Thought balloons in Mighty Avengers No. 1

<IMG hspace=10 src="/images/32905-30753/MIGHTAVN001_cov_SM.jpg” align=right vspace=10>I had a chance today to read The Mighty Avengers No. 1, as written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Frank Cho.
The comic featured the restructuring of Marvel Comics’ premiere super-hero team, The Avengers.
Inside, Bendis aschews the alleged company policy forbidding, or a least severely limiting, the use of thought balloons.
And you know what? It works. Instead of having to guess what’s going on inside the characters’ heads, it’s opened up for us with a little extra writing.
Nowadays, most Marvel books are modeled after movies. You see action. You hear (read) dialogue. You here lots of exposition. But this book reads more like a novel. Rather than guess what they’re thinking, you know what they’re thinking. Instead of slogging through expositionary speeches, you get more natural expositionary thought.
It’s all this that makes Mighty Avengers No. 1 better than 90 percent of what Marvel’s put out in the last five years.
Even better, it takes more than 5 minutes to read.