I was in a comics store recently with a good friend, who was astonished to learn that in comics work, there are often several artists who contribute to the finished work. The simplest explanation I could offer about the penciler/inker divide is that the pencil artist is often the better storyteller, and the inker is the better finish artist. Reasons and mileage will vary on that. In comics, I'm a one-man show (not surprising when you consider my peers like Jeff Smith, Colleen Doran, Paul Pope, and Terry Moore are as well). Commercially, it's much more common for the artist do do the work solo from start to finish.

I'm doing a lot more work in the final inking of a piece than I used to do - mostly because I already know what I'm going to be doing on certain textures, so I don't really have to render them in pencil. So for a drawing, I need to get the composition right, and certain details (such as facial features) that I don't want to improvise in ink. But all the rest can be done on the fly.

The best recent example is this piece I just did for the excellent (EXCELLENT, should be a novel) story "Mudlarks", by Kat Otis, for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show magazine. The pencil art is below. Click through on the link underneath to see the finished art to compare. (The preview is free - but this story alone is worth the $2.50 price to read the whole magazine.)



http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i16&article=_004

(Also - clicking on the magazine illo will give you a bigger pop-out window so you can better compare the art.)