This isn’t the case for all American comic books and comic strips, there are moments of wordlessness and then there are truly wordless stories like Frank by Jim Woodring but a good number of superhero comics tend to have rather cramped writing. In the sense that you have multiple word balloons in a single panel, at times the word balloons become full of text in just a few panels when I feel there needs more panels laid out to time the dialogue with. I know this from writing comics scripts and doing well one comic story myself.
It’s actually been pointed out that with superhero comics, especially those from DC and Marvel, this bad habit started out when pulp writers started writing comic books. So you have a lot of captions and dialogue happening in a single or a few panels. To be honest, two word balloons in a handful of panels is enough. But making three or more is too much, especially if it doesn’t allow space for the character’s dialogue to be timed. At other times, I feel if pictures are a thousand words then the character’s actions, movements and body language can sometimes be enough.
There needn’t more words in the panel to convey what the character’s actually doing, well it does feel telepathic to literally read the character’s thoughts on paper but even then sometimes it betrays the character’s body language. I even think this conditions some cartoonists to not trust the character’s body language when captions are being used to tell you what the character’s doing and thinking.
There are others who do a good job at the characters’ body language despite the wordiness, but I think more panels are needed to time the dialogue with. It’s something that wouldn’t be easily pulled off at first, but also necessary when it comes to timing the characters’ dialogues and speeches. It’s always possible to be creative around limitations, but even then you’d still have to figure out a way to McGuyver things when it comes to timing the characters’ speeches and dialogues with one another.
I knew this myself when I tried doing 3 or 4 panel cartoons, it’s not easy at first but it takes some time getting used to this. It’s actually been said that the habit of writing a lot of dialogue in just a few panels is a bad habit taken from pulp fiction, since some of the earliest comic book writers (not comic strip) were pulp writers themselves. Since they’re not used to the way comic strips are written and drawn, they added what they knew best. But sometimes it doesn’t go so smoothly, so the panels become really cramped.
Not all American comic books do this, some like Owly and Frank eschew words altogether to focus more on the characters’ movements and body languages more. Likewise, newspaper comic strips aren’t this wordy either but it seems this bad habit has been passed down to future writers. The other problem is that such stories are constrained by other limitations, especially if it’s just either 32 pages per periodical (in the case of American comic books) or 3 or 4 panels per cartoon (newspaper comic strips). Nonetheless I won’t be surprised if some McGuyvered their way into those venues.
Even then, there needs a stronger emphasis on timing the dialogue per panel as to allow breathing space.
fynm 