A general question about comic books

[acrovader]

I'm hardly the comic book aficionado and I have a relatively small collection (mainly stuff from the 1970s). But the other day I happened to check out some modern comic books and found something amiss. Whatever happened to those non-dialogue words in the panels that described the action, etc? The stuff now seems lightweight and you can easily breeze through a comic book in a matter of minutes. Maybe I'm way behind the times, but that extra stuff made comics more fulfilling.

[Bruce Banner]

Yeah, those narrative text panels are now largely a thing of the past, unfortunately.
A shame really, as they invariably added to the overall story.

[MRP]

Through the early 2000s there was a strong push in comics to make them more cinematic and to let the art carry more of the story. Thought bubbles disappeared as did third person narrative captions. There are still narrative captions occasionally, but they are usually first person narration that sort of replace thought bubbles to give you a glimpse of the inner thought process of a character, but have the same kind of vibe as a character voice over in a film or tv episode.

It coincided ironically, with the rise of the superstar writer not the superstar artist that dominated the 90s. Writers were working full script instead of traditional "Marvel style" where the story was plotted, then drawn, then scripted. There was a sense that a lot of the narration that you refer to was a crutch to tell the story when the art didn't do so clearly, and if the art did it's job was redundant because it was telling you what you could see.

There is a sentiment among modern comic readers that comics form the Bronze Age and earlier (i.e. up through the early 80s) were too verbose, and most of the text was redundant and unnecessary. Those with that sentiment fell that mode of storytelling is dated and unreadable and as a visual medium the art should do the bulk of the storytelling.

I can see pros and cons of both perspectives-yes the art should do the storytelling, look at the masters like Will Eisner and you can see this in play) and yes some writers would be overly verbose virtually covering up the art with dialogue, thought balloons, and narration boxes (Don McGregor and Chris Claremont come to mind here though I enjoy both of their works), but I think the pendulum has swung too far-comics are the unique blend of words and pictures in panels and pages as a storytelling medium, and the lack of strong narration contributes to the overly decompressed storytelling that plagues a lot of modern comics. There are a lot of good comics still that get the balance right, bit not a lot of them are coming from Marvel or DC these days.

-M

[Hedji]

Interesting. I guess I didn't realize the narration is gone. I always appreciated the way Stan Lee used them to communicate to the reader, that we were in on the story, in on the jokes, and part of the club. It was a welcoming device, used very creatively to draw you into the action, especially if you were picking up in the middle of a story arc.

[Starroid Raiders Dagon]

I've seen both sides of the spectrum. Check out those old Adventure issues with Starman. Humma-mama. At the other side, Hulk comic when the Eric Bana movie came out, and Silver Surfer miniseries from around the same time. I couldnt imagine buying an issue without having a quick glance inside, first.

[TrekStar]

Just curious to know if DC-Marvel comics still have the news letter page?

[MRP]

Just curious to know if DC-Marvel comics still have the news letter page?

A handful of Marvel books still have a letters page but not all. I haven' seen a letters page in a DC book in ages. Things like the Bullpen page or the DC Publishatorial or the old Meanwhile Columns by Dick Giordano are a thing of the past.

What you normally get (from Marvel) is some kind of title page with the creative credits, a blurb on what happened previously (sometimes with panels from previous issues included, sometimes not) or some kind of blurb with the premise fo the character or book (like the old intros in the Bronze Age MArvel books at the top of the splash page)

Here's an example form an FF issue from 2014...




DC not so much on the title pages, but a few other publishers use them too.

Dark Horse still does letters pages for most books, and uses the inside front cover as a title page.

The new Micronauts series from IDW has the first page titled previously with a few flashback pages, then a page that gives small pictures and blurbs about each character on page 2 before the new content starts on page 3 each issues. After the last page of new content is a page with a preview of the next cover and a next issue blurb and then a few pages of house ads.

So it varies form publisher to publisher, but most have something at the beginning that is meant to get a reader up to speed, some still do letters pages (though less so Marvel and DC on that) and some of the other publishers still have some sort of publishers page and house ads (most publishers do not sell ads to outside companies and outside of Marvel and DC, most publishers do not interupt the story pages with ads, putting all the house ads and such after the final story page.

Some creators such as Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, go out of their way to create additional material as back matter in their creator-owned books at Image Comics to flesh out the worlds they are creating instead of house ads for other books. They usually do not include this material in the trade paperbacks (though they do in the deluxe hardcover editions) to use it as incentive to pick up the books. It is usually background material on the worlds their books take place in.

Basically each publisher has its own way of doing it, but largely Marvel and DC rely on their websites and apps and online comic news/hype sites and forums to take the place of the old bullpen bulletin and letters page type material. Marvel is slightly better at retaining some of that stuff, but not much.

-M