It’s important to understand there are several artists involved.

But for the “main” art—there’s the penciller & inker. These are usually two separate people. Following those are the letterer (me) & the colorist.

To produce a monthly comic book of 22 pages of comics, we generally need to create one page per day each—IF we want weekends off.

As a long-time letterer who was an early user of computers in comics creation, I can do a whole issue of lettering in about 4 or 5 hours. This morning I did 18 pages before lunch. Obviously lettering is much less time-consuming than drawing each panel, though. And I’m very fast.

But even that time-frame is aided by a particular workflow that I’ve designed over time to speed up the process. Other letterers may take 2 days to do a whole 22-page issue.

If you think about the process on a particular Tuesday, the penciller may be pencilling page 7 of Super-Guy #321. That same day the inker is inking page 6—that he got from the penciller the night before. The same day the colorist may be coloring page 5—that the inker had sent the colorist the night before.

The production chain isn’t really that tight—a penciller may deliver the art to the inker in 5-page batches—but they are staggered by only a week or so in a well-run schedule.

So once a penciller is done, within a week or so everyone else has completed their job.

By the time the issue is in the comics shop—the next issue should be about half-done or completely done already…and in the shop complete in another month.