I prefer the older tales. There's more to them. I miss the old paper. I miss the look of the comics from that time. A decent amount of what comes out these days looks overdone. Writers keep padding stories so they can write more books and collect a larger paycheck.

The industry turned a corner a few years ago. Hard to say if it was the right one. I doubt that they can go back. So I guess they just plow ahead.

It's all a matter of preference, although it seems that current readers prefer cinematic/ decompressed stories, and there are definite advantages to those (for writers/ readers.)
It was a bit annoying to read silver age comics in which crucial action occurs in captions (although it's equally annoying to pay three dollars for a book which takes you three minutes to read.)

Artists need captions because

A They really are not that good anymore at narrative...

B. It sets the mood and serves to draw the reader in. These are not movies it is a book with pictures

Read any Alan Moore Swamp Thing... The Captions are as important to the narrative as the art and it moves the story along

Not having captions IS a sign of lazy writing and the "artists" of today don't put enough in the art for it to exist without a caption box... It was NEVER a matter of not trusting the artist it was about TELLING A STORY which comics today fail miserably to do.

Caption blocks serve to show a transition of time and offer vital information that a snapshot cannot ever give... Read Frank Miller's Daredevil... He uses them perfectly in Daredevil #181

The style today of no captios and only dialogue is like looking at a photo album.. It tells you nothing and only leaves you with vague impressions.... It is not story telling...

That, or maybe it's a stylistic choice that sometimes works and sometimes does not, depending on the writer and artist in question, having nothing at all to do with a creator being "lazy" and everything to do with it being another approach, successful or not, to creating a comic.

besides mignolas hellboy, i'm not particularly a fan of captionless comics, i guess its what i grew up on and for the most part and i miss them alot these days. when someone like claremont or stern is really feeling it they can write the most entertaining captions and thought ballons that add depth and dimension to their stories. done correctly, there is no defense!!!

I gotta say, I prefer the captions and description. I am reading some of the Silver Age masterworks, and I have to say, I prefer them in many ways. No, it is not my era. Yes, there is some clunkiness. But, the words often emphasize what is happening in the panels.

Yeah, today, you'd get a great shot of Thor chucking his hammer at someone. (Like in Civil War say). Which I'll look at for 1.5 seconds. But, in the old days, you'd get words with that that would enhance the power of that throw and the impact of the hit. What that throw meant. That, for me anyway, the way i read comics, i don't get by just a visual depiction-usually. I don't mean simply repeating what is in the panel-Thor throws his hammer-but enhancing the visual.

Also, i feel like for $3, i should be able to read a comic for more than 5 minutes. Particularly in Jemas's day, I was reading comics in 3-5 minutes, and it sucked.

Also, frankly, I've been reading comics for 20 odd years, and with many artists, these days, there are times that, and often at crucial moments, I really can't tell what happened. How we got from here, to there. I can't see, say in a fight, who hit who, where they hit, whether it hurt, etc. Reminds me of a movie that has a lot of close-ups in action scenes, where you don't know what is going on. Storytelling is sometimes lacking.

one related ex. at the end of New Avengers: illimunati 1, which has some big guns-Doc Strange, Iron Man, Namor, Prof X, Reed, others, sitting at a table and basically trying to share info to make it better to confront threats. Anyway, it all falls apart and everyone tells off Iron man-either nastily, or they leave sad, or whatever. The group falls apart. Then Black Bolt gets up and there's two panels where he gestures something-two specific panels identical with his hand extended and maybe they are slightly different in the hand gesture. and I don't have a clue what Blakc Bolt is saying (and frankly, nobody did-they kept complaining and hounding bendis until he printed his script for the scene on newsarama which then made it all clear). Is he pissed, sad, telling him off (obviously i can't speak). I'd have preferred a caption which made it clear what he felt and how strongly.

and personally, my choice, but, I prefer captions, dialogue, thought balloons, dialogue on covers, etc. Like I said, my preference. I dont mean every time, but use the tools thta make comics, comics.

Oh, definitely, good captions can provide mood, and some writers use them in astoundingly compelling ways. DeMatteis, in Kraven's Last Hunt, uses two competing sets of captions providing the rational and irrational thoughts of a character, fighting against one another, and, my God, does that provide atmosphere in what's already an extraordinarily atmospheric story.

But captions can also detract from the visuals of a story, and I think that's often the result.

-Comp

For those of you scoring at home, the following people in this thread are correct: almost everybody but Comp, with most honorable post going to Eric Lund.

Eric St. John gets the John McCain award for transcending the whole debate.

Comp does get a shout out for a cool avatar.

This is also correct and also applies to me.


Hmmm. Incorrect.

I'll go transcendent with Taft. We're dealing with Sturgeon's Law here: "Ninety-five percent of EVERYTHING is crap." Yes, lots of stories with sparse text suffer from unclear visual narrative -- AND lots of stories with an abundance of text suffer from excess exposition. The trick is finding the five percent of each that rocks.

Two cents: The best captionless narrative right now isn't being produced in the Marvel or DC universes. It's being produced by Brian Vaughan and his two totally different but equally outstanding art teams on EX MACHINA and Y: THE LAST MAN. I'd stack the storytelling in those books up against Stan Lee's best any day.

And just to be clear, I third this motion. Bart Sears on poor Priest's CAP AND FALCON? Good god, could the visual storytelling have been any more horrendously undecipherable?

Will Eisner could tell a totally decipherable story without a single caption, and you could follow it. Byrne has done it in the past, and so has Neal Adams. So, it's not impossible.

But, as many writers of comics AND prose have found out, they get paid more by writing bigger books. It fascinated me that even Louis L'Amour, who could write a nice dime novel in the 50s in which we got complete stories, was writing long novels full of padding by the 70s. Stephen King wrote a great story called Jerusalem's Lot which he later extended, but also padded (at least it seemed that way to me), into Salem's Lot.

Writer's put more words in than ever.

If someone will pay me per word here, I can write MUCH longer posts. Anyone?

Call me a dime-store heretic if you want, but I don't consider any of King's books (well, up to Needful Things*, anyway) to have much in the way of padding.

Sure, they're incredibly long, and Dear Sweet Cthulhu does he like his tangents, but I also find that I want to know even more about the setting and characters than he tells me.

But, then, I've never found any author as good as conveying a sense of place as King. As 'disposable' as many people consider (and dismiss) his works, I'm a firm believer that at some point he will be considered one of the great American authors.

*Okay, I'll admit, except for his short story compilations, I haven't bought much King since Needful Things. I do compulsively re-read many of his books, though

I think King is an excellent example of a writer getting too big for their editor to handle. J.K. Rowling is another. As their books get exponentially larger, the amount of real story stays the same.

In these later Potter epics, how many times did we need to see Harry in doubt, depressed, or otherwise pottering around before we got the point and wanted to see something - anything - else happen in the story?

As for wordy vs cinematic comics - I like them both, provided that the story is worthwhile. I think there needs to be a balance of both forms or the form loses its wonder and impact. And there is a limitation on what even good art can convey.

"The hammer lands with an impact that would destroy a thousand stars, but the Celestial Armor shrugs it off like it was the playful paw of a kitten."

Go ahead, draw that with the same amount of majesty and impact with just dialog balloons.

I guess what a lot of us are saying (on all sides of the discussion) is:

1. Good, effective storytelling is good, effective storytelling however you accomplish it; and

2. I'm seeing a lot of comics without good, effective storytelling these days.

The problem is, if I put down a comic with the impression that it did not effectively tell a good story, and that comic had hardly any captions or narrative, then it seems an effective tool that would have helped was left on the table. That's all. The issue doesn't really come up when the comic book succeeds.

And I used to love King but bailed after Rose Madder. Insomnia (the book) was the real reason, but I hung in for one or two more just to make sure the shark was jumped.

After reading The Stand for the first time (which I quite liked, save the somewhat poor ending), the uncut version, which seems to be all that's on the shelves, among my first thought was, "I could trim 200 pages out of that book easy and it wouldn't suffer.

I agree that his characterization is quite good, and he creates vivd worlds for these characters to inhabit, but I felt like a great deal of that material, especially in the book's first third, was entirely unecessary.

Still liked the book quite a bit, though, and don't regret reading it for a moment.