Joseph Leonard Sinnott (; October 16, 1926 June 25, 2020) was an American comic book artist. Working primarily as an inker, Sinnott is best known for his long stint on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, from 1965 to 1981 (and briefly in the late 1980s), initially over the pencils of Jack Kirby. During his 60 years as a Marvel freelance artist and then remote worker salaried artist, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders, and Thor.

In the mid-2000s, Stan Lee cited Sinnott as the company's most in-demand inker, saying jocularly, "[P]encilers used to hurl all sorts of dire threats at me if I didn't make certain that Joe, and only Joe, inked their pages. I knew I couldn't satisfy everyone and I had to save the very most important strips for [him]. To most pencilers, having Joe Sinnott ink their artwork was tantamount to grabbing the brass ring." Sinnott's art appeared on two US Postal Service commemorative stamps in 2007, and he continued to ink The Amazing Spider-Man Sunday comic strip until his retirement in 2019.

Early life and career

Joseph Leonard Sinnott' was born October 16, 1926, in Saugerties, New York. He was one of seven children to Edward and Catherine McGraw Sinnott; his siblings were Edward and five who predeceased him: Ann / Anne, Frank, John a.k.a. Jack, Leonard 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. His childhood comics influences include the comic strip Terry and the Pirates and the comic book characters Batman, Congo Bill, Hawkman and Zatara. Sinnott attended the schools St. Mary of the Snow and Saugerties High School. in the St. John Publications humor comic Mopsy #12 (Sept. 1950).

Cartoonists and Illustrators School instructor 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. Sinnott recalled in 1992 "taking the Long Island Rail Road every weekend and working all day Saturday and Sunday." He said in 2003, "Tom was paying us very well. I was still attending school and worked for Tom at nights and [on] weekends," with night work added after he tired of commuting to Long Island and "began working [in] my room on 75th Street for $7 a week." adding, "I can never have enough good to say about Tom Gill. He gave me my start." and the two-page "Under the Red Flag" in Kent Blake of the Secret Service #3 (Sept. 1951).

Regardless, Sinnott would go on to draw a multitude of stories in many genres for the company throughout the decade: horror, science-fiction and supernatural-fantasy stories for Adventures into Terror, Astonishing, Marvel Tales, Menace, Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales and others; war-comics stories for Battle, Battle Action, Battlefield, Battlefront, Combat, Navy Combat and others, including historical war stories in Man Comics; biblical stories in Bible Tales for Young Folk; Westerns in Frontier Western, Gunsmoke Western, Two Gun Western, Western Outlaws, Wild Western and others, co-creating with unknown writers the titular heroes of The Kid from Texas and Arrowhead, the latter starring a Native American warrior; and the occasional crime story (Caught ) and romance tale (Secret Story Romances).

He said in 2003, "I used to go up [to the office, at the Empire State Building<nowiki>]</nowiki> 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".

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. ... Stan 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".

He began doing such commercial art as billboards and record covers, ghosting for some DC Comics artists, and a job for Classics Illustrated comics. Former EC Comics artist Jack Kamen by this time was the art director of Harwyn Publishing's 12-volume, 1958 Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia for children, and had Sinnott join a roster of contributors that included such notable EC artists as Reed Crandall, Bill Elder, George Evans, Angelo Torres and Wally Wood. After a supernatural Kirby story in Journey into Mystery, #58 (May 1960), he inked Kirby's twice-reprinted giant-monster story "I Was Trapped By Titano the Monster That Time Forgot" in Tales to Astonish #10 (July 1960), although not the cover featuring that lead story. Sinnott in 1992 believed his first Kirby collaboration was a Western story titled "Outlaw Man from Fargo", Sinnott also inked a few panels of the following issue's second page, the remainder inked by another Kirby regular, Dick Ayers.

Sinnott explained his not remaining on The Fantastic Four after his single early issue:

Later career

thumb|300px|Sinnott, third from left, on a 2008 panel on [[Jack Kirby. With him from left to right are Mark Evanier, Roy Thomas and Stan Goldberg.]]

During his years as a Marvel freelancer, and then salaried artist working from home, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders and Thor.

Personal life

In August 1950, during a two-week school vacation from the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York City, Sinnott wed Elizabeth "Betty" Kirlauski to whom he remained married for 56 years until her death. His grandson Dorian specified, "He passed away this morning, June 25th, at 8:40 am at the age of 93. He enjoyed life and was drawing up until the end."

Awards and recognition

  • 1995 Inkpot Award
  • 2008 Inkwell Hall of Fame Award
  • 2008 Inkwell Award for Favorite Inker (Retro; tied with Terry Austin)
  • 2013 Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award.

He is the namesake of the Inkwell Award "Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame Award", or commonly called the Joe Sinnott Award. the Thing and the Silver Surfer.

Sinnott is named the No. 1 inker of American comics by historians at the Chicago, Illinois, retailer Atlas Comics, on its list of the medium's top 20.

References

Sources

  • Archived from the original on June 20, 2020, and more than 200 earlier dates.
  • Joe Sinnott at the Lambiek Comiclopedia. .