All Of This Has Happened Before

You know, I was all ready to pick on Bendis for yet another one of those splash panels that consists of nothing but people standing and talking with dozens of word balloons.

Yup. I was all ready...until I came across Justice League Of America #150 (1978).

Mark Shaw, formerly a Manhunter, had adopted a new identity, as the hero Privateer. But it turns out that he was really evil, and had infiltrated the League just to enact some nefarious crimes. But he gets outed by Red Tornado, which is enough to drive a guy into mad monologuing:


Now, you'd think that might have been enough...but nope, the next panel we get is perhaps the worst use of a splash page in modern comic history:

Click to embiggen to full insane exposition-vision...

This was a 35-page "Giant" issue, so you'd have thought that Steve Englehart and Dick Dillin had plenty of room to lay out their surprise villain's motivations and scheme.

But for whatever reason, they decided to grind things to a total halt on page 34 with a static, long-winded and poorly typeset 500+ word info-dump. Maybe they ended up a page short and had to do an emergency page fill-in. Maybe editorial didn't care for what they originally had on that page, and demanded a last-minute replacement. Or maybe they actually thought this was good comics...

So, Bendis, you're off the hook...this week