Vinny Colleta... Pro and Con

[Fan4Fan]

From Eddie Campbell...

 

From Mark Evanier...

 

From Mr. Colleta himself...

[Mr. Zipper]

Very interesting. Thanks for the links!

[Ogami]

Mark Evainer sums it all up pretty well. Even playing both sides of the debate towards the end and showing Colleta some (small) level of respect.

[mica]

I can't stand Colleta's work.

[Jeffro.]

I can't stand Colleta's work.

 

Just horrible stuff.

He destroyed the work of just about any penciler he worked over. Look at how he ruined Grell on Green Lantern and Warlord in the 70's.

[Sharkey]

I used to own that page from FF 40 that Evanier has highlighted, that shows the uninked penciled figure of Reed in the background that Vinnie failed to ink in. It's a shining example of what was wrong with Colletta.

 

I have mixed feelings about Colletta. I think that he was clearly a workhorse who cranked out a lot of work, and I don't think he did Jack Kirby any favors. That said, I don't think he was a hack. I think he had talent but maybe didn't use it. Maybe it was time constraints, maybe it was just a bad attitude, maybe he just decided to do enough to get by and get paid. After all, it was the 1960s, and these were comic books, not high art. It's unfortunate but how many artists left comics to try to get "real" work. Maybe he just wasn't motivated to do his best.

 

I do think there were times and issues where his inking of Jack's work was better than others, but everybody knows Jack's work never looked as dynamic with Colletta inking as it did with Sinnott inking. And if you go back and look at Jack's pencils, I think it looks like his work, detailing, and complexity grew over time when Sinnott was inking it, and you have to wonder if Jack didn't subconsciously put more effort into it knowing how the final product would look.

 

That said, I still think that Colletta did some nice work on Thor. However, I often imagine what it would have looked like if Sinnott had done it!

[cd4ever]

Oddly enough I was at a con this past weekend and I was at some dealers booth looking at a copy of Young Love 123, which was priced pretty high. The old guy who owned the booth with his wife came up to me and says "That has Toth art in it". So I started flipping thru the book looking for the Toth art. It was clearly indentifiable and the old man took one look at it and says "Colletta inks. What a shame. He ruined everything he touched." Then he walked away. I flipped to the begining of the story, sure enough, Inked by Colletta.

 

So I bought the book anyway.

[awe4one]

I used to own that page from FF 40 that Evanier has highlighted, that shows the uninked penciled figure of Reed in the background that Vinnie failed to ink in. It's a shining example of what was wrong with Colletta.

 

I was looking at that panel earlier and wondered what the point was. I completely missed the uninked Reed...

 

Jim

[Sal]

THERE IS NO "PRO" TO VINNY COLLETTA.

 

[Shadow]

Never cared for Colleta's work.

[That Ron Dude]

Even in that FF panel with the uninked Reed Richards, I ask myself how long it would have taken to finish it? I also look on all the texturing he did with white out and ask myself how long that took. Would the panel have looked better with Reed Richards there? I suppose that the bigger question though, is did he give Kirby (or the other artists he worked on) the respect deserved.

 

Colletta started at Marvel as an inker when their job was to cover the lines. He was one of a very few who made it through the period where the inkers became flamboyant artists in their own right. He had a scratchy pen line in a time when the brush inkers were kings.

 

He was no Joe Sinnott but compare him to Chic Stone, Paul Reinman, George Roussos or Sol Brodsky and he looks pretty good.

 

He looked good inking Thor. Those scratchy lines gave the book a middle ages woodcut look. Sinnott, Adkins, Giacoia, Palmer and the other hot inkers of the day could not have achieved that. He didn't look good on much else.

 

He knew how to make a picture look pretty. He favoured speed (which translated into money) over quality.

 

He more than survived. He had a little bit of power. He had name recognition. He claimed, at one point, to be the most reproduced artist alive. He will go down in the history of comics as an interesting anomaly.

[Mr. Zipper]

He more than survived. He had a little bit of power. He had name recognition. He claimed, at one point, to be the most reproduced artist alive. He will go down in the history of comics as an interesting anomaly.

 

I think you've nailed it.

 

From reading his letter, the interview and the anecdotes, he was obviously a street smart survivor and probably had little in common with the more artistic type personalities.

 

To Colleta, the work was a means to an end -- some walking around cash, nice suits, maybe a goomah and a bit of fame. He was a longshoreman with an india ink pen.

[That Ron Dude]

Had to get in again.

 

Colletta is not even that controversial. Nobody thinks that he was that good, it's just a matter of how bad he may have been. Nobody liked him when his work was being done, I have heard no revisionist assessment of his work.

 

Comics, as we have all heard, is a tough, tough field. When I hear the stories of Reed Crandell working as a nightwatchman, Steve Ditko's poverty, story after story of alcoholism, it makes me wonder why anyone would want to get into it at all. I have certainly never met Colletta but it seems that he had some kind of a plan to get steady work in comics. Anyone who can make a go of it in that field (without being a total scum and there are plenty of those too) has my respect. He shouldn't have erased Kirby's crowd scenes and turned a Howie Chaykin kitty-cat into a pillow. But in the broad context of an art form which is also a business, these things aren't that surprising. Think of all the pencillers that have lifted panels from other artists. Think of the artists that have employed assistants who have done the bulk of their work unpaid and uncredited. Think of the writers who use the excuse of "Marvel Method" to get the artists to do most of their plotting and some of their scripting too. I think these are quite parallel to Colletta's shortcuts for the sake of a fast buck. They are virtually the norm in comics.

 

Here is a list and commentary on the twenty greatest inkers of all time. http://www.acomics.com/ink6.htm

Colletta is not on it.

[*paull*]

I'm not disagreeing with your post, but I will say that I think the acomics.com artist rankings are a bunch of *spoon*. For one, Gil Kane over Steranko, Buscema, Crandall and Raboy? Please.

[awe4one]

Had to get in again.

 

Colletta is not even that controversial. Nobody thinks that he was that good, it's just a matter of how bad he may have been. Nobody liked him when his work was being done, I have heard no revisionist assessment of his work.

 

Comics, as we have all heard, is a tough, tough field. When I hear the stories of Reed Crandell working as a nightwatchman, Steve Ditko's poverty, story after story of alcoholism, it makes me wonder why anyone would want to get into it at all. I have certainly never met Colletta but it seems that he had some kind of a plan to get steady work in comics. Anyone who can make a go of it in that field (without being a total scum and there are plenty of those too) has my respect. He shouldn't have erased Kirby's crowd scenes and turned a Howie Chaykin kitty-cat into a pillow. But in the broad context of an art form which is also a business, these things aren't that surprising. Think of all the pencillers that have lifted panels from other artists. Think of the artists that have employed assistants who have done the bulk of their work unpaid and uncredited. Think of the writers who use the excuse of "Marvel Method" to get the artists to do most of their plotting and some of their scripting too. I think these are quite parallel to Colletta's shortcuts for the sake of a fast buck. They are virtually the norm in comics.

 

You make some great points...

 

Jim