Thread by @KurtBusiek

A couple of thoughts on this:

First, yeah, when comics were more often done plot-style, more artists got comfortable with the job of pacing a scene and controlling the page, so it’s not surprising that more artists became writers (often good writers).

The shift from...

https://twitter.com/CullyHamner/status/1114946688865714184

…”I can draw that” to “I can make that up” isn’t as big a jump when you’ve been working plot style for a while.

On the flip side, most of those artists had already done writing, just not necessarily professionally. When you start out making comics, you don’t have scripts...

…to work from (or didn’t in pre-internet days), so you had to make shit up yourself.

Frank Miller started out writing the comics he drew in apas. Erik Larsen wrote his own comics as a kid. Walter Simonson did his own comics at art school, and so on.

The writing was there...

…and just because they broken in as artists didn’t mean that writing came as some sort of revelation. Just experience and confidence and the ability to say “Hey, give me a shot at that” to an editor and have the editor figure it’s worth it because these guys clearly know comics.

It doesn’t always work — when John Buscema plotted and drew his own creations in SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN, they were derivative, empty formula junk. But well drawn. And he knew how to tell a story. He just didn’t have a story to tell.

Someone like Don Heck, when handed an idea...

…for a story from Stan Lee that amounted to “Here’s how the new villain shows up, here’s how Iron Man beats him in the end, you fill in the rest,” he got a lot of experience in plotting suspense and character scenes, but it never seemed to make him want to come up with his...

…own stories. He could have done it, clearly, but he didn’t want to.

John Romita was occasionally handed nothing more than a name for a villain and would plot an entire story from that. Clearly, he could do that really, really well, but didn’t reach to do more of it.

But the practice of doing it gave some artists the skill to do more of it, and some artists the confidence that they could do it at least as well as the writers whose plots they were drawing.

And we got a bunch of good writers out of it.

I think there are a multitude of ways to make comics, and I write plot-style or full-script depending on the project and the collaboration.

I think we should have more plot-style comics, though. I think they free up artists and give them control of the page...

...which often makes for better-looking, more exciting comics.

Not every project should be done that way. But the more external and action-oriented the story is, the more it seems like that can help. Look at MAD MAX FURY ROAD, which was mostly written via storyboards.

That’s about as “plot-style” as a movie can get and it worked brilliantly.

Anyway. Horses for courses. Just rambling on an exhausted Sunday. Time to go find waffles.

And I’ll add that plot-style comics require writers who know how to do them just as much as they do artists who can thrive on them.

Not as easy as you might think.

The first comics I did (fan comics, with Scott McCloud) were done plot-style, but I learned to write full-script too, and when I broke in professionally I started out writing full scripts.

I switched to writing plot-style out of self-defense, when working with an artist who did a workmanlike but unexciting job — doing it plot-style gave me a second pass at the pages, allowing me to write dialogue, FX and such that would “juice up” the storytelling, adding...

…tension and drama where it wasn’t as present in the pencils as it might be.

Since then, I’ve switched back and forth as need be, working with Alex Ross full-script, Carlos Pacheco plot-style, and so on. Whatever works. Whatever makes good comics.

Anyway. Waffles.