Both, Both

When you do a project on your own, I think it can be easy to devalue opinions on your work that aren’t your own. I’m torn because my two favorite comics we’ve read this year are Watchmen and GoodBye, one a solo exploration and one a collaborative project. How can I discredit the solo technique when I’m not certain another voice influencing Good Bye would have been good thing. Personally, as a person devoid of hand-pen coordination, I can only produce a golden comic with the help of a cartoonist. Maybe I sacrifice the purity of my image, but it’s both out of necessity, and I think a cartoonist or any creative type benefits from loosening the reigns of their vision and letting the story write itself. Working with someone else in a successful manner requires sharing the reigns, which can occasionally leave an artist upset by compromise, but adding another person is giving yourself a whole new pond to fish from and that pond is filled with different fish, so you won’t get sick of your own fish.

I think that story can be great when subject to collaboration, and offering the artist suggestions in what kind of symbolism, color, items you want included are valuable. I do think that the physical act of putting ink to paper is better when it’s done by one person to establish some consistency in the artwork, which can look blatantly disjointed if every other panel is filled in by a different artist. I am biased though, because in my collaborative comic, it would have certainly looked better if Polly drew the entire thing. The story was built, and evolved with the help of all our minds, but I think we held back (at least I did) the artistic potential of our comic by having everyone contribute artistically.

I can’t give final judgment because both have their merits. I can’t draw to my satisfaction, so I would benefit from another helping hand, but if I had the talent I think there is more value for the artist if they do it themselves, but I tremble imagining what Watchmen would have looked like without Dave Gibbon’s guidance.