I am writing a comic and I wanted inspiration for bettering myself. I wanted to know which writers of dialogue do you guys hate the most and which do you like the best.
For me the worst is Bendis, not only is his word choice pretty mediocre but those goddamn speech bubbles give me a headache just trying to read.
For best I don't know but I like Mark Waid.
Alias is the worst offender.
>those goddamn speech bubbles give me a headache just trying to read.
whaddaya mean?
Wow...
Bendisspeak? Bendisspeak.
>I am writing a comic and I wanted inspiration for bettering myself.
JLI and the Formerly Known as/I Can't Believe It's Not minis. Everything sounds good and snappy.
for future reference, physically it's incest, mentally it's complicated masturbation
Any reason why all that text had to be in one panel?
Bendis wants to be like Giffen/DeMatteis on JLI, but he really doesn't get it.
Sometimes I think Bendis is just playing along.
yo the key is balance
know where you want to show and where you want to tell and then apply art and text accordingly
movies are all about show
books are all about tell
comics are the literal medium here and take a little more tact to know when to lean one way or the other.
a lot of text isnt necessarily bad, it just needs good placement on the page and real importance to the story or compliments the art.
Like Dillon and the Frank Face?
You would've preferred it spread over a couple of pages?
Summarized if need be.
Thank you!
It's cute how Bendis continues to think he is the David Mamet of comics
his idol is David Mamet, so Bendis just apes his style, badly
Yeah and it fails completely.
Keith Giffen is my inspiration. His dialog feels natural and tends to flow very well. It can be condensed on some pages and even then it feels natural and flows very well. Maid is pretty good sometimes but he can't write teens for shit.
Dream(sandman) is the most carefully worded character on earth
Hellboy is a god of dry understatement.
Some of the homestuck chatlogs are amazing
Gunnerkrigg has good bubbling.
Jodorowsky is paleofun
Bendis? Playing along?
One of things you need to worry about too is making sure characters have a distinct voice. That's another problem is that all of his characters sound the same. Take the OP image. Take any other male/female combo and insert them in Luke and Jessica's place. Nothing really changes there. Put Lois and Clark in there, Spidey and MJ, Cyclops and Jean, Mr. Miracle and Big Barda, etc., swap out the nouns as appropriate and nothing at all changes. Every character Bendis writes sounds like Bendis.
Not just making some words sound like they're being spoken with an accent but word choice, verboseness (or lack thereof), is this character more uptight, is that one more relaxed. Really just go through dialogue in your head. It doesn't necessarily have to be "realistic" with all the stuttering and stuff like that that comes from normal human speech (unless that's a characters thing) but does the dialogue flow smoothly, does the conversation seem natural, does all of it seem true to the characters that you're writing.
He is. There was a scene with some mutant whose name I can't remember (tubby guy, I think he made balls explode with contact) who referenced how people said he "repeated things"
>"you repeat things?"
>"yeah. people say I do"
I get the feeling Bendis saw Glengarry Glen Ross as a college kid and thought it was super cool to have dialogue like that.
yeah you know, like going along with a joke you know is about you
Frank Doyle, head Archie writer from the '50s to the '80s. One of the few comic book writers in any medium who made characters sound like they were actually talking and not delivering exposition speak.
And by "medium" I mean "genre," gah. Anyway Archie stuff is good to look at to get an idea of how to tell a story very concisely with the minimum exposition and still give everyone a voice.
I like Ennis's dialogue
Any tips on this? I'm curious on how to get inside a character's mind and write them with a voice. I've also noticed Archie comics sound very natural and distinct yet they tend to use little dialog.
As weird as it sounds, I actively practice taking the myers briggs personality test while imagining myself in the mind of that character. If you get consistently the same rating when comparing your classification against other online versions of the test, that's a pretty good sign your characters are pretty well thought out and developed.
She's down for pound town.
Also, I get the feeling Bendis watched a lot of Gilmore Girls.
That's an interesting test
IT'S SO REALISTIC
Start with working on developing unique voices before natural sounding dialogue. People are more forgiving of slightly unnatural dialogue than they are of indistinct characters.
As an exercise, create a character then, keeping personality intact, write that character in different life circumstances.
Another good example of distinct character voices would be Palmotti and Grey's Jonah Hex series.
You know, you could remove all the dialogue and convey the same message just with property drawing the scene
Joss Whedon's dialogue is on a similar, terrible wavelength, though not suffering from the repetitive bullshit so much.
I don't have the original, sorry.
Another thing that makes classic Archie seem natural is it has great rhythm and pacing. Even when the characters are just chatting, they're always doing something and the story is moving forward. When you look at and they stopped the story and dedicated full pages just to meaningless back and forth. It's masturbatory on the part of the writer and gives the artist very little of anything interesting to draw, and even less of anything interesting for the reader to take in.
It's always a good idea to listen to actual people and how they talk. Go to a restaurant or the grocery store and do some light eavesdropping. Listen to people of different ages and backgrounds. Just be smart about it and don't follow people around or get all up in their business.