Years ago, I thought my life’s career was going to be in comics. My way in appeared to be through ink­ing. To that end, I did what all aspir­ing inkers look­ing to get into comics did at the time: I got my hands on pho­to­copies of pen­ciled pages, then inked them either on vel­lum, or by light-box­ing them onto bris­tol board. While recent­ly dig­ging through some old work, I redis­cov­ered this ink­ing sam­ple that I had total­ly for­got­ten about!

I had gen­er­at­ed a num­ber of ink­ing sam­ples work­ing over sev­er­al dif­fer­ent artists in those days. But for some rea­son, I don’t believe I ever includ­ed this when I sent out copies look­ing for work. Reap­prais­ing it all these years lat­er, it’s bet­ter than some of the oth­er sam­ples I did back then, so I’m not sure why I did­n’t use it. You might rec­og­nize the pho­to­copied lay­out as the work of Jim Star­lin, done for Mar­vel Comics’ War­lock #11 (pg. 14 of the sto­ry). It’s a good, clear lay­out. Pret­ty much all the info you would need as an inker to car­ry it to a fin­ish is there. There are even some sug­ges­tions about lighting.

When I did my inks, I did­n’t have a copy of the fin­ished com­ic to look at. And real­ly, that would’ve defeat­ed the pur­pose, see­ing how the art­work had actu­al­ly been fin­ished. Edi­tors and art direc­tors were look­ing to see how you approach ink­ing, not your pro­cess­ing of some­one else’s inks. And keep in mind, in those days, there was no inter­net where you could go to grab reference.

For post­ing here, I thought it might be fun to also sort of “re-mas­ter” the page, add the speech bal­loons and col­or it, based on how the page appeared in the com­ic. I guess that makes it both some­thing old and some­thing new.

Hope you enjoy!