New Brevoort Formspring

I think there’s a larger paradigm shift at work that accounts for some of this, part of which is that there’s been a movement towards having each story contain greater literary or emotional substance.

The joke (that was kind of serious) back in the 1970s was that a Marvel plot of the era consisted of things like: “Pages 5-14: They fight. Go nuts!” So in instances where those might have been the instructions, the artist in question was really going to have to use every trick at his disposal to made that battle memorable and worthwhile (and in most cases, it still probably wasn’t, as there wasn’t a whole lot of content or context apart from guys blasting at one another.) It also depended on the skill of the artist in terms of his or her choreography.

But I think the days of fight-as-story are largely behind us. There are still physical conflicts in virtually every super hero story–how could there not be?–but the emphasis is typically on something more than just the gladiatorial games of it all these days.