Search: genuinely good comic writers

So often in the past when I heard talk of the best comic writers, it was usually only in the sense of "far better than most of the crap I read" or "I'm surprised a comic is dealing with these issues in a serious manner".

I'm not actually looking to buy anything but I'm just curious about who you'd rate as a genuine writer. Even if it's for someone who isn't that refined word by word, but has a genius for plotting or concepts.

Since I'm very much a drawings first reader I really cant think of much. On the stories I liked best it's difficult for me to consider the writing by itself.

Mark Beyer of AMY AND JORDAN

https://slate.com/culture/2016/03/the-return-of-mark-beyers-amy-and-jordan-in-the-comic-agony.html

Not plotted at all except maybe in a "microvignette" sense. But great writing.

And, I mean, Charles Schulz, but you knew that.

Eddie Campbell.

I know Peanuts is acclaimed but I've never read it aside from a few episodes here and there and I couldn't really tell you much about why people rate it other than the observations in its peak era and that Gary Groth rates Schulz very high as a drawer.

Love Bunglers

is this thread for naming good writers of comics or good cartoonists, because nobody is naming the former

Tom king

Other than Alan Moore, I haven't found too many writers willing to write about their own process openly enough to guess that they're actually doing the heavy lifting over the artist.

Tom king

surely that's the examplar of in the sense of "far better than most of the crap I read"

(nb I've only read that Mister Miracle #1 that was highly esteemed and hilariously terrible)

King has gone horribly, Bendis-ly downhill lately imo - which is to say, he's tripling down on his idiosyncrasies, at the expense of story and character. (Seriously, don't read the rest of Mister Miracle.)

Jason Aaron is another one who's had a few undistinguished years, but he's a terrific plotter/storyteller when he's on form, and one of the few mainstream writers who can be funny in a non-nerdy way. His first 12 issues on Thor (round 2013-4ish) are pretty solid sci-fi.

Considering the question just now, it occurs to me that comics is the rare medium where the better writers tend to be recognized as such. Like, I can't think of many comics writers I appreciate who have flown completely under the radar, so my own list would be largely really boring and obvious (Moore, Morrison, Clowes, Los Bros, etc.). Carla Speed McNeil deserves more attention, for sure. Lapham and Brubaker's less mainstream material. Opinions seem to be deeply divided, but I think Hickman's Marvel stuff is some of the most impressive mainstream stuff I've read in some time (probably only exceeded in this decade by Morrison's pre-New 52 work for DC).

Oh, duh: Rick Veitch. I haven't read the last couple of things he did, but overall he's one of my all-time favorite comics creators.

Woodring, obviously.

Definitely think a distinction needs to be drawn between artists who (mainly) draw their own scripts and writers who (mainly) write for other artists.

whither chuck austen and frank tieri itt

This thread is for writers who are merely good, do u see. Not everyone can reach the lofty heights of a Mackie.

jeph_loeb_bibliography.docx

I am quite willing to bet that you can find an online discussion of great writers of comics where all of these names are unironically mentioned.

"jeph loeb is a great writer" - About 200 results (0.41 seconds)

"chuck austen is a great writer" - 1 result

lol

("Some results may have been removed under data protection law")

Ward otm

I think the bar is generally really low as far as actual writing talent goes, and writing specifically for comics, when the writer is not also an artist, is hard to judge due to the end result being highly contingent on some quantifiable writer/artist synergy

the worst of the medium is the lazy assholes who don't even bother to have distinctive voices for characters with the assumption that the characters will look recognizably different on the page, though

Steve Englehart in the 1970s.

I think it's easier to tell when a good writer is paired with a bad artist - Grant Morrison and Kieron Gillen have both been stuck with some shockers but produced good comics nonetheless.

On the other hand, even Virginia Woolf couldn't produce a good comic with Philip Tan.

is this thread for naming good writers of comics or good cartoonists, because nobody is naming the former

can RAG please clarify, and then if it's the former we delete all the posts except for one that says Alan Moore, Rene Goscinny and Harvey Kurtzman

I feel like there are a lot of people who have worked nearly exclusively as comics writers that have a mastery of the form and have worked well with a handful of artist to great effect, but they're underrated or buried under a lot of hack work that they've churned out for major publishers

otoh there are a handful of people who are reasonable at hack work and have had consistent employment in the industry (and nearly exclusively in the part that counts as an "industry") that have a couple books worth reading and a bunch of stuff that's completely disposable and forgettable

I should really be naming names but I'm instinctively reticent to attach myself to positive value judgments and should get over that!

There is that scene in American Splendor where Crumb looks at Pekar's manic stick figures and goes, "oh this is really good! let me draw this"

Pekar was not a good writer of comics, some of the comics he wrote were good

Itt sic will tell u why u r rong

not interested

was not a good writer of comics, some of the comics he wrote were good

think this goes for most of the names I was thinking of throwing out tbh. Like, I think Chaykin's writing for the initial 14-issue run of American Flagg is incredible, but then there's all the other stuff he's written.

he’s the Stan Lee of navel-gazing autobio

his comics were sometimes good when a cartoonist who knew how to tell stories would put a visual story on the page, and it would be printed with Pekar’s words in the balloons

(so, for eg, Crumb or Moore could make a Pekar script of stick figures talking into a compelling page; if you’ve got Gary Dumm drawing Pekar going somewhere and doing something, the best you’re going to get is a Gary Dumm page)

xpost! sorry WmC, don’t read that

I think Pekar's writing (in his prime) was really great, but I'm not to spend time arguing whether or not it qualifies as great "comic" writing. It's sort of in another category.

Are we purposefully avoiding obvious/old Big 2 stalwarts like Claremont, Michelinie, Nocenti, Gruenwald, etc.?

Claremont is a terrible writer.

yeah, I said it.

He kept me reading all that crazy soap-opera shit for years! I wasn't doing it for Marc Silvestri's pencils... :P

yeah I'm not saying Pekar sucks

I don't make many qualitative distinctions based on height of brow, so for my money 'good' and 'entertaining' are both worthy (if nebulous) yardsticks. I'd say Claremont is favored more by the latter measurement.

I mean let's be real here: I obviously love Marvel to bits but I would face an uphill slog in trying to argue that many of their writers past or present hit the level of 'genuinely good'.

That's the thing with the original question -- is "genuine writer" supposed to mean they transcend the limitations of the piddling, juvenile medium, or something?

I think I don't find Claremont entertaining because the underlying ideas (space pirates, 18th century costume romance, Legion of Superheroes ripoff, Alien ripoff, etc.) are actually really bad, and the only thing holding them together is this never-ending soap opera cycle of storylines/character arcs that never have any resolution.

You don't find hours of diversion in the tragic saga of a humorless dude in a love triangle w/two redheads?

I think the LSH comparison is actually interesting -- b/c while I'm much more of a Legion fan than an X-Men fan, I think Claremont handled the demands of managing a big cast of characters (and their respective characterizations) much better than Levitz/Giffen did at their peak.

(There were probably somewhat fewer X-Men/X-allies than Legionnaires, but still.)

Dude, there are 4,261,278,912 X-characters, r u mad

All I'm sayin' is, I recently read thru huge chunks of prime Levitz/Giffen "Legion" in collected form (I love that shit) -- but I couldn't tell ya "Imra" from "Ayla" from "Shady" from "PG."

The Heckler was written with the Bierbaums. (Trencher was solo, if you're thinking of that?)

Oh, I'd forgotten that. I did try to read the original Ambush Bug mini not long ago, and couldn't get into it. I had just read through `Mazing Man and Angel Love, so maybe I'd had my fill of 80s DC curios by that point.

on the creator/artist front, i will say that jaime and huizenga come to mind immediately

Lewis Trondheim

Sfar too. All the l'association guys really

I bow to nobody in my appreciation of Anthea Bell but she never wrote a comic afaik

some of the english dialogue in asterix is so far from the french original, so created-from-whole-cloth, i want to say the books should almost be credited to uderzo-goscinny-bell-hockridge

just because there's no lee-ditko-kirby fight for authorship or bad treatment, it doesn't mean she shouldn't get equal credit

i might be remembering wrong, but i think goscinny claimed some of the asterix books were better in english (eco said the same thing about name of the rose)

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo. Bell should - at best - be credited w/ 'additional dialogue' imho (and that's not to denigrate her contribution, they're great translations, but a writer she is not). Herge said similarly complimentary things about the English language versions of the Tintin albums (translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner) but you can be damm sure he wouldn't have recognised them or credited them as writers.

While we're on the subject of European comics, Pierre Christin definitely rates as 'genuinely good' imho.

how can you stay mad at someone for forty years for playing sax for a while because they liked Art Pepper, and then playing some quotes from Miles on a few gigs in 1985?

LOL nice try sic, but c'mon - Giffen profited from the work and imagination of another artist without any kind of acknowledgement (until he was caught swiping panel after panel after panel) - really don't see the difference between him and Stan Lee here.

Ethics aside, I give Giffen a pass because his (non-swiped) work is so good, especially the Heckler, 5YL-era stuff. It's such a shame that he never paired with better writers.

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo. Bell should - at best - be credited w/ 'additional dialogue' imho (and that's not to denigrate her contribution, they're great translations, but a writer she is not). Herge said similarly complimentary things about the English language versions of the Tintin albums (translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner) but you can be damm sure he wouldn't have recognised them or credited them as writers.

fwiw German readers make this sort of claim for Erika Fuchs, who translated a bunch of Barks and other Disney comics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs

Comic writers have had much more luck being able to move into the bigger money of working in TV quite a bit more now than before, since so many comic properties have made a gazillion dollars. A couple of the old 70s-80s comic guys like Chaykin did some tv work, but it was less common.

jeph_loeb_filmography.docx

Although I was clearly going for lazy snark re: Gaiman upthread, I think he does some things very well even though I can't quite bring myself to drop his name into the 'I think _____ is a genuinely good writer' construction. Like when I saw that he did a book about Norse mythology? I was like, I'll bet that's an awesome book of Norse mythology.

yeah, i've enjoyed plenty of gaiman, i just don't think anyone so inclined towards tweeness can be recommended without reservation

these days i think the gaiman-adjacent thing i enjoy most is the stardust movie tbh

The older I get, the more I'm inclined to like and enjoy Gaiman, even though he's done a lot of rubbish.

I think what I like is, he treats almost every project like a potential starting point for a new reader (there's that "good reader" thing) again. But at the same time, he's not a gateway drug and he's not a "comics for people who don't like comics" writer.

None of the people I know who enjoy his work are twee goths, either.

But yes, a lot of it is bad. My family love Neverwhere and I can't bring myself to talk to them about it.

Also interested to see what he comes up with showrunning Good Omens. It could be the ultimate in Gaimanny indulgence, or it could be really good, or it could be both!

Again, just to be clear, I do actually enjoy at least some of Gaiman's work, but, as is the case with probably 95% of what I enjoy, I don't think 'enjoyment' alone is enough to elevate a work to the status of 'genuinely good'. I also enjoy the film Robot Monster.

it'd be interesting to see whom collaborating artists consider the best writers. if gaiman turned in incoherent outlines scribbled on the back of rolling papers we'd be none the wiser.

on the creator/artist front, i will say that jaime and huizenga come to mind immediately

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, November 20, 2018 8:19 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Horrocks, let's not forget

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo.

also, the comic. Bell and Hockridge wrote some jokes over the top of a comic that already existed.

Herge said similarly complimentary things about the English language versions of the Tintin albums (translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner) but you can be damm sure he wouldn't have recognised them or credited them as writers.

Herge didn't even credit the artists!

"how can you stay mad at someone for forty years for playing sax for a while because they liked Art Pepper, and then playing some quotes from Miles on a few gigs in 1985?"

LOL nice try sic, but c'mon - Giffen profited from the work and imagination of another artist without any kind of acknowledgement (until he was caught swiping panel after panel after panel) - really don't see the difference between him and Stan Lee here.

I'm not familiar with his work before he started half-writing it, but my impression of the Kirby period is that he was influenced by Kirby body language (certainly he was the only Marvel artist ever to be so) and stuck Starlin faces over the top, not that he was ripping Kirby panels.

And the Munoz rips sit extremely different in context 33 years later, having seen many instances of Giffen first taking on another style and then adapting it to his own ends (eg keeping shadowy faces through a couple of styles after Munoz, taking on a fine-lined Maguire-esque approach to faces on the Invasion fill-in, then rebuilding his entire structure of body language around those blocky heads by The Magic Wars [and then dumping that style and inventing an entirely new one in two months before 5YL!]). Out of hundreds of panels he did in the Munoz style, directly quoting 8 or so of them doesn't bother me overmuch. It's 1985! Half the best records out are made of huge actual samples of other records. Plus at the same time he was working on ways of arranging panels and panel-to-panel flow that had nothing to do with Munoz' storytelling.

Denying it once was nagl, fessing up immediately after that and continuing to give shine to Munoz and apologies to the entire world for decades afterwards has surely earned him your slightly-reduced enmity.

I wish the Magic Wars stuff was collected, doesn’t seem to be(?); so I haven’t read the end of the Baxter series (and the end of “true”/classic LSH, as far as I’m concerned).

(5YL also hasn’t been collected, and probably should be, for historical interest — but I don’t think it’s aged very well.)

All of it's on Comixology.

Cool, maybe I’ll check it out next time they run a promotion or something.

I think they're $1.99 an issue. I've never seen them on sale but fingers crossed.

Huh, that does seem more economical (on a per-issue basis) than the collections themselves, when they exist (I think the Magic Wars arc itself is only 4 issues, but there are a lot of issues prior to that I’d like to go through).

afaik only the first 5 out of 63 issues of the Baxter series were collected? It’s probably still cheaper to buy on paper than digital even today (I bought the Tales Of newsprint reprints in the ‘90s when I caught up during 5YL)

There are for sure some reallly fallow periods when Giffen’s not on the book, but it all pays off (yeah, he’s back a year or so before Magic Wars) & Levitz is good at keeping the soap churning.

afaik only the first 5 out of 63 issues of the Baxter series were collected?

I thought so too, but searched last night and apparently there’s one more (collecting #7-12): http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes:_The_More_Things_Change

I think Giffen’s mostly absent from that arc.

That still leaves 51 issues of the Baxter series floating out there; maybe I will try to track them down on paper (my preferred format); make it a 2019 hobby.

Bell and Hockridge wrote some jokes over the top of a comic that already existed.

that is a pretty insulting summary of their work!

counterpoint: it is mindbogglingly insulting to Goscinny et Uderzo to suggest otherwise

I'm going to put aside the matter of Thief Giffen as I don't think sic and I are ever going to reach much accord on that and agree very strongly with him on this. Chuck, you seem to be claiming writerly privileges for Bell and Hockridge that would not be given to any other translator, afaik. I mean, don't all translators create their own approximations and variations of linguistic puns, local jokes, character names etc - that's the job of a translator!

is "genuine writer" supposed to mean they transcend the limitations of the piddling, juvenile medium, or something?

― my guitar friend wants his money (morrisp), Monday, November 19, 2018 11:35 PM

It mostly means that many comic fans are untrustworthy and "amazing" tends to mean just being distinctly better than most comics you read. I don't trust my memory of what I thought was amazing years ago because my standards were mostly based on reading certain kinds of comics.

As a teenage comic fan I liked Bruce Jones a great deal and at his best he was possibly very good, but a lot of that affection probably came from subject matter, approach, that he worked mostly with the best artists (he was good at drawing too) and the fact that he wasn't in the harrowingly shit cringetastic "hip" mode of a lot of the comics that were popular in the 00s. Bruce Jones wrote quite a number of novels so I'm curious to try them someday.

There were quite a few writers I liked just because they gave me a break from things I didn't like. Sometimes it's like how I feel about Jean Rollin in films: I respect him for what he's NOT doing more than thinking he's particularly great. Will Eisner is kinda like this, obviously great drawings/compositions and his writing goes down easy, but the tales are instantly forgettable.

I used to hear a lot of respect for writers like John Stanley and Carl Barks but it might be a similar thing. No idea, I don't think I've ever read Barks.

I've seen quite a few discerning readers rate Kazuo Koike as some sort of genius, probably uneven.

Chuck Tatum says "But at the same time, he's not a gateway drug and he's not a "comics for people who don't like comics" writer."

I thought Gaiman a textbook example of both. There's lots of people who only seem to read Sandman and the related titles.

I'm pretty sure there's plenty of writers of books and comics who have only done very good work, but they tend to have smaller bodies of work.

john stanley was a genuinely great writer who wrote terrific dialogue and clever plots, he is def worth checking out

Some people also really rate Hector German Oesterheld but I haven't sampled yet.

Thief Giffen

:D :D

I think Giffen’s mostly absent from that arc.

yeah, he dropped out as penciller after issue #2, and altogether after #5

--

Chuck, try this as an illustration of why I'm disagreeing: with any English-language volume of Asterix, take away any of the captions that refer to the scenario, plot or setting; remove any of the dialogue that illustrates or depends upon characterisation, or that advances the plot; then get rid of all of the drawings, the colour, and the panel borders. What's left is a comic originated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge.

the good funny bits

https://srikrishnadas.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/obelix-crazy_thumb.jpg?w=166&h=149

Will Eisner is kinda like this, obviously great drawings/compositions and his writing goes down easy, but the tales are instantly forgettable

loads of the late 1940s Spirits he wrote himself are absolutely crackerjack on "plotting or concepts. " nearly everything after the 1950s is absolute waste in both writing and compositions.

I thought Gaiman a textbook example of both

yah

Now that RAG has clarified that he does mean cartoonists, not just writer-only ppl, some genuinely good writers:

George Herriman
Frank King
Elzie Segar
Walt Kelly
Charles Schulz
Bill Watterson
Georges Remi
Rene Goscinny
Harvey Kurtzman
John Stanley
Carl Barks
Jules Feiffer
Robert Crumb
Bill Griffith
Shary Flenniken
Dori Seda
Justin Green
Claire Bretecher
Phoebe Gloeckner
Gahan Wilson
Tove Jansson
Gregory Gallant
Jaime Hernandez
Gilbert Hernandez
Franklin C. Ware
Chester Brown
Jim Woodring
Peter Bagge
Dan Clowes
Eddie Campbell
Roger Langridge
Simon Hanselmann
Kevin Huizenga
Dash Shaw
Jacques Tardi
Tim Hensley
Lewis Trondheim
Ho Che Anderson
Sammy Harkham
Michael DeForge
Lisa Hanawalt
Jason Shiga
Peter Blegvad
Emily Carroll
Kate Beaton
Julia Gforer
Alan Moore
Olivia Jaimes

yeah, he dropped out as penciller after issue #2, and altogether after #5

Looks like he did a little penciling in #11: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes_Vol_3_11

I ordered a “Like New” copy of this collection for $15, looking forward to it.

(I actually have #10 on my shelf already; it’s one of the few LSH comics I picked up as a kid: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes_Vol_3_10)

Reading up a little more, perhaps I should just stop at #18 (the Crisis crossover issue),
as I understand that everything afterward is now apocryphal/non-canon... (lol)

pretty sure I have linked morris to this before but if you want to record your readalong: The Legion Of Super Heroes: Classic Or Dud?

Thanks, sic (and sorry to sidetrack yet another thread with Cliff Claven–esque LSH ramblings, if that’s what I’ve done here...)

I mean, don't all translators create their own approximations and variations of linguistic puns, local jokes, character names etc - that's the job of a translator!

This is fair! I guess what makes me want to stand up for Bell is that the jokes and puns in her translations are (in UK culture, at least) as iconic and essential contributions to the book as Goscinny's or Uderzo's - although, of course, as Sic notes, her contribution wouldn't exist without their previous work.

That's not to take away from G & U, more to acknowledge that a simple "translated by..." note never seems like enough recognition to me.

I think we're all agreed that Bell and Hockridge were exceptional translators, and that Asterix was an especially tricky text to translate well.

But when I was a kid, getting into Asterix, most of the puns - and all of the classical allusions - soared right over my head. I was responding to the slapstick, the characters, the energy of Uderzo's drawing, the structural precision of Goscinny's plotting.

I think it's interesting that all of that witty wordplay is absent from Goscinny's Lucky Luke scripts - apparently because Morris simply didn't care for puns.

Speaking of Munoz, what about Sampayo as a writer?

john stanley was a genuinely great writer who wrote terrific dialogue and clever plots, he is def worth checking out

Yeah, I got one of the old Another Rainbow sets a decade ago and was amazed at how good he was, especially since the structure was so formulaic. I would roll my eyes every time there was yet another "Lulu babysits Alvin and tells him a tale" story and then by the end of each one be like "Wow, that was great!"

Iou Kuroda is a good writer, but his best work (the eggplant themed Nasu series, and his short stories) hasn't been officially translated.

Agree on Trondheim. Lapinot has great dialogue and situations. Burned out on Sfar (he's reeeeeally hated by a lot of French readers on an almost-visceral level - not sure why).

Late 70s-early 80s Bill Griffith is incredible - the Rousseau bio, the Claude Funston wet dreams one, Griffith's Observatory. Peter Bagge once said that Griffith may have been the best cartoonist on earth in that period and I'm tempted to agree.

Yoshiharu Tsuge of course.

I quite like that early 60s John Stanley horror story about the hand coming from the sewers, it was allowed to be a bit grimmer because the publisher (Dell?) was one of the few to escape the comics code. I never seen any of those other stories from that era. I think he only did a few of them.

Bagge otm re pre-syndicate Griffith

just finished the most recent issues of Piskor's X-Men recap (which is fun in its silliness) and man this really cemented my opinion upthread re: Claremont and his terrible ideas. Had forgotten the whole yakuza/ninja plotline but you can throw that on the trash heap with the Alien ripoff, space pirates, 18thc. costume drama, etc.

Hard mild-mannered disagree

I have no good reasons but I love the Alien ripoff and also the idea that 80s teenagers spent the decade following Claremont's wackadoo idiosyncrasies and fetishes like they were the Talmud or something