Most Independent Comic book writers don't do enough.

It doesn't matter if it's a new character or if they have been drawn a million times before, what matters is if opening a can of soda is important to the story,

The reality is that if you want to create a comic book, you should expect to pay your creative team a fair wage. Being a "writer" has very little do do with it. You can create a comic book but hire a writer and draw it yourself. Heck, you can come up with an idea and hire out the whole dang lot. If you just want to be a writer, then start sending pitches to editors, who as I mentioned, are responsible for assembling the creative teams.

 

A friend of mine who has been a Graphic Artist, a musician and involved in creating a graphic novel [more than one I think] has said the working relationship for making a Graphic novel is like being in a band. There may be the lead song writer but others in the band have an input and they have to work as a team.
I see the publishing houses as very much like music publishers. They may try to pull a team together but they are much happier when a team that is already working together walks through the door.

 

Character design will have been taken care of well ahead of the sequential art phase.

The normal course of business even for an indie book is that the creator (which we've established here is almost always the writer) will have character designs for reference, or first pay the artist to come up with said character designs. You don't just ask an artist to invent the look of a main character on the fly.

 

I thought the point was that when you're starting a new comic, there is work involved in creating the new character design, that isn't necessary when you already have an established character you're working with. Feels like common sense to me. Did I misunderstand something?

 

Exactly -- but creating a new design/character is not done when the writer hands over the script, and it's not something a writer/creator should expect an artist to do for free. (New) character designs should be well established by the time the project is ready to move to the sequential art phase.

See below for an example of some designs I worked with an artist on many years ago for an original comic. This and other characters' looks were well established long before the artist even started drawing page 1 panel 1.

I'm not quite understanding what you mean by "designed through argument"? As I mentioned, character designs are established well before the sequential art begins.

Artists do not work on an hourly rate, at least not in comics... at least not that I've ever heard of. They are traditionally paid a page rate for sequential art, and an agreed-upon flat fee for character design. Now as far as changes, there are a thousand and one different ways to work with an artist when creating a comic, but usually the artist will provide some roughs for the writer/creator to approve before turning in final pages.

The point I am trying to make in all this is that it's not necessarily a "larger creative undertaking" for an artist to draw a comic that isn't Spider-Man, Batman, or some long-established character.

 

Are we getting into semantics? There must be work done to design a character. Is that something everyone can agree on?

If one artist works on the design and another artist take those designs and starts drawing the comic, then the second artist didn't have to do the work involved in designing the character, because the first artist did it, but the work was done, nonetheless. I don't understand the objection to the statement that a character not designed yet requires more work than a character already designed. If the objection is that, hey, the design is always done beforehand, it feels like that's ignoring that the design was even done at all.

 

No. That's not how it works.

Again, no, that's not how it works. If an artist agrees to some character designs based on a particular fee, he/she is not going to quit working on them after 5 hours just because "time's up." I'm not trying to be flippant, but it's obvious you've never created a comic, and have little understanding of how it actually works.

I'll say this again: illustrators and comic book artists do not traditionally charge by the hour.

Think of it this way: if the kid down the street agrees to mow your lawn for $20, would they stop 3/4th of the way though because it's suddenly taking them longer than they think is worth $20? (Probably not, but they may ask for $30 the next time.)

There are original locations in just about every comic, whether it's batman, Spider-Man, or something you just made up. And hey, what to stop an artist from using the layout of the Batcave or Fortress of Solitude for the original hero's hideout?

That is exactly the objection. Nobody hands over a script with a 100% brand new lead character and tells the artist to just invent his look on the fly as they are drawing the sequential pages. That's just nuts.

 

Which to me means you're arguing a different point than the one I thought was being made. There is work being done by someone for a new character design. What is the objection to that statement? The writer doesn't just wave a wand and have character design notes to give the artist.

 

Old thread, I know, but I remember a contractor telling me that he'd never bargain hard with a customer. He said that the number of dollars given him were proportional to the number of nails holding up the siding. In other words, if you underpay, you will get shoddy work.
I get the amount of output you have is related to the amount of work you put in and each new project is another chance to break into the profitable side of things. I heard from an unreliable source that Terry Pratchett was a nobody until he published Small Gods, when the turtle on the cover finally hurled him into fame. (may or may not be true, but a good story anyway.)
As an Artist, not really a writer, I will say that as of right now I'd illustrate anything, but if I thought I could get legit commissions, I wouldn't work for solid cash on a big project unless I thought you had a good chance, as in are a published author, or I really like the story that much and like you as a person to boot.

 

I like the contractor analogy, but I also think if you are doing work for hire (whether is is siding or art or whatever), who the customer is needs to be taken into consideration. If I am an artist and Joe Schmoe wants to hire me to illustrate the cover of his comic, I understand that he likely does not have the resources of Marvel Comics. If I am an artist and some struggling family needs siding put on their house, I'd probably charge less than I would to remodel a McDonalds. Does not mean I'd put in any less effort in either case. Or, I guess I could turn down the struggling family and continue to look for higher-paying work. It's all subjective (much like art!)

 

For me, working in IT, I tend to do all the friends and family PC's for free or parts only, depends. At present I work with the same people everyday, so I tell them if they bring their home PC in, I will fix it, but I don't do house calls. In earlier years I did, and I did not like it. Mostly because I knew they could not afford me. Just a small thing like a virus on a PC could take several hours to fix, and if I was real thorough, a day or so. At an hourly rate, and that gets expensive quick. Yeah, I gave a lot a charity over the years, but what I can I do, I feel for people in that position, but my time valuable too. But I disliked working on home user stuff for a lot of reasons, and none of them ever said, wow, you worked so hard, here have more money. So the charity only seemed to go one way. I am kind of out of the home user game, and I don't think I will ever go back. Its not worth it.

I suspect the same is true for any profession. If I am an artist, I have to pay my bills to. What I do has got to cover that. So I am happy to draw and paint pictures, and perhaps in some special circumstances I will, but if it my profession, I cant just give it away on a whim. Not sure if any of that was on topic or not, but...