Keith Giffen was the first that I recall to make regular use of the elongated pause in comics. Examples exist before him, but Giffen would do it routinely. This would be the set-up in panel one. Panel two is a stat of panel one. Panel three (if you're lucky) would be the reaction to whatever was said in panel one, still a stat of panel one, but maybe with a slight change made to one of the faces, or a character redrawn to wave his arms. If you weren't lucky, if you got panels four, five, and six as stats of panel one as well, as the characters all waited on hold for the appropriate "beat" the author or artist felt the joke required.

This, I believe, was the crack in the wall that signalled to writers and editors that audiences would sit still for books with little or no actual content. You could do a page of stats and get by. No one had to do anything for that page. Hey, sometimes you could do that twice in a book. Just so long as the characters appeared on-panel, in costume, that was enough for the reader. They could be talking about hockey scores. Or playing guessing games. So long as the illusion of time progressing was given, the illusion of story progression would be there as well.

Bendis made copious use of this trope in his autobiographical comics and his first hit, Powers. Pages and pages of stats. No one's moving. Nothing's happening, and yet, look, magically the idea of the story taking place still happens... "Wow. That moment must have had terrific impact on the characters. Look how still everyone is."

Now stories that do not employ this "every moment is depicted and YOU are there in that moment!" style of comic storytelling are deemed choppy and episodic. "Superman was in Kandor in this panel and he's at work in the next. Two panels later, he's in Paris, then London, and Central America. This comic is stupid..."

It's this, as well as the rise of Power Girl, that convinces me that most fans are just here for the padding...

   This has me thinking a bit.  Once more, I have regrets about the state of the comics industry.  Other than JB's IDW work and a few other indie comics, I've not picked up anything from the Big Two since Neal Adams concluded his Batman: Odessey maxi.  The magic is no longer there.

   So what is there to look forward to?  While it's sad to say so, I really wonder if a complete and total collapse woudn't be such a bad thing in the long run.  After all, the Internet is one place where we can go look for something that might echo what grabbed our interest in the first place, and I have a feeling that it'll be there once all the publishers go belly-up.

   The drawback then, though, is that comics will only be a hobby for aging fans like myself, and not a viable publishing industry.

I think the other issue we have is that fandom sees "Johns, Bendis or Morrison" on the cover, and those names become more important than Superman, Spider-Man or The New Mutants.

When I first started with comics, it always seemed a happy coincidence that Marv Wolfman wrote Teen Titans or Green Lantern. I didn't actively seek either title out because of the creative team, but love of the character. 

Comics creators have been hyped for ages, though. It was a big deal when Sidney Smith signed a million dollar contract for his work on The Gumps 90 years ago. Fans followed Milton Caniff when he left Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon's debut made national headlines because it was the new Caniff feature. My mom's generation could tell "The Good Duck Artist" from the others on the Scrooge/Donald Duck books. Wally Wood's first issue of Daredevil had his name splashed on the cover in large type. Stan Lee's credit boxes were the most elaborate in comics, and all of the EC guys signed their works. DC's "Kirby is coming!" ad campaign. Companies giving a push to their top talent is as old as the notion of "top talent."

••

As usual, Andrew, you bend and stretch history to make it fit your point.

Very few artists on the early strips achieved the kind of fame of Caniff on TERRY, or Grey on ORPHAN ANNIE, or Capp on LI'L ABNER. Most of the strips, in fact, were produced by studios, with artists toiling anonymously under someone else's byline. Stylistically, artists could be recognized, and even followed, but it was still the characters who drew the majority of the attention. This was even more the case in comic books, where regular use of credits was virtually unknown for the first couple of decades -- and where, again, the name on the book did not always represent the person producing the work. "Bob Kane" anyone?

Stan made credits a regular feature in Marvel comics, in large part because he had dreams of Hollywood, and wanted to make the books Marvel produced "feel" like movies. But for many years, the characters were still more important than the talent. I could recognize artists like Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Wayne Boring, Carmine Infantino, but in most cases I didn't know their names, and that somewhat muted the focused adulation.

Walt Simonson has even said he thinks I was the first comicbook "superstar" in the modern sense. I'd be more inclined to point to Neal Adams, but in some respects Walt may be right. When Neal was making his explosive debut, the industry was still a lot bigger than it was by the time I arrived. Most people buying comics were buying them for the characters. It took the major sea change brought by the creation of the Direct Sales Market to bring in the "rock stars".

There are many years, and many damaging philosophical changes between "Hey, look! The guy who draws WONDER WOMAN is drawing METAL MEN!" and "I only follow Morrison/Bendis/Whoever."