Tic.
The very first time I saw a superhero comic, I knew there was something off in it, something that annoyed me tremendously. I could say it took me months, maybe years to realize what it was, but I would be lying. I knew what was wrong two pages later, and it was more than one thing.
The first thing that annoyed me was the sheer amount of words in bold and italic. Not only is it hard on the eyes, it slowed me down considerably. I like each character to have a different voice in my head, as well as a proper accent, so I imagine each text balloon being spoken, and all those words in bold and italic automatically sounded stressed in my head, as if the characters were putting a lot of emphasis on them. It became very unnatural.
Tac.
Dear gods, that is more trouble to write than it is to read.
The second thing was the ratio between text and images. Perhaps because superhero comics are mostly in color it takes too long and too much money to produce each page, each panel, so authors cram all the information they can in each one. I recall a classic image of Thor punching some villain and delivering a speech at the same time – I think the text bubble was bigger than the drawing, even. And if the dialog must flow, the balloons just sprout a new one, linked to the first but positioned so it is read in proper order. Like Little Gamers, only instead of sitting on a sofa they say four things during a single step while running after a villain.
I wanted to avoid the comparison, but on to it: the closest eastern thing I see to it is manga and anime about sports. Between a tennis player hitting the ball and the ball reaching the other court, or a basketball player shooting and the ball hitting the loop, other players and the audience analyze his movement, how fatigued he is, what strategy he most likely had in mind, what his probable next move will be, the possibility of success and what else he must do to win before the time runs out. All that is there, however, to make the viewer understand what is going on – no point in a story about a sport where all the important action happens in sixty frames or two panels.
Tic.
The third thing is the need to follow two dozen different publications to know what is going on. The casual reader is strolling around some Batman comic and bumps into something that makes no sense and has a (*) next to it that says “See New Titans issue 46″. No, I just want to understand this thing here, I hate New Titans. I have no interest at all in what some incarnation of Robin went to do after he left the Batcave, I should not have to read it to understand Batman.
Also, this.
As I end this post, I feel like I am cheating on my readers, few as they may be, when I comment on something that has been talked about innumerous times before. Something that was beaten to death in the late 90s, during the comics crisis, and pointed as reasons for the near collapse of the industry. Except the bold and italic text, I never saw anyone complaining about that.
And this whole post would probably take a single page in a comic. It would fit between the moment where I pick up the slice of bread from the table and the moment where I bite it.
Tac.
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Ou, vai ver, os editores de quadrinhos leram Proust demais. Meu primeiro pet nag com quadrinhos foi o fato de eles só usarem pontos de exclamação no final das frases; mas depois eles passaram a pontuar certo, e nunca achei o número de itálicos ou negritos excessivo.
Quanto ao número de balões, tenho certeza de que era uma questão de custo de produção mesmo. Tanto que as graphic novels, que supostamente têm orçamento maior do que as edições mensais, não tinham receio de colocar quadrinhos sem balões. (Ou talvez o pessoal das graphic novels simplesmente fossem art-fags.)
Exclamação em tudo realmente é um pé. Às vezes a pessoa fala com aquela cara de -__- e com exclamação. Mas nada incomoda mais que negritos e itálicos espalhados por aí. O pior é que incomoda e demora pra perceber o que é. Tipo sede.
I left superhero comics for good in 1997 when the amount of retconning miniseries finally got to me and when I discovered that what I wanted from comics I could get in manga (mostly anyway – those decade long shounen series aren’t anything I’d buy or read).