I’m not sure what to make out of Ng Suat Tong’s post on writer/artist collaboration in superhero comics over at The Comics Reporter. Well, okay, I didn’t like it–that’s what I made out of it.

And sure, part of the reason for that is that he takes a hammer to superhero comics I think quite highly of–he dresses down Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil run at length, and dismisses Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Mike Perkins et al’s Captain America run with a snide parenthetical aside. But more than that, I was surprised by the haphazard manner in which Ng conflates several totally different issues–the lack of credit given to today’s artists vs. the lack of detail present in today’s scripts vs. the cinematic (as opposed to, um, comics-matic) nature of much of today’s comic art.

Meanwhile some of his specific lines of attack seem poorly observed to me. For example: Far be it from me to mount a spirited defense of the art of Pia Guerra on Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man–its nondescript, not quite cartoony, not quite realistic, Vertigo-house-style stiffness is the reason I didn’t read that book until after it ended. But that same, let’s say, obviousness is precisely why the book clicked with so many non-comics readers of my acquaintance: It’s among the easiest comic art to read that you’ll ever come across. Moreover, the whole point of Y is to hew as closely as possible to the real world we know (with one big difference). How are the fervidly imagined dreamscapes of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy a relevant point of comparison in either respect? It reminds me of that time a few weeks ago when everyone got on Dan Nadel’s case for supposedly comparing Darwyn Cooke to John Stanley, an apples-to-oranges comparison he wasn’t actually making–only this time that really is what Ng is doing, even though he occasionally throws in a perfunctory “far be it from me to compare Alex Maleev to Jack Kirby” disclaimer.

I also think it’s a mistake to view the Moore/Morrison method of scripting as the pinnacle of the form. That’s not to deny the brilliance of either writer, mind you, nor the effectiveness of their best scripts. It’s just that with Morrison, there are just as many collaborators who were unable to make his meticulous method work as who succeeded, if not more. And with Moore, that method seemed to do exactly what Ng is decrying elsewhere, which is end up leading audiences to give all the credit to Moore and not his wide array of gifted artistic collaborators. These pitfalls aren’t the fault of either writer, of course, and in the normal course of things I wouldn’t even bring them up as strikes against their techniques. (Perhaps I’d go after the “plethora of references, symbols and incidental details” Ng lionizes in the work of Morrison and (by implication) Moore; my suspicion of fiction designed to be decoded rather than read is well-documented on this blog.) But the way Ng selectively highlights elements of M&M’s methods to make one point even though they’d count against his melange of other points necessitates my doing so. Basically I don’t think micromanaging every panel and page is the one true path any more than the far sparser scripting of today’s marquee writers is. Further, if these issues have anything to do with, say, Marvel and DC’s occasionally unfortunate choice of trade dress for their collected editions, that point needs to be much more rigorously argued than what Ng’s up to in his piece.

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