Showing, not telling

As I've got older, my tastes in comic books has regressed in one very specific way. I used to be all about the writer, and would put up with mediocre art if it had a great script, but now it's the artist that is the main draw. I just like things that look good, and am also craving comics that can tell a good story with a minimum of dialogue.

It's much easier to do this in a live action medium, but I'm still impressed how talented filmmakers can tell stories without the huge crutch of dialogue. 

There are silent sequences in many, many movies, but ones that have no spoken parts whatsoever tend to be animated, like the wonderful Robot Dreams, or the quiet brilliance of Shaun The Sheep, or the frenetic eternity of Roadrunner cartoons, 

They can say so much without uttering a word, and all telling very, very different kinds of stories.

There is less of this in live action films, and those that do go for it, like the recent Silent Night from John Woo, feel more like a gimmick than genuinely innovating. 

Some great movies tell their stories in action and movement, with the most obvious being the Mad Max films, which barely stopped accelerating. They didn't have to be told how much of a respected badass Furiosa was, because it's there in her movements, and actions, (although this didn't stop them making a full-length backstory for her).

They gave John Wick a whole background in book binding when he briefly retired from Baba Yaga duties, but never needed to really get into it, because everything you need to know about his precision and care is in the way he shoots some scum in the face

Great dialogue can make a film - best of decade film lists were usually talkfests (with odd exceptions like the aforementioned Angry Maxwell) - but I'm still baffled by the argument that you could prove Game of Thrones was scientifically worse in later seasons because there was less dialogue in his last episodes.

But film is such a visual medium, and the way the people move across the screen can tell you anything, without saying a word.