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The silent panel is a GREAT example. Allow me to be pedantic:
Comic books depend on rhythm and panels create the rhythm. Small, small, small, small...BIG SPLASH PAGE. Using identical silent panels as beats before delivering a punchline. Using a silent panel to show someone thinking, to slow down the pace of a story to build suspense or believability.
But, like a rimshot, silent panels can be gruesomely abused. Look at Iron Man #7. On page 16 there's a silent panel between Captain America and Iron Man designed to show that Iron Man is avoiding Captain America's rhetorical question. Meh, a little lazy but it's a convention and so it passes unnoticed. Then, on the next page, Luke Cage criticizes Iron Man and Captain America says, "He can hear every word you say." Next panel: silent close-up of Luke Cage looking chagrined. Why don't they just put in the horn: wah-waaaaaah. Blow a raspberry on you, Luke Cage! This is sitcom pacing - the pause for the laugh track where the audience goes "You got dogged!"
Page 18, another sitcom moment. Nick Fury and Dooligan MacDooligan are talking about Tony Stark and Tony Stark HEARS them! Then we get a silent panel of Tony at the bottom of the page while they turn to look at him...busted! This is the moment when the laugh track goes, "OOOooooooo!" Why didn't they just put in an enormous "BURN!" caption?
On the very next page there's a silent panel of Dundee McFundee walking past Tony Stark and Tony giving him the eye. It is the silliest panel I've seen in a long time. Just stare at it. Let it lift from its context. Are these guys checking each other out? Flirting? Is Tony Stark noticing the dandruff on Dooligan's collar? Why? Why is this here? Because the writer doesn't know how to move his characters around. It's an easy way to break up the scene, shuffling one actor offstage while the other comes on and dialogue switches from one conversation to another, but this would never pass muster in any other medium. A wordless entrance and exit framed this lazily and undramatically would result in a deadly pause in a play and in a movie it would be the time when you went to the bathroom. It's just a silent panel to cover moving the pawns around because the writer isn't good enough to do it any other way. Sometimes it's easy to write the superheroics and hard to write people walking in and out of rooms.
On page 20 we've got two inscrutable silent panels. I couldn't even tell you what they're for. In the first one Tony gives a speech and then...silent panel. Is Nick Fury at a loss for words? Did Tony's big speech sound dumb and the room is echoing with it afterwards? Or did the author just need a quick way to change from one track to another and thought it was too abrupt to jump from one dialogue panel to the next?
And in the second silent panel, one panel later, Nick Fury says, "Tell me about Argonaut." Silent panel close up on Tony. Then Tony says, "What...?" Holy overstatement, Batman! If he's just going to say, "What...?" then why have the silent panel? Did he fall asleep for a minute? Space out? See an ad for the SUPERMAN movie on a tv on the other side of the room and get distracted?
The silent inscrutable panel is a useful tool, but it's used by some writers as a lazy technique to make transitions or to cover stage business when there are a million other ways they could do the same thing if they just thought about it for a little bit. But like the producer of a bad sitcom their first instinct is to reach for the laugh track knob and turn up the volume to cover their laziness. |
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