Well, I may quibble that artists still can sell larger number books. JIm Lee drew some Suicide Squad to bring people in. Ivan Reis still sets a book on fire for the arc he draws. Coipel probably helped Clone Conspiracy. Cheung on CW II (...or did I just reverse those artists?)
Yeah, that last is a little backwards and a tad off as it was Chueng on C.C and was David Marquez on CWII, but I get what ya mean.
And true, I will admit that a high profile artist
CAN increase sales, but only to a point and only for so long, usually.
A writer just keeps the peeps
Plus, when it comes to artist pulling the sales, I think character also plays a huge part of it. With your boy Reis, whom I also really like, yes, he can put some numbers on characters like Green Lantern, but is it more because it is the combination of Reis with GL that is the main pull, more than just Reis?
Take Reis' Cyborg .... from that DC second wave of 52 titles (I forgot what they called it) ... his Cyborg #1 was the 37th ranked comic that month (sales to retailers) while the IDW/DC company crossover Star Trek/Green Lantern #1 was the 21st. And I am not trying to blast on Ivan, I do like his stuff, but he is not pulling the people into Cyborg. Of course it could be said Cyborg would have only sold half as much without him on the title and to that I say, heck yeah, probably, but DC really pushed that title as they were really pushing Cyborg as the new black hero on Justice League and Reis didn't bring him into the top 20 ... as an arbitrary number of value that really has no meaning.
And yes, Jim Lee is the poster child for pulling sales and he will continue to be so, but Lee's Suicide Squad was beaten out of the number one spot for that month by the #1 issues of both All-Star Batman and Harley Quinn. Two really popular characters and once people realized Lee was only doing the backup story and that the title was not written well, at all, the title dropped to 27th (issue #4) and 35th (issue #5) just two months later, with Lee still on art. And again, the question is would Suicide Squad sold as much at first without Lee? Heck no, but his art is not keeping the numbers.
I think it is like Marvel's famous resetting to issue #1, Artists may pull people in initially, but in the long run the retention is not there. However, artists are very, very important. They are, of course. I still say they are 20% of why a book sells. The remaining, off the top of my head, as I am making this up as I type
... character or title 45%, writer 25% and 10% company/publisher
. I may have to really sit down and apply percentages to that.
But bottom line, as you said we do agree basically and Marvel has crossed that line, making the characters look horrible and killing the books and also killing anything the writer has to say as, yep, artists are
THAT important.
EDIT - I hardly feel like editing this now, after Jeff's last post in Mega, but ...
I do want to acknowledge one thing about art in comics and, more precise, its value. While I don't feel as though art can pull the readers that writing or character can, essentially, I do know that it can have the exact opposite effect. In-fact I call it the Dynamite Effect(™ ...
). I will usually just skip right over any Dynamite comics as I know, for the most part, what the art will look like. Standard popcorn stuff with no or limited visual flair. Another example of just how important art can be/is
Or EDIT 2 - also like how you saw Del Mundo's Avengers and immediately said "Nope"
Yep, art can kill a book reallllll fast.