Captioned For The Writing Impaired

You know what I really really really really REALLY hate? This:

I'm not exactly sure when (or why) thought balloons became verboten. But the advent of the color-coded, mini-icon-bearing caption may be the worst thing to hit comic books since belts with lots of pouches.

This caption nonsense (did it start with Superman/Batman?) isn't inherently stupid. But in practical effect, it has become the most annoying thing ever. And not just because we've replaced thoughts with sludgy self-narration (what, is everyone in a noir now??).

Maybe it's partly because I'm old-school, and don't like to see the 70+ year tradition of thought balloons completely tossed out for the fad of the month. But mainly it's because the practice is so brutally executed.

Take the example above--really? Do we need a flash of every single characters' self-narration in that panel, no matter how trite or lame? Especially when it's so glaringly non-helpful--none of the captions advance plot or characterization in any meaningful way. But James Robinson is like a kid who just got a label maker for Christmas, and has to put a label on everything--everyone's going to get a damned caption, necessary or not!

But there are other crimes of captioning. For example, should I really need to refer to a chart or have to guess who is "thinking" at us now? Take the splash page:

Oh, hell, let's blow it up:

Now, maybe, as an astute comics fan, I should have intuited that the red/black color scheme with the stylized T was supposed to represent Mr. Terrific. Maybe...although I'd wager that 90% of the people who read this story didn't suss out that it was Mr. T until he was revealed to be the "narrator"--in the very last panel of page 3!!

That's right, 3 pages of narrating the actions of various other people, by a person who's not even there...and the creators didn't feel the need to identify that narrator, apparently because this lazy brilliant color/icon scheme is supposed to tell you who's "talking." Which, conveniently, relieves the author of any responsibility to make the "dialogue" particularly character specific. In the hands of a writer who can't handle the convention, it's the equivalent of "tell, don't show" characterization...why bother to write the caption so we know who it is by the way they "speak," when the reader can just look at the pretty colors?? Hey, it's the readers' fault now if they didn't know it was Mr. Terrific!

The other big sin? Doing everything possible to take the focus away from the art and the action.

Again, blown up:

You know, you could do characterization for Jade and Donna Troy when they're, you know, in the panel. But where's the fun of that? When you should be enjoying Mr. Miracle's hijinks, why not shift the focus to other people who apparently are not even watching what's going on, and whom the reader can't even identify (I defy anyone to explain how that odd little sigil is supposed to represent Donna Troy)? Why the heck would I want to know what Shiloh Norman is thinking about his ordeal, or what others think of it? No, let's focus on what people off-panel are thinking about something else entirely!!

It's the equivalent of people talking loudly about their day while at the theater when the movie's playing...and they're not even talking about the damned movie!! GRRRR....

Again, I'm not sure why such a massive groupthink took over the entire industry simultaneously. And captions aren't inherently worse than thought balloons...after all, there have been some pretty terrible thought balloons over the decades. But, in unskilled hands, this turn to captions has created a lot of bad habits and poor storytelling (not to mention tons of turgid, solopsistic and extremely-poorly written self-monologue).

So, somebody out there--free the thought balloon!!

Panels taken from last week's JLA #47.