Early Life and Career
Born in Saugerties, New York, Joe Sinnott was one of seven children to Edward and Catherine McGraw Sinnott; his siblings were Frank, Anne, Edward, and three who predeceased him, Jack, Richard and Leonard). He grew up in a boarding house that catered primarily to schoolteachers, some of whom inspired in the young Sinnott a love of drawing. His childhood comics influences include the comic strip Terry and the Pirates and the comic book characters Batman, Congo Bill, Hawkman and Zatara.
Following the death in action of his brother Jack, a member of the United States Army's Third Division, in 1944, Sinnott acceded to his mother's wishes not to be drafted into the Army himself, and he enlisted in the Navy in the autumn of that year. After serving with the Seabees in Okinawa during World War II, driving a munitions truck, he was discharged in May 1946. After working three years in his father's cement-manufacturing plant, he was accepted into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York City in March 1949, attending on the GI Bill.
Sinnott's first solo professional art job was the backup feature "Trudi" in the St. John Publications humor comic Mopsy #12 (Sept. 1950). Later, during a two-week school vacation in August 1950, he married his fiancée Betty Kirlauski (March 7, 1932 - November 1, 2006), to whom he remained married for 56 years until her death.
Cartoonists and Illustrators School instructor Tom Gill asked Sinnott to be his assistant on Gill's freelance comics work. With classmate Norman Steinberg, Sinnott spent nine months drawing backgrounds and incidentals on, initially, Gill's Western-movie tie-in comics for Dell Comics. Sinnott recalled in 2003, "Tom was paying us very well. I was still attending school and worked for Tom at nights and weekends. ... He was mainly drawing Westerns, like Red Warrior and Apache Kid for Stan Lee", editor-in-chief of the two successive companies, Timely Comics and Atlas Comics, that became Marvel Comics. "I have to give all the credit to Tom for giving me my start in comics," Sinnott added.
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