Yeah, if you're looking to attract an artist through the strength of your story, you don't just need to be good at writing, you need to be good at pitching a story, too!
This is exactly the kind of pitch I would avoid as an artist, regardless of content, because of the style of it. A "list of events" pitch, to me, is a red flag that the writer might be the kind of amateur writer that I'm wary of working with; someone who can't summarise what their story's about because they don't know, they just have a bunch of ideas strung together. If someone can't pick out the parts of their story to emphasise for an interesting summary, how can I trust them to pace an interesting story?
What is the story about? Is it about survival in a weird, lightless prison of a library? If it isn't, why linger so long on that scene in your summary? If it's about mages being hunted because of their powers, why wouldn't you mention that somewhere in your summary?
Imagine you're trying to get an artist to draw a Batman story, summarising the story you want to write to someone who hasn't heard of Batman before.
You wouldn't say "Well, the main character is a little kid, and his parents take him to this opera, but it's too scary so they have to leave. And when they leave, a mugger shows up, and shoots both of his parents, and they're killed in front of him, and so, when he grows up, he decides to fight crime." That's a fine summary of Batman's backstory, but it tells you nothing about the character we see in the comic -- rich guy by day, vigilante-by-night who fights the criminal underworld with gadgets and martial arts while refusing to take a life -- or about the story itself. If I'm an artist who's REALLY interested in drawing the kind of story that Batman is, telling me about a kid who witnesses the death of his parents doesn't get me pumped. Tell me about a dark but exaggerated world where crime bosses look like the Joker and Poison Ivy and a masked vigilante with a belt-full of gadgets tries to stop them!
Also, when you're writing, think about the tone of your story, and write in a way that emphasises that. An adventure pitch should sound exciting; a comedy should sound funny!
"He kinda figured if it didn't work the first time, it wouldn't work a second," is such a oddly light-hearted line that it sounds like the story could be tongue-in-cheek, which could also be fun! but then the rest of the pitch doesn't sound like that. Your entire pitch needs to support the tone of the story you're telling. What's the tone you're envisioning? Like, the post about the lightless library -- you could get a dark, gritty story of survival out of that, but imagine the exact same summary illustrated by Jhonen Vasquez (the Invader Zim guy) and it would become an entirely different, darkly comedic story.
So TL;DR
- Don't include backstory in your summary!! The artist wants to hear about the actual comic.
- Don't just list the events that happen! Figure out what best demonstrates the kind of story you're telling, and emphasise those things.
- Be clear about the tone you want the story to have and make sure your pitch reflects that.
