Dialogue in Comics

To me TV dialogue is usually suck if taken by itself, but in the mouths of adept actors it becomes a non-issue.

For that matter, judging comics dialogue by TV standards seems unintuitive and a bit arbitrary.

If you're talking about dialogue that feels "real": Ralf König, Clare Bretécher, Peter Bagge, Gérard Lauzier. The first two especially are masters of "everyday" speech; they're dialogue certainly sounds more credible than most of the stuff on TV.

Realism: John Wagner. Anybody can make rogue CIA agents etc 'realistic' - make a man with two giant shoulderpads and a bike with aircraft tyres into a gritty police procedural, then swap back to outright lunacy whenever it suits and have the whole thing hold internal integrity from week to week... well, Wagner's so great it's not even funny.

By GOLLY! Typing that scintillating sense-shattering sentence WITHOUT any of the above was... AGAINST NATURE ITSELF!

I reckon the following things:

a) "normal" speech sounds daft in non-normal type situations e.g. in Alias everything's fine until Luke Cage turns up, and suddenly the LACK of him saying "Christmas!" seems stupid.
b) it'd be annoying anyway if everyone went around going "er... um... dunno, what eh?" all the time. The typefaces would need to be TINY to get it all in!
c) we don't expect characters in novels to speak in "normal" English - in modern novels people still go on and on for paragraphs at a time without stopping to look at GURLS or the telly and forgetting what they were on about.
d) and when people in novels DO talk in "normal" its usually for comedic effect anyway, isn't it?

(There would be no more classes after the first one.)

Dialogue should have alliteration. It makes everything better.

Rucka and Brubaker do it a lot, though they handle the transition well, I think. Still, I don't know what they hope to accomplish from it -- there's not a lot of benefit that I can see, especially for the number of times it gets used.

The worst example I've come across was a cut that started in the middle of a WORD.

I am about done with a page (or two!) laid out as a grid of different people responding to the same question.

AKA The "Powers" thing.

(irrelevant to martin's point it starred a v.young pre-fame LIZ HURLEY as a LESBIAN SCHOOLGIRL)

(sistrah becky noticed this: i have poor hurley-antenna)

Yeah, at the same time that Rucka's Batman was being gorgeously distilled by Martinbrough in Detective, Brubaker's was being cartoonified TO THE MAXXXXXXXXXX by Scott McDaniels, whose tenure (I think he's on Robin now, after stints on every other Bat-Book) continues to boggle me, in Batman. But it seemed like a rare moment of overall high-quality among the Bat-Books (in the bundle, there's also a really, really excellent issue of "Harley Quinn").