10 Most Harmful Trends In Comics Today
5. Novelists...
Novelists, by and large, do not make good comic book writers. There are a few that do, but they are by far the exception, as opposed to the rule.
Writers that work mainly with prose tend to take far too long to make their point. A short, sharp comic book story that should be two, or three issues long at most, now takes six, or even eight months of your life to read, which is completely unnecessary (and ultimately loses fan interest).
Lets take a look at an example. Frank Millers Batman origin Batman: Year One was just four issues long. There were huge gaps in the narrative because Miller only used what was relevant to his story. Once he was finished, DC Comics spent a decade (or longer) fleshing out the rest of the story in the classic Legends of the Dark Knight series. Miller, a comic book writer through and through, intrinsically understood that comics are, at every level, a collaborative medium. He made space for others to tell fresh stories within his own overarching narrative.
Conversely, Scott Snyders recent origin story Batman: Zero Year, was something like twelve issues long (a fair few of them double, or even triple, sized) and encapsulated seemingly every single thought and feeling that Bruce Wayne ever had in his entire life.
Everything that happened during this Zero Year was catalogued in meticulous, obsessive detail. It wasnt a bad story, but if you read it issue by issue, that thing took over a year of your life to read.
A YEAR! For crying out loud!
This obsession with completeness means that it will now be increasingly difficult for other creators to re-visit and embellish this period in the characters life. Snyder, a prose writer before coming to comics, fell into the novelist trap of telling every story for every character and detailing every single event in microscopic detail, the way you would in a novel. This approach, frankly, doesnt work in comics.
In the past, when novelists worked in comics (as many of them did, under pseudonyms, of course), they adapted their writing styles to fit the format. Comics are a big, loud and bold medium. Something exciting should happen every couple of pages to keep the reader interested (and, crucially, encourage new readers to buy the book out of curiosity).
Comics dont (or shouldnt) have long, drawn out childhood flashbacks in every other issue and everybody sitting around being complicated together. It detracts from the excitement.
A good comics writer can give the reader an emotionally satisfying storyline, with more than enough tights and fights to keep you coming back month after month.
Look at Steve Engelharts trailblazing run on Detective Comics. Englehart, a novelist, painted a sweet portrait of Bruce Waynes love affair with the platinum blonde bombshell Silver St. Cloud, it ended in heartbreak and Silver went down in history as one of Bats best squeezes (despite far less time as a central character than any of his other flames). Still, Englehart found time to introduce new villains (Dr. Phosphorus, Rupert Thorne), revive old ones (Hugo Strange, Deadshot, The Penguin) and still tell the best Joker story of all time. The stories were fun and distracting, but they retained a resonant, emotional core.
Today, most novelists that write comics treat us to ponderous, dramatically heavy stories that either feature no captions or dialogue at all, or else weigh down every single page with lengthy, ornately-written navel gazing and unwarranted introspection. It is frustrating to watch their characters endlessly going on and on about their childhoods, their pet peeves, their likes and dislikes and so on...
Or, in the words of Dick Grayson; Backstory. Not interested.
Comics publishers should be looking to comics writers to tell stories, not novelists, screenwriters, academics, pig farmers, porn stars or anybody else, for that matter.