You got some fantastic replies so far.
I have written my own comic before but as a general I’m not much of a writer; I’m currently working from a script by my friend and I’ve worked on two other comics in the same manner in the past.
Each artist is different, so communication with yours is super important! Even if they say whatever you do now is fine, make sure they understand you’re there for them.
For me, here’s makes make a collaboration like that ideal:
Clean formatting
I like as little unnecessary information when I’m getting down to it. For me, an ideal script as dialogue with 1-2 word explanations of the emotions my writer wants the character to display. What do you want happening in panels, if you have something specific, i.e. “character struggles eating her soup” > “character is having a hard time eating the soup her mom made her while she was sick, not because she’s feeling unwell, but rather because of her secret eating disorder”
Your artist is already familiar with the story and it’s not necessarily the right place to remind them what’s going on.
Setting
I’m not sure why, but most of the writers I worked with forgot to add a place where the scene happens, for a lot of scenes? Specifying where it happens at the beggining of the scene could be useful.
Understanding Pace
This will return in one of the future points
It’s important to understand pacing when writing a comic. Often I get pages with 8,9 panels and then a folllowup of pages with 2-3 panels, not because the shorter pages are more important, but rather because the writer wasn’t able to gauge how much information they want crammed into the page.
If something very important or emotional happens in a page; you want there to be as little panels as possible to make your readers take longer to read it.
If there’s a lot of action going on in a page; you want it to be as compressed as possible, you don’t want two closeup panels one after the other because there’s a lot of speech, because the focus point should be the action.
As a writer it’s important to know these stuff and be aware you’re not asking for things that may “ruin” the pacing.
It’s also important to remember sometimes something that takes a very short time writing could take a long time to portray in visuals. i.e. “He sneakily hides the stolen item in the woman’s bag.”
In visuals you’d have to have a panel establishing he has the stolen item in his hands, but out of sight for other characters. You have to establish where the bag is, then maybe a couple of panels of him getting closer to the bag, then a panel of him putting it in and then one where the item is in the bag. Of course that may be an overkill on some cases, but on some it’s truly necessary. The reason actions take so long is because you have to go by every part of them happening for your readers to understand what’s going on, hence having something like this alongside a full page worth of actions/dialogue can be hard to balance.
Availability
Try and see if they sent you any messages with questions at least once a day! For me, it can really stump the workflow if I’m stuck on a page due to something not making sense to me in the writing, but my author isn’t available for a long period of time.
Optional: Picking up the slack
Thumbnailing
Thumbnailing is something you can try doing even if you don’t have a lot of / any visual arts experience. Essentially, it’s doing a little sketch of what roughly the page will look like. My thumbnails look like this, for example, but even more much simple “circle-and-box-people” thumbnails work.
Doing the thumbnails yourself doesn’t mean the artist has to use them, but it can actually be a great relief not to have to do them as an artist, and it often incorporates the writer’s vision a lot more. Additionally, it forces you as a writer to think in visuals which can help a lot with pacing and with script writing.
Lettering
Essentially: speech bubbles, sfx.
You can try and learn to do it for your artist, it’s not too difficult at a basic level, and it can definitly help increase production time.