Regarding the General Attitude Around Collaborations

Got some positive experiences collaborating with amazing artists, so here are some tips to work things smoothly.

1-Compensation: exposure, experience or whatever new mumbo-jumbo buzzword folks use today is not a form of currency. I recommend to either pay per page/drawing or go with percentages. (the latter is harder to achieve because you gotta get people to believe in the potential of the project when it's in an early stage)

2-We gotta choose our partners carefully. It's better to have no partner than a bad partner, that's why i prefer working with people i know that have the skills required and are trustworthy. A good way to get this info is to see their portfolios and getting to chat with them.

3-If you are the writer, communicate clearly your needs and what you want drawn. The artist can't guess what's on your mind and you want to save as much time as possible by avoiding many unnecessary redraws. If you don't know what you want, figure it out before making a request. In my case i often draw a sketch with concept art or give a reference or two for the artist. After that i trust that they will do their magic.

4-If you are an artist don't be afraid to ask questions, it shows that you care and helps for a better communication and avoid unnecessary redraws. Be clear about which deadlines and tasks are manageable and which ones are not, and of course, don't sell yourself short.

5-A common question one may have is who gets the last word on what?......it depends a lot of what you both agreed. The person hiring gets the last word, but if you are in a partnership involving shared revenue, the writer has the last word in plot and the artist gets the last word in art. Of course, no matter who is in charge you can exchange ideas and opinions, sometimes an artist surprises me with a way to improve something.

6-if you are the one paying, pay on time or as close as on time as possible. People are dedicating their time and they deserve compensation without an unnecessary wait. If you can't pay on certain dates be upfront and inform your partner.

I do want to make it clear (and just adding to everything already said) that I have worked for free on a number of pieces that I just plain really enjoyed.

I'm not sure how common my mentality is, but for me, I'm more likely to work for free with a writer who has a solid script already and a story I really like, than I am to work for pay on a story I don't like or with a clearly badly written script. I've experienced both a few times over the years.

Size of the story matters, lol.

It was a novella and I was stuck in an empty room with nothing but a typewriter and a stack of typing paper. I made use of it.

Sounds amazing. I wish I could have even a day like that! I feel like I’d get so much accomplished. 🥺

Probably, I certainly did.

I have an immune disorder and was delirious with illness at the time, and couldn't be exposed to people. So I wrote a book, most of which I don't remember. Just a small room and the endless smell of warm ink.

It was a strange book.

I think there's bound to be a lot of tension around collaborations because it usually starts with one person's bright idea. It's harder to dedicate yourself to another person's pet project, especially if you aren't getting paid the going professional rate (which is usually the case - people want to bring their project into reality, but they don't have the cash to hire freelancers. That's why they are picking up collaborators on a forum). Also, since that first person already has a set idea of how certain parts of their idea should play out, it may be difficult for them to accept another person's vision for the project. So in the end, they may start bossing around a collaborator that they aren't paying.

IMO the expectation for writing skills is lower than the expectation for artistic skills on Tapas. How many premium comics are just trope soup? Or maybe the plot is thrilling, but the actual writing is terrible. I think people are, in general, more confident in their writing skills than their drawing skills (because "hey I wrote research papers in high school"). I can describe a scene in five minutes, but it will suck. Editing and revision make for better writing. Reading good books, doing research, and having life experience also make for better writing. Ideally, I think a collaboration may work best with several artists per writer because yeah, drawing characters as they move around the scene and change body positions takes a lot of time. Also, in a comic, there simply isn't as much text as you would have in a novel because the artwork takes over the tasks of describing characters, scenery, and movement. However, writers are often responsible for the storyline, which is more important than both the art and the text combined. Payment should be based on actual contributions, not perceived contributions, and that can get tricky when you are splitting revenues by percentage.

yeah, this is why I think it's so important that writers who are looking for collabs have some work online that artists can read through. Comics are a different ball game than writing online serialized novels, (and most importantly, original works, and not fan works that have a reading audience built in that won't care about the quality so long as their OP makes out.)

the pay structure has gotten kinda weird over the last like 100 years of comics publishing, but like how many webcomics are really going to turn a profit, out of all these collabs? So few that I think most artists just want to be paid up front because we know that the royalties are going to be like zilch most of the time, or if it's free, to have the opportunity to work with friends we really like working with. And those are projects that tend to be so short that there's no risk really, if it's like what, 4 pages? Sure, wtv.

An online portfolio would be great, but if you aren't paying the writer (except in possible future revenue), you can't expect them to be particularly experienced (it goes both ways). Established writers are either going to be working on their own projects or working for guaranteed income.

For long term projects, it might be best to have a trial period to check for compatibility of personality and style, with no hard feelings if someone decides the collaboration won't work out.

But yeah, in creative fields, only the few can make a living. Obviously, artists and writers both would prefer to be paid upfront, but they aren't all going to get that opportunity.

Oh I totally agree about having a trial period, I've seen too many people feel like their married to a collab that they have grown to actively hate because of the time commitment and the people involved. A collab can easily scope creep from a 10 page short story to an 800 page epic.

But as for a portfolio I didn't mean needing to be published by a publisher, because I agree that's too high of expectations. I meant like personal work. Because much like an artist, a writer should be always making a portfolio of their personal works, so I don't really understand why they don't have one. We're literally on a site that lets you post novels for free, why don't they link novels most of the time in those collab posts? It's kind of odd. That or they'll be like "I can't post my work because I don't want someone to steal it" which is a whole other trust can of worms when you're going to be entering a collaboration with them.

People still do this, lol. I've gotten some pretty epic heat from writing a BL.

But yeah, I get both sides on the fandom thing. It's not just writing, either. There's a long-standing awareness in the art community-- particular among those of us who do a lot of commissions-- that crappy fanart will make you more money and attention than really good OC art. Obviously good fanart will get even more money and attention than bad fanart, but still.

All that aside, I've seen beef both from writers and artists in this community for a while now. Artists don't feel valued, writers don't feel valued. It's a bit of a subjective field and naturally, the individual skill level should really be the deciding factor with both sides.

But I do think there's a big discrepancy. Only once in a while do I see artists looking for writers. I very often see writers looking for artists. As was mentioned earlier here, one of the big factors is that most artists who do comics are also writers. Anyone can tell a story.

Problem is, a whole lot of folks don't realize their stories aren't that good, and that goes for both sides. But with art, there's a lot more technical aspects, it's easier to describe what's wrong with a picture. Anatomy or what have you. A story that just isn't good, is harder to critique. It's not impossible to critique, but I feel it tends to take more effort than what the average stranger is willing to spare. So we have a whole lot of bad writers who don't know they're bad writers, who want artistic skill level rivaling Miyazaki films.

If you can draw and you can write, even somewhat decently, then you understand how much time it takes to do both.

If you cannot draw and only write, you are less likely to understand the amount of work it takes to draw a page.

And then the overwhelming majority of writers come in here with no scripts, no real experience outside of fanfics or Naruto knock-offs that are pretty low-level, running auditions for artists of a caliber they can't compare to, expecting everyone to just be aware of their greatness as a writer, offering Exposure Pay(TM).

So artists are generally upset that they are undervalued because... they are. As an entire populace, basically, by the overwhelming majority of 'Looking For Artist' posts that they are constantly exposed to.

Writers are generally upset because they are undervalued because they're constantly reminded they do less work than the artist, nobody is looking for writers, etc etc, which is also true. The overflow of bad writing has drowned the ones worth working for.

Neither group is wrong. The problem is that there are SO MANY abusive/uppity/bad/inexperienced/demanding writers that it's just damaged the experience for everyone.

Sidenote: There's also a lot of really bad art, and I don't want to overlook that. I consider my own work barely at the level of acceptable for a professional comic. The overwhelming majority of canvas artists are just not skilled enough to be publishing and also tend to be oblivious and have a lot of the same issues with the toxic writers mentioned above. But since writers are so much more common than artists, they have to face wading through all this bad art/not skilled artists to find a single decent one and have less options. I actually have a hard time on this site with the way a lot of comic critique goes. I have seen countless critique requests where people focus on all these minor things like, "oh gosh, I think you should maybe just touch up your lighting", when the anatomy is atrocious and the art is genuinely just hard to even look at. But I've rambled enough here.

I just want to drop a little thing about writing vs. art that I think gets overlooked by a lot of writers... The artists have to do every step a writer does. So often I see writers trying to factor in things like "brain-storming" and "research" and "draft-writing" into how long the writing takes them but, like... artists have to do the same thing lol. They have to do visual development for characters and setting, doing multiple iterations to see what reads well. They have to look up and practice drawing the rigging of a 17th century tall ship, or the skyline of 1920's New York City. They have to try multiple drafts of panel layout and composition before they arrive at the final sketch. And it all just takes longer just because it physically takes longer to draw than to write (it takes me the same amount of time per page to arrive at the final script as it does to arrive at the ROUGH composition - not even factoring in the time it will then take me to complete the page. The amount of time it takes to describe a crowd and the feel of it is not even in the same zip code as the amount of time it will take to draw it).

So, like... it's not "undervaluing" writing to say that it's just faster to do, and I say this as someone who is a comic writer-illustrator and also a prose writer, so I think writing is pretty cool. But there's just no comparison. It's really not an insult to writers to say that artists deserve more compensation or more consideration for their comfort/interests because if we actually valued both skills equally, they should get more based on time committed alone.

It's absolutely fair to ask for a writing sample before agreeing to a collaboration. However, there is no way in **** that I would post a novel online available to the public without going through the legal process of formally copyrighting it. While a creator technically owns the copyright as soon as the work is created, it's much harder to protect that right if the work isn't formally copyrighted.
(I don't have a dog in this fight though. I try my best to avoid collaborations because I like to eat.)

I'm available, but I charge by the hour, lol.
You do make a fair point on that, but I think as a whole, artists are more aware of where they went wrong without having to be told. Writers may be able to smooth out plot holes and grammar issues on their own, but they may be oblivious to a section being too awkward or confusing (although occasionally there are art-driven sections in comics where it's hard to tell what's happening, so that's not quite limited to writing). I also see a lack of cultural knowledge in some amateur writers; which can lead to not knowing how many tropes are too many tropes, using a stereotype that is cringey, accidentally including anachronisms or geographic inconsistencies, etc. Not that that has stopped a number of popular writers from making money, so maybe the larger world doesn't care, lol.

Re: Fanfic and fanart
Of course, a lot of it is terrible and is basically riding on the tails of the original work, without adding much merit. There can also be legal complications with fan work.
HOWEVER, a number of classic literary works could feasibly be called fanfic. They didn't have the word at the time, or the internet.

Personally, I could care less what novels someone's written, since that doesn't really show whether they have skill in comic script writing. But I would definitely expect to either see a completed comic they had written, or other script examples. And I would expect anyone looking for an artist would have a proper, finished script (or at least the first six months to a year of episodes) before they even try to find an artist. Nobody wants to get involved in a story that ends up not being good, because they couldn't go over the script before they decided to join in.

Artists put our work out there all over the internet, and especially given the AI issues lately, it's very much at our own risk. But that is our portfolio, and those are almost always our best, finished work. So I think it's only fair to expect writers have the same availability of their portfolio, or at the very least, a script we can see and read before deciding upon it.

Writing of course has technical elements, but anyone writing a story (and that can be either someone who is just a writer, or a typical artist who writes their own script) can definitely have mistakes they don't see. It's a large part of why I get frustrated with the community being so painfully gentle with critique. Obviously I'm against just being outright mean, but the delicateness of people toward those who genuinely need earnest, real critique to ever succeed is... despairing. And again, this is an issue for both people writing and who draw. I see more bad stuff come through here and on canvas than good, and most of the time the artist/writer/combo/whatever has no idea that this is probably the main reason they aren't getting those subs. It's sad.

I thoroughly enjoy a good fanfic, don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed some fanfics more than the original work they were based on. It's just that those really good ones are quite rare.

Yeah, no matter how I look at it, it's safer to make your story public accessible on the internet on a site like Tapas that logs your upload date, than to privately send it to a collaborator. In the former case, if someone decides to plagiarise your work, you'd at least have proof you wrote it first, whereas your collaborator can take your work and run without leaving a trace :'D

Tbh I think it's just as difficult to give a good critique of writing as it is to give a good critique of art. Sure, anyone could look at a technically flawed picture and say 'it looks wrong', but the only reason you can't do the same for writing is because you have to take the time to read through it; but after you took the time to experience the whole thing (which only takes you a second with a drawing), you can also just say 'it feels wrong'.

But yeah, it does take longer for an artist to evaluate a writer's skill than vice-versa, which means a higher opportunity cost for artists wanting to collab

I agree. At the very least, if you're collaborating or even hiring an artist, you should at least have a solid script to show them, since I think it really impacts if they will even work with you, let alone stick around. We all have to showcase what we can do, after all. I don't expect a writer to work with me if they can't even look at my previous work, and specifically in the field of comics. I think we should have equal expectations in that regard. We're both at risk of theft to have our stuff out there, but honestly, I seriously doubt anyone is going to steal a script here, and if they did, it'd probably be fairly easy to prove the original author. But there are always risks. That's just part of the job.

And I agree with your sentiment about good critique. Especially the factor on time. I think people are just less willing to put in the time to critique a random stranger's writing than the ten seconds it takes to look over a picture and say, "that knee looks wonky", or what have you.