when is too much dialogue too much in comics?

I asked this to a few other comic makers but I figured id ask comic readers this too.
For reference and if you haven't read my work its at www.jkcomics.com.

How do you know if you have too much dialogue in an issue?
Both my last issue and now this one seem to be very dialogue heavy. I feel that was the main problem in my issue 1 comic. Which i am going to redo later after I am done with this storyline called Obey.

But I was going over last issue and this one and its very hard to get rid of any dialogue. It all fits and is needed for both character and plot development. But it makes the comic less fun in some ways to me since its a heavier read...

Any thoughts on this topic? Should I sacrifice character development or what? Its rather frustrating...

I appreciate any feedback on this. Thank you.


-Sin

I went to Random.org and grabbed two numbers. The second one* I took to Order of the Stick. I randomly got This comic, which I feel makes my case: There's no limit to dialogue if you can convince players to read it.

Maybe you should ease people into that much dialogue. Once you do, however, the sky's the limit.

Anything and everything is rated by its convenience primarily, quality second. The first few comics should be about convincing people to read it in the first place. The later comics should convince them to care.

You could always do what Erfworld does. They have artwork with speech bubbles, but then they supplement the regular work with text stories in between. This way you get deeper character development, but the action is not obscured by walls of text.

When you can't see what is going on in the comic due to too much dialog, then you have gone too far.

Too much dialogue in comics...Chris Clarmont. That's first thing that comes to mind. The guy would have the Xmen spitting entire paragraphs of dialogue in time they throw a punch. On top of explaining how their mutant powers worked every time the used them. He's had some great stories but he would sometimes overkill the text boxes.

Dialogue I think you can go crazy with so long as it doesn't hinder the art or slow down the pace of the book to unnecessary levels (Example: a character is supposed to be performing a quick action such as ducking a punch and yet has time to think out or read an entire novel). Just focus on making it worth reading, though, and folks will likely be okay with any amount of dialogue.

kind of true as long as Art Work is good and don't put any useless info like what they eat or what they done over the week. What you need is to tell the Story Dialogue in a way that keep people reading, Like adding Drama and Conflicts.

All true and I agree but if you skim over my work, mainly the Justice-Knights comic, http://www.justiceknights.net/comic/jkcomics.html

I keep looking over my work. I think issue 1 is too long and all the dialogue I put in there with several scenes was me setting up plot points throughout the series. I think now that it is too long and too much unneeded dialogue for a first issue. I plan on going back and taking out the unneeded stuff for that issue to make it more enjoyable as a first issue.

But looking back, I think my best work has been issue 2 and issue 5. Those have action and dialogue and it all carries itself with a great pace. I very much recommend reading at least issue 2.

But still, if you skim my work, I feel there is too much dialogue... but that could just be because I am comparing them to issue 2 and 5...

I remember reading somewhere -- maybe Scott McCloud? -- that suggested a soft rule of 35 words per comic panel. More than that is too much. But it's extremely variable.

My comics tend to be wordy. Indefensible Positions was more talk than action. My new comic, Genocide Man, will have plenty of action but I'm still on chapter 1, so there's still a lot of setup exposition that needs to be done. (That's why I'm not going to really plug it until around chapter 3.)

I'd say you shouldn't worry about it too much. Worst case, you give into the tendency to have a wordy comic. People still read wordy comics. No big deal.

Bendis does wordy pages quite well, but then he's the Tarantino of comics, so he can get away with it. As long as it moves either the plot or character forward without much repetition, then I say go for it. I'll have to see if I can find a good example of how he does it.

It's not the amount of text; it's how well you utilize it.

I generally think that not only do too many of today's mainstream comics use too LITTLE dialog (thereby making the story move like molasses), but they also have too many characters using dialog that ends up either being pointless or needlessly expository. It's probably a consequence of "decompressing" stories for the trade paperback.

In my head, I usually think in terms of AVERAGING five panels to a page and three captions or word balloons to a panel.

Show don't tell. If you can draw the action, you should. That being said, you should stay away from comic porn splash pages that don't add to the story.

You're not just telling a story, your also showing it to us.

One well done dialog page that springs to mind recently is a shot from the latest issue of SHIELD. The scene is just two guys walking down a giant winding staircase talking. Rather than fill the pages with word balloons or talking heads, there is just a single, full height page of the two walking down the stairs. To the left is all their dialog, listed almost in script format. It worked really well, IMO.

There is too much dialog when it is uninteresting.