Many people do not understand that writing a comic book is not just writing the captions and dialogue. It involves coming up with a plot, figuring out how to develop that plot beat by beat, figuring out how to tell that plot one panel at a time…and writing the copy and dialogue that appear on the pages.
Comics are not about drawing individual panels that are pleasing to the eye. They're about drawing individual panels which tell a story as you go from one to another. A drawing can be absolutely magnificent in a stand-alone context but wrong from the standpoint of storytelling.
One of the biggest mistakes made by beginners involves the density of information. They try to convey too much of it in one panel or too little.
Copying the work of another writer or artist is sometimes best described as an "hommage." But sometimes, the more appropriate term is "plagiarism."
It is impossible to make a decent living in comics if you don't love what you do.
If your hero is as unheroic or as insane as your villain, then I really don't care who triumphs in the end unless, of course, the villain is out to destroy Los Angeles.
The ability to write dialogue that feels natural and conversational when read on the page has less to do than one might think with the ability to write dialogue which sounds natural and conversational when read aloud by an actor.
In most fight scenes, the amount of time it would take actual combatants to throw all those punches is often less than one-tenth the time it would take them to speak all the words in their word balloons while they battle.
The paper that's available to the artists to draw upon gets worse with each passing year. So do the brushes, pen points and ink they use on that paper.
The drawing paper that most pleases the penciler will always displease the inker and vice-versa. And when letterers lettered on the same pages, they never liked either kind but they were stuck.
Whenever anyone tells you you are one of the two best writers (or artists) in the business, the other person they like will always be the person you think is the most untalented person in the field.
The two most important things an editor brings to a project are to create the proper working environment in which the work will be done and to place the right people in the right positions. And "right" is at least as important as "good."
Readers will usually have a deep fondness for what they read when they first got into comics and so will have a natural antipathy for a major revamp of those books and the characters in them.
Better comic books usually result when the writer and the artist are friends with good channels of communication. Sometimes, it helps if they are the same person but not always.
A character cannot register more than one emotion or perform more than one action per panel. That's because there's only one drawing of that character per panel. I don't think the "multiple image" trick works unless you're trying to convey super-speed a la The Flash. And I don't think going through multiple moods in the captions and word balloons work since the visual only shows us one mood.
When a comic ships late, it is not always the fault of any of the creative talents involved. Often, it's the fault of the traffic manager or schedule-maker but the talent will usually get blamed anyway.
People too often confuse the job of the editor with the job of the proofreader.
In comics, as in all the other arts, the most difficult response to get out of your audience is laughter.
Some of the best comic books ever done were done by writers and artists who were amazingly fast.
And being fast was often not because the person wrote or drew amazingly fast but because they were dedicated enough to sit at the keyboard or drawing table all day and/or all night.
An artist should never try to draw the female form until he or she has seen — and preferably, drawn — a lot of them in person. This applies to the male form also but not quite as much because comics don't do variations on the male form as much as they do on the female form.
Plots need to be the right length. Some very poor comics have resulted from trying to cram a good 25-page storyline into twelve pages or to spread a good 12-page storyline over twenty-five.
The more powerful your protagonist is, the harder you have to work to come up with a credible challenge to him or her.
Colorists often have to make up for the fact that the artist has not bothered to think about the source(s) of light in the panels.
"Stunt" storylines like marrying off or killing beloved continuing characters have very little impact because everyone knows they're stunts to be undone at a later date.
