I feel like sometimes people don’t value writing as a skill as much as artistic skill

Are you kidding me? The reason there IS a "writer versus artist" discourse is because all these sites and review platforms DON'T value the work of the artist- like you can just plug any old fuckin body in there and the story still works...this type of disregard for the value of the artist permeates and carries on to newer/younger writers who feel and carry on like, "I'm THE SHIT, and I can get any artist I want and my story will work! Artists are a dime a dozen"...there was a situation a couple weeks ago on Twitter where a writer(unfortunately, I know him coz I've did a few cons with him) was like "the artist shouldn't get [co] credit if it's work-for-hire," and comics twitter went off the handle; he's deleted the tweet, but that's gonna leave a mark on him(apparently he's doing a comic that some Hollywood type folks are looking at, plus he had some really good sales; while I applaud his success, I kinda feel like he's getting the "big head" syndrome).

Comics, are a visual medium- and the right artist with the right vision can elevate the writer's story to unparalleled heights. Definitely not saying writers aren't equal to artists- both are integral to the success of a comic; but for some insane reason, critics and media want to ballyhoo and praise the work that the writer has done, without acknowledging the equal contributions of the artist- and now they have the whole industry thinking that "I can snag any old artist off the street and make my comic work"...if the artist is interested and invested in the characters & story genuinely, you will see it in their work; by that same token, if they aren't interested in anything about the story and characters, you will see it in their work.

This mess needs to end, coz the industry is going to end up eating itself.

Huh, this could be because I'm kinda out of it, but I don't know what you mean by visuals vs. elitism? It definitely is an elitism thing, comic visuals don't have much to do with it, just the medium.

I don't think it's the lack of imagination, I think the low perception of comics comes from it's origins. Comics were originally made for kids, and it's always been marketed and treated as such, so there's this misconception that the medium can't possibly be used to tell mature stories. If they are for an older audience they're immature, violent and/or filled with porn. At least that's the perception I take from most people. It's just like how traditional animation is treated. Although unlike comics animation was originally for adults, then molded into children's content since kids were drawn to it, eventually sealing it's fate as being considered less sophisticated than 3D animation and live-action.

Lol that kinda sounds like it circles into what Shanny said about artists being treated like work horses. Our world is full of visuals, you can't advertise anything properly without a good logo and/or good ad visuals, the majority of people are more likely to buy stuff that has a visual design that fits their interest. There's a super high demand for artists in various fields, yet they're a dime a dozen.

To be honest, writing and art should be equal in value but I feel like it is a bit comparing apples to oranges here about which is more labor intensive. It's more of a "brain power" vs "technical power" kind of thing. Even though both are creative skillsets, writing demands more problem solving for ambiguous problems, while drawing demands you to solve straightforward problems but with a high skill barrier.

I would compare to my experience when I switched my major from design to computer science. I think both majors were pretty hard but in different ways. In design, it was extremely labor intensive, but the learning material itself was not hard to understand. On the other hand, computer science was not as intense in terms of labor and workload (my sleep greatly improved during that time), but I did struggle more with understanding the learning material at times. I would probably equate my experiences with design to art and computer science to writing if we're talking about my experiences working on my comic.

Writing can be hard because the problems you might have to solve in it are hard. For a common problem I've found myself when writing: how do I transition from this plot event to the next? It sounds straightforward but there are so many factors I need to take account for. Like will the transition make sense? Is it contrived? Would this type of transition be entertaining to readers or will it slow the pacing too much that they'll drop off? I don't think I've ran into any questions like this when drawing, but the main thing is I'll probably be spending more hours drawing than I am at writing, and time is money.

My issue with this statement is that art being a technical skill speeds up with practice. It can take an hour a page, and hour a panel, or a week a panel depending on your skill level, experience, and dedication to perfection. Some artists can produce 24 pages of fully colored comic artwork in a month; much of the time it takes longer. There are others that can do manga pages in under 2 hours.

Writing simply does not have the same "awe to time" ratio. You can make an amazing, world class recognized piece of digital art in a day. You can make a large artistic effort like a painting in week or a month, and sell it for millions if you are a well known artist.

Writing, while having some technical aspects takes a predictable amount of time. If you, like me, compose about 600 words an hour; to compose a novel sized story of 60k word would take 100 hours. 3 solid work weeks 10 hours a day. That is a short book, and that is just to get the words down. After which may require a rewrite, extensive editing, and auditing. That's if you don't get rejected for the content you write.

Art is interpretive, so people viewing it can derive what it means to them. Writing is callous an cold in comparison. Words mean specific things which can be offensive to a wide variety of people. You have to skirt around all of it. As a writer I feel like I am constantly walking on eggshells with my potential audience. My most popular story is set in another world with concultures to avoid political issues.

"art takes more time" is relative. It depends how much you are writing, a book or a comic. Comics might be faster and this conversation might be focused on that. However, for me art can be done relatively quickly and quality art is dime a dozen.

For valuing that work I can get a full color illustration for about $50-100 dollars from most artists charging for the service. On the other hand, writing an article for a website of about 1000 words I can charge $50-100 dollars for. Both the artist and writer can take about 2 hours to do that same work.

I honestly don't think there should be a debate
Any skill is HARD to obtain, is time consuming, requires years of development, constant learning, repetitiveness, patterns, grabbing any kind of resource and munch it like shredded cheese at 3 am.

Writing is hard, that's why I don't write and just focus on drawing because it is something that I already developed and had the resources for one at the time when I was originally interested in learning for both.

But on top of that, both will still have to develop skills like charisma, marketing, speeches, planification, leadership, fellowship, social interactions and more because one doesn't live solely of one single skill and makes it work for the rest.

But still, something that always bothers me is that there are always going to be those few (Or mayority) depends the case, of individuals that thanks to their lovely entitled behaviors the rest is put under the same bag and ends up generalized.

Like, I know a lot of writers who are amazing, with interesting stories, working hard, collaborating but at the same time there are times I see a few individuals, especially on my DMs that... kind of makes the rest to not look good on the spotlight and while one doesn't try to generalize there are certain paths that... just ugh.

Same for artists, you're going to find workaholics who barely take care of themselves, those filled with joy and hopes and then you're going to have those that literally are on another planet and saying nonsense or that just cry and whine so loudly because they can't get a commission despite of 10000 reasons why.

Like, yeah we all make fun or cringe at wattpad kids but then when we get disappointed with media we pridefuly claim that these kids could come up with a better ending for a series or better character development. Which is fun, not gonna lie but to a certain extent we're also denigrating both the professional skill and the amateur skill, despite well, good ideas doesn't mean there is gonna be good execution either.

And most of the time people don't see that a lot of things are scripted, like speeches, even trashy tv-reality is scripted, music, poems, commercials, even the topics of the news are scripted beforehand someone comments on it independently if we're talking about informatives, narrative text, a script, fanfiction, or whatever. Writing is writing, now, deciding to enhance that skill, that will differ from one person to another.

Either way, both careers, jobs, tasks, skills, hobbies, whatever you wanna call the art branches: drawing and writing. There is always going to be someone who doesn't value that skill, someone to screw up and make the rest look like clowns, as well for people who shows exactly that yeah this is hard work, woah the things that you can achieve, look how far you can get! And such.

I believe that the issue not only lies because of well, terms of technique, actual effort or whatever. But because it's more common heard to have illustrators being approached by some person who info dumps the lore of their story with the hopes of making a comic and become extremely rich and famous on their DMs instead of the same situation but inversed. (The fact that is not as frequent doesn't mean it doesn't happen and in both cases, I would slap whoever asks for free stuff like this)

I personally don't know which labour is more time consuming, if art or writing, I just know that it can take me an entire day to clean my house compared to someone else who takes a morning to do it. It all depends on the person and their circumstances.

There might be some dismissive attiude because when you make a comic you are writing - dialogue, narration, inner monolouges are all stuff you write in, but another thing is that visual communication is in general more difficult to get across to your readers unless you put in a panel when you specifically zoom in on a detail and your characters say something about that detail then your readers will probably miss it. an early interaction in my comic is between alya - a technician - and Rahat - a pilot with a leg prosthetic. Alya asks Rahat if they need anything rahat responds with "the usual" the next page shows rahat taking off their prosthetic and handing it to alya, Now as I write it out what "the usual" is is obvious right? but because the main focal point of this page was a stage being all glowy I got comments about how "the usual" was a lightshow. Something Alya has nothing to do with. Visually communicating that kind of info is hard as hell.

But at the end of the day writing for a comic is more important than the art. You can have great art but if the story sucks then the comic sucks. But if your art sucks but your writing is good people can still read it.

I totally agree. Writing a good and interesting story is as hard as drawing a nice and proper comic. I've been learning traditional drawing and painting since I was a child and a few years ago I got fascinated by this job and started writing and very recently I've started learning digital art.

From my own experiences, I can say that, sure, drawing a perfect panel IS time-consuming, and so is writing a perfect paragraph. When you draw a panel, you always fill up spaces/places and try to make it more perfect as you gain more experience. Just the same way, every time you read a paragraph that you have written earlier, you do edits and try to make it more perfect as you slowly learn more and more about writing skills. And that is very time-consuming too.

So, both are hard and both are time-consuming, but at the same time, both are very interesting in their own way too.

Writing feels so much harder than drawing.
With drawing, at least you can slave away at drawing exercises and improve incrementally with consistent, methodical practice.
But sometimes with writing, no matter how well constructed a story might be, it just might not connect with other people. Good writing requires solid life experience and wide reading on the writer's part. Of course soul is important when it comes to great art, but the need for it is not nearly as apparent as it is in writing.

Just posting this to motivate a few folks and laugh a bit

You know what, people? We're a joke, as writers, authors, comic artists, illustrators. Let's just go home
Look at what this monster did, look at what this madman did. Seriously, when I saw that big, insane, scaring sheet blocks I started sweating

Ahh yeah I guess I was kind of talking about multiple things there XD One of them is basically, as you put it:

I made a point of mentioning this because I thought you were saying comics are looked down upon because it's a visual medium, but we basically agree it's more about origins/perception it's for kids etc :]

The second thing I was talking about is the 'lack of imagination' thing. In my experience, at least, I've seen people say that books are better than comics/movies/games/visual mediums in general because it makes you use your imagination, and 'kids these days' are so spoilt with visuals that they forgot how to use their imagination.

I brought this up to acknowledge there are scenarios where people will devalue visual things because they're visual (which again I mistakenly interpreted to be your initial message), and saying this is more a case of it being "valued less because it's valued more" was kind of saying the mere fact those people think visuals are spoiling us means they think visuals are good

Is that so? I actually find art takes a more predictable amount of time because of how technical it is. Writing, I find, is very 'swingy'; during editing, everything might click relatively quickly or you might have to do a billion rewrites before you find the right words.

But you already mentioned editing etc so I assume what you actually mean is that there's a bound on how quickly a writer can write whereas an artist can always get faster with more experience. That's not really true either. Art might not have a commonly known 'unit' of content like 'word count', but there's still a lower bound on how little time you can finish a piece in, no matter how skilled you are.

I don't think that art is necessarily valued more above writing, it's more like... art pretty much always produces a product that can immediately be judged for its quality. People generally don't really walk around talking about how they're an amazing artist without people asking to see their art.

With writing though, though the act of moving through the story is undeniably faster with writing than with art, you generally don't present a piece of writing by itself. Usually it's presented as a "compilation" of pieces of writing in the form of a book made of scenes and chapters, which takes much longer than each individual piece. This means it's a lot more normal of people to go around talking about their writing without actually showing it - and that means WAY MORE people walk around talking about being a writer than there actually ARE writers (i.e. people who actually complete stories and goals and work to improve their writing craft), which means that it feels like there are way more writers than artists.

I hope nothing I've said comes off that way. I try to hammer home how hard art is because I am a writer first and artist second, and also because I feel like a lot of writers searching for artists get... pretty cruel about other people's writing.

I think part of it is... writing is a lot easier to think you're good at. Even if you don't have an 'eye', most people can see their work doesn't look like a professionals.

On the other hand, I've seen a lot of very smart, talented people who assume writing is something they can just jump into. It's much easier to be blind to how far you have to go, and taste is so much more varied.

Sorry for the Wall of Text.

To the people who responded to my above post, I'll let you know I read your posts in full and agree with a majority of your criticisms. I'm not here to argue, I just want to voice how I feel about the matter, from my own worldview and the kind of people I'm exposed to.

This has been my case as well. If I don't enjoy the art style of a comic, I'm simply not going to read it. I've turned down manga that people have suggested to me as good purely on the art style alone.

I've also been on the other side of that, where I have written a comic which utilized very poor art skills but told a story; and people resonated with that anyway.

It's all about delivery, execution, and... well marketing unfortunately.

But as for my "art can be done relatively quickly and quality art is dime a dozen" statement, that applies to writing too. I never said that artists were "quick and disposable", I implied that "it was quick and easy to purchase". Which is a very different kind of statement. In a way, writing can be quick to purchase as well, but I can't "request" the way in which writing is written by an author. Not in the same way art is revised and customized in turnaround.

When I purchase art for various projects, manly for board game components, and illustrations for larger things like display art or promotional material. Even original concept designs in finalized color are delivered within 2-4 hours, that is including revision steps. When it comes to revising writing, you normally are requesting a rewrite of almost the entire draft document from a different viewpoint, prospective, or containing different content. Where sometimes artwork, a portion of the art has to be removed and redrawn; most of the time its adjustments to color composition or the request of specific items be included or moved... etc.

I'm not saying either is more difficult than the other, as one is a dexterous skill practiced over a lifetime, and the other is an entire redo of a composition. I am saying that any practiced artist can become a "hyper efficient" producer of "quality" art. Some of the best artists, especially in the video game concept industry (most of the top of artstation) are used to this fast turnaround on commissions and requests. That is their job, day in day out.

These people are comparable to authors who produce multiple novels a year, in the sense of throughput. The best are publishing 3-5 novels (sometimes 10-20 if they are a ghost authors who have 3rd party editors). Often, the "pros" only need to publish about 1 novel a year to "sell"; your JK Rowling's, Steven King's, and George RR Martin's. Statistical outliers.

Lesser known writers tend to produce more work to "get something to stick".

The same goes for artists. The difference is however, that alot of these "professional" artists produce a constant stream of artwork, textures, materials, concept artworks, character model sheets...e tc Day in and day out. 8 hours a day, multiple works per day. After that same year of work they have as much as a thousand, unique, original, full color illustrations in their portfolios. Being used in video games, trading cards, marketing materials, tattoo parlors... etc. While none of these people are "household names" like the above authors. They are within the industries they represent. Comics being one of those industries.

This says nothing about the quality of either group's product; but it does about the recognizability of that product.

It is more difficult for an above average writer to stand out because writing has a low barrier of entry. Put words onto page, have general knowledge about story structure, and the grammar and syntax of a language. Writing also has a quality "bell curve". There are very bad writers, and very good writers, but a majority of people fall somewhere in-between. The best writers tend to stand out and are quickly recruited.

Art on the other hand has a high barrier of entry. Knowledge of architecture, or anatomy. Endless practice of repetitive motions. Knowledge of artistic mediums and their best use cases. The results of practicing with those mediums. Subjects. Stylization. Color theory. Sure there are comparisons to aspects of each in creative writing. But art, unlike writing, has a "descending quality curve". Most people are "bad" artists, very few people are good artists. Most people are weighted toward the "bad" side of the curve. For this reason, it is easier for above average artists to stand out among their field.

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The difference here is that a practiced artist can make a single striking representation of their craft with much less time investment. Even if it takes 1 solid work week to make a piece of art. 40 hours, and I know what an artist can accomplish in that amount of time. They would have 50ish amazing pieces to share with their world, in their portfolio, and to further their carrier. It would get them hired.

In the same vein as an author, I might have 3 full sized polished novels in that amount of time. The perception is, "that sound like alot of work" not "that sounds like you make a good product". To absorb the quality of your work, they would have to read at least one of those novels. Not be judgmental and align with the content or its message or whatever else they are looking for.

For the artist, they show their portfolio. The person looks at 50 images, and makes a decision. One takes a full day, maybe longer. The other takes an hour, and that is only if the person they are trying to get the art production from looks at each image for more than a full minute before making a choice to hire them.

tl;dr - I don't think this is really about art vs writing. It's about how difficult it is for the writer to get noticed over the artist. I feel that is why writer's are sore about credit of a collaborative work. Of course, the right thing is to credit everyone equally regardless the level of contribution. That is what game studios do, and Hollywood sort of.

Also the stuff behind the curtain: it's not like these writers were working on one project at a time; a lot of our current reads from them- were written years ago and it's taken that long for them to get a publisher to agree to it, after edits. A lot of them are probably scribing new material as we speak.

It's easy to do that, once an artist has gotten their foot in the door and have gained a value for their work; it's a whole other hill to climb being a starting creator who has to "find their groove"...

I think both can be noticed...if a story is good, it's good. The goal of writer and artist when creating a comic is to tell a story; the art needs to be indicative of the writing- to express what the story is trying to tell or sell.

I'm always down for a good story/good art comic...but the current discourse & climate sometimes has me peeved about how artists are perceived and valued; almost like they're "meat for the grinder". I've seen rising writers who post the heck out of their artists work- and don't name names/give credit to the artist; it's like, "read my comic or [the comic brand] comic"...I've also seen writers who do give their artist credit.