Z-A of Me Meme

E is for Exposition.

Bully recently posted a comparison of the wordcounts of Amazing Spider-Man #13 and Ultimate Spider-Man #13.

It got me to thinking about the differences between modern and silver-age comics, and I realised that the major differences are the background of the writers and the style of script they were writing.

Silver Age comic writers came from literary backgrounds, where they were paid per word. 1-5 cents per word and you learn how to become verbose. In Stan Lee's case, the Marvel method was fraught with pitfalls. A loose plot description could be taken any number of ways, and the only way to get the story back on track was through the word balloons.

The further away from their literary starting point comics got, the more visual the medium became. Nowadays everyone wants to write for the movies, back in the '50s and sixties, all the writers want to be novelists. There's a big difference between the story structure of those media, and the comparison shows it.