Thanks to Brad Meltzer's Justice League #1, I have discovered a new rule of storytelling.
If you have an off-panel conversation, it cannot include more than two participants.
Two people's conversation can be followed easily by the simple assumption that they take turns (per Grice's fourth maxim of manner). Any more than that and the audience will be unable to keep them straight.
This holds true even when you use visual elements like color or font to identify the particular speaker, unless the visual element is extremely obtrusive. Swamp Thing-style captions might provide enough contrast. I think a font would have to actually be hard to read long before it could be distinctive enough. Color-coding is clearly insufficient. (See below.) It's conceivable that a good enough writer with characters with distinctive enough voices could make a three-way conversation followable.
In this particular case, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman discuss potential inductees for the League off-panel while we see the inductee on-panel. Their captions are distinguished only by coloring.
Note that the letterer's attempt to solve the problem does not work at all for many vision-impaired people, such as my chum who is completely colorblind, for whom all of the captions would be a uniform grey. This is an example of the well-understood phenomenon that improving something's accessibility (meaning ease of use by the handicapped) makes it more effective for everybody.
It may also be an example of the script-transparency problem, where a writer fails to realize that there's information in his script that isn't visible to the reader, and should be.
I believe I've seen letterers use little miniature logos at the beginning of the caption to identify the off-panel speaker. That works. It's bringing enough of the characters on-panel that we can distinguish them. Similarly, if their silhouettes framed the panel and their word balloons or captions pointed to their silhouettes, they wouldn't be off-panel.
Posted by Greg at September 18, 2006 6:21 PM
I agree.
I also happen to have just read #0 and #1 earlier today, and I have to say that not only are you right, but this three-way conversation thing is, in my opinion, a 40/60 split, where 40% of the time their over-caption discussion of themselves and the league in #0 and themselves and potential League members in #1 is interesting and reasonably good (to occasionally genuinely very good) characterization, while 60% of the time it's trite, adds nothing, or comes off as rather fanboy-ish.
So, for me, a mixed bag.
I can no longer look at the Brad Meltzer credit without thinking, "This is the man who made Jean Loring bugfuck."
And then mentally add, "Man, Identity Crisis sucked."
Which kind of colours my enter experience of reading from that point on.
I enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out which of the three were saying which thing, in #0 and #1...
It was fanboyish, but the reason I read Justice League is that I'm a fanboy. Also, it gave me a series of small mysteries that I could solve, which balanced against some of the big dangling plot mysteries that I may not ever solve.
However, the overlapping conversations between the villains in #1 was just frustrating.
Interesting. Without having read it, I was going to ask aloud if the effect might be one of a puzzle?
I will say that my first reaction to Greg's edict was "I guess I better go tear up my copies of Starstruck, then." Not that I think that Brad Meltzer is one-tenth the writer Elaine Lee was, mind you.
I would not characterize it as a puzzle--as I noted, the captions were color-coded, so were trivially distinguishable if one went to the effort. Since the effort stops the flow of the story, I consider it an affront to storytelling.
I have not read Starstruck. I am willing to believe that its writer, letterer, and editor could have had enough command of craft to effectively convey speaker identities in a three-way off-panel conversation. Back then, projects like Starstruck weren't attempted without command of craft.
There are very, very few people working in superhero comics who have that level of craft now. They can ignore my rule. Everybody else needs to learn my rule, because they haven't learned enough else to violate it.
So why do you keep buying this stuff? That's $3 to $4 you could have put toward a good book, or even an Archive Edition from the days when comics used things called plot, writing, editing, storytelling, etc.
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Clearly I have been wasting my life till now. Thank you, Jeffrey. You don't need to hang around, I'm sure I'll be just fine now that you've shown me the light.
Except, wait a minute. You're posting from the same IP as Matt. Wow, that's quite a coincidence. Are you guys brothers or co-workers or something? That's pretty cool. I wish I had a friend. Mostly, I just put a sock on my hand and pretend.
"I think a font would have to actually be hard to read long before it could be distinctive enough."
Exhibit A in my argument against this statement: The differing fonts for Bruce Wayne's and Jim Gordon's narrations in "Batman: Year One"
Each was distinct and yet still readable.
"I would not characterize it as a puzzle--as I noted, the captions were color-coded, so were trivially distinguishable if one went to the effort. Since the effort stops the flow of the story, I consider it an affront to storytelling."
I didn't find it so hard to follow.
Though one convention that multiple person off panel conversation have followed in the past was the use of icons to designate which character was speaking.
It doesn't work so well outside of superhero conversations, but in this case the bat shield, the "S" shield and the interlaced "WW" would have done the job quite well in this instance.