[crashryan]

It's Jack, all right. When I was a kid Jack Sparling was the artist my uppity friends and I identified as the ultimate talentless "crud artist." This conclusion was based largely on his work for the later Dell Comics (e.g. Space Man), in which he seemed to have taken no more than ten minutes to draw each page.

Only after years of examining his work, from its 1940s origins on the Hap Hopper strip through Jack's last days on Buck Rogers, did I realize we were wrong. Sparling was in fact an artist of considerable ability. From time to time he'd do truly interesting art jobs...his work for Toby (Billy the Kid, John Wayne) comes to mind.

As the years passed Sparling became ever more prolific, and the more prolific he was the sketchier his inking became. It didn't help that a large percentage of his output was for low-paying publishers. Sparling doesn't seem to have put a pennysworth more effort into a job than he was paid for. I'm sure this is why some of his Dell stuff was so awful: he really did draw a page in ten minutes.

I wouldn't be surprised if after so many years cranking at top speed, Jack Sparling couldn't have taken his time if he wanted to. Sparling pencilled two jobs for Marvel in the 60s. Stan Lee tried to slick him up by giving him for inkers John Tartaglione (X-Men) and the slickest of all, Joe Sinnott (Captain America). The results were not good. Sloppy or not, Sparling looked best inked by Sparling.

Link to the book: Pin-Up Pete 1

[The Australian Panther]

I had the same opinion on Sparling from reading his Dell work while simultaneously being exposed to Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Steranko, Adams, Gil Kane, et al. It wasn't just his inking, it was his pacing of a story and a lack of comparative dynamism in his characters that made him an artist you didn't want to see on a book. However, there is no doubt that he had excellent talent as an artist. Even in his Dell work, when he had to do a comic of a Movie or TV show, his depictions of known Actors is always great. Looking at some Artists work here and comparing their work in the Silver Age ( George Tuska being another example) I have come to the conclusion that some of them had no enthusiasm for drawing SuperHeroes and would rather have drawn Crime, Adventure, War Romance or Westerns and this lack of enthusiasm shows in their work.