I am that way with most artists. How can people identify them
I seem to have an eye for comic art. Maybe this is because I shunned Marvel Comics (which gave credits) and mainly read other publishers like DC that didn't give credits (not consistently)--when I first started reading comics. So I quickly learned to identify the artists that I liked--even if I didn't know their names.
On an old message board, Rich Morrissey told me that he used ears to identify inkers. It makes sense--while an inker might have to adjust his style, depending on the penciller, he's probably going to ink ears his own way no matter whose pencils he's working on. Now that might evolve over time, but if you have a page that you know was inked by Joe Giella in '63 and you have another page from '63 where you don't know the inker, you can see if the ears in both look the same--and then it's probably Giella. I've always noticed the weirdness of comic book ears. It confounded me as a kid, because the whirls in those ears don't look like anything in real life.
Still on the business of inkers and just for identifying Old Look Batman inkers, you look at the bat on the chest. Each inker had his own way of doing the bat, so you should be able to distinguish a Charles Paris ink job from a Sheldon Moldoff. I think Bob Hughes gave me this tip--also on an old message board.
This rule of thumb probably applies to other characters who have chest emblems (or back emblems in the case of Spider-Man and Superman).
Sid Greene, my favourite inker, has an unmistakable style. When he pencils a comic, he always tries to put Julius Schwartz somewhere in the scene. He didn't do this when he inked someone else's pencils, because he didn't think it was proper.
Other pencillers have their own idiosyncracies. I can spot a Carmine Infantino pencilling job from a mile away, because he has his own way of posing figures. Other artists are harder to spot, but if you study the work of a penciller for awhile, you get to know his favourite poses and those are a giveaway.
Unless, some other artist is swiping his style. That happens. In Captain Marvel Jr. adventures, the other Binder artists would swipe Mac Raboy poses. But these stick out like a sore thumb. In Raboy's own work, the poses were organic to the story, but in a non-Raboy story, Junior is striking this pose for no other reason than the artist wants to do a swipe. I think some weren't even swipes--I believe they would cut out Raboy figures and paste them on the page.
Anyway, even if you don't have an eye for art, just through sheer hard work it should be possible to make a good guess at artists, if you have a small number of suspects. Simply by tell-tale features in the art it should be possible to rule-out or rule-in the artists on your suspect list.
Lately my eyes haven't been up to this challenge. They quickly get tired, especially if I'm staring at a computer screen for more than a few minutes. Otherwise I would probably do some more detective work, but I've had to cut down on my computer time to save my eyes.
