Oh hey, I subscribed to your comic last week because it caught my eye. Really impressive art!
I fall into the "loosely planned" segment. I know how my comic will end and how the overall character development goes, what the themes are and certain major story beats, but I'm relatively loose on the fine detail of how arcs play out. I think it's a good compromise because I can react in an agile way to how the audience feel about characters, pacing, tone and things. Sometimes a scene works really well in my script, but is agonisingly slow when I thumbnail it and needs editing.
Of course, this does mean I need to be careful to avoid a "How I Met Your Mother" scenario. That sitcom's ending was entirely planned out from the get-go, and all the scenes of the kids reacting to their father's story were recorded in one go, so the plan was always for the ending to go how it goes, but it was intended to be a much shorter series. Because the series got padded out so much more than was ever expected, when the ending did finally arrive, even though it was the ending intended from the beginning, the characters had developed in such a different direction due to needing more drama to pad out two or three extra seasons, that most viewers found it really unsatisfying and out of character.
