Tin Tin & EC Comics

What interesting to me from reading through some of these older EC books and Tin Tin is the mindset behind the writing compared to what I've been accustomed to in recent comic history.  In a way seems that comic writer's thought if there's not writing in each panel explaining then the reader would just not get it. In one of the Action Comics I've read there were 2 pages of Superman going through an epidemic where he's the last man on earth and the red sun has zapped his superpowers.  The majority of the narrative is told instead of shown as we only get a few shots of the wrecked landscape.  The other issue is I barely even took note of the villains that got Superman into this predicament, their ship was featured but  we only saw the Kanor in a few spare panels.  

What has me in disarray with the older Action Comics and certain EC adventure comics of the day I believe is the fact that there's not much of a variety in their layouts or action scenes.  In this era of superhero you can definitely tell the artists were pressed on deadlines as there's such a simple design that they all seem to follow for every scene; quick landscape shot that doesn't really show much of the background, portrait views of any talking character unless they're performing a movement, then they'll take up that whole panel.  I guess that's my issue, there's just some terrible design choices in panel compositions and page layouts that were being repeated instead of corrected.

Not saying that all comics that follow this are bad as that simply is not true at all. Jack Kirby's Black Panther comic was a pretty fun read because his design sense of the compositions in his panels were much more well done, along with making the text more subservient to his art instead of vice versa.

Reading through Tin Tin's adventure in Nepal was very enjoyable, in spite of the peculiar type choice and format.  I must be way too used to american comic bubbles and type, because whenever there were longer passages of type in Tin Tin I had to concentrate a little bit more otherwise I would glaze over it immediately.  One thing that's for sure is a lot of comics really suffer when they have to be formatted to online reading.