Last year sometime I came upon "Comic Party", a manga and animé series based on a Japanese video game about, of all the strange things, creating and selling amateur comics (i.e., doujinshi). "Comic Party" is very uneven, ranging from really great to head-stabbingly dull, but until somebody makes The Great American Self-Referential Webcomic, it's as close as I've seen to depicting what being a webcomic artist is actually like.

(TokyoPop is publishing a domestically-grown take on the same idea, titled "DramaCon", actually, but it's still about doujinshi -- just Yankee doujinshi.)

One of the interesting cultural differences is the concept of the "comic circle." In the manga world, if "Comic Party" and "DramaCon" are any indicator, the prevalent model is for teams of people to work on a single title as a club. But in webcomics, teams seem to be very much the exception rather than the norm. Most of the webcomic artists I know (myself included for many years) do most or all of the work themselves, from the writing to the art to the HTML of their websites.

Some do it because they're control freaks and want it all done exactly their way; others do it because they can't find anybody else willing to help them out. There seems to be a certain indicator of status when you've reached the point where you get a "t-shirt guy" or webmaster who'll take over some of that work for you.

While this is great for all our Little Emperor egos, I do sometimes wonder if this is keeping many webcomics from being the best they could be. Most people are better at one element of a comic than another -- words and images are two different disciplines, and mastery of both is a lifetime struggle. If you can write easily but can't draw a straight line with a ruler, why not hook up with a better artist? If you can draw beautiful pictures but can't structure a sentence to save your life, why not hook up with a better writer?

One of the reasons I let NeverNever stay dormant for as long as I did, was that I didn't feel my art style was right for the project, and I didn't want that limitation to hurt it. Fortunately, I managed to team up with an artist who is just right, and NN is better than it has ever been.

It helps that I am a competent artist and can communicate with Sue about what will make a given panel work or not work -- speaking the same language is important. But because she can draw the strip with the look I wanted it to have, I don't have to fight with that part and can concentrate on making sure the writing is its best.

Is it just that finding the right partner is difficult? Is it ego? Is it that doing webcomics is such a fringe activity that teaming up is just not logistically feasible? What makes it such a solitary pursuit for so many?