A guide to comics part 2 (creators)

Part 2 in a 6 part series that will be over by midweek next week at the latest.

Last time I talked about publishers and how different publishers do things in different ways. There are plenty of comics readers who read stories based on which character(s) are featured in the story or which company published the story. Others choose what to read based on who the creators of the comic are and today I'm going to go a little bit into just what is meant by the term creator and what types of creators exist.

The artist.

Andy Wales

Exactly what you'd imagine. The artist draws the comic, mostly following a script from the writer. How detailed the script is, and how much room to interpret the script the artist has, varies from comic to comic. Pages are drawn much larger than the eventual comic page in case you're wondering.

The writer.

Again, pretty much what you'd imagine. The writer comes up with the script, either individually or collaborating with an artist, and then the artist draws the page. The writer is not responsible for physically writing the words on the page, that's someone else's job which we'll get to later. It's worth noting that sometimes there are co-writers on a book. Often this is because a famous person wants to write a comic but has no real experience of doing so (for instance Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Django Unchained/Zorro cross-over). They may then co-write a book with an established comic book writer. In this instance it's common for one person to be credited as the plotter, ie they decide what story they want to tell, and the more experienced writer being credited as the scripter, ie they wrote the script that is passed to the artist. In the Django Unchained/Zorro crossover I mentioned before Qunetin Tarantino & Matt Wagner will co-plot the story and Wagner will script it.  Generally when artist/writers work together the writer is named first. I've put the artist first just to follow alphabetical order.


The cartoonist.

Jeff Lemire

The cartoonist is someone who both writes and draws the same comic. This is really pretty much unheard of in modern day Big Two comics (DC & Marvel, as discussed in part 1), more common in independent comics and much more common with small press comics. There are people who started out as cartoonists and still produce independently published comics as cartoonists but also have a job just as a writer for one of the Big Two publishers. For example Jeff Lemire, above, does this. The reason cartoonists who do this tend to be employed as writers and not artists for DC or Marvel is it's much slower to draw a monthly comic so employing them to draw a comic or two while they write and draw one independently isn't feasible but employing them to write a title or two is.


The above types of creators are the ones that influence people to buy comics based on the creator rather than the publisher or character (s). However there are other people who produce a comic and I'll quickly go through those positions here.

The colourist.

Elizabeth Dismang-Breitweiser

As you'd imagine this person gets copies of the art and colours it. This sounds simple but a good colourist can make a book look great. Poor colours on the other hand can also be very noticeable. 


The inker.

Veronica Fish

The person who takes the art and inks over the lines to give it more definition. Again this sounds really easy but good inking can make good art great and poor inking can make good art look poor. You can see in the picture above the difference between inked and uninked art. Inking can be done with pens or brushes.

The letterer.

Max West using an Ames Lettering Guide.

Remember how I said above the writer doesn't actually write the words on the page? Well, the letterer does. Any words, and generally any sound affects, will be put on the page by the letterer. Lots of lettering is done by computer now but some is done by hand, as seen above. If done by hand the lettering is first done in pencil then inked over. This might be the most over-looked skill in comics. If the letters are don't properly then the comic fails on a pretty basic level.

It's not uncommon for a cartoonist to do all or some of the lettering, colouring and inking themselves and some artist double as inkers, either for their own art or another artist's.