I thought I'd share some advice that I gave to a writer recently.  There are a lot of writers, who are serious about their craft, but still new to it, and they're looking for an artist to collaborate with on comics projects.  I receive a somewhat fair amount of inquiries from writers on here, so I thought this might help.

*By no means am I an expert, but I've been through enough of these interactions that I feel I can share these points.



"Another thing you might try is writing a short 4-5 page Super Hero sample script (hear me out...), and then see if you can find an artist who would like to draw it.  The benefits of that are:

-Artists need these kinds of samples for their portfolios, so the chance of getting someone to do it for free increases, because it benefits them as well.  Even better, if you can offer $10 a page for that, it will most certainly get done.

-You will have the experience of working with an artist.  There are things that you can never know about how you're staging scenes or your panel descriptions until you have an artist say to you "I can't make that happen in one panel."  Or, "This page with 10 panels?  I can do it in 5".  

-You're not "blowing your load" on an artist of amateur capabilities.  Meaning, you have these grand, inspired ideas... don't waste them right out of the gate on someone who isn't capable of fully realizing them on paper.  It's like getting married at 18.  When you're 30, you're like "I never experienced life before marriage!"  I've got a friend who wrote a fantasstic story, and a publisher told him "I'd totally publish this, but the art isn't good enough".  He was screwed because his not-up-to-snuff artist owned half the rights to the book.

-While you're having those sample scripts drawn, you'll have time to save more for an artist with a higher skill level.  

Being able to pay an artist really helps your cause.  Occasionally you'll find someone willing to work for split rights/profits who is actually pretty good.  But when that happens, they're likely to get offered paid work, and they'll have to leave your project for the simple economics of it.  Also, I've heard several stories of artists who are slow or lazy.  Nothing motivates one to turn around a page like being paid to do it."


Hopefully that's helpful to someone.  If not, thanks for reading anyway