Weekly Comics Spotlight #027

[choanata]

I suppose I'm just trying to rectify things in my head with this theory.

The other thing I was thinking about, since these aren't exactly no-names being killed off...what if the deaths are a set up to Blackest Night? Generate a few more soldiers for the war kinda thing, by killing folks off.

The Flash rougue that may or may not have been killed off in issue 4 is pretty well known. What if he was to become a power player in the Black Lantern Corps? Like Kilowog for the Green Lanterns and that other big dude for the Sinestro Corps. Plus, it's an easy way to tie Blackest Night into Flash and other titles...

Just throwing out ideas.

[Skyhawke]

The not naming of names is part of the writing for the trade trend and really cuts into the accessibility of the stories.

While I don't think things need to go back to the Claremont-esque "I, Storm, goddess of the winds, leader of the X-Men must deal with my fear of enclosed places due to claustrophobia" kind of thought balloons or captions, it would be nice if characters that either speak or play a meaningful part in the story were at least named when they first appear.

I can be a bit forgiving when the extras that are in the background and don't really do anything in the story are not named. But not so much when key characters in the story go unidentified.

It is increasingly unreasonable for the creators to just expect us to remember everything about a storyline told over the span of five or six months, sometimes much, much longer.

People are forgetting one of Stan Lee's very important rules. Every comic book is someone's first book or in today's world, is someone's first collection of stories in a trade format.

An editor should recognize the secondary villians and heroes are not being called by means of conversation or narrative box on any of the panels. It not just enough that they are called out in the script for penciling and coloring purposes.