How do Ohba and Obata split the work on a manga?

Death Note, Bakuman and Platinum End all credit the same division of labor: Tsugumi Ohba for story, Takeshi Obata for art. In practice, Ohba's contribution arrives as thumbnails, complete miniature pages carrying the dialogue, the panel layout and basic drawings. An editor reviews them, and they are sent to Obata with the script finalized and the layout mostly done.

From there the page becomes Obata's. He determines the characters' expressions and the camera angles and produces the final artwork, the faces, the clothes, the gothic architecture. Ohba, meanwhile, guarded the tempo and kept the dialogue as concise as possible, and he planned Death Note's ending and its exact length in advance: the series stops at precisely 108 chapters because he built the thumbnails toward that number.

The strangest part is how little the two men met. They did not meet in person at all while the pilot chapter was made; the editor told Ohba there was no need. During serialization they rarely met face to face and worked through their editor, and their first in-person meeting at the editorial office came in January 2004, a month after Death Note had already begun.