All the News That's Fit to Print

There's a little thing that Kurt Busiek did in Astro City: The Dark Age #1 that I admire, and felt deserved some recognition.

Several pages in, there's a panel showing the cover of the Astro City newspaper with a large cover story about the Old Soldier. What impressed me is that Kurt scripted the actual text of the article, despite most of it being covered by caption boxes.

Frequently, comic creators will utilize the image of a text piece, such as a newspaper or magazine, but will only script a headline and use Lorem ipsum for the article. So I appreciated that Kurt went the extra mile to write real news copy, even though it wasn't necessary.

I recently came across another example of this, by Christopher Priest in Black Panther #1. Granted, it's a splash page of only the newspaper article, but due to its orientation on the page, sentences start getting progressively cut off after the first paragraph. And yet Priest scripted the entire article in full, and didn't revert to dummy text partway through.

So kudos to Kurt and Christopher, and other comic creators who put that extra bit of care into their craft.

Edit: The full text of the 'article' can be read at the Astro City website.