Comics week at The A.V. Club continues as Brian Michael Bendis talks about his early work, starting at Marvel, bringing back thought balloons, and the growing continuity of Ultimate Spider-Man:
The word “continuity” has kind of got this evil reputation, you know what I mean? What it did was, it invented a more reader-friendly comic book. Even though it’s 120 issues, you read that recap page, which by the way didn’t exist in ancient comics prior to Ultimate Spider-Man. That was a Bill Jemas invention. The new writers don’t want to bog down the writing with exposition, which is just lazy writing. So to do a recap like they do in front of Law & Order, or “Previously on ER“, to do that and get back right into the story. So that has now been applied to every comic book. So it brought down this way to tell a more layered, character-driven story, unshackling a lot of the tired ways that a monthly book was being produced. You just don’t see Wolverine slicing someone with an 80-line thought balloon over his head filling you in on everything that’s ever happened to him in his entire life, that kind of stuff. And though it sounds cheeky, “Oh, that’s a big invention,” it really seismically changed a lot of the language of comics, and freed up stuff to go nuts.
Every comic book is someone’s first or their last. If someone’s picking this up for the first time, is it entertaining? Can they follow it? You can have a four-part or six-part story, but you should be able to get right in there and figure out what’s going on immediately, without insulting the reader at the same time. And also, someone might read this and go, “I’m never buying another comic book again, I’m moving on to something else. I like girls.” And they never read another comic again, and it’s your responsibility to make that not happen. So these were the theories applied to the Ultimate line more than it was continuity, it was reader-friendly. Don’t talk down to people to get new people in.
As a bonus, he also discusses fan fallout from Avengers Disassembled.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:44 am
“The new writers don’t want to bog down the writing with exposition, which is just lazy writing.”
A curious choice of words. Obviously the recap page is a much superior way of doing the same thing, especially because it avoids repetition when the story is reprinted in trade paperback. But if you don’t have a recap page – and until the last few years, we didn’t – then you absolutely NEED exposition. There’s nothing “lazy” about including something essential, only lazy ways of going about it. (“I can’t believe Annihilus has returned again!” “Yes, Reed, and let me spend the rest of this page narrating flashbacks of something we both know!”)
You don’t become a better writer by shunting the exposition to the recap page; you just become a writer whose publisher has adopted a better format.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Sometimes it was done well, but sometimes it was done in a lazy way. Perhaps that’s what he’s referring to.
There are comics that have done a lot of recapping completely fluidly. A new character comes in and asks the perfectly reasonable question of what happened and the regular characters explain it all. On top of that, some new information is added so it isn’t just a rehash. There have been some recaps that fit seamlessly into the narrative.
However, a lot of times much more direct methods are used. The main character throws a punch and starts thinking, “Funny, I never would have thought so much could happen in such a short time,” and then time stops and the next page is nothing but flashbacks. That sort of heavy handed recapping pops up way too often, if only because there are only so many ways to cleverly recap with subtlety.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Do they have recaps on “Law & Order”? I thought that show was self-contained.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Actually Bendis is wrong about one thing – Bill Jemas didn’t invent the recap page for Marvel books. Marvel was doing them as far back as the mid-90s.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
If it’s in a few word balloons, good.
If it’s in captions with quote marks over pages of one-color panels that actually show you the scenes from last ish, bad.
(Just a guideline, of course, not a black-and-white rule.)