Recently, an overview of the life and career of noted cartoonist Basil Wolverton appeared here, touching on his accomplishments along both secular and spiritual lines. In this installment, our subject is Marvel comics artist and inker Joe Sinnott.
For many, if not most comic book fans Joe Sinnott is considered the "The World's Greatest Comic Book Inker", both figuratively and literally. He is perhaps best known for a long run on the Fantastic Four series (famously touted as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine").
"Joltin'" Joe Sinnott was born in upstate New York in 1926. He developed an interest in art as a young boy, having been inspired by a gentleman who had been renting a room in his family's home, and would draw pictures for little Joe, who would be sitting on the armrest of his chair. After serving in the Navy, Joe attended art school and afterwards began getting his work published.
In a career spanning 60 years Joe has drawn most of the characters produced by Marvel Comics including Captain America, The Incredible Hulk and The X-Men. Although "officially" retired, he still remains active on occasional projects, and inks the Spider Man Sunday newspaper strip.
In spite of this dazzling and colorful array of fantasy and adventure, Joe's favorite work is that which he did for the publication Treasure Chest, a comic magazine which he had drawn for in the 1960's and '70's, and which was distributed in Catholic schools.
"I sent some art samples to them because my kids had brought a few home from St. Mary’s school, and they called me right away. They felt my style would fit perfectly with the scripts that they had, so the first story I got from them was the life of Joyce Kilmer, the poet who was killed in WWI, who wrote the famous poem 'Trees', and who wrote many other great poems.
"After that, it seemed like Treasure Chest gave me mostly biographies like I Pope John XXIII, and MacArthur and Eisenhower, and Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. I really enjoyed working for Treasure Chest a great deal. They only had the one book, and years later, they finally had to suspend operations because a lot of Catholic schools were closing around the nation and they no longer had an outlet. They tried to sell them on the newsstands but they were lost with all of Marvel’s and DC’s books.
"It was a great magazine. It really was. They appealed to all different aspects of the kids. There was adventure, there were biographies, there were stories that you learned from, and I did stories, on a history of kites and the history of tails on animals. Each animal has a tail, and the tail is the most important part of the animal, whether it’s a possum or a fox, or whatever.
"The fox, of course he keeps warm in the winter time with his tail. And the horse swishes the flies away with his tail. So that was a very interesting story I did. And I also did the history of stagecoaches and things like that. The stories were extremely interesting, and they gave you the chance to do some good art."
In fact, a ten issue speculative storyline in the magazine, a kind of "1976 in Prophecy," forecast the election of the first black U.S. president!
Ironically, yet fittingly, years later Joe was called upon to work on biographies of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, which were collaborations between Marvel Comics and the Catholic Church.
Recently it has become common for notable comic book stories and magazines to be reprinted in both hard and softcover book form. It would seem "timely" and appropriate, then that, hopefully, Joe's Treasure Chest work will appear in such a form at some point!
(Quotes are from an upcoming article about Joe in Filmfax magazine.)