collaborative comics

[arecomicsevengood]

So most of "art comics," or whatever you want to call them, the best comics, are single author comics. Many would argue that this is the best way to make comics. I'm not saying I disagree! But I would say that the sign of a good or great comics writer is that they are able to write a comic for a cartoonist that is better than what the cartoonist would produce on their own. Lots of people arguing that Stan Lee was a bad comics writer will point to Kirby's Fourth World work being stronger - I might suggest that the Spider-Man stuff done with Ditko is better, more readable, than any solo Ditko comic as a counter-argument. Someone could probably argue for Harvey Pekar having written the best Crumb comics, the best Frank Stack comics, best Corben comic, maybe the best David Collier or Joe Sacco stuff. Or maybe no one would argue that, and would instead say that the reason those comics are good is purely because the cartoonists are good. As a Peter Milligan fan I think I would say his work with Ted McKeever, Mike Allred, Brendan McCarthy and Jamie Hewlett is the best work those artists made. The comic Matthew Thurber wrote for Ben Marra that ran in an issue of Smoke Signal I probably like more than any other Ben Marra comic but maybe that has more to do with my being a big Matthew Thurber fan.

I'm not interested (necessarily) in a thread about "good comics produced collaboratively," where the artists are people who have always worked from scripts written by others. I just want to talk about examples where a writer was able to tap into what an artist was doing and articulate a clearer expression of those ideas, via complicating things with their own ideas and obsessions. Because I think that's the implicit goal of collaborative comics, that most mainstream comics values, and it's so rarely reached, instead just producing work where artists are alienated from their labor due to working in an assembly-line fashion.

[robindh]

This is an interesting thread idea, here are some examples that might fit the bill:

• From Hell: not very familiar with Eddie Campbell's other work or his fascinations as an artist but I feel like FH is the best thing he's been involved in, probably top 10 all time for me.
  
• You could make the argument that Tardi's best stuff is in collaboration with writers like Forest or Manchette 
  
• I think Hector Germán Oesterheld brought out the best in everyone he worked with, even the artists with storied solo careers like Breccia or Pratt.
  
• None of Barry Windsor-Smith's solo work is as good as Weapon X or his other x-men stuff, though I can imagine some will disagree.
  

[dominocorp]

I think it's interesting when you look at Alan Moore's work with JH Williams on Promethea and then compare it toJH Williams solo on Echolands. With Promethea you'd assume Williams knows how to make a coherent or poetic comic on his own, but apparently not.

I think one of the most fascinating collaborative comics is Moore/Campbell on Birth Caul, which is essentially an Eddie Campbell solo comic because (as far as I understand) he didn't work from a script, he just freely adapted an Alan Moore performance. Cartoonists who can work art comic/solo/auteur style are usually the best collaborators.

[eheitner]

Does anyone know of any examples of Munoz & Sampayo working separately, to compare?

I think you are writing about something slightly different than duos like Dupuy & Berberian where the "art" and "writing" are not treated as separate roles, within the partnership, right? Or (until recently) Rupert & Mallot (who then also collaborated with artists like Schrauwen)?

What about Donjon? Are those all written by Trondheim with art by someone else?

I feel like Franco-belgian comics have a lot of those famous teams....Asterix and all that....

Also not necessarily "art comics" in the way you are thinking of, I guess.

[arecomicsevengood]

I know Munoz has done adaptations of books by himself before - I have an issue of Aces (an old eighties magazine format thing reprinting European comics) where they say that a Munoz adaptation of a Roberto Arlt novel (since printed by NYRB Classics) will be coming out in a forthcoming issue of Raw. I don't think that ever saw print in English though. And Sampayo has collaborated with other people, I think there's a Francisco Solano Lopez thing he did Catalan put out back in the day I haven't read.

Whether a cartoonist working from a pre-existing text and adapting it (like Munoz did with Arlt, or Campbell did on Snakes And Ladders) feels more like a solo work or more like a collaboration is an interesting one. Eddie Campbell's solo stuff like Alec and Bacchus seems pretty tightly written in advance anyway, and so those Moore books feel looser in comparison - more improvisational, but in a jazz sense where one player responds to what another person is putting down.

[robindh]

Muñoz has done comics with Julio Schiaffino, Solano Lopez, Igort, Oscar Zárate, and Claudio Stassi. Only the work with Solano Lopez is available in English. Sampayo also worked on the Arlt adaptation.

Donjon has some stuff drawn by Trondheim, but recently it's all been drawn by a who's who of Franco-Belgians, Argentinians etc.

The story with the Birth Caul is that Moore just handed Campbell the script he used when performing the spoken word piece, giving no further instruction.

[mikesheawright]

i'm only familiar with Schrauwen's work (not the other two guys) but i really liked Portrait of a Drunk, that felt like a more than the sum of its parts sort of collaboration, with Schrauwen's voice/style still coming through as an ingredient.

Moebius/Jodorowsky: Incal (yes), Madwoman of the Sacred Heart (not so much), neither as good as Moebius solo IMHO.

i will ride forever for 100 Bullets, haven't liked anything else i've read by either of those guys collaboratively or solo.

Elektra: Assassin is a thing i still love and seems to represent the biggest strengths of both Miller and Sienkiwiecz who elevate each other in that book. they did another Daredevil thing that's cool too, i forget what it's called. a slim book.

in general i am mostly interested in things made by one person, even when they're "bad" they're usually interesting to me in one way or another because of how singularly expressive they can be.

i am interested in seeing more work done by multiple ARTISTS as opposed to just writer/artist splitting the duties. multiple people drawing on the same page and playing off each other is something i want to investigate. sort of like improv acting? hit me up, artists, if you want to try it sometime!

[dominocorp]

Birth Caul/Snakes and Ladder are very good, they'd be on my greatest comics ever list.I teach Snakes and Ladders to students every year but they never like it

[eheitner]

Is "Brought to Light" Moore/Sink any good? I found a stray issue of Stray Toasters and thought it was pretty bad.
Has Moore ever had any reallllllly bad collaborators, or collaborators that he made seem worse than they appeared otherwise? I don't think so?

[arecomicsevengood]

Brought To Light's great, I think you'll especially like it if you have interest in explicitly political comics.

I wish Sienkiewicz had done more solo stuff in black and white - there's a Batman Black And White story and an Oni Double Feature thing in two issues. He letters himself in both instances, and you get to see him more as a cartoonist than you get with the full-color mixed media stuff.

[franlopez]

Jul 9, 2023 13:12:39 GMT eheitner said:

Does anyone know of any examples of Munoz & Sampayo working separately, to compare?

Was looking for something else and found this thread... The list of stuff has already been provided, but seems like nobody here commented on Evaristo (the Sampayo - Solano López comic), which I think is kinda fascinating to read in comparisson to the work Sampayo did with Muñoz, specially while keeping in mind that a younger Muñoz was an assistant to Solano López...
There's certain decisions in the Muñoz/Sampayo stuff that I think we tend to read as Muñoz decisions that are also present in those Solano López pages, which I think speaks to a relationship a little more complicated than the original comment of "examples where a writer was able to tap into what an artist was doing and articulate a clearer expression of those ideas, via complicating things with their own ideas and obsessions": that relationship can also work the other way around or in both directions.

I drew a lot of pages in close collaboration with a writer for about a decade and a half (someone should put that out in english! it's great, trust me!), and I could see how that affected my work, but also his work, and the work he did with other cartoonists (which, in turn, also affected his work and then ended up having echoes in me).

I think for people that have not done much work in this way, it's easy to imagine a very simple and straightforward unidirectional path from writer to drawer, but I think the reality of these things tends to be a lot more complex.

As a sidenote, I'm very curious about the (hopefully upcoming) solo work of Mulot...