What I see is that you need to be better in the sense of being able to diagram better the structure of your SCRIPT in order to make it easy to understand, easy to adapt, easy to put dialogues and other text.
You can be faster in the sense that when you read it, you can grasp the visual aspect of it faster, instead of having to go through several thumbnails or sketches and reimagining the situation over and over again.
So yeah, you can write better in order to have a more solid idea of what you have to do.
But that's as much as both subjects relate to one another.
- Exactly, why your chapter took a year to draw?
- How many panels or pages does it have?
- What is the amount of detail put into it?
- What is the style you're using?
- What is the technique involved, if traditional or digital?
- How many hours a day do you have to work in said chapter?
- How much of a pointless perfectionist are you, unsatisfied enough with your craft that you have to redo and correct several times until you claim it finished?
Of course, if you take both tasks, writing AND drawing, your comic production is going to take longer, especially if it's something you're doing alone. I gotta ask, are you competing against someone? Do you have a deadline to worry about? An expiration date? If not then take it easy and work on your series on your own time, there is people that took over 13 years to finish a comic book.
Let's say, you have the script of your 40 pages comic. How much times does this, alone, took you?
Then drawing, apart, how long did it took you too?
People don't owe you patience tho, not all of us are teachers whose words are the exact thing that you need, not everyone has a secret magic tip to put things on motion, some stuff you'll have to figure out on your own.
Lensing and a lot of other people have gave you better advise that you could actually need, use and try to find out the way to exploit said advice, creativity is also needed to solve problems, not to make stories or cute artwork only.
On my times, the only thing you'll be told is: Practice
Practice to draw faster, practice to write faster, practice for everything. Figure out where are you slow, figure out why certain things take you long and figure out a way for yourself about how to optimize things based on your resources, skill, tools and technique.
If this is your first comic, then, try to aim lower, less pages, less intense brainchewing worldbuilding, you don't need to info dump the reader either. Do something shorter like a one-shot or a 10 panel episode to have the grip of things or make a page at a time.
But WRITE A SCRIPT FIRST, write down your stuff, be it notes, documentation, worldbuilding, trivia, structure, and more before moving onto the comic phase.
Consider it as if you were building a house, you cannot start by doing the roof or painting the walls if there are no walls, no bricks nor plumbing, nor foundation.
Make a story to understand what it is what you need to do in order to achieve your goal: To make a comic.
You're not going to explode or your story will disappear if you pause it, move it aside and make something new to test out comic making properly. Start with something easy to script, start with something easy to draw.
