Anything by the late, great Harvey Pekar.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau.

Alan Moore books... at this point, Mark Millar.

I loved Watterson's writing for Calvin & Hobbes.

Pffft, writers. If they were worth a damn, they'd be pencillers.

I have never bought a comic book just for the writing. The comic could be written by Grant Morrison, but if it's penciled by Ron Lim... I won't buy it.

All of them.

Well said. I don't think I'm buying any books just for the art right now. I guess Kick-Ass was the last one I did that for. Marcos Martin is another artist I'd follow around. Still, I prefer the one-two punch of writer and artist on the same page though. I'd take a fantastically written story with mediocre art over the opposite any day.

Current favourite newish writers would be Jeff Lemire, Jason Aaron, Jeff Parker. Maybe Jonathan Hickman, Mike Carey and Matt Fraction.

Writers I'd follow around: Ed Brubaker, Brian K Vaughan, Darwyn Cooke. Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore always attract my interest as well..

I generally like a good combination of writer and artist. I tend not to buy poorly-written books,
even with great artists, and I don't regularly buy great writers teamed up with poor artists.

I like the sum total, storytelling.

All of them here too. I can look at pretty pictures on the internet for free. That said, I will not buy a book that is pencilled by someone I hate.

I put that aside and bought a copy of PITCHED anyway.








I kid, I kid. Or do I?

By this do you mean one person doing both the writing and the drawing?

Hm. Not necessarily. I do appreciate that quite a bit and often the results are very good, but generally whether it is one person or two, I like when the writer-artist come together collaboratively to produce a singular vision. That is, I prefer when there is give and take and cohesion in goals between the writer and artist. Synergy usually results and both ingredients are integral to the work.

I also prefer musical artists who write and perform their own material versus a manufactured hit machine.

I won't read it unless I find both the art and the writing worthwhile.

Unless we're talking about one-panel cartoons and some newspaper strips. There are a lot of those where it's all about the gag and the art is just sort of there. When it's just a short gag the gag can still be funny even if the art doesn't really add anything. There have been funny strips that could pretty much have been done with rubber stamps. And might have been, for that matter.

Right on, but I'm a bit more flexible. If I like the artist enough, I'll buy the book just for his art but he'd have to be one of my top guys.

For example, I bought the Shanna the She-Devil trade just for the Frank Cho art. However, if Ron Garney had drawn it, I wouldn't have purchased it despite liking Garney's work. Garney with Waid on Capt. America is a "must buy" while Garney with Gail Simone on Green Arrow is soemthing I wouldn't go near.

It's a scale; the better the writer, the weaker the art can be for me to buy it and vice-versa.

At the moment, FF. I don't like Neil Edwards' art, but Hickman's writing is good enough to overcome my dislike of it.

I'm reading Invincible Iron Man more for the writing. I like Larocca, but I don't like this style he's using, and I HATE the colouring. PEOPLE ARE NOT SO DAMN GLOSSY THEY LOOK LIKE WAX!!!! Grrrrrrr (though it has improved a fair bit. The first arc was AWFUL for this)

And the Greg Land-drawn parts of Second Coming. I HATE HATE HATE Greg Land's 'art', and HATE that it's included in a big crossover, meaning I have to look at him re-using the same damn pictures every couple of pages for a chapter here and there. BUT those chapters are written by Mike Carey, and continued the main story, so it was worth slugging through the atrocity that is Land's art.

Put me down for an "all of them."

But good art is a major plus.