Joe Sinnott
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' The 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'd inked Kirby's Fantastic Four #5, the issue introducing Dr. Doom, plus a science fiction monster story in Strange Tales #95.
During his fifty-plus years as a Marvel freelancer and then salaried artist working from home, Sinnott inked virutally every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders and The Mighty Thor. His smooth, slick inking style has influenced such artists as Terry Austin and P. Craig Russell, although there was at times criticism that it tended to smother the individuality of some pencillers; this was particularly raised with artist Bill Sienkiewicz's short run on Fantastic Four. Sinnott is credited with influencing what would become a Kirby trademark, the heavily inked cosmic bursts eventually known as "Kirby Krackles".
Biography
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), he grew up in a boarding house that catered primarily to schoolteachers , some of whom inspired in the young Sinnott a love of drawing. In high school, he took what few art classes were offered and became editor of the yearbook and of the school newspaper, the Ulsterette.
Sinnott entered the U.S. Navy, and was part of the Seabees in Okinawa World War II. He was discharged in 1946 at age 19, and after working two-and-a-half years in a cement plant's rock quarry, began to pursue illustration as a career. In 1948, he was accepted into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts) in New York City, attending on the GI Bill.
There, school co-founder Burne Hogarth suggested that Sinnott's style might be suitable for comic books, and teacher 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. "Tom was paying us very well," Sinnott recalled. "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."Template:Fn
Sinnott's first solo professional art job was the backup feature "Trudy" or "Trudi" (sources differ) in the St. John Publishing Co. humor comic Mopsy. Later, during a two-week school vacation in 1950, during which he married his wife Betty, with whom he celebrated their 55th anniversay nin 2005, Sinnot branched out. He met with Lee, who assigned him a three-page Western filler, "The Man Who Wouldn't Die", and soon began drawing in other genres for Timely/Atlas as well.
"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." 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."Template:Fn.
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."Template:Fn
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.
The Marvel Age
more to come
Later life and career
Sinnott went into semi-retirement in the early 1990s but continues to ink The Amazing Spider-Man Sunday strip.
He and his wife's progeny are children Joe Jr., Linda (deceased), Kathy, and Mark; grandchildren Chris, Malissa, Erin, and Trevor; and great-grandson Bernard Vincent.
Awards
Sinnott won the 1967 and 1968 Alley Awards for Best Inking Artist. He was also nominated for the Shazam Award for Best Inker (Dramatic Division) in 1974.
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."Template:Fn
Footnotes
- Template:Fnb Amash, Jim, interview with Joe SinnottAlter Ego #26 (July 2003), pp. 4-5
- Template:Fnb Ibid., p. 6
- Template:Fnb Ibid., p. 11
- Template:Fnb Ibid.