Telling a story

Comic books are all about telling a story. It can be seen as a mix of a graphic and written medium, but that doesn't change the purpose of the comic book being to put a narrative across. Narratives can be extremely simple, or very complicated. The comic book as a narrative medium has evolved quite a bit since "the golden age of comic" (late 1930s to late 1940s). At the time the merging between text and images was a new idea, and the textual medium would overwhelm the comic book. In the very first Judge Dredd comics for example, the authors wrote what the Judge was doing in the picture. Is it really necessary to describe the picture with text? That goes against the whole principle of comic books have text and images working hand in hand, it was more of a free for all at first.


Steve Gerber & Stever Brunner, Howard the Duck #1, Marvel Comics, 1976
There is no sense to discribing the image by sense. The drawing already does the job of telling you the part of the story it illustrates. Having thought or speach bubbles or a narrator explaining what can already be observed in the artwork is redoundant.

This can be seen as a very clumsy way of using the comic book medium. As comics evolved through time, text would be less and less present and a real balance of words and pictures was established. In fact mangas like Priest would take things the other way and have entire volumes of mangas with very little text. This lead to a lot of pictures to say very few words.

4 consecutive pages from a French copy of:
Hyung Min-Woo, Priest, Editions Tokebi, 2004
Most of the Priest series is like these 4 pages: a lot of images, and virtualy no text. This makes for a very fast read of the volumes because there is not that much to read on each page. The pictures do not tell us much, but illustrate a almost second by second scene of Priest. This is the opposite from the Howard the Duck example, the difference is that the scarce text has a contemporary artistic justification: the author purposely wants to have no text and narrate the story only through pictures. Howard the Duck does not have that luxury because of the historical background: the medium had not been fully exploited and explored, and comic books were still very much an "underground" medium, therefore the clumsiness of the first comic book artists.

PS: Steve Gerber, if you ever read this, Howard is one of my idols and the best ever Marvel Comics superhero!