Comics are a haunted medium. From its beginnings, panel after panel has been the work of ghosts.

Ghost artists, that is. And while the "haunted medium" line may seem like just a setup for a weak pun, the use of uncredited assistants and ghost artists does continue to haunt comics today. The artists behind many legendary pieces of work fail to get the recognition and compensation they deserve, and fans must engage in whodunits of their own to try and match a particular page to the proper pencil or pen.

Pure practicality drove the need for assistants in comics' early days. There was rarely enough time for most artists to write, lay out, draw, ink and letter a daily feature. So an artist would often put together a studio, hiring less experienced artists to draw backgrounds or ink some elements of the strip. This provided a valuable breaking-in point and training ground for new would-be artists, and freelance opportunities for working artists without their own features. Milton Caniff explained the process by which he produced the Steve Canyon strip in an interview with comics legend Will Eisner in February 1982:

"I'm going to dictate this [story] over the telephone to Shel Dorf . . . I can dictate this to him, six strips and a Sunday page, and he will have it lettered and in the mail that same afternoon by by air express . . . When it comes back from Shel, I send it right on to Dick Rockwell . . . who then really lays out the strip in tight pencil. Then it comes back to me and I finish it [by inking], and I'm the last one to see it."

(This interview is reprinted in Eisner's book Shop Talk, a highly recommended set of interviews with major figures in the history of comics.) No matter how many assistants worked on the strip, however, only the artist or artists who had the contract with the syndicate signed it. And within the world of strips, that's no big deal. As Mark Evanier said in a great series of columns on Batman creator Bob Kane, contrasting the worlds of strips and books: "[I]n newspaper strips, the guy who signs it is the guy in charge of getting it done every day."

The comic books of the time didn't even have that luxury, in most cases. Newspaper comic strips were the far more prestigious branch of the medium, and they paid accordingly. To make ends meet, even the most successful artists needed to churn out the pages, and the only way to do that was to bring on the extra hands. Credit wasn't such a huge issue, because with a few exceptions like Superman and Batman, comic book features were unsigned. But those exceptions followed the pattern of newspaper strips: a point man (or men) signed the contract with the publisher, and that dictated who got the credit, even if the guy who signed the contract never put pen to paper.

As I alluded to earlier, Bob Kane is probably the most famous example of this. He did not write the story that appeared in Detective Comics #27 in 1939; his friend Bill Finger did. Finger wrote the next published Batman story as well; then Gardner Fox contributed several before Finger returned. Kane pencilled these early stories, but quickly took on an assistant to do the inking. Finger also wrote the story that introduced Robin in 1940. But Kane was the one who dealt with the editors at DC, and so the stories bore his signature. Ultimately, Kane signed a contract with DC that stipulated that he would deliver a certain number of pages of Batman art every month, and that any Batman story DC published would go out with his byline. Eventually, Kane stopped drawing at all.

That arrangement lasted until 1968, when DC and Kane reworked their deal. Over the first three decades of Batman's existence, a number of excellent artists drew stories under Kane's signature, including Dick Sprang, Lew Sayre Schwartz, and Sheldon Moldoff. Some, like Sprang, worked for DC; others, like Schwartz and Moldoff, worked directly for Kane. Sprang's work from the fifties defined the look of the character, while Moldoff provided inks and eventually pencils almost from the beginning. But the people reading their stories at the time had no idea who they were. Today, efforts have been made to match up ghosts with their art, although the effect of different inkers on different pencils can make that difficult. Much of this work is done by fans, such as those that contribute to Who's Whose in the DC Universe?, the source of the individual artist bios linked to above. But as publishers mine their back catalogue for material for the book market, proper credit remains a pertinent issue. (The recently published Dynamic Duo Archives Vol. 1, for example, does not list Moldoff's contributions.)

In contemporary American comic books, the situation has certainly changed. Since the 70s, comic books have included credit boxes that list not just the writer and pencil artist, but inkers, colorists, letterers, and editorial staff. Writers, pencillers and inkers routinely have their names listed on covers, and colorists and even letterers have started to warrant such notice as well. The deadline crunch is not quite as bad as it used to be; publishers will delay books or hire fill in artists where necessary, and compensation has improved since the 30s, so there's not the intense pressure to turn out multiple pages a day. Unlike Japan, where manga artists still maintain large studios of uncredited assistants to meet the demand for material, American audiences have come to demand that the work in the book match the names in the credit box. A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran commented on the difference in an interview for PULP Magazine:

"One is expected to have a studio and a staff, and of course that's not the case here. In fact, one is expected not to have a studio and a staff. (laughs) I know that, especially in alternative comics, which is where I've been working on A Distant Soil, having an assistant or an ghost artist can make you vilified by the fans. They hate that. But in Japan, you're expected to have an entourage and a half-dozen assistants and a whole crew of people around you, and you've gotta pay these people!"

Avoiding assistants isn't a hard and fast rule even now, however, especially when it comes to comics' unsung heroes. As comic coloring becomes a more intense process, colorists are hiring assistants, forming studios, and farming out the preliminary work to those breaking in. (This process, called "flatting," is discussed in our feature on coloring.) So a colorist credit might be assigned to a particular studio, or to the main colorist and, in smaller type, the studio. Books whose lettering is done by the graphic designers at Comicraft are variably credited to a specific individual, "So-and-so of Comicraft," or simply Comicraft. Some books just have the art credited to a particular studio, with no mention of particular individuals; Udon is an example of a studio that works in this way.

And newspaper strips themselves haven't really moved far past their original paradigm. While folks like Charles Schultz and Bill Watterston never let another finger touch their strips, it's long been accepted practice for strip creators to hire ghost artists and writers. Jim Davis has been using ghost artists on Garfield for decades, for example. Usually, but not always, the ghosting is unnoticeable, any variation chalked up to artistic evolution. An example of the highly-noticeable ghost occurred last year, when Tom Batiuk brought in comic book artist John Byrne to ghost a ten-week run of Funky Winkerbean while Batiuk recovered from an injury. In comic books, Byrne is a legend, whose work on Uncanny X-Men is considered a high point for those characters and who has also done acclaimed runs as a writer/artist on Fantastic Four and Superman. He also has a very distinctive style, and when he ghosted Batiuk he didn't try to emulate him. The strips looks very much like John Byrne drawing the Funky Winkerbean characters, and some fans found the change disruptive. (Batiuk himself released a statement declaring how happy he was with the new look, and stating his intention to work some of Byrne's style into the strip even when Byrne's run was over.) One fan posted on an unofficial Funky board: "Tom Batiuk shouldn't be signing his name to something he didn't draw, and why he would WANT to put his name on this mess is more to the point."

Of course, if this article in the Kansas City Star (free registration required) is correct, Batiuk has been signing his name to something he didn't draw for quite a while, with no storm of protest at all: "In a phone interview, Batiuk explained that in recent years artist Chuck Ayers has been doing the strip's penciling, and when this story line ends, Ayers will resume that job. (Ayers also draws Batiuk's other comic Crankshaft, a Funky spin-off, so bringing in Byrne let Ayers get caught up, too.)"

Ayers is credited on Crankshaft - but not on Funky. Looks like the ghosts are here to stay.

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