I like Jerry Ordway's work. (both pencils and inks) But I thought he went overboard on JLA; redrawing JB's work. It seems that Nelson followed this pattern in Action.

Jerry's work with George Perez deserves honorable mention.

Just purchased a really good book called Curt Swan: A life in Comics in which JB is interviewed in. I was not really a big Swan fan but can see how his style influenced George Perez. Here are some pages from JB's run on Superman. These first two definitely have an Indiana Jones vibe to me.

A couple more. One from Superman and one from Man of Steel.

Those first pages from Superman I purchased many many years ago! Directly from Jim Warden. I own quite a few JB pages and have been collecting his work for quite a few years now.

In regards to Terry Austin, Austin's work on anything JB has done has always been favorites of mine. I believe Terry only inked the first couple of issues of Superman with Keith Williams assisting on backgrounds. Although Kesel is not a favorite inker of JB, I did like the end result on Superman as well as Legends.

In regards to the colored X-Men pages, I bought those colored. I thought that it was dumb to color the orginal art. The comic page itself is colored so I didn't see the need to damage a work of art. (as I see them) But a Byrne/Austin X-men page is something I can't pass up.  :-)

That was Wolverine in that issue? I thought it was the beast!  ;-}

Who knows what really goes on behind the scenes of making a comic?

I agree that Ordways inks improved many aspects of Byrne's pencils in that JLA story -- I also can see where Ordway's style distracted from Byrne's pencils and style -- but that's an inherant risk involved with letting some other artist put the "ink" on the page.

Byrne's recent JLA story inked by Mark Farmer was a complete disappointment for me (both art and story - but let's just talk about art).   I saw Farmer just tracing Byrne's line, inking onto the page little "art short-cuts" instead of taking a few extra seconds to add some detail that Byrne left out or to correct some anatomy, etc.   There were entirely too many "O" faced people in this recent story --- something I doubt Ordway would have allowed if he had inked those pages.

I believe the penciler/inker relationship should be a sum of the parts -- I clearly see Byrne and clearly see Ordway in those JLA pages.   I personally like that.

to add -----

Even Mr Byrne says quite often that he tried something different with his line (on commissions).  That's the INKED line he's refering to, the last line left on the page.   I think that approach to changing subtle aspects of one's own work is the same thinking behind having different artists of differing strengths ink pencils.  I know the dual penciler/inker thing is also a time issue for getting deadlines met on comic production -- but if "tracing" was all the editors wanted -- we'd all be inkers.