Why do some many old comics have "dialouge" that is essentially talking and expositing to the audience. Like who would ever say naturally what the cop says at the bottom right
Why do some many old comics have "dialouge" that is essentially talking and expositing to the audience.
What are some of the reasons you think they did that?
Its for kids obviously, but kids don't need things spelled out for them... Isn't Cinemaphile always talking about how kids aren't braindead moronic and can interpret things for themselves..
>kids don't need things spelled out for them
Anon, kids are fricking moronic, much like you.
could be that unlike modern art, the old art wasnt really clear on what was happening or what they were trying to convey, so they had to add expositional lines/thoughts for the readers to understand that Peter wasnt just eating shit for no reason, he was trying to break his fall.
To save money on art.
Wow OP you are the first person in all of history to point out that super hero comics can be silly and unrealistic, keep an eye on your mailbox your trophy will be coming soon
Imagine how good this classic run would be if the writing were better.
It would probably then deserve all the current merit.
cop almost sounds sarcastic
Just generally old serial style writing, and lack of faith in visual storytelling. With EC comics,IIRC often the writing was even all done before the art(as in, the artist got boards with the lettering
The other thing is, we take for granted just how familiar we are with these characters and general genre conventions. Like we know how Spider-man is supposed to move thanks to 60 years of comics, movies, games, etc. But in 1962? this might be your first Spider-man comic.
You might remember the days of 90's/2000's anime dubs where they'd occasionally make jokes about characters using hair gel or try to explain genre conventions because they weren't sure how American kids would respond to them. Now a kid can pick up a manga at target and just go with it.
Sometimes they were paid by the word, sometimes they were unsure if the art by itself was enough to properly convey what was happening, sometimes it's because these comics were written for incredibly young children (think kindergartners) and each issue was assumed to be someone's first so they had to make sure everyone was 100% clear on what everyone's deal was.
IIRC, Stan Lee had a rule that each panel had to have dialogue in it.
My thought was always that the more time it took to read a comic, they figured the more it felt like you got your money’s worth.
I have that feeling still. It depends on how much it is, but if a whole 35 page issue is all silent, then I'd breeze through it and feel it was 4.99 wasted.
Honestly I've never minded this but I like reading and it's easiest for me to process information through written language. If none of these dialogue boxes were there I could still tell what's happening but it would be harder for me.
Seems fine to me I like it, there are actual bad examples from the same age of comics
Wasn't this Stan Lee purposefully making all female characters moronic, sometimes even contradicting the script the actual artists had crafted?
Stan was casually chauvinistic, he didn't hate women. I can't recall if he even wrote that page, but with the Marvel method the artist was the one who drew that so the writer had to write the dialogue explaining what was happening.
Yeah, mostly when it came to Jean Grey. Often times, he would have Professor X guiding her through the most obvious of tasks.
Stan was actually pretty progressive when it came to strong female characters
You mean Kirby was pretty progressive and Lee tried to rewrite as much as he could in order to stop it
Marvel's female characters really were not that progressive regardless of who was responsible. There are girls from the golden age (and earlier) written way better.
Neither of them were perfect. They wrote in Crystal into the FF to replace Sue after she had Franklin and barely did anything with her and that's on Kirby as much as Lee.
>Panel: Medusa uses her powers to disable the FF's security
>Dialogue: Thank you Wizard for telling me how to use my powers to do this thing. I couldn't do this without you
>Panel: Fantastic Four watch this happening
>Dialogue: It's fine. Our systems weren't working anyway because Sue, with her poor woman brain, forgot to turn them on.
Yes. Yes, he did.
>Jean uses her powers to avoid falling into a hole
>anons spin this into Stan Lee being a misogynist or Gwen being trans
not even twitter reaches this far
God fricking damn comics used to be so fricking easy in the so-called "golden age". You could put a gorilla on the cover of the comic and make more money than god. That postwar boom really was like solid cocaine, huh?
I can sort of see someone saying this but not the way they're saying it. Silver age stuff does have a habit of really weird explanatory constructions though, especially DC.
A few reasons
The main one was that at the time, comics were one of the main form of entertainment for kids so they'd compete a lot. Hence you had a lot of explanation for kids who just picked up a random issue
You also have the fact that society back then wasn't zoom-zooms so reading more than 6 sentences in a page was perfectly fine.
Another reason is that comics weren't just 'for kids', they were trying to capture teens and young adults too, actually. So by having less reliance on pictures and more on words, it was more 'mature'.
>You also have the fact that society back then wasn't zoom-zooms so reading more than 6 sentences in a page was perfectly fine.
>Another reason is that comics weren't just 'for kids', they were trying to capture teens and young adults too, actually. So by having less reliance on pictures and more on words, it was more 'mature'.
Where does the interpretation that more words = smarter storytelling. Brevity is the sould of wit and all that, but more practically who wants to read a story that repeats semi-obvious things back to them in the form of stitled dialogue
Well the first line you quoted is to do with attention span - not more words = intelligent. So I have no idea why you mentioned it.
The problem is that comics weren't really 'stories' in how you would see them now with storylines.
A lot of them might be 2-3 parts weekly or monthly at most. The stories were mostly just like episodic tv shows.
Batman (1960s tv show) was literally how things were done in comics then
>Brevity is the soul of wit
You’re dumb.
No u
1. Stan Lee was filling in the speech bubbles after all the art was finished so he threw as much dialogue in as he could to cover all bases
2. Lee actually thought that readers wanted to read as much dialogue as possible, he thought a comic you could skim in minutes by just looking at the pictures was a rip-off
3. His writing background was in creating promotional material so he naturally had a sensationalist "I can't believe what I'm seeing" perspective to everything he wrote
I read the classic ASM run when I was a kid, I’m a 1999 zoomer
I liked all the wordiness and dialogue because I loved to read, I wasn’t just looking at goofy pictures
Writers got paid less if there wasn't enough text
Remember to ignore people who pretend they know for a fact exactly what went down in the original Marvel bullpen
Including Kirby's own son?
https://twitter.com/Kirby4Heroes/status/1670191107169484800?s=20
especially
Yes, including Kirby's son.
How great is the avaerage person's understand of the events that occured at their dad's work?
Why would you take such a biased source as indisputable?
Because as he says in that letter he directly watched his father work at home. And because it's not the first and it won't be the last piece of evidence that Stan Lee didn't do shit.
The only accounts you should take are the ones from Lee, Kirby, Ditko, etc. the guys who were there. And even then they should be taken with a grain of salt, because a lot of stuff didn't come out until decades later, half remembered and tainted by emotion and substance abuse.
Stuffy but kind of charming. but I wouldn't use it on everything, in fact any crutch is bad unless it's your style
>unless it's your style
Still a crutch.
Yes, but that individualizes one's work at the same time
Stan Lee the public grifter.
Stan Lee admitted his flaws and mistakes and was always quick to praise other comics legends, it's haters like Kirby who thought they were perfect and lived spiteful lives.
Who does so much hentai have to have dialog that is just the characters narrating to the audience? "Oh my god, you're fricking my butthole, my brain is breaking, oh my god you're going to cum inside my ass", like we can see it happening in the panel you don't have to explain it
I just don't see how Ditko Spider-Man and Kirby Fantastic Four are considered the pinnacle of comics with that clunky ass writing. It seems incredibly backwards to me.
Same reason old Renaissance paintings are considered some of the peak of human achievement even though modern realistic artists can paint similarly or better- there's something to be said about being the first to have the idea or the freshness of it.
That's a nonsense comparison. Renaissance art is a revival of Classical art combined with then-modern developments. It wasn't the first anything.
Also, Renaissance art IS great. Its had its own resurgence via the Neoclassical and Pre-Raphaelite movements in the 1700s and 1800s. These comics are considerably clunky, given what's available today, and even at the time. Renaissance art holds up.
Also, comics preceding these, and some running concurrently, were better in the art and writing departments. They just weren't heavily-marketed, never-ending superhero "epics".
There's some charm in it imo. Been reading Thor from start to end, and a lot of it is them trying to either over-explain these new sci-fi concepts to kids who might be confused and ass-pulling random powers out when necessary. A lot of comics writing from 40s-60s was 1-2 dimensional Good guy with the patented marvel "1 or 2 flaws TM", like Thor's bum leg and being bad with women, and comics writing was similarly pretty basic. The reason they get remembered so fondly is because for the time this was high concept stuff and really very creative.
There's definitely charm, but that's about it.
They have good art and plots and so many imaginative ideas.
Because boomers cannot do subtly
Anon the people writing these comics came before boomers.
nooooooo~ boomers is everyone older than me and zoomers is everyone younger than me
They were called comic BOOKS for a reason.
how else am I supposed to know what the cop is thinking? if I only look at his face I might as well assume he's thinking the shit he took last night and the blood on the paper.
>how else am I supposed to know what the cop is thinking
Don't know if your memeing here, but just show his horrified expression or have him say something like, "My God...". We can infer from there what he is thinking, the audience doesn't need a mental soliloquy for the cop to explain his though process.
Capeshit isn't well written, more at eleven.
Huh
I miss this kind of writing.
It's actually better than the garbage we get now.