comics Western, in fact I mentioned it when discussing John Severin in this post. And I am not surprised that Draut did not appear in it because, as I wrote, S&K did not seem to have anything to do with it other then providing a couple of covers.

Unfortunately I am only familiar with the work Krigstein did for Simon and Kirby and therefore I am not in a position to judge who inked him.

Harry

Belfi seems to have been such an artist, who used kids fresh from collage for penciling and inked/finished the rest himself. Severin graduated when he startted to work with Bill Elder, but that was probably over in the other western title of Prize, Prize Comic Western. Are you familiar with this title? Maybe of the artists overlap, including Severin, Belfi, Donahue, Briefer and Stein… but strangely not Draut.

Bernie Krigstein did indeed only do two stories for S&K. Greg Sadowsky states in the big Fantagraphics reprint book that Krigstein must have inked the Vidocq story himself, since he saved the stats and he only saved stats of stories he inked himself. I have always suspected it was inked by someone else, maybe Dick Briefr. Maybe you can go back and have a look. Could it be Broderick or who-ever inked Broderick?