Alpha Flight Pictureless

Stephen Frug found this group of pages from an old Alpha Flight comic (#6, p. 8-15) and sent it along to me in relation to “pictureless comics.” This is John Byrne at work on the classic “polar bear in a snowstorm” white on white image.

What is probably most interesting here is how much the classic Marvel style, with its excess of narrative captions and dialogue, is exposed. With all those words, you don’t need the images anyway. A sly commentary by Byrne?

Here’s a few of the pages (completely out of context, let’s just say there is some monster thing creating a snowstorm and one of the heroes (apparently a shapeshifter) is trying to fight it) (Click on them for larger views):

(P.S. Looks like I was slash-dotted in Japan! Halfway through the day and I’ve had 200 hits to my post on Taniguchi’s Walking Man manga. Unfortunately I can’t read the originating page (in Japanese) to find out what they are saying.)