annoying narrative style still present in today's superhero comics?

[WebLurker]

Sorry. I disagree.
There seemed to be much more characterization explored in the thought balloons than in a box.

Having been a long-time reader of Ultimate Spider-Man and a recent reader of the new Green Lanterns, I have to disagree. I find the boxes less clumsy. Either way, it's what the authors put into the boxes or balloons that gives characterization, not the format used.

[Jim Kelly]

I remember Gaspar Saladino's lettering for the classic SWAMP THING run in the '70s. It was a thing of beauty. Probably the first time I became aware of how much the letterer brought to the work. And letterers in those days were overworked and underpaid--and it all had to be done by hand, no computers. Anyway, the thing was that Swampy rarely talked--it was painful for him to do so--so he had to "speak" through his thought balloons which were distinctively rendered by Saladino. When ST did talk, Gaspar made you see the strain in forming those speech balloons.

[Pohzee]

The talk about the lack of recap pages has made me realize how annoying expositional narration used to bring a reader up to speed. If there's not a better way to do this than I'm not...

Barry Allen, the Fastest MAN ALIVE!

[C_Miller]

I've had an odd and disconcerting experience with this during the past few years.

My initial comics-reading years were 1977-1984, the heart of the Bronze Age. I was between the ages of five and twelve during those years, and thus, the comics of that period informed my sense of how comics should look and read.

The years go by, and I drift in and out of comics throughout the remainder of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. For most of the 2000s and 2010s, I've lamented how today's super-decompressed comic book storytelling style, devoid of the narration boxes and thought balloons that were common in the comics of my youth, is inferior to that of the comics I remembered from the 1970s to early 1990s, and I'd wished that comics would return to that earlier style.

Then, a few years ago, I tried to read Neal Adams' BATMAN: ODYSSEY, a new release for 2012 that was done by Adams in his unmistakable 1970s style. This should have been right up my alley.

I could not get into it. It's not that I felt that Adams did the story badly or had lost his touch. He was as good as ever, but having grown accustomed to (though never fond of) the modern comics style, I could not get back into the style with which I was raised.

I had this same experience this week reading BANE: CONQUEST # 1 by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, the classic 1990s BATMAN team whose work I loved two decades ago. BANE: CONQUEST was very much in the vein of VENGEANCE OF BANE or KNIGHTFALL from the 1990s, but somehow, I just could not get into it. It SHOULD have been manna to me, and Dixon and Nolan were as good as ever, but...something had changed in me. I could not get back into the classic style, as much as I fondly recall it.

This is something I've started having a problem with in reading the older classics I loved too. I still have fond memories of them, and consider them superior to most modern comics, but for some reason, recent years of reading modern comics has changed something in me and I can't get into the old style the way I did in the past.

I'm not sure I'm explaining myself well. It's a very disorienting kind of ambivalence: still loving the classic style, but somehow belatedly recognizing its quaintness. It's like longing for a lost past, miraculously being given an opportunity to revisit it, and then seeing that it hasn't changed at all...but somehow totally has.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

I'm actually finding the opposite. Granted, I'm a younger reader (only started in 2002 at the age of 13), but I'm finding that the older comics speak to me a bit more. They may be "quaint" or "overly flowery", but there is a freshness to them that I don't get when reading a modern superhero comic. I do appreciate the the writing seems to be taken a bit more seriously these days, but to me, it feels like most superhero comics today are written in a paint by numbers fashion to appease long time fans who don't really want the characters to be allowed to deviate too far from how they're used to them. They don't want to let them grow.

So to me, I'd rather read a comic from the 1970s or 80s, rather than read a comic from today featuring the same characters in some form of arrested development.

[Jim Kelly]

In terms of authorial voice, I can see it if you're a ten year old kid and you pick up a comic that's in a different style, you're liable to go "GAK!" and run away. When I was ten years old I had a hard time adjusting to some comics (although I really enjoyed the old comics that were reprinted in the Giants, despite the very different tone in the authorial voice).

But I'd expect that--especially with everything being available on the internet now--someone a few years older would know this, that comics are written in different stylistic voices. And you'd know what to expect. By the time I was thirteen--without any internet--I knew what to expect when I read a "Golden Age" reprint and I wanted to read those comics because I wanted to understand how comics in general and characters in particular had developed.

Sure, it's an adjustment but so is IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, yet once you get used to that voice, I'd think you'd be cool with it and not constantly freaking out that it's outside what you're used to from other stuff.