On the day that I'm put in charge of a comic book company, my very first act...
...will be to ban %^&*$!#ing photocopiers. Because if I wanted the same panel repeated 6 times? I can have interns Xerox it a hell of a lot more cheaply than whatever I'm paying an artist to "draw" it.Panel (note I didn't use the plural) from this week's Sensational Spider-Man #33.1, script by Tom DeFalco, "pencils" by Carlo Barberi.
Couldn't agree with you more. This is actually one of my biggest peeves with modern comics along with the overuse of "first person narration captions". I think out of all the times I've seen the panel copy trick it's been effective maybe once - maybe. It's just plain lazy. Curious to know who started the ball rolling.
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I saw the use of repeated panels was Alpha Flight 12 (sometime in the 80s). Except John Byrne used it to good effect, with the image getting closer, and pen lines thicker. But I think Bendis made it "popular" and I expect most artists love the time saving.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, wouldn't the above panels be more dynamic and interesting if there were different views?! Bad storytelling.
Yeah. It's starting to get annoying.
ReplyDeleteKeith Giffen did the stat thing many times during his run on the 5YL Legion.
ReplyDeleteBut Giffen's Legion was so dense, you hardly had time to notice you were being shortchanged. If indeed, you were.
ReplyDeleteThank you, I was reading this last night and it actually threw me right out of an otherwise decent book.
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