Why are comics so less wordy now than they used to be?

Why are comics so less wordy now than they used to be?

ADD if you're a hack, more concise writing if you're actually good. Though sometimes a comic could benefit from longer writing.

Styles change. Wordy exposition used to be hip.
Or atleast writers thought it was hip. Now they don't. They like faux-naturalistic talking.

I feel like I would prefer them to be wordy. Especially with modern marvel comics it feels like I don't get my money's worth because nothing fucking happens.

They need to spread the story across multiple issues to get your money

Having more words doesn't mean it will be better written. I think Bendis would be better if he used less words instead of making characters just ramble on forever without saying anything important.

Most user's today, especially the ones that scream CASUAL, can't read, have little to no comprehension, and don't consider a comic good unless it has a lot of "action."

In the 80's Moore and Miller became prominent and they started cutting down on text. (Yes, Moore still had expressive narration back then, but compare Watchmen with his first two or three Captain Britain stories) From there people started realizing they could cut down on text. Marvel meanwhile still kept doing what it did since Stan Lee set the style and tone and Chris Claremont and John Byrne were popular throughout the 70's and 80's.

In the early 90's, some Image titles emulated the verbose style of the X-books (which makes sense since Lee, Liefeld, and Silvestri worked on X-books before leaving) but in an even more awkward manner. Like for instance it's weird for Ripclaw to be saying all this in midair.

So between Marvel doubling down on imitations of Claremont's style, Image and other companies doing their take on Marvel's writing style, a lot of people got tired of it. Add to that the falling comic sales and people like Warren Ellis was suggesting comics make things more naturalistic sounding. Garth Ennis also had a disdain for the X-Men because of its writing style. On top of that, Byrne was falling out of favor with his late 90's Marvel work, and fans weren't exactly supporting Claremont's return to X-Men. It was probably no surprise that the biggest comics hit of 2000 was Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis and Bagley, where the writing and pacing were different from Marvel's usual comics.

Comics don't need walls of text to be good.

Because comics used to written for young kids in mind and those kids needed to have things spelled out for them with heavy exposition.

>good writers/artists pioneer comics that have less text and more expressive panels
>shitty artists copy them
>lazy writers take the opportunity to work less
>most comics are drawn by shitty artists and written by shitty writers

End result 20 pages of nothing because the art is incomprehensible and the writer didn't explain anything

Because then they usually needed only one issue to tell a story. You really felt like each issue was important and it has lots of stuff happening.
Now they just add bunch of meaningless shit every issue to pad it, and now that one story is taking 6 issues instead of 1 like it was before.

Likewise, they were written such that any issue could be your first, so it required a lot of reiterating basic info every issue like each character's powers and recapping the events of all relevant past issues for anyone new to the series.

makes sense since they didn't have internet to check up on the characters

This is the only thing that bothers me. Look at that paragraph, supposedly said in midair. You wouldn't be able to surprise someone, jump, and get that all out without some sort of reaction.

Bendis.
with Moore as the intermediate.

So Stan Lee felt like he was doing something. Sometimes he would write a rough outline but it's the artist who had to plot out the story. Then he filled in the word balloons. That whole sequence where Spider-Man is trying to lift that wreckage off had it's pacing ruined by Lee adding paragraphs of dialogue in those pages.

>no speedlines

Will comic artists ever learn, it doesn't feel like the characters are moving

There was a time where writers were paid by the word. Stuffing in as much exposition as a page could coherently handle meant a bigger pay.

Guys like Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson were great with speedlines.

>picture of spidey jumping backwards to avoid an enemy attack
>"Oh no, he's trying to attack me! Good thing I jumped back at just the right moment so I didn't get hit!"

Webcomics stole the words from them.