Well idk what this thread is becoming but I wanna add my two cents because it's something that I think a lot of comic creators struggle with.
The Explaino.
You know, when you're writing a story, and it's made in a created universe, or has some complicated premise or situation and you don't know how well the reader is going to understand it, so you try to explain as much as possible with a prologue or a character specifically created to help explain things, or thought bubble and long, pointless dialogue.
Explaino.
We've all dealt with it, I'm dealing with it right now. It's one of those things where you can't have too much, but you also can't have too little. My advice is to only include what is absolutely necessary for the reader to know (And not wonder about). The only way to ensure this is to have a select number of people read it and tell you where their wonder turned into confusion.
See, some explaino is necessary, but not everything. Not everything needs to be explained. Why are things this way? The reader doesn't know, but if the character's reactions to the things are relateable in some way, the reader will not care about the explanations. Why, in this universe, are hats a public necessity? Who knows, who cares, but how do our characters deal with this premise? How do they get along in this world of hat identities? That's all the reader cares to know, as that's the only interesting thing about this silly premise. They don't need to know how hat culture came to be.
I find that this explaino stuff is the hardest to work with when creating an original universe. You have all these ideas about why things are the way you made them and how they came to be. You've done all this work on your universe's timeline and features to set it up for your present story, and you have to throw 99% of it away because it doesn't matter. Hell, even if you throw away a prologue, you still have the problem of dialogue. It needs to be smooth, interesting, and realistic, but it also needs to make sense, progress the story, and end quickly. For this, I'd say that when you're writing a dialogue, you lose sense of how the scene will visually play out. Re-read all your lines and ask yourself, "Can I show this instead of tell this?" Your reader wants to wonder about what your character is feeling by their expressions, they don't want to be told. Sometimes your explaino can even be shown instead of told. Show how hats relate to people's sense of identity, don't explain the social status of each hat.
Well that was longer than I expected, but dernit, this problem is everybody's problem.
