When Did Decompression Turn into "Nothing Happened?"

[MindofShadow]

I am not an "old" timey comic book reader. I didn't start regularly reading comics into well into the 2000's.

When I go back to read some of the really old comics from the 60's and such... they are just sooooooo dense and compressed that it is a chore for me to read many of them. I am not used to it and for me, it doesn't feel like a good fit for a medium where I feel the art should tell a chunk of the story.

But... when did the switch take place to decompress to allow comics to breath a little more (which it need IMO)... and then when did that initial decompression turn into this 12 issue arcs where it takes a year to tell a story and you commonly have issues you read and nothing really happens at all? Who pioneered those switches?

EDIT:

To clarify..


1. when did decompression start? Who pioneered it?

2. when did decompression turn into "stretching the plot." Who pioneered it

[Captain M]

This is a great question, I would like to know this as well because I feel exactly what you feel. (On this subject at least). Older comics are so hard to read for me.

[Leach]

I am not an "old" timey comic book reader. I didn't start regularly reading comics into well into the 2000's.

When I go back to read some of the really old comics from the 60's and such... they are just sooooooo dense and compressed that it is a chore for me to read many of them. I am not used to it and for me, it doesn't feel like a good fit for a medium where I feel the art should tell a chunk of the story. ?

I agree with this, I've started down the path of reading introductions as they happened and reading the comics in "order". Some of those issues may be 14 or 15 pages, but I can only get through 2, maybe 3 before I have to stop for a couple days. It's tough to read some of these older issues, I've only gone through about 65 issues in the matter of 4 months.

[Nazrel]

I am not an "old" timey comic book reader. I didn't start regularly reading comics into well into the 2000's.

When I go back to read some of the really old comics from the 60's and such... they are just sooooooo dense and compressed that it is a chore for me to read many of them. I am not used to it and for me, it doesn't feel like a good fit for a medium where I feel the art should tell a chunk of the story.

But... when did the switch take place to decompress to allow comics to breath a little more (which it need IMO)... and then when did that initial decompression turn into this 12 issue arcs where it takes a year to tell a story and you commonly have issues you read and nothing really happens at all? Who pioneered those switches?

Don't call that decompression. Decompression means proper pacing. What you're describing is stretching a plot; it's what every other medium calls it.

The two should not be equated.

[MindofShadow]

Don't call that decompression. Decompression means proper pacing. What you're describing is stretching a plot; it's what every other medium calls it.

The two should not be equated.

I was asking 2 separate things


1. when did decompression start?

2. when did decompression turn into "stretching the plot"

[Iron Maiden]

I am not an "old" timey comic book reader. I didn't start regularly reading comics into well into the 2000's.

When I go back to read some of the really old comics from the 60's and such... they are just sooooooo dense and compressed that it is a chore for me to read many of them. I am not used to it and for me, it doesn't feel like a good fit for a medium where I feel the art should tell a chunk of the story.

But... when did the switch take place to decompress to allow comics to breath a little more (which it need IMO)... and then when did that initial decompression turn into this 12 issue arcs where it takes a year to tell a story and you commonly have issues you read and nothing really happens at all? Who pioneered those switches?

My joke answer to the title of the thread would be "When Bendis started writing for Marvel"

What to you find hard to read about the older comics? Too many text boxes? Thought balloons? Frankly, I miss them both. I think you got more bang for your buck at 12 , 25, 50 or 75 cents an issue, depending on the era.

To be sure, the writing could be a bit florid at times compared to some of Bendis' or other writers sparse dialogue. Bendis's trouble is he's a man of few words and sometimes he keeps repeating them. He can be good at times but he's one Marvel writer I find quite frustrating at times. His current arc in discovering Tony Stark's parents is a case in point. It's taking far too long when comics cost 4 dollars a pop and it drags on. The art is nice but the story is weak so far.

Probably one of Stan's biggest flaws and this is probably true of a lot of Silver Age writing is to describe something in a text box that the artist has already done a good job of showing in the art. But I still have no trouble going back and reading comics of that era I guess because I grew up with them.

Artists were under much more pressure in the silver age so there were many shortcuts employed ...sparse backgrounds or sometimes things shown in small panels. The pay wasn't that great per page so the more pages they could turn out, the bigger the payday for them. So maybe that could lead to the writer filling in the gaps.

[Carabas]

I am not an "old" timey comic book reader. I didn't start regularly reading comics into well into the 2000's.

When I go back to read some of the really old comics from the 60's and such... they are just sooooooo dense and compressed that it is a chore for me to read many of them. I am not used to it and for me, it doesn't feel like a good fit for a medium where I feel the art should tell a chunk of the story.

But... when did the switch take place to decompress to allow comics to breath a little more (which it need IMO)... and then when did that initial decompression turn into this 12 issue arcs where it takes a year to tell a story and you commonly have issues you read and nothing really happens at all? Who pioneered those switches?

EDIT:

To clarify..

1. when did decompression start? Who pioneered it?

Osamu Tezuka, in 1947, on Shin Takarajima (according to Wikipedia).

Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch are the ones to credit with popularising it in superhero comics.

ETA: oh, and Steranko. Jim Steranko was great at decompression in the 60's/70's.

2. when did decompression turn into "stretching the plot." Who pioneered it

That's not decompression at all. That's just padding. Decompression is a very specific literary technique.
And probably some hack in the golden age. Lovecraft was doing it on his prose stories in the 20's. People who get paid per page will tend to get as many pages as possible out of a story. Every single gratuitous fight scene that has nothing to do with the plot is 100% padding.

[LordMikel]

I'm going to go with a bit after 1990 for decompression. I remember reading Armor Wars II in Iron Man in 1987. Which led into Iron Man versus Fin Fang Foom and the Mandarin after that. But there was an issue or two between those two storylines. But slowly Marvel determined that trades are sellable and you need to thus have a 6 part storyline to sell as a trade. Followed by another 6 part storyline.

for the when did storylines get longer? I'm going to cite the Clone Saga in Spider-man circa 1994 as the culprit. My understanding, the original storyline was going to be relatively short, but sales were so high, that editoril pushed for the story to be longer. Thus setting the precedent.

[CentralPower]

It is a question of story-pacing and breakdowns. Some things just look better if they are spread-out. Modern comics tend to look better and be less jumbled. The trade-off is that less happens in a single issues. (Of course, comics have not been written as single issues for years now.)

I think the trend goes back to at least the 90s, though it was more clumsily done then.

[MindofShadow]

My joke answer to the title of the thread would be "When Bendis started writing for Marvel"

What to you find hard to read about the older comics? Too many text boxes? Thought balloons? Frankly, I miss them both.

Text bosses at that frequency and length were completely foreign to me. Not used to the "third party narrator."

It is just so.... dense. Overly dense. Like the illustrations are being suffocated to death by words.

Like this page...



So... many... words

Or something like this where the words are 100% unnecessary and the illustration alone tells the story.

[Raye]

I feel the same, I began reading in the late 90's, and I like my comics a bit decompressed, and a lot of older comics seem really rushed, cramped and unnatural to me.

As for when it started, though it was a gradual thing that didn't happen overnight, there were steps leading up to this (a lot of manga, Sandman, Watchmen, etc.), but decompression is generally thought to have really begun in the late 1990's and early 2000's, pioneered mostly by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch with their 'widescreen' very visual approach in The Authority. (which is one of my favorite books ever) Grant Morrison was doing similar things around the same time in his JLA and such. Bendis' 'talky' approach started around the same time. Which at the time people loved because his characters were talking more naturally than they had previously. People really don't generally get right to the point, there ARE a lot of um's and pauses and one word answers and all the typical Bendisisms. but it does take a lot more page space to get that done. As with anything though, it is a tool and can be done well, or poorly, or outright abused. Around this time trades began to gain more traction and people realized that if a trade told a complete story, it was a more appealing package. So people began padding where it wasn't necessary to stretch arcs to 6 issues so they could fill a trade. If a story can justify 6 issues, there is nothing wrong with 6 issue (or more!) arcs. The problem only comes when a story that really should only take, like, 2 issues, is stretched to 6.

[Pat Thomas]

Text bosses at that frequency and length were completely foreign to me. Not used to the "third party narrator."

It is just so.... dense. Overly dense. Like the illustrations are being suffocated to death by words.

Like this page...



So... many... words

Or something like this where the words are 100% unnecessary and the illustration alone tells the story.

The purpose of the words in your example is to enhance the action for the reader. True, you can see what is going on, but having
narration can describe something that may be unclear to the reader. In the 1960's and early 70's, I will agree with you that comics
were overly wordy, but they were being written for kids. That's who bought 90% of them. Until the price approached $1.00,
most kids could afford to buy comics. They were cheap and everywhere. The adult readers were a very small percentage of the overall
readership. Writing styles evolved throughout the 70's, 80's, and 90's because they had to. Kids were being priced out of the market,
plus readers had to find a source for comics when they vanished from stores. For some reason, with each generation, reading words
has changed from being a pleasure to a chore. Maybe eventually they'll do away with words entirely, and we'll have "adult" picture books
without all those pesky words to mess them up.

[Frontier]

I'm a pretty young reader, relatively speaking, but honestly I think I preferred when books were a little more densely packed, whether with dialogue, text boxes, thought balloons, etc., because it felt like you got more bang for your buck then you generally do with most modern comics.

It also felt like things developed more naturally and you got more insight into what was going on with the title character in their book, or a better sense of a team, and even developed their supporting cast far better then what is generally possible in today's comics.

It's why I generally prefer some of the older, more classic, stuff to modern books. But that's just me.

[LOSTie-chan]

Weird, I never knew people had so much trouble reading old comics. lol

I don't have any preference between compressed and decompressed but I do find the older compressed stuff super charming. I love all the hammy dialogue and the over dramatic ways they would describe EVERYTHING. Also, like an earlier poster said you got so much more bang for your buck. I don't have read 5 to 8 issues to get through a single story line. It's usually done in one or two issues.

Honestly there should be a balance between the two. Especially now when comics get cancelled before they can even finish a single arc.

[MindofShadow]

The purpose of the words in your example is to enhance the action for the reader. True, you can see what is going on, but having
narration can describe something that may be unclear to the reader.

well derp... I was just giving an example where it wasn't doing that, it was distracting from it.

Like I said, not my cup of tea but I could see why it would be others

. Maybe eventually they'll do away with words entirely, and we'll have "adult" picture books
without all those pesky words to mess them up.

Well that's a little much lol

Although that works on occasion if the artist is baller