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The Chemistry Set features several comics (Steven, Elizabeth, I'm addressing you in particular, since you've contributed to this conversation) that are part of a comics tradition in which the same writer works with a variety of artists (I'm familiar with Gaiman's Sandman series, but I'm sure there are lots more!).

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I think it's fair to say the majority of North America-produced comics are the result of collaborations, certainly in the case of the mainstream superhero publishers.

There's actually a faction of comic creators that are writer/artists (frequently referred to as "cartoonists" to differentiate them from the one-discipline creators) who believe (quite vocally, in some cases) that collaborative work is, on the whole, inferior to the work of an auteur comics creator, on the grounds that the vision produced in the latter instance is ultimately that of a single creator, rather than a compromise between two or more people.

As someone who writes comics (there's a possibility I could draw them, too, but even before I had back issues there were other people who could do the job faster and better than I ever could, so I try to find those people and convince them to work with me), that notion galls. I think, if anything, interstitiality as it applies to collaboration between different artists/disciplines to produce a single work is where I personally may ultimately find the most value in the concept. If nothing else, it seems to offer something in the way of a philosophical defence to choosing to collaborate rather than work on a solo basis.

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How does each artist's individual style affect your storytelling?

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I'm honestly not sure it does, at least not as the story will ultimately appear in its final form. Firstly, most scripts are begun prior to my having an artist attached to a project, so at that stage there's no practical incentive to tailor a script to anything but my own personal tastes.

When an artist is attached, the basic comic storytelling principles I've learned and accept as valid will generally apply to almost any art style (at least any art style that has actually telling the story in a coherent fashion as a primary goal.) I have gotten out of the habit of giving artists page layouts (unless they ask for them), and there'll be significant variations in artists' interpretations of scripts (even if several were called upon to draw their version of a single comic page from the same script, the differences would be striking), so the mechanical writing process (number of panels on a page, order and quantity of dialogue, individual panel descriptions, etc.) isn't really directly affected by an artist.

There are some indirect influences artists have on my work, though. When I'm writing a given piece, I'll be considering a range of artistic styles that might work for the particular story in question (while trying not to limit myself to the point where I'd ignore the work of someone who's not in the style I'm thinking of, that would nevertheless be a good fit for a story.) I'd been looking for a suitable project to collaborate with artist Nick Johnson on for a few months before I conceived of The Holiday Men, which, with its preponderance of ridiculous action-oriented scenes and satiric intent, is perfect for both his hyperkinetic, cartoony style and his irreverent sense of humour. So, though I tend to write stories much the same way, I am affected by artists insofar as I won't attach one to a story I don't think they're suitable for.

As a working relationship with a specific artist develops over time, I'll also get a better sense of what sort of script they prefer to work off of. I tend to be fairly wordy (by modern comics' standards), and I do see the value in describing characters' internal thought processes for artists, in the expectation (or at least hope) that they'll be able to communicate some of that visually.

So far, the artists I've worked with seem to appreciate that sort of detail (to paraphrase my Done To Death collaborator, Fiona Staples, "It's nice to have that there if I need it, but it's also nice to be able to ignore it if I don't."), so I haven't had a need to modify my general style. That said, if there was an artist I wanted to work with who did prefer having less (or more) detail, I'd certainly be willing to work to their preference. It just hasn't come to that, yet (at least not on independent stuff.)

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What kind of verbal bridges do you have to cross every time you work with a new artist?

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The first consideration all writers need to have relative to their scripts is clarity.

I do tend towards more detailed panel descriptions, but those descriptions are all built more or less the same way: they start with the most basic description of the shot as I envision it ("Close medium side twoshot of A and B."); this is followed by detailed visual information that needs to be included in the panel ("They're facing each other across the panel. A's got a gun pointed at B, who's bleeding from their gut wound. Because A speaks first, he should be to the left of B."); that's followed by descriptions of stuff that's less concrete, in visual terms ("A's brow is furrowed in frustration at B's apparent apathy to the fact that she's got a gun pointed at her. She should be worried, but instead she's sneering at him. She knows something he doesn't."); and finally there's the dialogue (A: You don't seem worried. B: That's only because I know something you don't know.)

My theory is that, by organizing my descriptions this way, my artist collaborators have an easy way of locating the information they're looking for when they refer to the script. Alan Moore, one of the most celebrated comic writers of all time, writes notoriously dense panel descriptions. A couple of artists who've worked with him used highlighters to mark different elements in the descriptions (blue for setting, yellow for character, pink for camera angle, etc.)--one of them even said something to the effect that, having marked out the relevant information (or having their wife mark it out), they then pretty much ignored the rest. As I'm lazy and don't want to waste my own time and energy, I'd rather not put my artists in a situation where they'd have reason to do something like that--at a minimum, they should be able to pick out the relevant information without having to underline and highlight bits and pieces of the panel descriptions.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if this is what you were getting at with your question, but I try and make sure that the comic creation process is a true collaboration--I tend to be fairly hands-on, especially in the thumbnail and lettering stages. It's important that a mutual respect and trust is developed between me and my collaborators. I need them to know that I'm not asking for something without giving it a certain amount of consideration, and I need to know when they believe there's a better way to tell the story, so a conversation about the goals of the story, sequence or panel can be discussed freely. I try to ensure that there's frequent two-way communication between me and the artists--I don't want them to be unhappy with something their name is going to be on (and that they're going to co-own along with me.)

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Whose visual work inspires your verbal style?

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I'm not sure how to answer that one, because I'm not sure entirely what you mean by verbal style. If you're referring to artists whose images influence my storytelling style, the answer is pretty much all the artists who work in narrative art whose work I encounter, though I give special attention to people like Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin, Paul Grist, Will Eisner...I recently read Jonathan Hickman's The Nightly News, and it was a revelation...

Because you've specified visual artists, and because most artists who aren't also writers are working from a full script of some sort (usually including panel and page breaks) rather than plot-first style (where the artist receives a synopsis of the story, breaks it down, draws it, and the writer then writes dialogue to go with the art), I'm mostly mentioning cartoonists. I'm just as influenced by comic writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman.

If, on the other hand, you meant what visual artists influence the actual language I use in my scripts, the word choices I make, then the answer is, not many. When it comes to language use and phrasing, I'm much more influenced by writers than artists. Left to my own devices, my creative writing (even in scripts nobody but an artist or editor will ever see) tends to resemble (or I flatter myself that it resembles) the sort of thing I most like to read--Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Julian Barnes, PG Wodehouse, Ramsey Campbell...I'm fascinated by the way these and a few other, mostly British authors use language. There's a poetic clarity to their descriptive passages I haven't found in a lot of North American writing, which often feels a little more haphazard in its approach to language, at least to me.

Andrew F