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The following appeared in the 'Press Enterprise' newspaper (Pennsylvania, USA) on June 20th, 1999:

His Line of Work:  Comics
by Jacqueline M. Smith

'Phantom' inker adds depth to daily strip, artist explains during convention at Knoebels

ELYSBURG - Turn to the comics page of the Press Enterprise any day during the week, and you'll see Keith Williams' work.

He's one of the artists who collaborates on "The Phantom," a strip that has been around since 1936.

But Williams, 41, isn't the one who draws the Phantom.   That task falls to a Florida man named George Olesen.

Williams does the "inkning" for the Phantom, adding shadows and lines to Olesen's pencil drawings.  You can see his finished product every day "The Phantom" runs in black and white.

"It is my job to make it black enough so it pops out on the page," Williams said Saturday.  "An inker can make or break the drawing."

Williams, of Brooklyn, is in town for a comic book convention at Knoebels Groves.  The show continues today from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

He took some time out of signing autographs for collectors to talk about what it's like to work on an internationally known comic strip, and about his longtime ambition to launch a successful strip of his own.

Williams also recalled good-naturedly his first months out of college, when an art career just didn't seem to be in the cards.

A graduate of Manhattan's School of the Visual Arts, Williams had always envisioned a career as a pencil artist.

But, he said, he found "ideas didn't translate from my head to the page."

So he temporarily abandoned the notion of being a pencil artist when he got out of college, instead looking for any way to break into comics.

He didn't find it.

He did, though, find a succession of other jobs:  one at Barnes & Noble, another working at a high school.

"It made me work harder (at my drawing) just so I could get out of those jobs," he said with a laugh.

Finally, Williams' big break came when he landed a job at Marvel Comics.

But he didn't work as a pencil artist.

He was a background artist, the person who draws everything but the characters in the comic strips.

Williams worked for about two years doing backgrounds before moving on to repairs.

In that line of work he would fix up other artists' drawings.

"If they drew the hand wrong, I would do it over," he said.

A year later, he accepted a job as an assistant editor at Marvel.

But by then, he had developed a hankering to be an inker, and he wasn't a good fit for the editor's job.

"I was getting frustrated," Williams said.   "Stuff would come in, and I would think, I could ink that.  But it was my job to pass things off to other people."

He quit the editor's position after nine months and began inking pages "here and there".

'The Phantom' calls
Then, about five years ago, the Phantom's longtime inker announced he was retiring.

Williams had heard of the strip, but admits he wasn't a huge fan.

Still, when he heard about the opening for an inker and someone at Marvel asked him if he was interested, he definitely was.

He set up a meeting with Lee Falk, who created "The Phantom" 66 years ago.

The two "hit it off" at Falk's home overlooking Central Park, Williams said.

"To meet the man who created something like 'The Phantom'...that was mind-boggling itself," Williams said.

Falk gave Williams a few pencil drawings and told him to ink them.

"He liked what I did, and he hired me," Williams said.  "I was actually kind of surprised at how easy it was."

Falk has since passed away, but "The Phantom" lives on.

A man in Norway writes the strip's plot, Williams said.

Then Olesen does the pencil drawings and sends them to Williams for inking.

Williams also puts the text into the characters' dialogue bubbles, printing the words on a computer.

"I would love to do it by hand, but I don't have the time," he said.

Strips are usually done about two months before they appear in the paper, Williams said.

"The Phantom" appears in about 500 papers around the world with a readership of 6 million or so.

But Williams sees precious few of his strips on newsprint.

"It's not carried in any of the newspapers in New York," he said.

Comic dream
Although Williams said it's gratifying to "enhance other people's work," he dreams of putting together his own strip someday.

In fact, it's a dream he's harbored since college.

He has an idea for the strip, but he won't divulge much.   All he'll say is it's about a female.

He works on it when he's not inking and hopes to launch the strip by 2000.

If all goes according to plan, he'll be the pencil artist, the inker, and the plot writer.

"I want to do everything," he said.

Fewer and fewer artists are relying on inkers these days, Williams said, calling his profession "a dying art."

But Williams has no plans to abandon inking "The Phantom" anytime in the near future.

He's enjoying what he's doing - much as he enjoyed the afternoon at Knoebels.

"This is fascinating," he said.  "I've never been at a comic book convention where there was an amusement park right outside."

Thanks to Ed Rhoades

The Phantom � ™ 1999 King Features Syndicate Inc.
Last Updated:  September 11th, 1999.