Christopher Rule (November 23, 1894 – April 1983) was an American comic book artist active from the 1940s through at least 1960, and best known as the first regular Marvel Comics inker for comics artist Jack Kirby during the period fans and historians call the Silver Age of Comic Books. Biography Early life and career After driving an ambulance in France during World War I, Christopher Rule in the 1920s worked in comic strips and fashion illustration. For publisher S. Gabriel & Sons, Rule and Pelagia Doane illustrated a Pinocchio "put together book" in which gummed illustrations could be cut out and mounted on background sheets. Comic books In 1943, Rule was a comic-book inker with the Jack Binder Studio, and also that year inked Fawcett Comics stories featuring the superheroes Mary Marvel and Mr. Scarlet. By 1944 he'd become a staff artist at Timely Comics, the forerunner of Marvel Comics during the period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Rule worked in what was called the "animator bullpen", which produced such movie tie-in and original talking animal comics as Terrytoons Comics, Mighty Mouse, and Animated Funny Comic-Tunes, and was separate from the superhero group producing comics featuring the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner and Captain America. Due to his work going unsigned, in the manner of the times, comprehensive credits are difficult if not impossible to ascertain. Rule's first confirmed credits are as inker of the one-page fashion filler "Junior Miss Steps Out..." and as penciler-inker of an eight-page story in the teen-romance comic Junior Miss #1 (Winter 1944). Rule continued to ink romance stories over such pencilers as George Klein, Mike Sekowsky, and Syd Shores in such comics as Faithful, Love Classics, and Love Tales. He expanded into other forms, including heroic adventure with the mythologically based superheroine Venus, inking Werner Roth on a story in Venus #10 (July 1950); and then into horror, inking penciler Sekowsky's story "Hands of Murder" in Adventures into Terror #4 (June 1951), from Marvel's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics. Inker Joe Giella, who worked on staff at Timely for two years beginning circa 1946, recalled Rule at the time as "a very heavy, older fellow with grayish hair. He was a good friend of Mike Sekowsky's, and worked in the same room with Mike. He was kind of an intellectual". Artist Gene Colan, a Marvel mainstay from 1946 on, described