I have bought a few modern comics recently - not many but a few - and there was something about them that was bugging me. I worked it out eventually - it was the absence of motion lines in the panels. Everything looks static and dull to me without them. One of the things I like still about Byrne drawn comics is that he uses (or used up to BOTD anyway which is as far as I followed him) motion lines.

I raised this a few months back, and it seemed it was just me who felt this way. Is it?

Answers on a postcard*please to:

Magpie
Thames Television
Teddington Lock
Middlesex

*Not really.

Motion lines are one of those conventions of comics, like thought balloons, that certain contemporary creators seem to regard as embarrassingly old-fashioned. To some extent that's a matter of personal preference, I suppose. But I do wonder whether some of them don't realize that things like this are unique to this particular medium, and that refusing to use them means refusing to exploit some of the comics medium's distinctive tools.

It just looks like a series of stills to me. And difficult to follow too. Who's hitting who/what is rebounding off what etc

Ironically, Jerry Ordway, whose style is otherwise about as old school as any post-Silver Ager can possibly get, pioneered this in the 1980s. I love his work in general but am not crazy about the lack of speedlines.

What Daphne said also applies to the loss of narrator captions, and I agree with her completely. In their quest for a movie-like photorealism they've dropped too many things that make comic books unique, and end up with what looks like inferior quality to me rather than improvements or sophistication.

I think if you're going to drop them, it ought to be a conscious decision in order to achieve a specific effect, and the work ought to be constructed with that in mind. Dave Gibbons' work in Watchmen doesn't look still and lifeless because the decision to forgo speed lines wasn't arbitrary and because he presented the story with this particular affectation in mind.

Dropping them arbitrarily just to seem somehow more sophistication or because that's the trend seems like a good way to overlook a aspect of the medium and little more. Not a unique aspect of superhero comics, of the medium.

Why leave a tool in the toolbox if it could be used to improve your story?

Like any technique, I'd never say this shouldn't be done. Maybe sometimes in should. But at least have a reason to be doing it that is specific to your story. I agree with the folks above; they're a tool, and a good tool unique to the medium. Their absence can be jarring (even if subconsciously), and not necessarily in a good way.

In one of Epting's first Cap stories with Brubaker, there was a scene where Cap threw his shield at a train or something (I can't remember just now), and there were no speed lines; the two pages it took for the shield to get where it was going (really! ) just had a series of stills of the shield, basically. I had the same thought as you reading that. I noticed in the last Cap Omnibus that Epting has started doing speed lines again. I think it makes the action more powerful.

I do want to make clear that I personally don't have a problem with comics not using them and otherwise going for a movies-on-paper effect. That's a perfectly legitimate way of doing comics. It can produce good results. I do think there has been too much of it, with too many creators (and editors) who think that's the highest form of comics. It's not.

I like motion lines. I like narrator captions.

I had never thought of that, but I think you're right. They do seem more static.

This.

I like speed lines and narration.

This thread would be easier to understand if it were framed in terms of how to "fix" comics.

Is this the new "Fixie?"

That's because comics are sequential art. An action sequence in comics works best if the images flow together. If the individual panels are so highly detailed they look like book illustrations or photos frozen in an instant in time, it can interfere with the flow. It becomes a series of static images, not something the eye smoothly runs through.