I Like When Comics Do This… Part 1: The Pictures Speak For Themselves
Great images (renaissance paintings, sci-fi concept art, that one DeviantArt image you use as your phone background) evoke a story without explicitly telling it. Comicbooks are such an appealing medium because the story doesn’t stop at that one image.
What I want from comics are evocative, awe-inspiring images that are part of a great story. But too many comics are just scripts that happen to be accompanied by images. The images are sometimes borderline redundant.
I like to see both the images and the text pulling their weight in moving the story forward. Comics where the images are just background music for the text are not good enough.
Repetitive Images
Let’s start with this example: when two characters are having a long conversation it is common to see tens of pictures of one or both of these characters where nothing much of substance is changing from image to image. What is the point of this?
I can imagine the frustrated artist drawing panel after panel of the same character, that the readers are just going to skim over anyway because the point of the scene is clearly in the speech bubbles.
These are filler images. The conversation might be the best in the world, taken on its own, but every line of speech has to be accompanied by an image. A script that asks for twenty shot-reverse-shot panels, where the image does nothing more than reinforce the emotion already conveyed in the speech (“I’ll get you for this!” — apicture of the speaker with a scowl), is wasteful.
I’ll throw in an exception here. Artists who are very good with facial expressions and body language, such as Fiona Staples or Rutu Modan, can draw as many faces as the conversation warrants. By capturing the subtleties of emotion and particularities of a character’s movements as they pertain to the development of the conversation, by letting those subtleties say something new, or say it better, they are actually satisfying this rule by letting the pictures contribute to the story. I wish there were more artists with a nuanced and empathetic approach to drawing facial and body expressions, but such talents seem to be in short supply.
Distracting Speech Bubbles
The viewer should be allowed to to absorb the pictures, but the text overlaying those pictures demands attention. Language takes a shortcut through our brain, interrupting our immersion in the image. If a book is always leading with language, your attention can be pulled from one speech bubble to another. I’m sure you have found yourself skimming over the the images in this situation. If that is what is happening, then what is the point of it even being a “graphic” novel?
I sometimes think that when you split the labour between an artist and writer it’s easier for the writer to try to “earn their keep” and over-contribute. This might be the cause of books with more speech bubbles than is good for the story. Manga and graphic novels with only one creator struggle less with this problem, and usually flow better and are more immersive. The first volume of Invincible impressed me by how much faith Kirkman had in allowing the pictures to tell the story. Hellboy by Mike Mignola, is another good example. On the other hand, see a comic written by Brian Michael Bendis for a bit of a mess.
The thing about speech bubbles is that they are a compromise. They are immersive in the sense that they allow comic books to convey aspects of the world that can’t be represented directly by the medium (speech and sounds). But you also have to consider that real life does not have speech bubbles hanging over peoples heads. When we meet somebody (or see a photo of somebody) our attention is drawn to their eyes. But in comics, our attention is drawn to the text. You can’t “hear” what somebody is saying while also looking at them as you can in real life or in movies. So in that sense, speech bubbles are anti-immersive. That’s the balance writers and artists have to consider. I wonder if we’re all so used to speech bubbles as a convention that creators are over-comfortable with them. They are a tool, with pros and cons. Understanding the nature of the compromise is, in my opinion, vital to writing great comic books.
Here’s what happens when you remove the unnecessary bubbles: you start paying attention. You don’t rely on the text as a crutch to carry you through the story. The details in the pictures pop out at you, and you ask yourself questions. What is happening here? If those details had been described in the text, you didn’t really need the image there in the first place. If you have to look at the images to understand the story, you enjoy them more, and you are more immersed in the scene.
Words should be used in harmony with the images. The two can be more than the sum of their parts. Writers should know when to use text, but also know when something can or should be said without words.
Images That Tell The Story
I would say at least an equal amount of the story should be “revealed” by the images as by the text. If the information is conveyed both ways, you can usually work out which one “counts”.
This dichotomy might give you something to think about next time you are reading a comic. For instance, in a conversation you would expect most of the story work do be done via text. But if the facial expressions add more information to the scene (for example, if you can tell that a character is lying, or how they feel about something that is being discussed), you might consider that to have been “revealed” by the images. On the other hand if the text and image give similar information, but your eye reaches the text first, or you only get the full details from the text, than the work of the image might have to be discounted for these purposes.
Old comics were in the habit of over-explaining. They seemed to have the attitude that a story should make sense even if you never looked at the pictures. Maybe they were thinking of their children readers ie. better to over-explain to make sure the young reader is following things. Perhaps it would have made more sense for the story to work even if the child never looks at the words — after all, you expect children to be less literate than average.
Or maybe it was simply a matter of proximity to a time when stories were 100% writing, and creators were still figuring out the best balance for comics. Either way, people today tend to find old comics clunky, and I would say the main reason is that they read like this:
Some of those images do not even make sense without the textual elaboration. I would like to see more stories where the text doesn’t make sense without reference to the images.
Locke and Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez, was fantastic at putting essentials details in the picture without calling them out in the text. That’s a comic with a perfect balance between illustration and writing in service of storytelling.
Alan Moore (Watchmen) and Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan), both text-minded creators, still ensure a lot of worldbuilding goes into the background images of their comics, so they satisfy the rule in a different way.
For a more action oriented example, Chris Samnee’s art on Daredevil and Black Widow takes the stage as much as Mark Waid’s writing. Often there are pages with almost no words at all. Man, reading those books is like being taken a water slide — they flow so smoothly.
Taking this idea to it’s extreme, I think every comic book writer should even be able to write an entirely textless story (even if that isn’t what they do day-to-day). The Arrival is a comic without any words at all. When I first read it a few years ago, I thought I would have trouble falling into the story without the guiding voice of speech bubbles and text boxes. It turns out that, yes, I did get lost, but in the good sense — lost in the story, not from the story. Lost in the pictures, some of which are utterly etched into my memory. It is so easy, without the distraction of speech bubbles, to fall deeper into the images. Without a speech bubble sergeant marching you across the page.
Why don’t more comics do this? Or at least take steps in this direction? Well, fair enough, no other comic is as pretty as The Arrival. You might say that other comics can’t afford not to distract you — it’s for the best if you don’t examine the images in bad comics too closely. But that’s not the sort of comic I am looking for.
Balance
The indie “writer-artists”… no, wait, I thought that I would get away with that hyphenated combination in the same way we use “singer-songwriter”, but I’ve just realised how awkward both phrases sound.
Anyway, the indie creators — the artists who draw their own stories, write their own dialogue, even sometimes letterer their own letters — rarely seem to have a problem when it comes to text vs art. That makes sense, because they’re making decisions about both simultaneously. To them, it’s all just art — the words just elements of the picture, the images just elements of the communication.
It’s the same for the mangaka, who has a similar level of holistic creative control over his/her stories.
Of course, there are conventional western creative teams who absolutely nail it. Some I’ve mentioned above. I will mention some more below.
Frank Miller’s 300 won’t ever be accused of not giving the artwork room to shine. It has a nice habit of dedicating a lot of the page to one spectacular panel, then using smaller grids to deliver the conversation. Both elements of the book are excellent, and they don’t get in each others way.
Getting even more contemporary, Isola is one of my favourite ongoing comics exactly because it feels like evocative concept art come to life. The artwork is rich in place and personality, and is allowed to have its maximum impact because, when it can, it stands on its own.
I can only imagine what the average crappy superhero writer would do to this page.
1: “My name is Captain Rook. The land I live in is called Isola.”
2: “When I was growing up Dad told me I couldn’t be a soldier. I sure showed him”
3: “Still, sometimes I still feel so out of place I think I might be a Skrull!*”
Text Box: *Editor: See Issue #0.5 for the full story!
4: “That tiger is Olwyn — she’s the queen. Long story.
You can imagine how distracting that would be to the atmosphere and emotion of this page! Blegh.
***
You’re probably thinking I’m down on writers in general. You probably think I rant about the virtues of the Marvel Method and think DC’s New Age of Heroes could be the best thing to happen in comics since the 80s. It’s not really true. I am a writer myself. I think that, overall, if you consider the writer to be not only the person who writes the text boxes and speech bubbles, but also comes up with the plot, characters, themes, and dictates the flow of the story, the writer actually has more influence of the overall quality of a book than the artist does. “More influence” also means that if they don’t know what they’re doing, they can detract from the hard work of a good artist. I think it’s very important that the two sides of the creative team are working in harmony so that this does not happen.
The point is, we’re reading comics and graphic-novels instead of novel-novels because of the images. If the text is:
- superseding the image on a storytelling level by pushing the story forward on its own; or
- distracting from the image on a visual level and making it harder for us to get immersed in the atmosphere and emotion of the scene
…then the text is in the way, and that’s bad.
That’s why I like comicbooks where the images speak for themselves.
***
Now, I don’t know what the usual workflow for artists and writers is at DC and Marvel, but I imagine a pretty disconnected, impersonal working relationship, where the writer does his job, gets it approved by management/the editors, and the script gets sent off to the artist for drawing. However, I find it hard to imagine many great comics coming about where the artist and writer didn’t spend at least a portion of the creative work in the same room together, or at least a ton of time on the phone. Two brains are better than one, but only when they are communicating properly with each other, working as nodes in a unified, interdependent system.
A bad working relationship between an artist and writer, it seems to me, would be about as effective as jamming a metal plate between the left and right hemispheres of your brain.
I’m sure it happens. Bad working relationships, I mean, not the metal plates thing. Even members of revolutionary bands sometimes hated each other’s guts. See Simon & Garfunkel. Are there any famous examples of creative teams of great comics hating each other? Of course Stan Lee and Jack Kirby fell out, but who knows what their relationship was like at their peak. If you know any examples please let me know in the comments.
When asked “What is it that you both like about each other’s work, and that you find most enjoyable about working with each other?” Frank Miller said of Klaus Jansen:
Mostly I think that what I enjoy is that fact that it’s such a tight collaboration that it almost manages to be one person’s work sometimes — at least that’s how I read it. I think Klaus and I are in basic agreement about what we’re doing. Some relationships between creative people exist on tension — two people pulling in different directions much the same way Lennon and McCartney were supposed to have determined the Beatles’ sound, by their disagreements rather than by their agreements. I don’t feel that this is the case in Daredevil’s. There’s much less wasted effort going on. My deciding to do something and Klaus deciding that it should not be done — there doesn’t seem to be a fight there; rather the two of us are pulling in the same direction.
***
Appendix A: Text-Dumps
What if the writer has a lot to contribute but can’t do it in a way that will flow with the images of the story — a lot of detailed world building, for example? I’m not saying this can’t be valuable. Rather, I’d prefer a comic just dedicate a page to text rather than wastefully ask the artist to illustrate numerous filler panels just adhere to the conventional flow of comics. A situation where this is most obviously acceptable is at the start of a story, when we’re all a little more accepting of an information dump to give some context to what we’re about to read. Even Star Wars does this.
Pretty much every comic starts this way, actually, but only with a boring, generic catch-up page. A block of prose don’t have to be lacking in style, in a comic book least of all places. Artists have got all the freedom in the world to go typography crazy, or put illustrations in the background, to get people to keep reading. Put those copywriting skills to good use: make it easier to read than to not read.
Another time text dumps are cool is when that text is part of the story’s world anyway. The image and the text are seamlessly combined — it’s still an image, an image from the fictional world, but it just happens to be an image of important text. Watchman used newspaper articles, for examples.
Lyra’s Oxford, a companion to Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels, was a book filled with tangential in-universe paraphernalia— brochures, maps, adverts. Not all of them are directly connected to the story, but I think this can serve as inspiration for good comic book worldbuilding.
Appendix B: More Examples
Here are some pages I like that I couldn’t fit into the body of the article:
I’ll be talking about that last X-Men example more in Part 2, mostly about symbolism, but with a lot more to say about speech bubbles. See you then!
