The Challenges of the Comic Book Writer

I've found in the last few months that it's hard out there for a pimp... I mean a comic book writer... We get to write tons of words, tens of thousands on pages, imagine things in our head and then try to find a home for them, first in the welcome (hopefully) arms of an artist and then in the warm embrace of a publisher. Problem is, it may not be easier for a writer to think up ideas than anyone else, but theoretically, it should be easier to write than draw... Well, if it takes you longer to write than it takes a good artist to get a page drawn, you're doing something wrong. On a good day, I'm able to write around 10 pages of comic book script... If you saw how many words I put into my scripts, you'd see that it's a pretty good accomplishment. That means that, in theory, I could write 300 pages of script per month (if I was a full time writer and not just a commuting writer [2-3 hours per day], god help me on the amount I could write), which is over 9 issues of a book per month... 9 different titles. I read someplace that for an artist, some can handle a few different comics every month, but that's working full time! I've got to give it to the artists that they love their craft and are good enough to pour that amount of effort into the project... Seriously, hats off to them! I think if I was able to be a writer full time, I'd still try to keep the projects under a dozen so I had a lot of time to read, research, and spend a lot of time with my wife.

Point to this??? Probably just that I acknowledge that the time investment involved in penciling a book is significantly more than it takes to write the book. Problem with being a writer / creator / world builder, though is that each character, creature, story-line, issue is an entity into itself and putting yourself out there is a daunting prospect.

Serious question, because I really don't know the answer... What's harder, to erase a picture and re-do part of it or editing a script for faults? Is striking backspace or selecting and deleting more painful than erasing some or all of an image? If you look at pure time invested, again the artist probably wins...

Rambling... it seems to be what I do best!