Here are the two pages from X-Treme X-Men 1 by Claremont & Larocca of which i was talking:

"All I can think when I see those pages is that if I wanted to read a book, I'd have bought one! "

Pretty much how I felt about the last five or six years of Cerebus. Someone should have told Dave Sim that his genius as a cartoonist and comic book writer didn't extend to prose. Or dissertations about religion and sexual politics. Ouch.

I like my comics to be as well writen as books. And i like it when it takes to me some time to fully read them. Words could be about nothing of course, and ink lost. But that's not the case with Claremont. With him words=story, and thats exactly what i'm looking for. When i see pages like the two i posted above i think that this is the kind of comicbook i want to read.

Of course i read lot of books too, and i've always been a big reader since childhood. I like my comics to look more like novels than like tv shows. I prefer it when they use narative captions, thought clouds and don't just rely on flashy pictures and pseudo-witty dialogue.

I'm there for the story, not just for the art.

Of late, with more and more writers returning to the full script method, we are seeing more and more words on the page. People who simply do not think in pictures doing all their storytelling in the text, instead of letting the artists do their jobs.

Whatever. It's more messing with Stan's core concept of what makes a mutant. Not that there was much of that to be seen in the last thirty years or so.

I think one key shift in the comics is, say 10 years ago, Claremont would have written this scene with the X-men fighting robots in the Danger room or something else ACTIVE while saying just about the same thing - or at the very least, had the flash backs be to very ACTIVE scenes instead of portraits, and now, it's sitting around talking heads -- it is JUST Exposition now. ::yawn::

By the way -- on the pages posted above, which of the characters are the heavy smokers? So heavy, in fact, that they have filled up the panels they're in and actually sent smoke spilling over into adjoining panels.