Blackest Night #3

[trueredorion.insanejournal.com]

4 pages from Blackest Night #3 by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis.

The Indigo Tribe reveals some backstory:





And then the BL JLA bust in and Indigo-1 teleports away with Hal against his will.

Comments

[rab62.insanejournal.com]

Truly, Geoff Johns writes like a story conference. Sometimes he'll have good ideas for character motivation and suchlike...but rather than have characters talking to each other like people and revealing their personality through their actions, they just stand there and exposit motivations at one another.

[jlbarnett.insanejournal.com]

this is like a military briefing, not a conversation between friends, or even people who know each other.

[rab62.insanejournal.com]

While I think the military briefing side was also overwritten, that wasn't the bit I was talking about. I mean stuff like this:

"The fastest man alive was always late because he stopped and befriended the people he saved. He spent hours meticulously analyzing a crime scene so he could find justice for a victim that didn't have any. He slowed down bad rejoined the rest of us every chance he got. You're running nonstop because you're afraid it'll be taken away again."

And then three word balloons of the same back from Barry! It's having the characters tell each other stuff that should be shown rather than told…and it tries to be profound and meaningful and eloquent, but the sheer tonnage of words prevents it from achieving any of those things.

[rab62.insanejournal.com]

Oops, sorry, that came out differently than I intended. I meant to say "yes, exactly!" :-D

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

It's usually not something people like in normal conversation to have people constantly defining them. The natural reaction most have to that is resentment of being oversimplified. So it sounds wrong as conversation.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

That is definitely his biggest flaw as a writer, that and his penchant for dismemberment. It's like his laws of dialogue all come from Jim Shooter's dicta back in the 80s, that character dialogue should always explain to the reader who this character is. The characters pitch themselves.

[starwolf_oakley.insanejournal.com]

Mark Waid, both on Legion of Super-Heroes and X-Men, put a caption box next to each character giving each character's name. He started almost every issue of the Flash with "My name is Wally West. I'm the Fastest Man Alive."

Waid also has a penchant for dismemberment, as seen in KINGDOME COME and Irredeemable.