This month I thought I’d talk about something specifically from a writer’s perspective – how to recruit and work with an artist on your strip or comic. Obviously, your first task is to actually approach an artist about working with you. These days that shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, there are loads of places online you can now visit to make contact with artists and illustrators, and view their work. There’s www.deviantart.com and www.comicspace.com for a start. You could also trawl a few comic-related messageboards as they often contain dedicated threads for writers seeking artists and vice versa.

Another alternative is to simply turn up at a comic convention and try approaching a couple of people wandering around with black portfolio folders under their arms. This is pretty much how my collaborator on Hero Killers, Declan Shalvey, and I hooked up, and the same goes for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, the much-celebrated creators of Image’s Phonogram. After making contact with an artist you’re going to need to see samples of his/her work. Now, pin-ups and big, showy one-off illustrations are all well and good but what you really should be asking for are samples of their sequential work – five or six pages at least. Once you get your hands on some, pay particular attention to how well the artist draws scenes of simple conversation as well as fun stuff like action sequences and fight scenes. A sound grasp of anatomy is also essential. Chances are your fledgling artist isn’t going to be as good as John Buscema or Travis Charest, but then your first script is unlikely to read like some great lost manuscript by Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, is it? What you’re looking for is someone with potential, whose storytelling instincts are good and who is a useful and worthwhile collaborator. Ultimately you’re looking for a co-creator, someone who doesn’t just draw your scripts but breathes life into them and elevates them – comics are a visual medium after all.

You’ll also need to find an artist whose style meshes with the subject of your story. After all it’s pointless asking a Frank Frazetta-inspired fantasy illustrator to have a crack at your grim and gritty big city crime drama. At risk of immediately contradicting myself, you’d be surprised at just how adaptable many comic artists are. For instance, my pal Will Sliney (http://sliney.blogspot.com) is an up and coming artist with a real gift for drawing high-octane superhero stories, but he’s also illustrating a graphic novel adaptation of Richard III (www.classicalcomics.com). Now that’s what you call flexibility.

Before you approach an artist it’s probably a good idea to have the script for your story already written. If not, you should at least have a reasonably detailed plot breakdown and some character descriptions to hand. It tells anyone thinking of working with you that you’re serious about what you’re doing and that your story isn’t just some sort of half-baked pipedream. (At this stage I should point out that I’m not always good at taking my own advice and apologise profusely to those artists I’ve been promising scripts to for the last year or, er, two). When you first team up with an artist you’re always hoping that it’ll be the start of a long, mutually beneficial relationship in which you work together again and again improving as you go. First of all though you should break them in easy – maybe start off with a five or six page short story to see how well you can work together. You’ll soon suss out what your artist’s strengths are and learn how to tailor your future scripts accordingly.

Once your artist is on board, you should agree a deadline for the completion of the art together. It’s all very well giving someone a 20-page story and expecting them to have it fully pencilled and inked in a couple of weeks but, with the best will in the world, it just isn’t going to happen. Like aspiring comic writers, aspiring comic artists often only get to work on their pet projects outside the demands of work, study or family, maybe for only a few hours a week. You should be looking at giving them three months to complete a five or six page story and, realistically, anything up to nine or ten months for a comicbook of 25 pages or more.

The chances are your artist will have a few ideas of their own about how to visually represent things in your script that are slightly different to yours. It’s very tempting to be precious about your script and dismiss everything they say out of hand. Don’t. Your story ceases to belong solely to you as soon as you hand it over to an artist. Avoid being precious about your work and try to throw yourself into the whole “partnership” idea. An artist who feels they’ve had real input into the creative direction of the book they’re working on is likely to do a much better job than someone who has just followed a script to the letter. Of course, it’s a different kettle of fish if they, say, change the gender of all your characters or insist on adding a talking green moose to the cast but that isn’t very likely.

With the best will in the world, sometimes your collaboration isn’t going to work out. This will usually happen because, for whatever reason, the artist doesn’t get around to drawing your script (lack of motivation, taking on too much other work – there are a dozen possible reasons). As a writer this is one of the most frustrating things about the collaborative process and being fobbed off with excuses time and again will do nothing for your blood pressure. In that situation you need to know when to cut your losses and find someone else. There are a lot of very talented, highly motivated aspiring artists out there and, chances are, you’ll soon find someone right for you. Sorry if that sounds like a cheesy ad for a dating agency but you get what I mean…

One other thing worth mentioning is money. Unless you have extremely deep pockets or grand plans to set up your own comics company, chances are you won’t be paying the artist for his or her work. That’s something you should make clear at the beginning so there is no misunderstanding. There shouldn’t be a problem though as fledgling artists, like fledgling writers, are mostly keen on finding an outlet for their work and gaining experience of their craft.

Oh, and finally, the talking green moose is my idea. Don’t even think about stealing it.

Andy Winter has been publishing his own comics since 2002 and is the writer of the Eagle Award-winning Hero Killers. Check out his regularly updated workblog here: www.winterworkblog.blogspot.com