TRADITION!

I'm not addressing the kind of tradition-for-tradition-sake that Tevye advocated. I wanted to address the nature and evolution of comic panels. Having been raised in the seventies, the comics I read as a kid usually had traditional panel layouts. Oh, sure. there was the occasional panel break and so forth, but nothing like the anarchy of design I see today -- if it can be fairly described as design. Much of it looks like ten pounds of guano in a five-pound sack. Everything comes in the "jumble-O-crap" layout (to borrow a locution from Lilecks). One can hardly follow the flow of the page, and I find it entirely distracting from the story. I'm not exactly longing for six panels perfectly aligned vertically and horizontally, but there's got to be some happy medium, a line that was crossed with abandon after I grew up and left comics. Imagine my shock when I returned to it as a business and found the place a mess. I don't want to sound as if this is a ubiquitous problem -- there are a lot of good designers out there, and I think much of the mess has been cleaned up -- but, all too often, some people try to be 'creative' when they don't understand a lick about design. But then again, what do I know?