Osamu Tezuka is an extreme example that disproves the idea that artists can't write. One does not have a museum put up in one's honor for being mediocre.
Oh, absolutely - Tezuka was a genius. Allow me to list a few other artists that can write: Scott McCloud, Paul Chadwick (author of CONCRETE) and Walt Simonson, whose THOR run was the most mindblowing since Kirby left (though Tom DeFalco's later use of the Tomorrow Man and the Thor Corps were equally interesting).
However, the reason they are so extraordinary as to be worthy of mention is that artists that write well are
rare. And even the writers mentioned as good examples of artist/writers have never done work as good as when they were paired up with someone else. Sure, I like KAMANDI too, but it wasn't as mind-blowing and fun and written as smartly as FANTASTIC FOUR. Jack Kirby's art, without a writer to tell him what to draw, got lazier and more simplified; artists draw things that are easy to draw. George Perez's WONDER WOMAN was forgettable and imagination-free, removing most of the little elements that made Wonder Woman charming and changing her into a second-rate, inferior female Superman (why was so wrong with gliding and the robot plane, Georgey?). It was easily inferior to the work George Perez did with Kurt Busiek in JLA/AVENGERS and AVENGERS. But here's the thing: Perez's Wonder Woman didn't
totally blow. The thing about dancing bears is, it's not that they can dance well, but that they can do it at all. And George Perez does deserve some credit for the fact that he was AWARE of his inadequacies and very wisely asked for a plotter (Busiek) to work with, when he was offered the sole position of writer/artist, something the arrogant and childish John Byrne has never been able to bring himself to do.
And for every Jack Cole or Tezuka, there are a thousand artists that use the prestige of their artwork as leverage to manipulate others into giving them a job they are not qualified to do. Byrne, McFarlane, Mike Grell, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, Chuck Austen, Howard Chaykin, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen (sorry, Erik, we've all gotten tired of your one-trick-pony): my God, it reads like a WHO'S WHO list of the mediocre. In fact, it's no coincidence that the period from the 1980s to the mid-1990s that had writer-artist singularities dominate comics, with writers viewed as unecessary to the creative process, were possibly the the deepest nadir that comics in their
entire history ever experienced, and it is all entirely to blame on the arrogant presumption that someone good at art may also be good at a
totally different field. Many cite problems with the manipulative gimmicry with the 1990s (variant covers, et.al.); comics have always been dependent on good-natured hucksterism, this wasn't the problem. The real problem with writer/artists is that the reason they were so common was because writing well, plotting, and characterization were skills that were no longer valued.
