page_title: Joe Sinnott
section_title: Silver Age of Comic Books
hierarchical_section_title: Joe Sinnott / Silver Age of Comic Books
caption_attribution_description: English: Comic book creators Mark Evanier, Roy Thomas, Joe Sinnott and Stan Goldberg speaking on a panel on Jack Kirby at the November 2008 Big Apple Convention in Manhattan.
context_page_description: Joseph Leonard Sinnott 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, initially over the pencils of Jack Kirby. During his 60 years as a Marvel freelance artist and then salaried artist working from home, 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.
context_section_description: During the late 1950s and 1960s period historians and collectors call the Silver Age of Comic Books, Sinnott continued doing occasional pencil-and-ink stories for Atlas Comics as it transitioned into the nascent Marvel Comics, contributing to such "pre-superhero Marvel" titles as Strange Tales, Strange Worlds, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense and World of Fantasy. He also began a stint with the low-budget Charlton Comics, teamed as penciler with inker Vince Colletta on several romance-comics stories in series including First Kiss, Just Married, Romantic Secrets, Sweethearts and Teen-Age Love that he would do through 1963.
  Sinnott's first collaboration with Jack Kirby, one of comics' most historically groundbreaking and influential creators and the penciler with whom he is most often identified, came with the war-comics story "Doom Under the Deep" in Atlas' Battle #69 (April 1960). 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", but nothing approximating that appears in standard databases.
  Sinnott did one additional Kirby pre-superhero Marvel story, "I Was a Decoy for Pildorr: The Plunderer from Outer Space", in Strange Tales #94 (March 1962), before inking his first Marvel superhero comic: both the cover and the interior of penciler Kirby's The Fantastic Four #5 (July 1962), the issue introducing the long-running supervillain Dr. Doom. 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:
  Before Stan called me to ink Jack on Fantastic Four #5, I never knew the Fantastic Four existed. I lived up here in ... the Catskill Mountains, and I never went down to the city at that time. ... Everything was done by mail and I didn't know what books were coming out, even. ... Stan called me up and said, "Joe, I've got a book here by Jack Kirby and I'd like you to ink it, if you could. I can't find anybody to ink it." ... [When the pencil art arrived,] I was dumbfounded by the great art and the characters. ... I had a ball inking it. I remember when I mailed it back, Stan called me. He said, "Joe, we liked it so much, I'm going to send you #6." So he [did], but I had committed myself [to] another account at [publisher George A. Pflaum's Catholic comic book] Treasure Chest ... and this was a 65-page story I was going to have to do on one of the Popes ["The Story Of Pope John XXIII, Who Won Our Hearts", in vol. 18, #1–9 (Sept. 13, 1962 – Jan. 3, 1963)]. I had committed myself to it, so when I had started #6, I think I just did a panel or two. I had to send it back to Stan.
  Sinnott had by then inked the introduction of the Norse god superhero Thor, in Journey into Mystery #83 (Aug. 1962). He also inked the following issue's Kirby cover, and, following his papal project, he both penciled and inked five subsequent Thor stories, in issues #91–92, 94–96 (April–Sept. 1963).
  Aside from these sporadic works, however, Sinnott was primarily inking for Charlton during this period, with occasional jobs for American Comics Group, Treasure Chest, and Dell Comics, for which he variously penciled and fully drew film and TV adaptations, and penciled the one-shot biographical comic The Beatles #1 (Nov. 1964). But then, in 1965, he returned to Marvel to work virtually exclusively, beginning with his inking the cover and the story, "Where Walks the Juggernaut", of The X-Men #13 (Sept. 1965).
  After this, Sinnott began his long and celebrated stint on a Marvel flagship title, Fantastic Four, inking Kirby on "The Gentleman's Name Is Gorgon! or What a Way to Spend a Honeymoon!" in issue #44 (Nov. 1965). He remained on the series through Kirby's departure after issue #102 (Se
caption: 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.
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