Doctor Strange #7, page 8

Dr. Strange battles Umar and her Dark Dimension demons on this Romita-inked page from 1975. Umar is sister to the Dread Dormammu and mother to Clea (whose father Orini also appears here in panel three). Outside of a handful of work on romance comics, I think this is the only time John Romita applied his brush to Gene Colan's art on a mainstream title. Some will kvetch that Romita overpowers Colan in this issue, but I recognize what each artist brings to the collaboration, and I think the art in Doctor Strange #7 is amazing. This is my hill, and I'm willing to die on it!


John Romita on working with Gene Colan:


"I inked Gene on a couple of romance jobs and a few covers. I didn't ink him a lot. I wish I had done more, but I will tell you he's very hard to ink.


I told Gene that when you get a guy like Jack Abel who knows how to ink you, you've got to cherish him, because Gene works in grays. Now it looks like he's doing blacks, but they're grays and they're subtle. And there's a lot of soft lines and a lot of soft edges. How the hell do you ink those? Where do you soften it up and how do you soften up? You can't use drybrush because you're not doing a pulp drawing. The truth of the matter is that when you ink Gene, you're interpreting his stuff to the best of your ability. Either you get heavy-handed like I sometimes did—I got too heavy-handed a couple of times in his love stories, because, I mean, here was all this gray and I thought it was black. What you need to do is find a way to soften that, or break it up somehow with a line technique.


I thought the answer to his whole situation was to just reproduce from his pencils, but the technology wasn't good enough for those days. Nice litho offset would have been nice, and they could have done his stuff. When he did get stuff done in pencil, sometimes it worked and sometimes, it didn't. But the truth of the matter is he was very hard to ink, but a few guys like Tom Palmer make Colan look like Colan. Jack Abel had a knack with his work that was very good on 'Iron Man." But outside of that, very few guys could ink him. I know Giacoia did and he did a passable job, but it was a little hard, and all of the softness from Colan is gone when you do it with a hard line. I think Gene was lucky to get some of the good inking he did get."


~ John Romita, interview with Jim Amash 2006/2007