This interview with Devin Grayson, a current female writer of BATMAN comics explains what it’s like.
http://www.comicfoundry.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=150
Warning: it’s long. But it’s very illuminating. Next time you think a comic sucks, remember that it might NOT be the writer’s fault.
For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, this is the part were they explain the comic book-making process:
Can you take us through the life of a script? What happens after you write it and turn it in? What are the steps?
An editor would be even clearer on this than I am, but here’s my understanding of what happens. I send my script in to the book editor as a Word file attached to an e-mail. For a regular series, like Nightwing, often no one else needs to look at it, but for a larger project, like the Ra’s Al Ghul “Year One” thing (or during a crossover event), the script itself may also have to be approved by the other editors in the editorial group, and possibly even by upper management and/or the company publisher. During crossovers, they also get sent to other writers working on the same event. If any of those people have a problem with it, a good editor calls or e-mails the writer and talks him or her through the changes they want. The writer then has a day or two to make those changes and turn the script back in. A bad editor just changes stuff without calling the freelancer. The only thing I hate more than being asked to change things is not being asked to change things.Once the company has a script they’re happy with, the editor sends a copy to the penciler. Very new pencilers will be asked to send in a breakdown, or “spring board,” of what they intend to do; a regular series artist may do that for him or herself but will otherwise pretty much just dive in. If reference material is needed, the artists may call the scriptwriter or the editor (whichever he or she tends to get faster responses from), ditto questions (it frequently happens that you’re working on the sixth script for a series and the artists calls with questions about the second or third issue, which can be a little disorienting for a second).
As the penciler finishes batches of pages (the standard comic book is 22 pages of art), he sends them in to the editor, who indicates where the balloon placements for the dialogue are going to be if the penciler hasn’t already done this, and then forwards the pages on to the inker. The inker goes over the penciler’s work, refining it and adding weight and texture to the lines.
From the inker, I believe the art pages go back to the editor and then out to the letterer, who also receives a copy of the script from the editor and gets the proper text into the captions and balloons, sometimes by hand but with increasing frequency by computer. When all the pages have been penciled, inked, and lettered, the editor sends a copy back to the writer, called the issue “black-and-white.” This is usually the first time the writer has seen the art work, and it’s usually a month or two after having finished the script – the good news is that the writer now has time to correct any mistakes in the text – either typos or dialogue corrections that help the text work better with the art. The bad news is that it’s usually way too late at this point to change any of the art, so if something has gone wrong – say the penciler has strayed way off the original script and the editor didn’t check the art pages against the script, so now there’s a major missing element in the story or and unexpected, extra beat – it’s up to the writer to fix it. That, as you can imagine, has been known to cause some tension between writers and artists – there’s nothing like turning in a really tight script that achieves everything you want it to only to get back art two months letter that bears no resemblance to what was requested and then be asked by your editor to change the dialogue to match the artwork instead of the other way around. So much for auteurism! But as much of a pain in the neck as this is, the reasoning for it is obvious – it takes the penciler and inker easily twice as much time to patch a finished art page as it takes the writer and letterer to change some dialogue, and any business that puts out monthly products isn’t about perfection, it’s about getting something – sometimes anything! – out onto those shelves.
The writer sends in any text and very minor art corrections back to the editor, who forwards those changes to the letterer and inker, and then the black and white gets sent to the colorist.
As the writer, I don’t see or hear anything about the book again until it shows up in my comp box, but after it gets colored, it gets resized, printed, shipped, and distributed.
Man, stuff like this makes me glad I’m a FAN writer.
Though I would still give it a crack if it meant I could write SUPERMAN… 