When Jack went back to Marvel, he did not ask for Black Panther...or any existing books. Stan Lee called Jack and asked him to do that new series because of the last reason you suggest.

Jack started caring who inked him when he became writer-artist-editor, when he was doing comics he felt were “his” and when guys like me were telling him it mattered more than he thought. Also when Mike Royer was available.

I disagree. I think there have been a lot worse. And if you don't like it, direct some of the blame at the person who assigned Roussos to do it and at a company that paid so poorly that they couldn't attract very many inkers.

Most pencilers who didn't like their inkers looked at the finished work and thought, "He didn't understand what I drew there" and/or "He lost the energy or the personality I put into the people." When Kirby criticized an inker, it was usually the latter.

At Marvel in the sixties, Jack really didn't care who inked him. Asking for Dan Adkins to be replaced was a rare exception. At DC, he did care and for multiple reasons, demanded Colletta be replaced with Royer. Personally, I never thought Colletta was the right inker for him on anything.

That's interesting, Scott. It's not what John said to me but I assume Sal is reporting correctly.

When I interviewed Buscema, he said that the only two inkers he ever liked were his brother Sal and Frank Giacoia.

Jack's comment about the Dan Adkins inking was "He made everything thin which should have been thick and everything thick that should have been thin." I didn't understand this when he said it (I was around 18 at the time) but now I do and it was the opposite of what Royer did.

Most comic book pencil artists of Jack's era liked some of their inkers and not others...and some, like John Buscema and Gil Kane, disliked most of them. Every time one of those pencilers is quoted as not liking some inker, fans of that combination are shocked.

I hate to repay your generous offer of a Bluesky invitation with disagreement but I didn’t think much of Klein as an inker of Swan, Colan or Buscema. Very slick but I think he lost expression in most faces he inked.

I think the period of Kirby's inking you refer to is a period when the DC Production Department was nagging him to make his inking look more like everyone else's and he was trying to give them what they wanted.

Best Kirby inker: Kirby. But the other guys you mention were close.