This discussion also brings back what I recall reading in my copy of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.  There, Stan Lee and John Buscema ran through a "quiet" situation by demonstrating how changes in "camera angle", the positioning of characters on each panel, and attention to certain details in action could make even the most banal conversation between men in an office could come across as exciting as the most spectacular superhero fight.  It seems that this lesson has been forgotten by many recent art school grads.

   Maybe we ought to have a Top 10 list of "Most Unnecessary Scenes" for comics, such as the static talking heads page that appeared in a recent volume of the Avengers.  That one could've used a kick in the pants from Stan and John!

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I have long suspected this is at least PART of the reason books get behind schedule. I can't begin to fully imagine how demoralizing it must be for the artist -- already reduced to Art Robot by being handed a full script -- to have to face page after page, day after day, of talking heads.

We'd never be able to get away from ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN

I read the first trade a few years ago based on the good buzz. It takes him something like 6 issues to put on the costume! And people/critics think this is a GOOD thing! To me, that's what started the era of decompression.

Reading all this, I do worry that there are readers out there (by which I'm not talking about JBF'ers! I mean the idiots who prompted this thread) who have two settings: big splash-page action set-pieces, and copy-pasted panels of 'talking heads'.

And yet, give them an actual character-driven story (remember those things, old-timers?), and it's 'soap opera'. Go figure.


Of course, this might also be due to the fact for far too many, the only kind of character-driven drama they know IS soap opera, and thus they equate any other kind of storytelling with it. Like when I'd want to punch my locker door in frustration at school, whenever I'd hear people talk about Shakespearean 'unrequited love' as being like something they'd seen on 'EastEnders' or 'Hollyoaks' (for readers outside the UK, these are home-grown soaps - and they're not great, frankly).

(worst case in recent years for me - 'Downton Abbey'. I finally managed to put my finger on what bugged me about it, and it's more of the same - it's made by modern TV writers used to the soap opera format, and thus it's a 'generic modern soap in period costume'. Compare that to things like the original 'Upstairs, Downstairs', or actual 'period drama', where the choice of setting defines the characters/storytelling, and is more than just 'bodywork' that disguises the same-old same-old under the 'hood')