Qfyilyi

I believe the word comicist is a valid word (for one who is a follower of comics), but it doesn't sound right to me.

Example sentence:

He was an accomplished comicist after decades of working in the industry.

ist definition:

a follower of a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement.

Some words sound natural with ist, such as cartoonist and scientist. But the ist added to comic sounds contrived.

Are there any alternatives with the same meaning? Are there rules for adding letters to ist to improve pronunciation?

The clos­est we have to or­tho­graph­ic rules that could ap­ply
here is that words end­ing in ‑c that get end­ings that start
with e, i, or y must first add a k to pre­serve the sound.
That’s why words like pic­nic and traf­fic reg­u­lar­ly be­come
pic­nick­er and traf­fick­er re­spec­tive­ly.

So you could cer­tain­ly have a comick­er.

But words that take ‑ist don’t seem to care how they’re pro­nounced,
so you wind up with phys­ics but phys­i­cist, lyrics but
lyr­i­cist. Th­ese leads you down the un­pleas­ant path from comics to comi­cist, which
I can­not blame you in the least for be­ing un­com­fort­able with. I am, too.

What­ev­er you do, your main prob­lem is go­ing to be that with­out
sup­port­ing con­text to prime your read­er, peo­ple won’t be sure
whether you are talk­ing about hu­man co­me­di­ans or about graph­ic
car­toons. This hap­pens al­ready with words like comi­cry, which
is am­bigu­ous in this same way: it makes you won­der whether it
is about lit­er­a­ture or the stage or the graph­ic arts.

Com­ic books have on­ly been around by that name for a smidgen more
than a cen­tu­ry, so you won’t be able to rope in old words. A
com­i­car is a writ­er of come­dies, while co­mi­ces were a
sort of Ro­man as­sem­bly, per­haps bet­ter known as co­mi­tia
these days if they’re men­tioned at all.

On­ly in 1913 did com­ic artists start to re­fer to those artists
who ac­tu­al­ly drew comics. Then well be­fore the end of that
cen­tu­ry, at­tribu­tive use such as com­ic col­lec­tors no longer
raised any eye­brows.

Al­so dur­ing the lat­ter­most parts of that same cen­tu­ry did
comix come to mean an un­der­ground or counter‑cul­tur­al com­ic
book in­tend­ed not for chil­dren but for adults. How­ev­er, I don’t
know how wide­ly that word is known, and of course au­ral­ly
comix­ist is no bet­ter than comi­cist.

Nonethe­less, sev­er­al pos­si­bil­i­ties along that line which you
might con­sid­er are a comix­ist or a comix­er. Th­ese are not
es­tab­lished terms, but they wouldn’t con­fuse most any­one hear­ing
them.

How­ev­er, in writ­ing it might be less than scin­til­lat­ing­ly
clear whether a comix­er was a fan of com­ic books or some­one
who co­öper­at­ed with one or more oth­ers in some sort of mix­ing
project; that is, a co-mix­er.

Comicist from comics is no less valid a formation than physicist from physics, and, in fact, has been attempted before:

Those who heard Mr. Andrews on Tuesday evening, have obtained a knowledge of the great literateur and comicist [Mark Twain] which would take weeks and months of rigorous study to accomplish … — Broadford Courier And Reedy Creek Times (Broadford VC), 24 July 1896.

Up till now,' one of them writes, ' we did not know Puccini as a comicist except in some isolated examples … — The Musical Times 60 (1919), 138.

Now Mark Twain is usually called a humorist and with Puccini, the word looks like a nonce creation to pair with dramatist. In any case, the word was not frequent enough to appear at its proper place, nestled between comices and comicly in volume 3 of the New English Dictionary, 1893.

This is tantamount to hanging a “vacant” sign on the word and either waiting for a new lexical tenant or letting it fade away as so mainy failed coinages.

A fanzine in the 1990s took up the word in the sense you envision and used it as the title:

Source

For comicist to become a common designation for a comics author/writer/artist requires more than an ephemeral publication or a discussion on a website like this one. If, say, the late Stan Lee_ had casually referred to himself a few times in public as a comicist, then all the kids who drew comics on the back of their biology notebooks would want to grow up to be one. And a word is reborn.