Thread by @KurtBusiek

I read a comic today where I liked the writing, liked the art, liked the premise and the plot, but something wasn’t quite clicking, and then I figured out what it was:

The writer was writing the book as if he expected the artist to take charge of the pacing, and the artist was drawing it as if he was expecting the writer to do it.

The result was, a lot of the scenes felt vague, unfocused.

The artist is like the director/cameraman, choosing how to tell the story visually. If a scene ends on a moment of emotional isolation that the reader is meant to pause on, a camera move — pulling back, zooming in — can make you feel it more.

If the artist doesn’t do that, though — if it’s just visually presented the same as the rest of the scene — it can fall flat. The writer, though, can pick that up. The dialogue could be written (or rewritten) to make you focus, to make you take that pause.

All kinds of things about a scene — setting, mood, conflict, emotional depth, pacing — all of them can be enhanced or blunted by how the artist visually tells the story. And all of them can be enhanced or blunted by how the writer writes it.

If neither of them are stepping up, though, if they’re leaving it to the other one to do, then it falls to the audience to interpret it, without those visual or verbal cues that would help them.

Early on in my career, I was writing a book full-script, and the artist was presenting it in a manner I thought was bland and undramatic.

So I switched to plot-style, which allowed me to compensate for the visuals, punch up the dialogue, take charge of the pacing.

Whether it was taking what would have been one balloon and making it into three, strung across a panel and ending with a burst balloon, or adding captions to slow down a transition or set a mood — I was able to take more control of the reading experience, make up for what the...

…artist wasn’t doing.

I can’t say if it worked as well as I wanted (I was pretty inexperienced), but it worked better than it was working the other way.

These days, even if I write full scripts, I do a revision after the art’s drawn, so I can riff of of what the artist drew.

Sometimes that means cutting text, because what the artist drew does the job really well and I want to get out of the way. Sometimes it involves adding text, to enhance moments or smooth transitions, or whatever.

But I want the story told as well as it can be told.

One of the things I find myself saying about comics writing over and over, is:

“It’s not your job to write a good script. It’s your job to write a good comic book."

The end result is what matters.

If you write a script that’d be wonderful in the hands of Steve Rude, and it goes to an artist who doesn’t have Rude’s deftness, and they fail to bring out the brilliant nuance of what you wrote, then whose fault is that? The artist’s, for...

…not being up to the job of drawing that script? Or yours, for handing that artist a script they couldn’t handle?

Ultimately, fault doesn’t matter — if the comic didn’t come out good, everyone should be trying to do better next time, rather than pointing fingers.

Because the job isn’t to do your part of it and back away. It’s to get a good end result.

So anyway, the comic I read today has a good writer, a good artist, good premise and story, but it could be a better comic if someone was thinking about the end result more than the individual jobs.

Collaboration is about knowing when to hand off, and when to compensate.

Then again, if I said all this to the people who made the comic, they might think I’m crazy, that this is exactly the effect they’re going for and I’m just misreading it. So it goes — it’s an art, not a science.

And this is why sometimes I think I’d be a good editor and sometimes I think I’d be way too controlling and intrusive, because maybe I don’t know when to let it go.

Ah well. So it goes.