As for a comics connection--look up the illustrated Tale of Genji from the Heian period (1100ce or so, iirc). About 20% of it survives, the various pieces of the hand-scrolls separated among various museums, and I would say it is sequential art. The production sequence which the experts say used was one which I think any person familiar with comics would recognize.

The European masters did the same thing, with figure specialists and landscape specialists working on the same paintings. Sometimes we know who they were, other times it's "studio of..." Too bad they didn't put more detailed credits on the works. Figures: Jazzy Giovanni Cimabue, backgrounds: Jolly Giotto, letters: Avuncular Arturo di Simeca.

I've come to think that our concern with assigning a work of art to one artist is our own hangup, a consequence of our modern cult of celebrity, and ultimately born of the same human urge that once created countless gods as personifications of War, Love, Wealth, Fidelity, etc. Trying to analyze an artwork exclusively in terms of a single artist's vision is like trying to analyze the chemical composition of a rainbow.

We scoff nowadays at worshipping gods because we're too sophisticated to believe in their literal truth (and refuse to accept the possibility that those who once worshipped them knew perfectly well that they were worshipping metaphors), and instead we create metaphors like "Peter Jackson" and heap worshipful praise upon him and credit this imaginary superhuman with having personally created every last aspect of the movies that were merely directed by the real person who shares the name.

Various genres differ in how explicitly collaborative they are. Theater and comic books are certainly more so than most others; perhaps something like poetry is least of all. But you can't get away from collaboration and to pretend that you can is to worship a metaphor. Even a poet can't get away from collaboration with his or her readers, because all writing itself depends on shared understanding of the meanings and associations of words, and a work that tries to go beyond that shared understanding, like Finnegans Wake, doesn't make an effect until a reader/collaborator makes the effort to assimilate and share in the author's meanings.

DJM writes: ... but surely that does not also mean that the artist would be undeserving of the primary credit for his creations.

And why is it important to us that the artist receive primary credit? This is a hangup in our own minds, not that of the artist (who in this case is dead and could no longer care less, but who when living is unlikely to have craved that the work of his collaborators be dismissed).

Dave Bull writes: But who do we remember now - that man who carefully drew every line in the print? The carver who brought those lines to life? The printer? No, the only name we remember is that of the man who brushed that original sketch.

Again, our hangup. Who do WE remember, WE WE WE. As if it matters whom we remember; as if the artist is supposed to feel warm and fuzzy up in Heaven because we've burned some extra incense at his altar.

It's all just vanity and idolatry. The artwork exists, and EVERYTHING in the community at the time contributed to it: the quality of the sunlight that day, the shared meaning of what a particular kind of brushstroke evokes, the assistant who filled in the sky, the communal understandings that caused the artist to want to express this idea to other people, the strawberries that the printer ate the evening before doing his part of the work.

The artwork came into existence through means too complicated for us to analyze completely, and each of us reacts to it differently in an infinitely complicated way that is influenced by every experience we've ever had. Everything else is a metaphor, useful when you want to talk about what is ultimately ineffable, but an illusion all the same.

Adam, could Miller have been exposed to ukiyo-e through manga? Or did he study them directly? Manga, of course, draw on the Japanese tradition of integrated text and graphics that goes back, literally, for a millenium. (It came and went in Japanese art, faded out almost entirely in the Meiji period and then came roaring back in manga in the '50s. Modern manga themselves--I just recently looked them up, came from a fusion of Japanese cartooning technique and Western cinematography.)

Teresa, it occurs to me that ukiyo-e were anything but traditional Japanese art, by the way. They are syncretic works, western-influenced. This is most clearly indicated by the use of perspective. (Which, by the way, sometimes the artists faked.)