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Level of Language

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Ranko:
When I look at older comics, like the Golden Age ones, and the newer comics, it seems to me that the older ones had much more dialogue in them. Did they, and if so, why did they and why comparatively less dialogue today?

jfglade:
 Golden age, atomic age, and silver age comics did, generally, have more text than today's comics. I think the "National Lampoon," a satire magazine which is now defunct hit the nail on the head when it said, in part, in its editorial to an issue devoted entirely to comic strip features back in the early seventies, "Today's readers aren't."

 The typical comics holds dialogue down to a minimum apparently because writers and/or editors think current readers don't want any more verbiage than absolutely needed to convey points the artwork doesn't. There are fewer panels in current comics than golden age ones as well, and current comics look more like poster books than they do like traditional comic books.

 For a good twenty years now, there is a feeling in academic circles that students are become more sophisticated about visual literacy but are becoming "aliterate" in regard to text. The feeling is that modern students can read, but they don't want to and won't if they don't have to. Most current comics seem designed to support that theory.

Yoc:
If you look at a Lev Gleason comic you sure get that feeling.
Many things change.  Today stories that would take one issue, heck one story of say 16pgs or so, now are being spread out over four issue arcs so they can later be collected into trade paperback collections.
It's all about money.

boox909:

--- Quote from: Ranko on June 28, 2011, 09:19:29 PM ---When I look at older comics, like the Golden Age ones, and the newer comics, it seems to me that the older ones had much more dialogue in them. Did they, and if so, why did they and why comparatively less dialogue today?

--- End quote ---

There is no clear cut answer to this question. Part of it depends on who the writer is...a writer such as Roy Thomas is prone to a lot of dialogue. Another factor might be the particular 'house style' of the Comics Shop producing the story/book in question. Recently DC Comics announced that they were going to cease the six issue story arcs, citing that a survey of readers complained that these arcs were overly wordy.

As a kid, I would write my own Captain Marvel stories for fun, and I would model these on the style of E. Nelson Bridwell who tended to write 100 words per page.

100 words seemed to fit.  :D

philcom55:
It's worth noting that a lot of early scripters had a background in text features and really didn't 'get' that comics were a different medium. As a result there was a tendency to produce endless captions filled with redundant descriptions of what the reader could already see for himself in the artwork. A simple example would be a panel in which Superman is shown hitting Luthor with the dialogue balloons "Take that!" and "Owww!", beneath a caption saying "Superman hits Luthor!"

 - Phil Rushton

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