Okay, what is the RIGHT way to infodump?

[smokesalty]

I most often hear (and often say myself) that exposition dumps are a horrible and boring way to start a story. You know, your usual "once upon a time gods ruled the world...and then there was a war.."

And when it's overdone, irrelevant and boring, it can really turn people away.

BUT- I do think there can be a time and place for it when done right. I wanna know what you guys think!

I'd say I'm alright with it if it's conveying information concisely and clearly so that the story can be more easily understood and focus on the important parts. For example, an easy to follow explanation of the power system so that we can spend more time and focus on character writing and fight scenes. But I'd be fine with it if it ISN'T a huge wall of text. There would have to be interesting visuals to come with it, and I don't wanna feel like I'm studying when I'm just reading for fun.

Because I do feel that telling can be useful for getting things moving. It depends on the story tbh.

[HGohwell]

I think inherently it's the "dump" part of info/exposition dumping that's the problem. Because that's what it often feels like, it's just been dropped, copy pasted from a world building document without any care for the impact it can have or seamlessly working into the narrative, no matter where in the story. And the quickest, easiest way to fix this is to just give it some character or break it up.

For instance, this is the opening of chp1 for The Scorpio Races, one of my favourite books, and it comes after you vague and mysterious murder horse prologue:

People say my brothers would be lost without me, but really, I’d be lost without them.
Usually, if you ask someone on the island where they come from, they say something like Round about Skarmouth or Back side of Thisby, the hard side or Stone’s throw from Tholla. But not me. I remember being small, clutching my father’s lined hand, and some wind-beaten old farmer who looked like he’d been dug out of the sod asking, “Where you from, girl?” I answered, in a voice too loud for my tiny freckled self, “The Connolly House.” He said, “What’s that, now?” And I replied back, “Where we Connollys live. Because I’m one.” And then — I am still a bit embarrassed about this part of it, as it speaks to a black part of my character — I added, “And you’re not.”
That’s just the way things are. There are the Connollys, and then there’s the rest of the world — though the rest of the world, when you live on Thisby, is not very large. Before last fall, it was always this: me, my younger brother, Finn, my older brother, Gabe, and our parents. We were a pretty quiet family altogether. Finn was always putting things together and taking them back apart and saving any spare parts in a box under his bed. Gabe wasn’t a huge conversationalist, either. Six years older than me, he saved his energy for growing; he was six feet tall by the age of thirteen. Our dad played the tin whistle, when he was home, and our mother performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes every evening, though I didn’t realize what a miracle it was until she wasn’t around.
It wasn’t that we were unfriendly with the rest of the island. We were just friendlier with ourselves. Being a Connolly came first. That was the only rule. You could hurt all the feelings you liked, so long as you weren’t hurting the feelings of a Connolly.

This is, for all intents and purposes, straight up exposition about the main character and her family, but because it's done with such character, it doesn't feel like it's just been dumped there from a character backstory sheet. It's very telly in many ways, but the character flare on it makes it more forgivable. (Although it gets away with it because the prologue is murder horses and has one of the much iconic ominous opening lines to keep you there, but I think this would work ok without anyway and given I know people who skip prologues by rule and so missed it, I think it did ok.)

Another common, mostly worn out version is to just lean into it and just making it a classroom scene. Or, much like ATLA, make it brief, if you can sum it up in a few snappy sentences, you're pretty good.

[darthmongoose]

Okay, let's think about some iconic info-dumps:

Undertale and Deltarune, which were inspired by Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Star Wars

Avatar the Last Airbender

I also think the one at the start of "Magical Boy", while not "iconic" is a good use of the trope. Plus it's a comic, and a lot of the ones I just listed are shows, films and games.

First problem a comic needs to get over: You don't get music, so you can't rely on John Williams or Toby Fox to get you through it by just having everyone go "wow, dat music tho'!". BUT, I think that does highlight the need for strong atmosphere and vibes in your opening exposition dump. You'll be limited to things like your visual style, colours, the tone of the text and the font choices being really strong and creating a unique vibe.
A really common issue I see is people use the fact that it's a vague myth to make the art kind of lazy and vague, when actually they need to pull out the stops to make the art as visually arresting as they can, even if it keeps details vague. Avatar the Last Airbender did this amazingly, with these iconic shots of the master benders and the caligraphy, lovely detailed shots of landscapes and strong images like the fire nation soldiers all lined up, attacking the audience with fire.

Second problem: Modern webcomics are an attention economy. I'm going to play Undertale because I already spent money on Undertale. I'm going to watch Star Wars because I paid for the cinema ticket, or at least saw a review or heard a friend going "oh my god, you've never seen Star Wars!? It's one of the best movies ever!" or something. Chances are, your webcomic will not have the advantage of advertising, widespread publicity or reviews, and isn't something somebody has paid for. You have maybe as few as 1-3 pages or chapters to convince somebody your comic is worth their time. So the info dump needs to be vital and ideally should be short, and it should immediately then launch the story straight into an interesting scenario.
A really common mistake is following an info dump with another boring scene that starts with the protagonist waking up, or the protagonist as a child being told this story, because after expositing backstory, the creator then feels the need to exposit who the protagonist is, because that wasn't in the opening. Compare Star Wars, which explains there's a big war going on and then BOOM! We're on a space ship! Being attacked! By an even bigger space ship! Holy crap! There are dudes getting shot and this 7 foot tall guy in black armour picking people up by the throat! Woah!

[TheLemmaLlama]

I think a big part of it is treating the lore/information as something that's entertaining in its own right, rather than something to 'get over with' because it's stuff your readers need to know.

It's like the difference between your math class in high school taught by a teacher who doesn't give a shit and is only teaching the subject because there's a shortage of math teachers, vs a youtube video on the same topic by a math expositor who's passionate about the subject

[LostKelp]

1 make it brief
2 integrate it into dialouge
3 only mention when people need to know it and leave the rest as background detail.

Eg if you wanted to explain your cults system you could have a new recruit/reporter ask someone about it which could also act to characterise the person answering the questions.

With comics you could use a cutaway to some person explaining it or just have an Asterix in the bottom of the panel explaining it.

Yeah, all of these can be botched pretty easily but just rely on meathod 1-keep it brief. If you have a dense and complicated world like high fantasy or scifi it can be a benefit to leave it vague so the reader can "discover" it by themselves without it being directly explained. But I have a tendency to just assume that people are along for the ride and I don't really need to explain myself, which while generally true, can leave people confused and disengaged. And with the whole "need to know" basis kinda leaves "want to know" to the wayside. Like it'd be nice if I clearly explained how the ranking system works in sts and how and when certain people get killed by the tazdahir. But it's fine if the readers can infer that lots of people die and the ranking system plays into that. They aren't really that important and stuff gets cut for the purposes of telling a story efficiently. And if they aren't lmportant and they're difficult to integrate into the plot they can be footnotes and extras. That's what artbooks are for.

[thepenmonster]

Star Wars' opening crawl worked because it was brief, to the point, leaned on established tropes, and had one of the greatest musical scores of all time.

You don't have John Williams. You'll have to sick with brief and to the point, and use tropes people are familiar with.

ex-

You saw her potential, so you pushed her beyond her limit. Though the overloaded mind usually dies, instead her mind was fractured. Now her mind experiences every world, every possibility, at the same exact time, commanding the infinite knowledge and power of the multiverse. Now she's seen too much, lost any sense of morality, any belief in objective truth.

- Everything Everywhere All at Once. Which, by the way, you should watch if you haven't. It's an excellent lesson in how to make world building understandable quickly. And just an all around good movie.

[Legendofgenii]

I suppose you could look at how documentaries do it - lots of information partnered up with jaw-dropping imagery, with interesting compositions & lighting etc.

So when giving some lengthy exposition, just give folks (like me) something amazing, pretty, or fun to look at. Then even if the info didn't quite sink in, I still had a good time.

[Nugtown]

I think I have a few things to say but the most important one is give us eyecandy. There was a story I read that even injected random pictures of animals when the author couldn't think of how to pad out his monologue with a scene and it worked, silly and random as it was.
No one has to do that specifically, but the idea carries the same way. If you're going to do something lengthy, just make sure you don't forget comics are a visual medium.

[BoomerZ]

The best info dump of all time is Lord of the Rings (the movies). It's literally an 8 minute history lesson but you don't care. Why does it work? It's because it shows you and still tells a story. Those 8 minutes are a movie onto themselves. And it gives just enough information to get you interested in the movie. The problem is what I call the "cult of worldbuilding". Everyone thinks their world has to be completely fleshed out and consistent. After doing all this work the author now wants you to KNOW that the world is fleshed out and consistent. So they explain how the magic works in detail and how the royal family lives and how the trade agreements came to be and how the monsters were defeated and how peace has been the norm and how a evil is rising and.... This might be needed for you to keep your story in check, but not the readers. They usually don't care. You can explain most of this during the story.

Another way to hide info dumps is have them during something else. Little bits of info sprinkled into normal dialogue while the characters do something else. This is how most good writers put information into the story, while not just monologuing to the reader. And the bonus is you can plant seeds of what is going to happen later on in your comics (foreshadowing).

[cherrystark]

I most often hear (and often say myself) that exposition dumps are a horrible and boring way to start a story. You know, your usual "once upon a time gods ruled the world...and then there was a war.."

What you're describing is what I call a "prologue". Readers need to know that the Monkey King stole the Jade Staff which caused a series of dominos to fall so our "chosen one" to be the chosen one. And it's always nice to know that the story is taking place in a land far away. And sometimes readers will need a more in-depth explanation of a plot element but it should be just enough detail to keep the story going.

The problem with infodumps is that people tend to be pretty heavy-handed with them. They like to dump as much worldbuilding as they possibly can into a chapter. *I think that has a lot to do with author culture.

[powerplantanimations]

I usually do it either to set-up a joke or when it's appropriate like a truth being revealed. It's like gossip. You hear something and you're like "No, no! I want to hear more."

Also when you've been alluding to something for a long while where people get antsy and WANT that answer. You gotta make 'em starve.

[KevinReijnders]

Dumping is never a good way to go about it, but exposition in and of itself is not inherently bad.

If for example you go with the "Gods and myth" prelude in your example, you could frame it as a story being told to a young version of the protagonist (great example of this is the opening to Treasure Planet). Or maybe contrast the epic storytelling VO with visuals of the mundanity of modern life, etc.

The thing to always, always and always avoid is starting out with, what I call, "a wikipedia article". It's something that happens a lot in shonen stlye stories, or when an author has a ton of worldbuilding and wants to explain the setting to you first.

Another general rule if thumb, never have one character exposit information to another character they already know.

[AmysGames]

I think a lot of it has to do with timing. The thing people usually dislike about infodumps is how inordinately long they are, and give a lot of information that the reader has no reason to care about. So the solution is usually to 1) keep it short, 2) make it visually interesting, and/or 3) introduce the main characters first, so we have someone to connect this information to.

With my current comic, I decided I wanted to dedicate the first few pages to showing off the main character's personality by way of her interacting with classmates, etc., before jumping into the action. Now this is fine when binge-reading through the archives, but with a page-a-week upload schedule, I didn't want to surprise readers with the premise of the comic several months in, so I decided to also include a short prologue. This lasts all of six panels, with stylized visuals, and I posted it at the same time as the first actual page where the main character appears.

I don't know if it was the right choice per se, but I put a lot of thought into it, so I'm standing by it, lol.

[Llyrel]

I either include the info in dialogues or show it in panels rather than explicitly mentioning it

Some examples:
-In Chapter 1, Adrian and a friend investigate on crime scene involving a vampire and a shapeshifter. His friend is not as familiar with the supernatural as he is, so she asks a few questions (within the context of the investigation), which he promptly answers. No long monologues, just a couple of sentences to answer her questions and then the conversation moves on.

-In the most recent chapters, we see a very tired Adrian having trouble standing after using magic. It isn't explicitly said that it was magic that drained him of all energy, but his body language hopefully should serve as a hint.

Basically, I try to make the info a part of the story rather something that interrupts or delays it

[TheLemmaLlama]

I suppose you could look at how documentaries do it - lots of information partnered up with jaw-dropping imagery, with interesting compositions & lighting etc.

It's literally an 8 minute history lesson but you don't care. Why does it work? It's because it shows you and still tells a story. Those 8 minutes are a movie onto themselves.

Basically what I was trying to get at; see the lore itself as a story, rather than a pill you have to force down the reader's throat so they can understand the 'actual' story Make it an experience; aim to make the reader feel something with your lore dump. Make use of visuals, story structure, etc; the things you normally think about when making a comic. Documentaries (and science exposition) excel at this; I'm surprised the connection between academic outreach and exposition in fiction is, like, never talked about XD

I suppose you could chop up your lore and try to sprinkle it as lightly throughout your story as you can, like a parent trying to feed veggies to a fussy eater, and relegate the rest of your lore to bonus material. But I can't help but feel a bit sad for your lore when you do that Like, when I pick up a fantasy comic, I'm there in no small part because of the lore! (This is also why I crave more fantasy slice-of-life; lore doesn't fit into your plot? Well come up with some smaller, low-stakes plots that the lore is relevant to!)

[VividRunning]

If you have to info dump, a cool way to do it would be through dialogue and/or a flashback. Do it in a way that the audience won't even be able to tell your info dumping--Basically, just give a backstory.
IMO, if you want the audience to know about the backstory, you shouldn't info dump. You should do it slowly, to add onto the mystery and to make people want to read it more rather than having them know everything right from the beggining.

[ueonts]

I think you should tail exposition to story beats. If you reveal information it should be attached to an event which moves the plot. For example, a character could reveal some information simply so they can upset another character or something like that.