Tuesday, July 13, 2004

RANT: Comic Book Captions

I've been reading comic books for waaaaaaaay too long. The whole Silver Age on. I've had serious concerns with lots that has gone on in the comic book industry, one that I left nearly 20 years ago. But I still collect and read.

One of the most recent 'innovations' in comic books is computerized-colouring. And that means caption boxes can be made artistically ... and unreadable. The colours, the background blending, the odd shapes ... they've taken a core component of comic books and SCREWED IT UP! Black type looks okay on white, but less so when the caption background blends into emerald green. Is that such a hard concept to understand?

The Teen Titans are in their umpteenth revival currently at DC and a recent issue I read featured NO thought balloons, now considered a corny anachronism. Instead, floating captions serve the purpose, each caption being coloured differently for each character. Most of the captions are blended and tough to read. They'll blame that on the printing. One exception was Superboy's blood red lettering on a black background. Who thinks up this crap? What happened to readability?

A pox on all their houses.

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