Classic Comics! Exclamation Point!

While reading these comics I was very confused to how anyone ever thought that comics would cause illiteracy. There is so much text in these older comics. Most of the panels are completely dominated by it taking up usually half of the whole panel. I think that is probably one of the biggest tells that these comics were made in the early days of the comic book. They hadn't quite gotten the balance between text and image down yet. I would imagine many of the writers were coming from pulp fiction and having a hard time writing so little and trusting in the image.

The old EC comics were extremely reminiscent of pulp fiction with the helpless young damsels and the nagging wives. The comics definitely are lacking in women and the women that are present only exist to serve or antagonize the men. One of the comics I read in a Weird Fantasy issue was actually about how people could no longer have children and so they were going to bring people from the past into the future who could still procreate, but they put the portal in a men's restroom so literally no women came through. It most likely wasn't a commentary on lack of women in comics, but still made me laugh a bit because of the connection. Another of the Weird Fantasy stories was about a man who leaves his wife and goes to space with his new lover, his assistant, who he is predictably having an affair with because love has faded in his marriage and his wife nags him constantly. He smuggles his new lover by freezing her, but drops her upon arrival and she shatters. So in this she is literally so fragile she breaks. The women are so archetypal in these comics it makes me laugh, a cynical, bitter laugh, but still a laugh at how hilariously one-dimensional and man-centered the women were characterized as back then.

In the Action Comics issue that I read it became pretty clear that the writers were trying to dictate what the reader's inner dialogue was by narrating it. For example Superman had text like 'What does the evil medicine man mean? How can Superman cause anybody's death?' and 'But how can this save the doomed hun-sha?' which were questions that didn't really need to be written, but are more the job of the reader to wonder and have part of their own inner dialogue. Overall, it seems like in the majority of these comics the writers weren't trusting in the medium. They were trying to fill in all the blanks for the readers and doing all of the work for them, which for me makes these earlier books not as enjoyable to read. While this stage of comics was definitely necessary for the evolution I'm glad that writers and artists trust more in the medium and the reader now and modern comics are less about spoon feeding information.

However, the beginning of the evolution and the start of trust in the medium to communicate story as a balance between text and image is definitely seen in Carl Barks' work. It is kinda funny to me that a comic targeted at kids achieved this balance before the more adult targeted comics that were still really struggling trying to balance text and image. It is probably because of the constraints put on kids comics to not have too many big words or a lot of text, but because of that the image is able to do it's job and text and image works for harmoniously to tell a story. The Bark's work I read was one of the duck comics, The Secret of Atlantis, where Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck get in a squabble about a debt and after lots of shenanigans end up in Atlantis. Rather than relying on text to explain everything that happens in between the panels he draws out the action and shows the reader what is happening instead of telling. He really makes all of his panels count and no action or word is filler. Everything contributes to the story, there is no fat. There is a great momentum in his work because of it and I felt immersed in the story because it was never lagging. Looking at these older comics really reveals the kind of evolution that comics has gone through, especially in regards to trust in the medium and the reader.