So when creating characters, how much input do you have in their design? Is it mostly artist with input from you, 50/50 collaboration, or mostly you with input from artist? Or does it depend on the artist?

USUALLY, the process goes like this.

I come up with a character. If I know the artist, I may ask them first for things they like to draw and aim the new characters at that. When writing the Secret Six ongoing, I created several new characters and asked Nicola which of them she would like to help create, and she chose Jeannette (interestingly, one of those characters eventually became Katharsis).

But usually I come up with the character, their story, their traits, and their basic look, and I give that over to the artist. Because I am not an artist, I often include reference for hairstyles and the like.

The artist draws the sketch and the editor and I might ask for adjustments.

The secret of the industry is that no all writers are good at creating new characters, some mainly do their best work on pre-existing ones. Another secret is that some artists are not great designers, even some of the most popular artists.

A guy like Joe Prado (who designed Black Alice and White Canary) is easy to work with, he’s a FANTASTIC designer, as is Nicola Scott (Misfit, Jeannette) and many others. Neil Googe designed the entire cast of Welcome to Tranquility. It’s easy with artists like that.

With artists who aren’t great at design, sometimes the tweaking is more pronounced.

My most recent experience in this was working with Freddie Williams II, who did an amazing job designing all the characters in the Movement. I am wild about the stuff he came up with, and we went through LOTS of tweaks, but they were minor things about ethnicity and hair and costume colors. The main designs were all spot on first time.