Sad to hear about the passing of comic book artist Joe Sinnott. While I was mostly a DC reader as a kid, one Marvel book I read for quite a while was FANTASTIC FOUR. In retrospect, a lot of that had to do with the steady hand of Sinnott's inks over a variety of pencillers, from George Perez to Keith Pollard to John Byrne to Bill Sienkiewicz. Later on of course I'd discover that a lot of what he was bringing to the work was what he learned on his long collaboration with the creator of the book, Jack Kirby, and without a doubt the best pages of FF that Kirby did were the ones inked by Sinnott. Over 1000 of them, so that's quite a bit to pick from. Also loved their other work together, including some great Thor, Captain America and Silver Surfer stories and numerous covers. I also always loved him over other artists, so up top are two of the more unusual examples, Sinnott over Curt Swan on his signature character, Superman, and over Sergio Aragones on a Fantastic Four story.
And here he is on some more familiar ground, Kirby pencils, but on images you might not have seen. The FF cover is an unused 1960s Kirby cover that he inked later, and the New Gods sketch is from the 1970s. The Satan's Six page is a creator-owned feature by Kirby, probably drawn in the 1970s and published in 1993.
Among the few Kirby originals I've been lucky enough to be able to take an extended look at up close were pages inked by Sinnott, a pair of 1960s FF pages and a 1970s cover. They were even more impressive in person, just so flawlessly smooth and precise, capturing the power in Kirby's work while also capturing subtle details in the facial expressions and fully rendering the backgrounds in a way that doesn't overpower the foreground.
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