most important to comics

[spider-neil]

writer or artist?

 

[Zoken]

That's like asking which is more important to your body, Air or Water. you can't live without either.

The medium requires both to be good. one may carry the other for a short while, but if one is subpar on a consistant basis, then title will crumble. Art gets the attention and illustrates the world. But the writer creates the world and leads you around it and keeps you coming back.

There is no more important. sorry, but this goes most definitively in the "Stupid Questions" area.

 

[iloveclones]

Watch any time a "hot" artist tries to be a writer to answer this question. McFarlane immediately comes to mind. Thinking of some of who I consider to be the greatest Marvel artists (Ditko, Kirby, Perez, the Romitas, the Buscemas) didn't write their greatest works themselves (I'm sure you could come up with occasions when they have, but generally, they don't). Two that jump out who did start writing successfully were Byrne and Miller. But most of Byrne's success came when he wrote AND drew (a lot of the stuff that he just writes is just average). Sometimes these guys don't realize that co-plotting is not the same as writing.

If you pushed me on who I would like on a title: an a-list writer, or an a-list artist, I would choose the artist, because to me the visual component takes priority. I think that a good artist can put a shine on average scripts and really make them something.(That only goes for average scripts. When they start getting too bad, well, there's only so much you can shine a turd. Marvel pairs Claremont with some really good artists, but the end product is always the same: too convoluted) On the other hand, the best script in the world can really be mangled by someone who doesn't know ho to tell a story visually. Every time a "normal" artist fills in on X-Men for Bachalo/Ramos, the story actually begins to make sense. Which tells me that the story is solid.

 

[Telfie]

Both are equally important. It's like a hot dog with only the bread of sausage. Sure, either by itself is still edible, but it isn't really a hotdog.

Same thing with comics (writers and artists) :P

 

[Darthphere]

Writer. Hands down. Without the writer, the artist has nothing to draw. And the writer is responsible for the actual story.

 

[Whiskey Tango]

Both are important, but personally I lean towards the art. Bad pencils will kill a well-written story for me everytime, but if the writing is bad but the art looks pretty, then at least I have something to look at.

 

[fifthfiend]

Writer. Hands down. Without the writer, the artist has nothing to draw. And the writer is responsible for the actual story.

Really they're both responsible for the story. The writing tells the story, and the art tells the story, and if one of them does a ****ty job of that, then you end up with a ****ty story.

I know some writers work full script, but I tend to think of that as the writer taking on responsibility for certain aspects of the art, and even then the artist is responsible for translating the writer's script into actual comic storytelling.

In either case, it's just been my observation in the course of comics reading that the way things are drawn conveys as much if not more information about a given part of the story, and dictates as much if not more of the reaction to that story, as anything the writer contributes by way of scripting and dialogue.

 

[Darthphere]

Really they're both responsible for the story. The writing tells the story, and the art tells the story, and if one of them does a ****ty job of that, then you end up with a ****ty story.

Not really. Good writing is good writing. Look at X-Factor recently. That art has been ****ty as all hell, but the writing makes that book.