Tell Don't Show? - On Sara Kenney & John Watkiss et al's Surgeon X #1
As a general storytelling principle, show don't tell has more than just considerable worth. Well of course it does. But the supposed heresy of telling has its virtues too. For some, the dogma against it has hardened to the point at which voice-overs on film will be automatically decried as cheats and thought balloons in action/adventure comics slapped down as childish. That both have been brilliantly and repeatedly put to use over the decades is surely undeniable. But the one-size-fits-all would-be writing guru insists: display trumps declaration. Yet if all there was to stand against that homogenising credo was writer Sara Kenney and artist John Watkiss et al's Surgeon X #1, then the case for sometimes tell don't show could still be decisively made. Consider the above. It's the full page cliffhanger to Surgeon X's first chapter. As a first glance will tell, it's an initially unpromising exemplar of decompression. With all the potential