rkolter wrote:Joel, are we still disagreeing about your statement that writing is easier than drawing? Because you just made my point - an artist can take your twenty page introspective and turn it into a single page of driving with introspective thoughts plastered all around it in narration boxes.
No, I was saying you'd get a one to one relationship at best. One page of story introspection would translate into one page of comic introspection using that technique. You couldn't fit twenty pages into one.
In that particular case, the picture is simply an illustration. All the "action" is happening in the introspective text and that has to be written either way. The difference is that, in writing, you can start by saying "As he drove, he thought..." and with a comic you'd have to draw the whole scene.
I really suspect that you are letting your bias get the best of you - you are already a decent writer, certainly from what I've seen. If you can already hammer out a dozen pages of story, do a half hour of revisions and be done with it, yeah... writing would seem easier.
I'm certainly better at writing than drawing but I do both. I know that drawing can be faster than I do and I take that into account. Of course, there are extreme cases like Sergio Aragones who draws at light speed and puts in crowd scenes of thousands in less time than it takes me to write "There was a crowd of... damn he's finished already."
As a counterpoint, I've seen FAUB hammer out work better than most of the webcomic artists here do in a half hour
And Faub, obviously. I reckon I could still beat him in a race, though.
Hell, he drew my future tattoo in a couple hours under those exact circumstances.
A tatoo is just one picture and a comic is many. That's my own problem. I can draw a page sized picture at a reasonable nick but it takes me far longer to draw a comic on the same page. Lesson learnt the hard way, there.
There are some other points I brought up last time I had this debate which are valid. Firstly, you don't
write all the time you're writing. I plot and plan in my head while sitting on the bus or walking and that's a good chunk of the work. You can't draw so casually. So, drawing is far more hands on. You have to sit down and make the effort rather than just let your brain ferment the idea.
Secondly, if I, as a comic writer, have no script, I can run up a quick gag which doesn't progress the story at all. However, the artist still has to draw it. The same applies for plot filler. A character may only need to be shown to get from A to B, which may be important to progress the plot but requires no writing (as such). Again, though, the artist has to draw it.
Finally, there are more steps to drawing. Writing is simply that and editing. Drawing is pencilling, inking, scanning, adjusting levels, colouring, lettering and so on. The fastest comic artists are actually those who don't bother - who draw the whole thing on paper in pencil and just scan it (as McDuffies does). It surprised me to learn how slow computer lettering and colouring is. It's faster to colour in pencil and write your own text, it really is.
Sergio Aragones, I understand, doesn't use a pencil. He draws in ink. He doesn't letter or colour his own work so he flies through it. He draws as fast as I could scribble. Add other steps and he'd slow down a lot.
'Might be worth budding this off into a new thread.
Edit:
Jigglyman wrote:- Not Joel Fagin
Then give me back my hat!
- Joel Fagin
Why has no one told me this?
