Highway 62

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Swamp Thing: Reunion, as well as the trade collection of Grant Morrison’s tenure on Animal Man all got me thinking about comic writing in particular, and the Death of the Caption in specific. I remember reading comics when the original runs of these were all coming out (and read all but Animal Man regularly), and marveled how special those titles were back in the day. Let’s face it, comics writing (and by this I’m using shorthand for the mainstream), for the most part has been not all that great as these things are measured.

I have nothing but love for the highfalutin’ fancy talk of Stan Lee (particularly his work on The Silver Surfer which read like Shakespeare minus the iambic pentameter, at least to my adolescent brain), and even today I wholeheartedly embrace Jack Kirby’s writing on The Fourth World books and have nothing but respect for the caustic wit of Steve Gerber (in his myriad of works for Marvel and DC). I’ll acknowledge the historical importance of writers like Marv Wolfman and Dennis O’Neill, but I’m not blinded enough by my love of the medium and say that their works can stand next to other genre greats such as Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson or William Gibson (in mystery, mystery and science fiction respectively), much less stand on a par with literature (the accepted canon, anyways).

But authors like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, these guys put out work that read like poetry, and probed the darker recesses of their characters with an honesty and depth that was astonishing to me. These were authors who might possibly get a shot at some kind of recognition, as well as bring some respectability to comics as a whole. Nearly twenty years down the road, I find that assessment to be…overly optimistic. Certainly, Neil Gaiman has found wide commercial success. Alan Moore is still out there on the fringes, unfortunately, and I don’t see Grant Morrison getting widespread recognition or a wide audience outside comics (but I’ve been wrong before.)

Going back and reading these works today, I found myself dumbstruck at the writing. Not just for the quality of it, the sparkle and panache and ambition (and yes, even the overt artiness and willingness to wander way out on a limb that couldn’t support them.) The other thing that struck me was the sheer amount of text that they put on a page. I’m not talking about putting in long chunks of dialogue that ramble off meaninglessly and have very little if nothing to do with the story at hand. I’m talking about captions.

Captions. We remember those, don’t we? Oh sure, we still have captions these days. We use them for recaps or to dump backstory on readers. Very rarely, if at all, are they really used as a platform for artistry. I don’t know if it’s regarded as a game or contest, to see how little text one can use in a story and still get the story told. It seems like narrative captions are seen the same way that voiceovers are seen in movies these days (more on that comparison later) as things to be done away with altogether, as failures on the part of the writer to show character through dialogue or action.

There might be a couple of reasons for this. One, and probably the most crucial, is that it’s hard. It’s hard for a couple of reasons, mostly that for it to work, the writer needs a real handle on the character’s interior life (for lack of a better term). To make their thoughts ring true, the author needs to spend a hell of a lot more time and effort on building the character from the inside out (which isn’t always done in comics, at least in superhero books, as the characters are pretty set in stone, and shorthanding things can get pretty good results, not to mention the whole grind of doing a monthly book.)

Another reason why we’re seeing less captioning in comics these days (even from the same writers, to be fair, though Neil Gaiman seems pretty wordy compared to a lot of other writers) has to do with (at least the way I see it) the drive to make comics more like movies and less like books. We’re favoring the visual side of things heavily and minimizing the textual side things. We might get longish monologues, but not a lot of those. Readers do, however, get fewer panels per page and big cinematic action.

But we don’t get a lot of text.

Sure, there’s authors who buck this trend, though they’re few and far between. Consequently, theirs are the books that take a little longer than five minutes to read. But one has to wonder why there’s so much ceded over to the artist in terms of storytelling.

“Cause it’s comics! Duh!” You reply. “You get too many words on a page and you’re looking at an illustrated novel, not a comic book.”

I’m not so sure that I agree with that. By comparison, look at any mainstream comic from the 60s. You’ll see vast tracts of text that we wouldn’t even be able to conceive of today. Long and rambling ruminations in fluffy balloons like flocks of sheep on the page. Every panel has text, granted, sometimes too much of it. Sure, prose in and of itself isn’t necessarily a good thing. Prose for the sake of prose isn’t any kind of solution, but avoiding a string of more than twenty words isn’t the way we should be going either.

Comics are words and text. Sure, comics can be done without words (I’m betting that the scripts for the entirety of Frank Miller’s run on Daredevil are shorter than the script for Brian Michael Bendis’ “Hardcore” story arc), but without words, comics are nothing more than sequential art. They have the ability to be so much more than that, and it drives me crazy to see artists limiting their palette. Action might be the only means to show character and conflict in film, but in comics, we have access to all manner of tools that simply don’t work in film. And yet, I see comics writers trying to do make films in pages and panels.

Screen writing has been referred to as “the invisible art”, since almost nobody sees the screenplay, and dialogue ends up being the only way that the audience hears the author’s actual words. All I’m saying is that in comics, the writing need not be invisible, that it can add another layer of meaning and deepen the range of storytelling possibilities. Something that we could always do with more of, says me.

Okay. I’ll try not to be so abstract next week, but I won’t make any promises that I can’t keep. See you then.