That wet flapping sound you hear is my chickens coming home to roost. For years now I have maintained that most comic books just aren’t dense enough. Comics can do a lot of things and breezy action is only one of them - I like a page that invites the reader to linger and gawk a while. If that kind of page appeals to you as well then I suppose you should probably look into acquiring a copy of Roofstompers. A humbling experience for the jaundiced reader.
So perhaps we require a moment’s digression on the subject of pressure? We measure pressure in terms of Pascals - named of course for Blaise Pascal, mathematical doyenne of the seventeenth century. Right now you and I and every person we know, more or less, is experiencing life at the sensation of 101.325 kPa - that’s as measured in kilopascals, or if you prefer, 1 atmosphere. Where does this lead us? Well, we’ve been measuring comics in terms of kilopascals for decades now, whether we have realized it or not. The moment the first comic book was ever described in terms of “decompression� an implicit scale was created to measure the degrees of pressure to which narrative progression is subjected. What qualifies as 1 atm for comics? Batman? That’s not really a joke, I don’t think. Batman was a good enough economic indicator for Diamond for all those years, it makes as much sense as that to posit Batman as more or less the mean in terms of narrative density. It rarely goes too far out on the limb either way.
To speak as clinically as possible: however many events happen in your average issue of Batman, as well as the pace with which these events unfold, is more or less the number and velocity of events that can be expected to transpire in any mainstream or mainstream-adjacent comic book at that moment in time. It’s the mean, on most months smack in the middle of the bell curve for narrative density. On one extreme, to the left of that same chart you see much of Bryan Hitch and that school of attenuated narrative density, accompanied by writers content not to obscure the art, and on the other side you find comics often written by British folks who were trained to tell four or five stories in the space of our one. I’m a fool, in that I think putting fewer words on the page is cheating. It is however certainly possible to go too far in the opposite direction: the text issue of Morrison’s Batman had to be thrown out of our sample group, all copies were burnt, a recall was issued. (The Comics Journal would never, ever recommend setting any comic book on fire - that’s a young man’s game, and we’re none of us so young as we once were, nor all of us so men.)
