Four comics panels that never work

Here's Mark Waid's fitting tribute to Wally Wood's "Twenty-Two Panels That Always Work" -- four panels that don't. Also available as a handsome print, suitable for framing and display near to one's drafting table.

Mark Waid's Four Panels That Never Work (via Making Light)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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What’s a ‘drafting’ table?
- http://profiles.google.com/keithdtyler Keith Tyler
  
  I don’t know exactly, but I’m betting there’s one in the flag-adorned building just in front of the Jumbotron.
  
  (Drafting table? Get it? Cause it’s a recruiting station? Yeah..)
  - L_Mariachi
    
    Some fifteen years ago I was walking through Times Square late one evening and for some reason Social Distortion was playing on the Jumbotron complete with fairly loud volume. Maybe they rented an ad-hoc soundsystem and simulcast with it, I didn’t see any speakers set up on the street anywhere. There didn’t seem to be any kind of festival or street fair around.
- Just_Ok
  
  A drafting table is one that follows another table very closely. It helps reduce air resistance, which is very important for tables when travelling at high speed.
- Paul Renault
  
  It’s a table that’s close enough to the lead table (either right behind it, or if there’s a formation of drafting tables, in a V shape) so as to be in its splipstream and thus reduce drag.
- Thad Boyd
  
  http://www.giyf.com/
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I think that he’s suggesting that everything is done on the computer now. Or maybe not.
Ben_R_R

Unless there is a different 2 panel Wally Wood cheat sheet, I think you might be looking for “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work”: http://bigother.com/2010/04/29/wally-woods-22-panels-that-always-work/
- Cory Doctorow
  
  Right you are!
Frank Diekman

Speakers or no, if some villain did hijack the Jumbotron to deliver his ultimatum people would think it was an ad for a movie anyway.
- Shashwath T.R.
  
  Kneel before Dr Doom’s awesome technology that can make sound appear from a jumbotron without a speaker in it!
  - retepslluerb
    
    That’s Dr. *von* Doom, for you.
    
    Also, it’s not complicated. The Jumbotron shakes – and thus vibrates like a speaker - in fear.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  It’s all viral marketing fun and games until your granny gets vaporized.
enterthestory

The first panel, fair enough. But I have never seen the other three, and have been reading comics for 40 years. Waid is reading the wrong comics. He should try some of the European stuff.
- Xof
  
  “I’d tell you some titles, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have heard of them.”
- Thad Boyd
  
  Unless your name is Evanier, Spiegelman, Mouly, or MAYBE Busiek or McCloud, I’m pretty confident Mark Waid has read more comics than you.
  
  “Stump Mark Waid” is literally a convention panel.
http://profiles.google.com/keithdtyler Keith Tyler

Minus points for him not, in turn, realizing that Broadway no longer runs through Times Square and therefore traffic would not be aimed that way.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  When the supervillain invades, you can pretty much drive wherever and however you want. On the sidewalk, even! At least until his robot hordes start enforcing his edicts, that is.
- Thad Boyd
  
  Mark Waid is not an artist.
Van Diemen

I have seen #2 the day 9/11 happened.
I was living in London, saw a packed electrical store, though ‘that’s weird’, took a look myself. Everyone was watching in horror as the towers burned & fell down.
- http://twitter.com/spamfromjapan William
  
  I saw the same panel on 11th March 2011, the day of the earthquake off the coast of Japan. We all gathered round a TV shop watching scenes of salarymen (pl?) fighting to get back home in Shinjuku (a major Tokyo station). At the time, I had this weird out-of-body sensation that I was in a scene straight out of a comic book.
  
  Watching the news was useful, since it wasn’t something I’d thought to check and I (along with many of those around me) had been walking in that direction. I replotted my course on Google maps though.
- blueelm
  
  I *did* this on 9/11. I got out of school, didn’t know where to go, was just sort of in a daze and I didn’t have internet or tv, and until later that evening didn’t realize we had a radio around in the apt. (I know… hard to believe)
  
  But I actually stood around with people just like that and then went to a grocery store. I don’t even know why, but it was amazingly packed. I think we all didn’t know what to do. So we bought groceries.
5onthe5

Is it possible that the original Wally Wood “22 Panels” isn’t so much ingenious as it is just exhaustive? I mean, how many more than 22 ways of drawing expositionary dialogue can there be?
5onthe5

I remember seeing a really interesting book once, it was all illustrations of how comics work and how they’re drawn with a load of famous examples on each page… can’t remember the name…anyone help me?
- BDiamond
  
  Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud?
retepslluerb

Funny observations, but I can’t shake the feeling that only the first panel (Boing Boing shows only the 2nd and 3rd) relate to Wood’s list. Because it’s just plain bad.
The Jumbotron is just quibbling. If I can accept supervillians and them taking it over, I can accept that they have technology to make sound. The panel establishes that the villian has vast resources and a superiority complex. Works for me. A find a little showmanship more entertaining than supervillians with marketable technology who rob banks.The 3rd one obviously did work once and would even today be totally okay for a period piece. Until the advent of smartphones around 2005, the majority of people would not have had the means to access the information networks on the go and would indeed gather ’round. Panel 4, well yes, that’s simply overused, but mostly because it applies to the very limited subset “superhero comics“, that still dominate the US market. It would certainly shock in Topolino. :)
- 5onthe5
  
  I have an idea for a new Marvel villain:
  
  BACKLINE. His evil power is his ability to rig up a PA system in total secrecy.
  - s2redux
    
    If by “total secrecy” you mean “the PA tech is invisible to those who rely on his services,” then your new villain is already featured in dramatic scenes around the world every day. (And no, it’s not just guy techs…it’s happening at the Womyn’s Music Festival right now.)
  - Brainspore
    
    Maybe he just timed his evil announcement around New Year’s Eve so he could just use the same one they put in for the big street party.
    - Donald Petersen
      
      Then that blonde in the pink dress must be freezing her fanny off. Then again… Global Warming Is A Supervillain Plot!
- wizardru
  
  We already had the internet in full swing in the 90s, let alone 2005. Prior to 2007, you had to settle for crappy WAP-based interfaces…but the data was still available to ‘dumb’ phones. Blackberrys date back to the 90s, too. And easy internet access has been around easily as long. I don’t think anyone has engaged in the ‘stand around an electronics store and catch the news’ activity in40-50 years, except on TV, hence Waid’s comments.
  
  The reason he’s mentioning it isn’t nitpicking…it and the jumbo-tron image get used in comics A LOT. It’s a visual short-hand with little basis in reality, but its an overused trick that doesn’t actually work very well.
  - retepslluerb
    
    The Internet, yes. The web, not so much. I was actually in the business myself, helping bring major German magazines online. Web gained impact after ’95, no question about it. There’s a reason why iMac and “There is no step 3″ was a child of 1998.
    
    The technology you cite did exist, yes, but wasn’t that wide-spread yet.
    
    Regarding your 40-50 remks, see @boingboing-43cca4b3de2097b9558efefd0ecc3588:disqus ’s remark. I’ll grant that having the people outdoors instead of a mall dates the panel, though.
    
    I find the “Little basis in reality”-tidbit immensely amusing. ‘Cause, you know, I somehow have missed all those brightly-clad super-villains broadcasting their demands with much more subdued press briefings or letters to the editor.
    
    I’ll also concede that Mark Waid is immensely familiar with overused tricks, poses and cliches. He wrote Kingdom Come, after all.
    - http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore
      
      “‘Cause, you know, I somehow have missed all those brightly-clad super-villains broadcasting their demands with much more subdued press briefings or letters to the editor. ”
      
      Cheap rhetorical trick, ten yard penalty for the Comic Book Guy team. One fantastic premise does not make the whole of reality totally pliable. “A wizard did it” doesn’t really cut it.
      - retepslluerb
        
        So, what would be a realistic way for a spandex-clad criminal mastermind who wears a mask despite being known to the public to address the population he wants to be afraid?
  - Brainspore
    
    It’s a visual short-hand with little basis in reality, but its an overused trick that doesn’t actually work very well.
    
    That pretty much describes the world of superheroes and villains in general. What kind of person would wear a cape to a fight in real life? (Excepting bullfighters.)
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      What kind of person would wear a cape to a fight in real life?
      
      The loser, sometimes referred to as the deceased.
- Brainspore
  
  If I can accept supervillians and them taking it over, I can accept that they have technology to make sound.
  
  Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Surely any villain with the resources to build doomsday machines and robot armies could afford a few speakers from Best Buy.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    I never bought that a well-heeled caped crusader would utilize a rooftop searchlight as a summoning device, depending solely on thick, flattish cloud cover to project it on.
benher

Does it still “work” to dress up men in skin tight outfits and parade them around? (The same men most of which I might add, we’ve been stuck with for the better part of a century.)

I think number 1 is the most accurate, and the reason I quit purchasing US comics about 15 years ago. All American comics read like a blur, as if they’re trying to write storyboards for otherwise longer films; large swaths of scenes missing, little or no establishing shots nor concern for setting and mood… anything that takes time, talent, effort, and printing costs. The only break the reader gets from the fast-forward action are the occasional zit cream ads.

I always did like The Preacher though. But I think all that Vertigo stuff had the same problem – if only they’d stretched every 24 pages into 100 the pacing would have felt much more satisfying.
- retepslluerb
  
  You did check the box office results for The Avengers?
Timothy Krause

He could also add the panel that has flat-affect, dead-eyed staring characters speaking through the fourth wall and making oh-so-ironic points about the medium to the reader, capped with a passive-dismissive catchphrase. Those haven’t worked since last century, although, to be fair, it’s hard to imagine a Penny Arcade comic without one. Word.

And wouldn’t the relative scarcity of full-display windows with multiple screens be a likelier reason to not stand in front of them than smartphones? If you saw a disaster being broadcast on multiple screens all at once, directly in front of you, you wouldn’t stop? You’d whip out your smartphone and check Gawker first? Doubt it.

And it’s not that they’re stopping to check the news: I’m not sure how anyone could reasonably interpret the panel as such, as if those folks had somehow wandered out of the 1930s to check corn futures on Farnsworth’s Talking Box, or to maybe see what that nice FDR really looks like when he talks. It’s that they’re momentarily arrested by a mega-important event whose mega-importance is being broadcast on many blinking, multicolored screens. Spectacle, etc. Like, you’d totally rip off your headphones and Google Goggles and all the rest to look, and you’d maybe even share you experience with one of your fellow mortals . . . all before tweeting it and snapping your Instagram.
- Thad Boyd
  
  He could also add the panel that has flat-affect, dead-eyed staring characters speaking through the fourth wall and making oh-so-ironic points about the medium to the reader, capped with a passive-dismissive catchphrase. Those haven’t worked since last century
  
  Yeah, Pekar, McCloud, and Clowes sure do suck.
  - Timothy Krause
    
    Gosh, sorry you feel that way. I love those three, especially Zot, wow, what a beautiful comic.
dragonfrog

If you’re going to hack the jumbotron, how much extra work would it be to rent a speaker truck with a fake ID?
- Brainspore
  
  But there’s a good chance you might lose your deposit if you used it for a stunt like that.
  - dragonfrog
    
    I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the uneasy feeling of having overdue library books. I am Darkwing Duck!
http://nelc.livejournal.com/ NelC

Not to put off Mark Waid, I just found this on a totally unrelated search.
- kiptw
  
  James Thurber did something like this in the 20s, of things we were certain to see on the stage next season. It was prose, with perhaps a couple of illustrations (it’s in the Library of America volume) and had things like “A boy and a girl standing ten feet apart, back to back, carrying on a conversation.”
edkedz

Have to say, I enjoyed the burn on Johns in the last one. Richly deserved.
edkedz

Goddamn it, all that effort to avoid letting Disqus merge my accounts, and they fooled me into posting here with my Disqus account instead of my “boingboing-only” account.
I hate them.
kiptw

Here’s an updated 22 panels, where an artist went through Wood’s output and found 22 panels from his printed work that illustrate the 22 points.

Wood, incidentally, made the 22 for his own reference for those inevitable situations where a writer had given him panel after panel of just talking, and these were a quick reference for him and his assistants to try and keep things somewhat dynamic. I mention this because perhaps a couple of people here didn’t know that, and the rest of you already skipped the comment anyway.
http://www.facebook.com/dave.eckblad Dave Eckblad

I didn’t realize all comics had to take place in a modern day reality. Perhaps he should have stuck to the “These themes are overused” topic that seemed to be developing in panel one but was immediately derailed by two and three.