Originally published at: See what made David Aja's and Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run so legendary | Boing Boing
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a comic artist has nothing to draw without a writer. this piece does to writers what it claims is being done to artists. many comic writers in this day and age work with a full script, oftentimes laying out the panels and “camera” angles. they deserve the “top billing” that has been the standard since credits began. the last time we put more importance on the artists was literally the failure and collapse of the industry, and the worst creative period in history.
now, lets talk about how Aja never even remotely met a deadline on that book. it caused the book’s readership and success dwindle. his inability to be professional cost comic shops money, hurt the book, and burned readers. it sells really well now that its collected (and thats only if the completely incompetent management at marvel can keep it in print).
i mean he draws real nice and is an amazing talent, but lets not canonize him.
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That’s weird.
Your typical comic book has many pages of illustrations vs. like what: three paragraphs worth of text?
Feel free to ignore me, the last time I bought a comic book was in 1986.
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Absolutely value the art as much as the writing, but I’m an odd duck about these things. I won’t watch animated shows or movies if the animation is crude, no matter how good the writing. Same for comics. The art is a core attribute.
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There are lots of examples of comic artists who had as much, if not more, to do with the success of a character as the writers. I doubt Batman would have ever become the cultural icon he is today if they’d gone with Bob Kane’s original design of the character:
More recently, Spider-Gwen is an example of a character who essentially got her own ongoing title because people liked her costume design so much.
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I agree— the Fantastic Four and most of Marvel’s early output wouldn’t have been able to take off without the strong visual style and fast hands of artist Jack Kirby, who contributed most of the the new ideas in each issue, and pretty much all the other artists were told to draw as much like him as possible.
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Those guys also came up at a time when the average comics reader did not care that much who the writer was.
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This. Some artists get billing on top comic titles, and it hurts me to pass them up. Looking at you John Romita, Jr.
Only quibble with JRJ is he does faces with a bit too much mechanical precision, so his humans and his robots look a little too much alike 
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