FAITH MANAGES: TOO Many Words!!!

Lantern City #10

By people.

I give up.

This just became the target for this rant, I’d apologize but as no one gives a shit, why should I?

Over written comics. Writers! STOP cramming every available space with fucking words, it’s a visual medium it’s ok to let the pictures take their fair weight of the story telling!

When all your characters do is stand about and pontificate for a couple of pages before internal monologueÂ takes over during the action sequences and drags them down to a snail’s pace, you get tired of reading it, especially when seventy-five percent of the dialogue is redundant.

Comics managed to stop describing the contents of panels a long time ago and finally most comics have cottoned on to the fact you can’t deliver a soliloquy in the time it takes to swing a punch but there seems to be a new problem now; a desperate urge for legitimacy. There seems to be a pressing need for writers to prove themselves when it comes to writing comics by shoehorning the complete works of Shakespeare into ever page. This urge to over write seems to push good artists into desperately trying to turn pages and pages of dreary shit into something visually interesting, which while many might say that’s their job it reduces their role to being a window dresser from what it should be, a collaborator.

There are very good comics out there with a very high word to balloon ratio, and I know it can be a technique done well (Kelly Jones and Doug Moench are masters of the artist/writer tug of war) but when you look at a page full of people stood about waffling you lose the will to live, especially when it’s dryer than a nuns gusset.

That’s what happened with Lantern City, I struggled through most of it and just gave up when I realized I’d read the same word balloon four times and still had no idea what it said.