Thoughts on Comic book thought balloons: Then and Now....

[bminor]

When I was a kid it used to take me a at least twenty minutes to read a comic book. It was enjoyable, I got into the stories AND there was a lot to read.
In fact you might say that comics helped me learn how to read.

Well, back in the early nineties I stopped buying and reading comic books.  Sure I was older, married, a bunch of children, house mortgage, bills. Something had to give and it was comic books. This was right about when Marvel went bankrupt, filed for chapter 11 or some such thing.
As the years went by I would occasionally pick up a comic and look it over. I was never really impressed, and had no desire to purchase.
I didn't know what it was but the new books just did not draw me into the stories.

It took a little time, but it finally dawned on me. The new comics were ALL about the art. I could "read" a modern comic in less than five minutes!
Pages and pages of art, with very little dialogue. I felt that this method of story telling was pretty boring.

This was years ago when I came to this conclusion. But just yesterday I found another difference between comic story telling from the past and in the present.

I stumbled upon a article online about the lack of use of thought balloons! No one used thought balloons anymore!!! You never know what is going on inside the peoples minds. The inner narrative has been lost!

The creators of the "new comics" of today are just trying to make the comics just like the movies! They reaso that you can not hear what a person is thinking.

Some of the best films of all time have voice over narration. One of the best films that uses this technique is the 1975 detective noir film "Farewell My Lovely"  starring the great Robert Mitchum as Phillip Marlow, private eye. The film begins the camera pans up to him looking out into the night from his sleazy hotel room. There is a voice over has he narrates what is going on. They use this technique wonderfully throughout the film so you know what is going on inside his head.

Go on over to YouTube and watch the film, it is really, really good. Sylvester Stallone has a bit part. It is also introduces Jack O'Halloran for the first time, he of "Jaws" James Bond fame.

My conclusion would be that we have lost something really necessary for a person to enjoy and sympathize with characters in comic books today.

I mourn the loss of the inner narrative.

B.

http://thecomicforums.com/discussion/1279/thought-balloons

http://www.denofgeek.us/books-comics/11405/in-defence-of-the-thought-bubble

[tilliban]

Very interesting point, bminor!

That's what it says in that thought balloon forming over my head, anyhow...

You are probably right: Comic books want to emulate action packed movies - sans any inner monologue.

I do not read modern comic books at all. They have long lost their naiveté and charm and thoughtful mumblings.

[SuperScrounge]

Sadly it's not just comic books that try to emulate movies.

Once upon a time if a book or short story writer needed to explain something to the reader he could just explain directly as the story-teller. These days, that's considered "inferior" and the writer should use cabbageheads* to get this information across.

*Cabbagehead refers to the idiot in a story who asks someone else to explain something so the "cabbages" in the audience can understand it.

In addition to the lack of thought balloons, I believe captions have been done away with as well. ("Well, we don't see captions in movies, so we shouldn't see them in comics! Duuuuuuuhh...")

The idea that each storytelling medium has its own strengths and weakeness is ignored in order to turn out inferior copies of movies. *shakes head*

As for the amount of words...

Years ago I was trying to write a comic book script and it was taking forever for the story to move along. IIRC the introduction of the heroine and the main supporting character was something like five pages of them saying hi. (Okay, I had them telling jokes as well, but still, way too long.) So anyway I decided to pull out a comic that I knew had a lot of words, but didn't feel overly wordy to see just how many words I could fit on an average comic book page. I was rather shocked to discover it averaged around 200 words a page. For comparison, my writing books said that a manuscript page for a novel should average 250 words a page. Sooooo... replace 50 words with pictures and you have a comic book script?  I was stunned.

Not that I have anything against a well-done wordless story. When done right those can be good.

I think the problem these days is that most artists aren't as good as they think they are. What was it Bill Veck said about rising costs in baseball? "I don't mind the high cost of excellance, it's the high cost of mediocrity that bothers me."

Too many hacks think they're the next Jack Kirby/Neal Adams/(Name of artist you think is great) and the editors let them.

[Mr. Izaj]

 And that can be due to Marvel Comics' early emphasis on making the artist the star (something they still do today). And most editors today prefer to let the artists run rampant thinking there is a potential superstar artist there.

 Being a long time DC fan, I'm of the school that prefers to let the writer be the star. Forget being the next Neal Adams/ Jack Kirby/ etc., I would rather be the next Dennis O'Neil or James Robinson. In other words, I want to be the fellow who wants to turn out strong well written stories rather than filling the words for cardboard characters that are drawn by a hack who thinks he's God's Gift to the Comic Book Page.

[Yoc]

Hi guys,
Today's books are NOT universaly bad.
I can think of some good books for art and story.
Fables, Astro City, Mice Templar, Walking Dead...
I'm sure others could be named.  I wouldn't just look at the Big Two.
Older books but likely found at your library that I recommend include Y the Last Man (not for kids) and Tom Strong which has a fun Fawcett  kind of feel.

[crashryan]

The influence of movies is unquestionably the major reason for "underwriting" in modern comics. However I think another factor is reaction against the incredibly overwritten comics of the 70s and early 80s. Marvel, especially, had several writers who crammed every panel with endless captions of turgid exposition. After a couple of generations of new writers, the pendulum swung way back in the other direction.

In my opinion a writer should use whichever tools tell the richest story. I don't like expository captions but sometimes they're necessary. In comics there are some things that art alone can't make clear, no matter how skilled the artist. Space considerations also play a part. Japanese comics are famous for long, cinematic narrative sequences. They also come from a tradition of stories that last hundreds of pages. A Japanese creator can afford to spend three pages getting somebody from one side of a room to the other. Western-style comics seldom have that much space to burn.

I strongly dislike huge, melodramatic captions in which the writer is showing off his prose rather than telling the story. Captions in the EC horror comics are an example. So are all those "You enter the room, John Smith, and you face drooling DEATH" stuff in 70s comics. I prefer captions that move the story along and clarify action. Written in an interesting style, yes, not in diagrammatic text. But captions are useful accessories, not the machine itself.

I also mourn the passing of the thought balloon.  Like captions thought balloons can both enrich a story and also explain things that the art can't. Each medium can do certain things that others can't. It seems to me that a writer's great challenge is to take advantage of comics' unique characteristics to fashion a story that couldn't be told as well in any other form.

[bcholmes]

I stumbled upon a article online about the lack of use of thought balloons! No one used thought balloons anymore!!! You never know what is going on inside the peoples minds. The inner narrative has been lost!

Watchmen was the first comic I read where I noticed that there were no thought balloons. it eschewed a few comic book conventions -- sound effects, motion lines (with one exception). I read Watchmen as it was being released, well before it was collected in trade format. The closest Watchmen ever came to thought balloons was Rorchach's journal.

But I still see character's thoughts in comics; they usually appear in caption boxes. Batman frequently describes what he's doing with "voice over"-like captions. (One of my favourite examples comes from The Dark Knight: "Rubber bullets. Honest."  I find it interesting that the animated adaptations of both The Dark Knight and Batman: Year One lost a lot of the best moments by nixing so much voice-over.)

I was taking some "Writing for Comics" classes here in T.O. (taught by Ty Templeton -- long time comics writer and artist, most recently seen on Batman '66) and Ty basically said that the DC editors just tell writers that thought balloons are old-fashioned, and not to do them.

[Yoc]

Wow, it's a planned thing then. I guess I just never noticed.

[bminor]

Maybe that is why I really have never cared to much for Watchmen...
B.

[John C]

Maybe that is why I really have never cared to much for Watchmen...
B.

There's a long list of reasons why I didn't enjoy it.  I'm sure that's somewhere on the list, but much further down than its being pretentious and at least twice as long as it needed to be...

[chrisbeneke]

I see a common thread running through this thread's many comments: Comics are (or can be or should be) more than storyboards for movies.

This critique is one shared by Dorenavant, a forward-thinking french experimental comics group of the 1980s that deplored comics creators' continuing failures to realize the potentials of the medium.

Their writings remain mostly untranslated into english, though some recent comments have been translated here:
http://www.du9.org/en/dossier/dorenavant-again/

Some pics and very brief translations are here:
http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/search/label/Barth%C3%A9l%C3%A9my%20Schwartz

Some late-90s french web pages summarizing and excerpting more writings from the original 80s zines are buried at archive.org's wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010408091313/http://abirato.free.fr/6dorenavant/DOR1.HTM
then try links at the bottom of each page....

I could add more to this conversation if it gets warm again, but I will reach back even further to the 1890s and the beginnings of the American comic strip to address the "thought balloons are old fashioned" comment.

Jimmy Swinnerton, one of America's earliest newspaper cartoonists, beginning his career in 1892, later recalled that most of the cartoonists of his generation didn't want to use "speech bubbles" (his term for the balloons that hold the 'spoken' dialogue) because the bubbles seemed old fashioned, harkening back to earlier 19th century satirical prints by Rowlandson and others that employed the device.

Swinnerton's earliest successes for the Hearst papers eschewed speech bubbles and used captions underneath his anthropomorphized little bears and tigers. The few examples I've seen in Bill Blackbeard's various comics histories suggest these captions were ironic and obtuse and intended for a sophisticated reader.

The editors thought speech balloons would make the comics more comprehensible to a semi-literate immigrant audience.

Thanks for the free comics,
Chris Beneke