Art versus Writing

It's not a comic if you don't have writing and art.

There's no VS or "either or" situation.

This is what's known as a false dichotomy.

Honestly, there's no conflict between them. In comics, the writing and the art both tell the story. Do you know how much story you can tell with a single panel of a character's facial expression? Or how much meaning you can pack into the contrast between what is said in the dialogue and what is shown in the pictures? I mean, my story would be nothing without the visuals.

And as my ambition is to be good at storytelling, I strive to be good at both aspects.

I think both are very important and everyone will have their own preference. However, me personally, I care a little more about the story.

hands down writing is more important. good art is always important, and can really sell a comic, but it comes down to the writing.

there are loads of comics sold professionally with, honestly, bloody awful art that get sold on their awesome storyline (im thinking mainly of runaways here)

in western comics especially, you tend to get a 'good art but bland story' or 'bland art but good story' kinda thing, although there are more and more exceptions these days, lets not forget they do hire artists separate from writers, which makes getting both good art and story easier.

its possible to make a successful comic where theres little to no story but tonnes of incredible art (and probably a fair amount of fanservice /sigh) but honestly id take stick figured with a good story over fancy art with nothing behind it any day.

It's important to distinguish the writing from the story. The writing and the art are used to tell the story. I don't think it's a case of one versus the other - Providing they both compliment the story, they can be any any style or quality (or even absent?).

I'm keen on word play an writing style and my webcomic is mostly a single repetitive image with very little variation. In honour of this thread I have written a strip with little text and a different image in each panel. Enjoy1.

If the writing's bad, and the art's amazing, I'm not going to read it. If the writing's amazing, I don't care how bad the art is ^^

I would say writing, probably. When I think of it from the viewpoint of being in a writer-artist duo relationship, it's much easier for me to see myself in the shoes of the scripter than the one drawing.
Additionally, I'm more confident in my ideas and my ability to refine them than I am in my ability to draw out ideas and refine those drawings.

When it comes to my personal preference, both are equally important. When it comes to making a successful webcomic though, it's all about the art. Comics with good art will attract attention even if the story is crap. It's not because I think people are shallow-minded or anything negative like that, but it's simply the delivery of the medium being visual.

The art can be judged in a few seconds just by looking at it, but you have to read for a while to judge the story. You can see a banner and immediately, if it has bad art, you won't click on it. But if you see a banner ad that has really good art, you will click on it, and you will read a few pages at least before you decide if you want to continue, or it's not worth reading.

Writing is also more universal, in that everyone thinks that they are good at it. If you have vivid imagination and a word processor, you probably think you are good at writing. With so many "good writers" in the world, it can be difficult to find perspective on where you stand, to evaluate yourself, or to stand out from the crowd. Especially with some of the absolute garbage that ends up banking millions in popular media, while amazing works remain obscure. It's really a crapshoot.

I find it's also easier to see clear forward progress with art. An artist can improve page-to-page and you can immediately see the results. Where as with writing, you may have to wait for years to see if a long-form comic's story ever goes anywhere.

I enjoy art and writing equally, but I never feel like I'm good or bad at either thing. More like, I'll look back on something I did before, and I'll see a few things I did well, but a lot of stuff I could have done better.

To me, they're both important. No matter how good the story is, if the art is terrible, I won't be able to focus on the story. A comic is a visual medium, not a book. I strive to improve on both aspects!

There is more truth in this than I like. I have seen some absolute crap comics at the top of the various webcomic lists, only because the art is pretty. Honestly, the reason I still read so many published comics is because while it's easy to find pro-level artists in webcomics, pro-level writers are few and far between. And the absolute worst part is what you pointed out later in your post, people think they are good at writing, and have never studied the craft.

Eagle
(But I think that's going to change)

Both... There is a saying that people will welcome you by looking at your clothes, but will send you away by looking at your brain (or heart). It means that art is important to sell your content. I have a favourite comic here on Tapastic which is not very popular - but the only reason it is not is because the art is not still so appealing so somehow it stays unnoticed. So if you can jump the barrier of first impression, you may find a lot of gold. But art is important in comics because it is the tool that tells the story. So if you want to tell it in a good way, you should improve both. At the same time art is not enough for comics as well. It will totally be just an empty shell if you don't have a good content to fill it with

Well, I work as an illustrator so I guess it's quite clear which option did I choose XD But both are really, really important. It's the essence of comics! To unite art and writing into a good, new art form. If one of them is bad, the whole thing comes out wrong - maybe because it's awful to look at, or maybe because the story is boring.

I wouldn't mind to be a better writer, though. I have toyed with the idea of writing some short stories, but never actually got to it... someday, someday. At least I can get better with comic scripts, and that is enough for me at the moment ^^

The visuals matter. Sequential art does not require a story to exist. A series of panel with a ball rolling in is a comic. I also dislike the whole pretentious graphic novel thing. Comics are not novels. They are sequential illustrations. The progression from one panel to another is all that matters. If you want to tack on a story or some other experience, sure, it's quite feasible. But let's not fool ourselves thinking that the story matters. If it did, we would be reading novels, not looking at pictures.

Once all pretension to being a novelists are gone, that's when what is known as storytelling can occur. Storytelling is the art of using visuals to tell a story. Notice that I didn't say, the art of using words to tell a story. In comics - the one where the cartoonist gets it at least, the visual tell the story as much as possible and words or "writing" is subservient to effective storytelling.

The writing for me is more like a conceptual thing. The big idea. But the nitty and gritty is all storytelling. Only after having read a good chunk of a story does the big picture often starts to show its tail.

I know that most will disagree with me but it has been my experience and how the greats in comics that I have studied have handled their work. They never pretended to be novelists or writers. They were cartoonists and that was good enough for what they were doing.

They also were not ashamed of calling their work comics, as opposed to using grandiose terms such as graphic novel. I really dislike this term.

I think you missed something in the definition of sequential art. The "convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" part. A series of panels with a ball rolling does not fit that definition, unless the ball is doing something interesting, or if it is instructions on how to roll a ball.

The term Graphic Novel may be pretentious, but you are tilting at a strawman here. That term is not in widespread use here, as most of us call them Comics.

And for what most of the people in this forum, or involved with webcomics period want, yes, story does matter. For most people, it's all that matters. They don't care about the prose or the art, they want story, in an entertaining format. While there are some art-centric comics that have done well, most of the best received comics on the web are about story, not art, and not writing.

This is opposed to mainstream comics, where the writer is what most people are picking up a comic for.
As for reading a novel over a comic? I read comics due to the fact that when the medium is done right, it is a better story than a novel, a movie, or a TV show. Yes, story does matter, and the marriage of verbiage and visual is what makes comics work.

I don't even know where to start here. Let's try the OED, since we don't even agree on terms. Story: An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

No mention of writing. Most comics are drawn from a script. Let's take the word Writer out of here, and replace it with Scripter. That script could be verbal, it could be a storyboard, it could be just a set of thumbnails, but in most comics, it is a written document.

Without that script, whatever form it is in, you have no story. Without the visuals, you have no comic. And no, words are never subservient to effective story telling, they are part of it. All attempts at silent comics (that I have seen) have been nothing more than entertaining stunts without long term effectiveness. The medium uses words and pictures when it is performing at it's highest peaks.

Do the names Greg Rucka, Marjorie Liu, Eric Von Lustbader, Warren Ellis, or Brad Meltzer mean anything to you? All of them write comics and consider them selves novelists (as does the New York Times Bestsellers list). Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Peter David call themselves writers.

And much as I dislike the term Graphic Novel being used to describe any tradebound comic collection, there are many works in the comics world that go beyond being simple stories, and well into novel territory. The Watchmen is a novel, and you can call it such, or stick the word Comic or Graphic in front of it, but none of that changes its Novel status.

By the way, there's a reason I responded to this post. You reveal your bias against writers in your first paragraph, and the rest of your post is downplaying the writing aspect of comics.

Webcomics are looked at as the bush league of comics by outsiders, and a lot of this is due to the general poor quality of the writing within the field. While professional level artists are surprisingly common within webcomics, professional level writers are not, and part of that is due to the disdain writers are seen with inside the field. That has to change.

Eagle
(I hate writing long posts)

Hi @eagle1, the points that I've made above adhere to a long continuing view of comics and are part of an ongoing debate about the nature of comics. My post simply skewered things away from the writing-led perspective about comics which is where you come from.

In this debates there are the writing-driven comics folks, then, the words and picture advocates. Then you get something closer to McCloud's definition which you quoted above and finally,you have the other other end of the spectrum which is mine. Comics - or sequential art are primarily a visual art pure and simple. To this visual art, other levels of complexity can be added.

Storytelling, in that perspective is not about stories or plot. It's about conveying information visually over a sequence of drawings/vignettes. A story is optional. But how the information moves from one frame to another is what reigns supreme. Mastering that one skill - storytelling is what the other comic book greats that you did not mention work on for decades and still complain about not getting quite right. I'll drop names like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Frank Frazetta, and Burne Hogarth.

Greg Rucka, Marjorie Liu, Eric Von Lustbader, Warren Ellis, or Brad Meltzer are writers. They are not cartoonists. They use comics as their medium but as you mention could be writing prose too. Most people here are cartoonists. They draw and they write their comics. They need to focus on master cartoonists much more than writers to master this medium.

Writer/artists teams never produce work that is as smooth and direct as cartoonists who are responsible for everything. When they do, it takes them more work to achieve the unity of the single cartoonist, and much more compromises.

Of course you'll probably disagree with this, but this is my position and ultimately why, the visuals are all that matter about comics. Everything else (text bubbles, colours, writing) stands on the visual's core foundation.

P.S. Many cartoonists, like me do not script their comics at all. They just draw the storyboards directly based on a premise. In my case, if it's written down, it's one line. Most often it's straight from my mind to the comic page without any script. That's how Jack Kirby did it when he created the Marvel universe. He was not a writer at all.

What? Um...King Kirby is one of my heroes. I have the honour to have sat down and talked with him for a couple of hours over a meal at a slow convention. He was one of the greatest comic creators ever, and it is shameful the way he was treated by the company and industry he helped revitalise.

He did not create the Marvel universe.

At the point in time that the universe was being created, Stan Lee was the main writer, and was turning out scripts so fast (and in some cases not even writing them, but relaying them verbally) that the resulting method of turning out a story synopsis, having the artist draw it, then having Lee go in and write the dialgue and captions before the letter started on it is now known as the Marvel Method. Kirby's art and creative genius shaped the Marvel universe that we have today, but you are totally leaving Stan Lee out of that process, and it was a true collaboration.

I disagree strongly with your idea that teams never produce work that is as smooth and direct as solo acts. Very few people are capable of being brilliant in writing and art, and it shows. There are few of the comics on my favourites list that have 1 name on them, and none of the ones in my top ten do. They are all brilliant collaborations, and even when someone comes along who does do wonderful art and writing both, such as the undersung Mike Grell, their work still does not equal that of a well functioning collaboration.

I just got pages back on a collaboration I am working on now. The artist changed my panel layout in such a way that I am going to be doing re-writes on the script. I'm not upset, since it's better than what I wrote. Our combined work improves on both of our individual work in a way that just has me bouncing off the walls. It's a wonderful process, and I wouldn't trade it for the world! There's a reason why the best books in the mainstream are usually collabs, regardless of the fact that you have had superstars that could do it all since the 1930s. The Collabs are usually better.

And much as I love Kirby, the series that he wrote himself were never as good as when he was drawing other people's scripts.

This debate is not long-continuing. It's relatively recent. Like within the last 15 years. And no, I am not from the writing-led perspective. I do both art and writing, and I see the balance between them. And it is a balance. The oft-spoken mantra is that great art draws them in, great writing keeps them. It's true, but it misses the point. A great comic can have mediocre art and writing, but the story telling is what shines through. There are not a lot of the best selling comics of all time that feature great art. A lot of them don't even feature great writing. But the story almost always wins out in the end. That's not the art or the writing, that's the marriage between the two.

Eagle
(And I am finishing up a review while doing this. Sheeesh!)

Hi @eagle1. This debate started when Scott McCloud released his first samples of Understanding Comics way back in 1991 in *Amazing Heroes, published by Fantagraphics at the time. That's before his book was even published. Several writers (including Neil Gaiman) who had seen his draft of Understanding Comics asked him to correct his own biases towards cartoonists and visuals. To answer their complaints, he added a chapter on comic writing at the end of the book. I remember that 1991 debate. I contributed to it!

There are many perspectives about comics. I've described a few and clearly stated which one I adhere to. Not everybody has the same definition of comics or even share your perspective.

History is always nicer to those who remain. Stan Lee claims that he did everything at Marvel. He did in a way but more in an editorial way. Some of the crazy stuff Marvel is known for that landed in a comic scripted by Stan Lee, did not come from him directly. He would give broad lines and Kirby would come back with intricate unexpected stuff. But he was so humble that he never took credit for most of it. Now, Stan Lee is anything but humble about his contribution to Marvel. Very little of Stan Lee's work done without Kirby, Steranko, or Steve Ditko has any relevance or weight.

On the other hand, Kirby's Fourth World Saga at DC Comics is epic. He is not a writer, nor a novelist. He's a cartoonist creating a story on a scale larger than anything he had done before at Marvel. If his solo work at DC was so mediocre, why would his Fourth World Saga which had strong theological themes resonate so much nearly 40 years later? Why is Darkseid the main baddy in the Justice League cartoons, and recent Superman stories, and possibly the first JLA movie?

I disagree about how collaborations are superior. I think of Charles Shultz, Bill Watterson, Will Eisner, Ozamu Tezuka, or even Pulitzer-prize winning Spiegelman mentioned above. The closest works in their league is Moore and Dave Gibbons's The Watchmen.