When Did Decompression Turn into "Nothing Happened?"

[harashkupo]

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

Well that's a little much lol

Although that works on occasion if the artist is baller

Kind of like that month of 'Nuff Said' issues marvel did.

One of the more enjoyable gimmicks.

[Raye]

It does require a very good artist though, and one that 'gets' the writer. But I can think of a few dialogue free or very nearly so issues that I've really liked.

About people saying you 'get more bang for your buck' I personally don't think 'more words=more value' I'm more concerned with what best serves the story being told from an artistic standpoint.

[Iron Maiden]

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.

I guess I'm not on the same page as you on this example *bad pun, I know*

Too me this is what a graphic novel can be.... where the text and images complement each other. This one ain't that bad IMO.

[MindofShadow]

I guess I'm not on the same page as you on this example *bad pun, I know*

Too me this is what a graphic novel can be.... where the text and images complement each other. This one ain't that bad IMO.

Yeah not the best example but... google images lol

[Star_Jammer]

Yeah not the best example but... google images lol

Search for Chris Claremont. He was very wordy/redundant. Sometimes (most times?) it works, but then other times you just get the feeling he might be the kind of person who likes to hear himself talk.

[Pat Thomas]

Kind of like that month of 'Nuff Said' issues marvel did.

One of the more enjoyable gimmicks.

I've only read (???) those issues from the titles I've collected since I started comics again about 5 years ago, so I don't
know about all of them, but the ones I've read were my least favorite issues in their runs. I truly hope Marvel doesn't ever
try it again with the entire line. Talk about difficult to interpret.

[Carabas]

Search for Chris Claremont. He was very wordy/redundant. Sometimes (most times?) it works, but then other times you just get the feeling he might be the kind of person who likes to hear himself talk.

To me it just shows an extreme lack of confidence in your artist to be able to do his job.

[Of Atlantis]

This is actually a really good question...

Like others have said, the emergence of trade paperbacks kind of dictate many story arcs to be 6 or 12 issues in order to fill them out. I feel that's the biggest motivating factor.

Secondary however, I feel as if writers are under the impression that providing a one-shot issue or two issue story arc following a 4 issue story arc gives readers an earlier jumping off point. I wouldn't be surprised if Marvel encourages 6/12 issue story arcs for exactly this reason. However, we saw Ellis provide us with a Moon Knight run with an individual story per issue and it was outstanding and sold well. Though I suppose if you're Ellis, you could get away with it. The up and coming writers out to solidify their value by selling well may not be so keen on taking the risk.

[JKtheMac]

I always get a little grumpy when people start talking about decompression, nine times out of ten what they are describing is not decompressed in any meaningful way. There isn't really a recognised definition and what is and isn't described as decompressed is often a matter of style.

The very word suggests expansion without adding any meaningful content, like blowing up a balloon by only adding air. It is perhaps worth considering if such an expansion can ever not include meaningful content. Classic examples pointed to are when writers or artists use multiple repeat panels or panels that are larger than necessary, but often those choices are being made to zoom in on detail or for emphasis (usually in a bid to be cinematic or evoke more purely visual media). Another example is when writers forgo action scenes in favour of character focused scenes or make use of interstitial scenes, again this is a form of pacing and is a style that often adds to character development or richness of setting.

As a rule of thumb, if I am tempted to use the term I usually mentally summarise what has happened in the issue, and if the summary is less than a short paragraph I would maybe consider the term. Usually I can't do this because what is apparent decompression is usually quite complex and involved. Ironically the issues that are most likely to have a short summary are comics with long fights that don't develop character or deepen the plot. Those kinds of comics are rarely labelled decompressed because the people that throw those labels around seem fine with lots of punches and not much character development.

[gurkle]

To me it just shows an extreme lack of confidence in your artist to be able to do his job.

Re Chris Claremont, I think part of what we need to remember is that these books were written Marvel style (plot then pencils then script) and they had to compress a tremendous amount of story into not very many pages (only 18, when Claremont's X-Men started).

So when writers got the pages, they had to find ways to convey things that weren't being shown in the art, either because there wasn't time or because the artist had to tell so much story in so few panels. A lot of the thought balloons and captions that were part of the Marvel house style until 2000 were used to tell us things that we weren't seeing in the art, or fill us in on actions that happened between panels - tricking the eye into seeing more than we were actually seeing.

Since 2001 Marvel has mostly used full scripts, and crammed in less story to each comic, so the writers are expected to know more or less exactly what they want to happen. Plus the writer today can't get away with asking the penciler to draw everything and then writing in whatever the pencils didn't convey clearly. There's an expectation that the art should speak for itself, while an artist like Kirby knew that he could draw a picture and then add captions to explain what was going on. No longer.

This led to a lot of the complaints about "decompression" in the '00s, because anyone who had read Marvel comics since the '60s was used to having a ton of story in each issue: two fights, a big plot twist, and lots of soap-opera subplots was what we'd usually get, and now an issue is more likely to have maybe half that.

[CentralPower]

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

Like this page...

Exactly. If the writer has to tell me how powerful and graceful the dinosaur is, then somebody has failed. Maybe the artist is known for crude illustration. Maybe the writer is a bloviating arse.

Too many comics, through the Bronze Age, consisted of a narration box saying what was happening, a crude illustration of what was described in the text box, and maybe the character narrating what they are doing.....for most panels on most pages.


And, to be blunt about it, comics like that are why the industry was an embarrassment for both the people who made and bought comics.

Search for Chris Claremont. He was very wordy/redundant. Sometimes (most times?) it works, but then other times you just get the feeling he might be the kind of person who likes to hear himself talk.

Having seen the man give interviews, I can confirm you are right. (His writing has not aged well either.)

Like others have said, the emergence of trade paperbacks kind of dictate many story arcs to be 6 or 12 issues in order to fill them out. I feel that's the biggest motivating factor.

So long as it reads well at the compilation level, I am fine with it.

[Riimi]

There's also the question of where the line between the two really lies. What one reader views as important may be seen by another as a waste of time, and vice versa. Thus, the general question becomes one without an objective answer. Although the trend towards decompression seems clear, and we've had people able to pinpoint the approximate shift, the claim that issues are so stretched out as to contain nothing at all has been rejected by several posters.

Also, I totally nominate Dauterman for our experiment in word-less comics. That man can draw, and his facial expressions are amazing.

[gurkle]

I'm not sure I would say a comic has "failed" if the art doesn't speak for itself. It's just an expectation we now have, so a comic couldn't get away with it. But for a long time, adventure comics were so compressed that almost every panel was a scene in and of itself. Jim Shooter, who started at DC in the '60s, explained how those stories were written:

Every panel was a scene. I remember old Legion of Super-Heroes comics with every panel starting with a caption. “Soon, at Legion headquarters–a fateful meeting!” You’d have the Legionnaires sitting around a table one would say, “We must pursue the space pirate.” Next panel, the art showed a Legion space ship chasing the pirate ship. The caption read: “Later in deepest space…” Dialogue coming from the Legionnaires’ space ship: “There’s Roxxas, the space pirate!” Next panel, in which the pirate ship was damaged, another caption: “After a massive battle…” “We got him!” Every panel was a scene! And they were able to do a lot of story in very short space. At that rate, you could do War and Peace in 24 pages.

Lee and Kirby and Ditko, as Shooter goes on to explain, actually were "decompressed" by comparison with other adventure comics, because they would allow scenes to play out longer. But they were still very compressed by today's standards. So in this infamous scene from X-Men 3:



Today the writer and artist would probably find some way to suggest the X-Men actually walking into the room and meeting Jean and Xavier, or they would just cut directly to Jean talking to Xavier and leave it up to us to figure out where the other X-Men were. In the older style of comics, though, Kirby will draw a picture of the two characters talking, and Lee's caption will fill us in on the action that led up to it.

It wouldn't fly today, but it's not necessarily wrong. We expect comics to be a "visual medium" and don't like it if the text says things that aren't conveyed in the pictures, but that's just fashion, it's not a rule.

[macattack]

I was asking 2 separate things


1. when did decompression start?

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

A lot of people finger Bendis for starting decompression, and they're not wrong. While Bendis isn't the first to decompress the stories, he was the one that popularized it with the hugely popular first few years of Ultimate Spider-Man, which encouraged Marvel to tell the other writers in their stables to follow Bendis' example. That is why everything is decompressed these days.

Since then, slowly, the writers have begun stretching the plot more and more. There's been no single "event" where the plots just started stretching all of a sudden. Just a slow creep until it became more noticeable and commonplace.

[ian0delond]

Too see how the idea of decompression went wrong in 15 years, you have too simply compare how Bendis wrote the early Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man now. You had a different pacing than what was the norm, but there was definitely a story told with beats. Now you can expect each issue to have 5 or 6 pages of speechless fight.

And there is some writers like Tom King or Nick Spencer who are thinking comics should more dense than what they tend to be now (among others obviously but Vision and Captain America are the best current examples).
Vision even has third person narration but also avoid the repetition between text and pictures. It uses that oldfashioned writing trope to give an atmosphere.

It's fashion an fashion changes. But seeing how some super stretchy Rebirth story sells I don't think mainstream super heroes comics are going back to a more text heavy narration soon.