I have never been able to argue with authorial authority

I have never been able to argue with authorial authority

In a recent discussion with my regular role-playing group one player was complaining about the plethora of super-hero movies being released recently, and her increasing exhaustion with this genre. Another defended it partially on the basis that he has always really enjoyed superhero comics so seeing good movies of them is fun, but yeah maybe there are a few too many. I chimed in to this essential conversation to observe that I’ve never been able to get into super hero comics by Marvel and DC (and I guess Vertigo too) because I find the text so incredibly frustrating to read. The way they put bold/italic emphasis on almost random words in the text – in almost every piece of text – really distracts me from what I’m actually reading and drives me crazy. The original complainer agreed that she, too has always found this off-putting.

As an example, consider this blog post at Lawyers, Guns and Money about what a superb comic artist some guy is. It gives a long, detailed dissertation about how the action within the frame is juxtaposed with the flow of the panels to inculcate in the reader the same sense of discomfort and challenge experienced by the character the panels are about. This seems like a fairly plausible interpretation of the effect of this particular set of panels but I just can’t care about how great this makes the artist because the entire scene is so devastatingly annoying. What is with all that emphasis in all the text? Why emphasize the word “lightning bolt” and the names? It’s distracting and annoying.

I’ve felt this way for years of course but never really investigated, so I tried a bit of googling to see if I could find anything on the topic, and a brief search revealed nothing – possibly because including the words “Marvel”, “DC” or anything similar in a search term drowns out the rest, but possibly also because no one writes about this stuff. So what is going on? Why do they have to put emphasis in comic book text at all, let alone randomly throughout every second speech bubble? Is it something about the reading age of the audience? Is it meant to add dramatic tension? Is there no one in either of these quite large companies who reads this stuff, finds it annoying, and occasionally considers maybe not doing it? Are there two types of people in the world? As far as I know the method isn’t used in manga, at least not in Japanese and I don’t remember it in English either. Why do these comics do it? And is there a legion of haters of this stuff out there? If you do hate it, is it possible to enjoy the comics at all or are is it always overwhelming?

Inquiring MINDS want to KNOW.