Broken Frontier

My friend the underground cartoonist talks about how an important part of the underground comics philosophy was that a comic should be created by a single individual: the same person who writes also illustrates; it is the product of a single person's vision.

Apparently that was in reaction against the “assembly line” production of most of the comics produced by Marvel and DC, where you have a writer, an artist, an inker, a colorist, an editor, and so on, so that the artistry of the final product is divided among numerous people, with final control resting with the company. While I can definitely see their point and certainly many of the greatest comic books (Maus, Persepolis, A Contract with God, etc.) are the product of a single individual with a single vision, there still is a lot to be said for collaborations.

Many of my favourite comic creators are pure writers. Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Alejandro Jodorowsky all work with separate artists to create their masterpieces and as a result, each of their stories is a very different experience. A Grant Morrison story illustrated by Frank Quitely is very different from one illustrated by Jill Thompson or Philip Bond. An Alan Moore story illustrated by Eddie Campbell is very different from one illustrated by J. H. Williams III. Each artist brings their own perspective, their own ideas, and combines that with the ideas of the writer, and together they produce something not quite like what either one would produce on their own.

As a member of Cloudscape Comics, I've worked on various comic book projects, though purely in the writer capacity. Because my artists' perspective, talents, likes and dislikes contribute to the work, the end result is distinct, and not something I would have ever produced on my own. Perhaps the final result is less purely mine than if I'd illustrated it myself, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Neil Gaiman said an advantage of writing a comic over writing a novel is that he can enjoy the final project as an observer, a fan, which he can't if it's purely his own creation. In the collaboration, both the writer and the artist put themselves into it, and through the joining of their ideas, something new is born, something both like and unlike each of its parents.