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There's a phrase comic fans need to adopt! I grow so weary of sections of fandom complaining about the cover price, while apparently overlapping sections heap great praise upon the "decompressed" stories.

In some ways, this can all be traced back in a 1960s issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, which Gene Colan opened with something like three pages of Cap walking down the street. I have long suspected the book was running very late, so Stan didn't have time to send the pages back to be redone with Cap doing something more exciting. So he scripted them with the troubled ruminating that became standard for Cap -- and a whole lot of writers thought that was a good idea.

By the time I got into the business, in the mid 1970s, "calm moments" and even "calm issues" were becoming commonplace. "Let the readers catch their breath" was an oft-heard phrase. So the characters would take a page or two to become talking heads. Was that really what the fans wanted?

Answer, yes, for some of the older fans. The ones who wanted the books to be "deep," so it could be less embarrassing to be seen reading them. But Stan had managed to be deep at the same time Jack was exploding off the page. It became de rigueur for fans and some pros to mock Stan's habit of using action scenes to have characters make speeches. But by golly, you got your money's worth in those books!!

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Something I have done for most of my career is constantly prune and, yes, compress. As I work thru a story, I look ahead, thinking Do I really need three pages for this? Could I do it in two? Could I do it in one?

And the more I am able to prune as I go, the more I open up the issue for more story!