The War Against The True Enemy of Comic Books

I've had skirmishes before. But today? Today, I declare war. War against the greatest enemy comics have ever known. Greater than Frederic Wertham. Greater than surrealism. Greater than Joe Quesada.

Today, I declare war ... on decompression.

Comic books aren't storyboards for films. The filmic viewpoint has infected the art of comic book making. I have nothing against movies. I like movies. Some of my best friends are movies. But comic books, sir, are no movies. I'm not saying that filmic devices and techniques can't be used in comic books. They can; but you can also brush your teeth with a mop.

Control over time is essential to the art of film-making. Unlike a book, where the reader has the choice of how quickly they experience the events of the story, a film decides not only what you will see but the rate at which you will see it. Comic books don't have that luxury. Oh, sure, they can fill a page with static panels to denote, say, an awkward pause in a conversation. But we don't feel that the way we feel in on screen; the mind just skips over the inactive panels and goes to the next word balloon.

Here's the world of "compression", exemplified by one of the great works of literature "The Monster That Loved Aqua-Jimmy" (as I recall, a copy was included in the Voyager payload).

PANEL 1: "You're going on an adventure!"

Superman is the catalyst who takes the protagonist out of his routine.

PANEL 2: "You're now Aquaman for a day!"

This panel establishes the hook of the story, tells you why Aquaman needs a temporary placement, makes it happen, and explains (roughly) why Jimmy is chosen: he's trustworthy.

PANEL 3: "Hey, I'm Aquaman for a day now!"
This panel conveys the information that Jimmy now has Aquaman's powers, enjoys them, and remains an enormous goober.


PANEL 4 "A challenge to my new powers ... from a pretty girl!"
This panel sets up a challenge to Jimmy's new powers, one that isn't life-threatening but challenges Jimmy's imagination, and provides a reason that Jimmy would accept the challenge ("She's pretty; why not?").

Okay, perhaps "The Monster Who Loved Aqua-Jimmy" isn't great literature. But it does not dawdle. Advancing the plot is paramount; comic books are about plot. Character moments are extremely enjoyable but they should be the beautiful scenery viewed from a hot-rod plot; please do not slow down, pullover, or (Schwartz forbid!) take a detour to find a character moment. If you can't find opportunities to reveal character in the natural course of a moving a plot along rapidly, then you should be writing novels, not comic books.

Let's compare "The Monster Who Love Aqua-Jimmy" to a more modern story ....

Justice League of America #1



Justice League of America #2



Justice League of America #3



Justice League of America #4

I'm not sure what the title of issue 4 is, but I always call it "The One Where They Stand Up!"


Now, I am aware that there are other things going on in those issues. I'm familiar with the Levitz model of advancing multiple plots and subplots. But I think you get my point; it seems that more happens in the first four panels of "The Monster Who Loved Aqua-Jimmy" than in the first four issues of the Justice League of America. This is what comes of editors encouraging creators to write novels using comic book characters rather than writing comic book stories.

I don't mean to pick on JLA or its writer, really; many modern comics are like this, since we live in a world where "stories" have been replaced by "storylines". I just wanted to pick one that most of my readers would be familiar with.

And please don't hand me that hokum about the economic necessity of writing for the trade. It shouldn't be an excuse to puff out what should be an action-packed 20 page story into a six-month snail race. If trades were composed of six action-packed stories (perhaps with some underlying theme to justify their compilation) rather than one bloated faux-epic, they would sell better, not worse.

Why do you think the Showcase volumes are so popular... nostalgia? In part, yes. But many people buying them have never read any of those stories before. They're not buying them out of nostalgia, they're buying them because they carry so much bang for the book.

Decompression is unsatisfying. Decompression is a root beer that's 80 percent froth. Decompression is like 4 hours of warm cuddling when you want 15 hot minutes of woo-hoo. If I wanted decompression I'd be reading Victorian horror novels like Frankenstein, with its chapter long digressions on Alpine scenery, not a sprocking comic book.

You know how many panels there are in Justice League of America #1 without any captions or word or thought balloons? Twelve. You know how many such "silent"panels there are in "The Monster Who Loved Aqua-Jimmy"? Zero.

In film, the director controls the passage of time; in comic books, the passage of time is in the hands of reader, who can take the story as slowly or as quickly as he likes. That's why filmic tricks like "silent panels", by the way, backfire. They don't create a sense of pacing and slow down your reading; they speed it up.

Think of those two or three page sequences where the characters silently engage in kick-ass martial arts conflict. Exciting, aren't they? Of course not; no matter how well they are drawn, you naturally blank over them ("Oh; fighting.") and dash forward in your reading to the next written word. In film, such scenes are exciting; but comics, like it or not, are a static medium, and such scenes read like Egyptian wall paintings. Why do you think comic books so often have people talking, thinking, or being narrated during fight scenes? Why do you think fight scenes are spiced with energy blasts, batarang throws, giant props, and needless acrobatics? They are speed bumps.

Slow storytelling means fast reading; fast storytelling means slow reading. The first is boring; the second is exciting.

You can dash through modern decompressed stories in moments because the rate at which you read is determined by how much is happening in the story. Try to dash through a story like "The Monster Who Loved Aqua-Jimmy" that way and you'll get a pounding headache after two pages. Compressed storytelling is exciting literary espresso; decompressed storytelling is boring weak tea you have to drink gallons of to get even a slight buzz.

Compressed storytelling has gotten a bad rep because it's associated with crappy stories. Yes, many of the stories written before the advent of decompression were stupid, but that doesn't mean they were stupid because they weren't decompressed. Sure, un-decompressed stories are challenged to get in the necessary exposition without using bursting word/thought balloons. But, face it, we have to suffer through those in your average Wonder Woman story anyway; wouldn't you rather have them advancing the plot than simply being so much empty badinage?

Think that a modern balance between quality and compressed storytelling isn't possible? Hogwash. There are many examples, but the easiest thing to do is read some Justice League Unlimited. Small wonder that JLU is popular with longtime readers yet still accessible to new readers and children.

Oh, look:
a panel that contains both necessary, plot-advancing information and
a gratuitous but delicious character moment.
Apparently such things aren't impossible, after all!

Decompression, by the way, makes comic book myth very opaque to new readers; too little information is conveyed about who's who and what's what. Decompression is only possible if you rely on the reader to know a lot of information you aren't willing to stop to explain (What is that purple starfish? Who are Felix Faust, Prof. Ivo, and T.O. Morrow? Who the heck is Trident? Geez, I don't even know who Trident is). Decompression is the enemy of comic books because it's the enemy of new readers.

DC; stop worrying that your writers are going to run out of ideas. Stop worrying that longtime readers will be annoyed if you repeat an explanation of a character or their powers. Stop worrying that your readers are going to get the bends without decompression. Return to the done-in-one, the back-up story, the high-octane elements that employ the medium's strengths rather than its weaknesses, and the kind of storytelling that only comic books can do.

The Seven Deadly Enemies of Comic Books

The Seven Deadly Enemies of Comics Books
are reaching out to attack your brain, destroy your pleasure, and lay waste to your medium of serialized entertainment.


Surrealism

which is counted as one with its sneering semiotic sidekick,
Dadaism
Okay, as much as I joke about it, I realize that surrealism & dadaism themselves are not intrinsic threats, or even prevalent in comics. But (in case you haven't guessed) when I talk about them, I'm really just speaking in code. I use "surrealism" and "dadaism" as surrogate terms to denote the tendencies in some comic book creators to ignore the need for perspective, context, and meaning. The emphasis on "cool moments", visually or dramatically, rather than on the entire product or effect of plot and art. Read anything by Loeb and Lee.


Self-Referentialism
Continuity is one thing: there are certain things one might reasonably be expected to know about Batman or Superman before reading one of their stories, without requiring exposition on them in every story. But when knowledge of specific previous stories becomes a necessary key to making sense of a current story, then self-referentialism has taken hold. It's the comic book version of an auto-immune disease, in which a system designed to keep comics sensible and healthy turns against it and starts killing it from within.

Moral Relativism
Defined here as confusing moral ambivalence with sophistication. Yes, it's a grey world rather than a black & white one; but that's makes it that much more important to take stands on right and wrong. Symptoms include heroes fighting heroes rather than villains,
and characters switching sides willy-nilly from hero to villain as the situation dictates.

Anti-Heroism
Using anti-societal characters as protagonists or characters of primary reader identification pretty much limits your audience to adolescents, or those with their mindset.


Nostalgic Paralysis
Nostalgia is fine, you know. In fact, since it's often steeped in offal that's been stewing for years, it can be fertile ground for germinating new stories, characters, and directions (as it is in the work of Geoff Johns or James Robinson, whether you like the particular directions they choose or not). Nostalgia can help a well-rooted literary future blossom, or it can become fetid and choke all storytelling like kudzu in a keyboard. When nostalgia keeps writers from adding to a myth or telling new stories it's become Nostalgic Paralysis.

Decompression
We often associate decompression with silent panels and dialog spread out to a "slow pace".
So a panel full of all that dialog and captioning hardly seems like decompression, I know.
However, four issues of it does.
When the "storyline" replaces "the story"
is it any wonder that "the trade" replaces "the monthly"?


Post-Modern Deconstructionist Metafiction
An any additional commentary on this would be...
meaningless and pointless.

Endorsement: Green Arrow

There is a lot happening in the DCU right now. And, surprisingly... I endorse almost all of it, including...

Green Arrow.

You read right; I'm recommending Green Arrow.

And that's not something I do lightly.

Point 1.  Green Arrow's scope has been limited appropriately.  In the previous run on GA, Ollie was padding about space-time more easily than running across of a rooftop.

Perhaps I could have chosen a better metaphor.

It also focused very much on his role at the paterfamilias of the Arrow Family. Which is nice and all, but...

it works much better when the central character is rock solid. It's something you can do with Batman.  But, as history teaches us, simply pretending Green Arrow is Batman doesn't make him Batman.

The new creative team recognizes this and are focused on Ollie himself Green Arrowing.  

Point 2. Good pacing.  I rail on a lot about decompression.  Green Arrow (#1 and #2) is great example of story that doesn't dash along at a Silver Age pace but is still not guilty of decompression. It takes three pages (its FIRST three pages) to show "there's pollution at a local playground".  But this isn't padding; it's zooming in on the crux of the story.  This is important, not only to our story but to Green Arrow.  

This is two pages where only one word is said.  But everything that is happening is important. We get a sense of the effort that Green Arrow is making, we see him doing *gasp* detective work.  I consider this "acceptably cinematic".

Point 3. They let Green Arrow detect. Look, Ollie's not the World's Greatest Detective. He may not even been a great detective. But he has a keen eye and is good at lateral thinking and the action should show those advantages.

People who think normally do not think of Plastic Cat Arrows.

The story gives a couple opportunities for Green Arrow to make contributions to an investigation outside of shooting arrows at stuff.

Point 4. The creators have done a great job with Ollie's personality. 

Ollie is a hard-ass who will let you know if you have failed this city.

But he is genuinely sorry for you that you messed up.

They have created a balance for it I have not seen before (outside the TV show).   

On the one hand, Ollie has no trouble being a rude pain in the neck.

On the other hand, he's not just spouting "liberalisms" randomly. His outrage isn't diffuse and random, it's specific, targeted, and (arguably) justifiable. THIS is a Green Arrow I can get behind.

And nobody wants to get IN FRONT of Green Arrow. Not even Barry.

Point 5. His outfit is cool.

Okay, fine; "cool" is a relative term when it comes to Green Arrow costumes. But the black and green works, his little cape is adorable, the opera gloves are VERY Mike Grell, he's wearing a utility belt, and, for the first time in my memory, he's covering his FACE with a scarf.

It's REALLY adorable. It's like he's still a member of the Junior Spectre Fan Club.
But, really, it does look like something you'd wear in Sherwood Forest, so I think it works.

So, now, it's just Ollie Queen who has a goatee, which doesn't even look all that stupid any more.

Ollie's a tech-bro, after all. It would be almost weird if he DIDN"T have that facial hair.

Point 6. The creators aren't shying away from the problems of writing a tech-billionaire who cares about The Little People.   Ollie is connected to the victims in the case (and might become one!) because he "ran the (evil) company for a month as a favor" to a friend.  That's just the most billionaire-bro thing EVER.

Point 7. The first and current plot is about a big multinational not caring about some of their business causing poisoning among The Little People and the writers take the time and care to personalize it. Not only is that perfectly on point for Green Arrow (as a '70s-style activist) is excellent a creating a niche for Green Arrow's adventuring.

This is some visual storytelling like I haven't seen since the '70s. It made me care.  The panel with the fallen groceries hit me in the feels.

Point 8. What this (and some more) adds up to is: Green Arrow feels unique.

Which, in Green Arrow's case, is not a given.

And unique in a good way.  

That's eight reasons. That's enough for now.

Eight is enough, as they say.

I endorse your reading the new Green Arrow.

Green Arrow Rant

I am about to rant. I am probably going to get flamed for it.

Perhaps those flames will counter my wave of indignation and we'll all wind up letting off a little steam.

But I cannot sit silently after reading this article, which reveals that filmmaker and journalist Ann Nocenti will be taking over writing duties on Green Arrow.

Now, Ms Nocenti's got more than enough pedigree (certainly enough to write Green Arrow, snort!); she wrote a passel of comics for Marvel in the '80s. In addition to some strong 'socially relevant' stories for Daredevil, she wrote a miniseries starring, Dazzler, which immediately gives her credit for gumption in my book.

Plus, I am delighted to see that she recognizes at least two of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Comic Books (Self-Referentialism and Decompression).

"Over the years I'd run into a comic here and there, and I would try and read it. It was like multiple characters, lots of characters squashed onto a page. A story you couldn't really get into. You had no idea of what was going on, and I thought, ‘They kinda lost their way, they're not telling single stories anymore.' "

This is very encouraging; if Nocenti can bring the 'done-in-one' to Green Arrow (and perhaps bring the practice back into fashion), she will have my admiration and thanks.

But I'm much less encouraged that she apparently knows zero about Green Arrow.

"Green Arrow," aka Oliver Green, is a rich billionaire based in Star City, which is apparently based on Seattle. "He's modeled after Robin Hood, so I guess his origin story is ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor,' " she says.

Nocenti didn't know anything about the character until she read Wikipedia. "The thing that struck me the most was the phrase that kept coming up over and over — ‘thrill-seeking activist.' Which I can get behind because I'm kinda a thrill-seeking activist."

I get it, DC; you're doing whatever you can to try to find more female writers. Ordinarily I might not favor that kind of 'reverse-sexism', but given the atrocious portrayals of Starfire and Catwoman since the reboot, it's pretty clear that something needs to be done to ameliorate the Slavering Fanboy Writer Syndrome that's smothering comic books.

But really... even I think Ollie deserves a writer -- male or female -- who doesn't have to look him up on Wikipedia to find out who he is. Is this one of the "1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow"? Give him a writer who admittedly knows nothing about him? Have we forgotten Jodi Picoult already?

Green Arrow has a Golden Age pedigree, with a longer and more consistent publishing history than anyone other than the other original JLAers. And you pick someone to write him who managed to be a comic book writer for, oh, 15 years, without ever having heard of Green Arrow?

I can't believe I'm saying this, but: GREEN ARROW DESERVES BETTER. DC, don't give you characters short-shrift in the rush to diversify your writing staff.

Things That Made Me Happy...

in my comics this week.

• The return of the real Supergirl...?
• The Ultra-Humanite's new Carpool Buddies ... of EVIL!
• Dawnstar's Thanagarian squeeze.
• The Legion's mission, revealed.
• I love that everyone in JLA walks around with their own logo; gotta get one of those.
• Vixen thinking that stairs are "architectural advances"; I laughed for nearly 3 minutes.
• Lightning rods. Shoulda seen that coming. You win this round, Brad.
  
• The severed head of Dolores Winter. Three different views!
• Superman using his greatest powers to defeat Redemption; Fabian Nicienza gets a big thumbs up from me.
• The "NO" sign in Arkham. I have got to get myself one of those!
• Superman's unique point of view in Countdown.
• The Joker's remorse. Sometimes, you just gotta love the Joker, and this week was one of them.
• Abra Kadabra's new look. VERY sexy.
• The cameo by the Rolling Head of Detective Lenihan.

Thing that made me happy in Aquaman this week:

• Cal Durham, Action Mayor!
• Lorena's first little horror story.
• "Blacklantis".
• The Malrey Trap; now that's comics!
• Olive with two pimentos? Heh. Heh heh.
• Kyesha's kitchen decor.
• Manta sucker-punches AJ.
• Topo uses Smoke Cloud.
• "KILL THEM ALL!"
• Lorena's second little horror story.
• Black Manta's new suit.
• Decompression is not one of Tad Williams' problems!

My New Art

I'm the proud new owner of some artwork by Patrick Gleeson.

This one is, of course, the crowning jewel: it's the first page of the Pfeiffer run on Aquaman. You know ... the one that had Aquaman in it.


That alone would make it worthwhile, regardless of what it was a picture of. But it's a dead floating panda. Not only is that one of the most brilliantly synoptic images in comics that's been created during my lifetime, it is a perfect example of the appropriate use of silent panels and cinematic technique (which I've railed against when they are used for decompression). Besides, like any true Washingtonian, I harbor a secret, seething hatred of all things panda.

This next one is another masterpiece of comic book illustration, where words are not necessary; it's the first view of the new coastline of San Diego.

Note how the panels "pan out" in subject, from the intimate loss of a single loved one to the vast scope of the entire disaster. Oh, Sub Diego, we hardly knew ye.

The third may not impress you much, "why, it's mostly some fish in panels without the background filled in!" Ah, but it's one of my favorite comic book pages of all time, in its subtlety and power. Yep, it's just fish swimming in an aquarium in their usual random way. That is, until the last panel, where they are suddenly facing the same way. Toward to the sea. Toward Aquaman. Who's coming.

It's enormously creepy and a reminder of how scarily powerful Aquaman is; he's not a mere force of nature, he's a force over nature. He tosses around the biosphere like Batman would a batarang.

The final one doesn't have the same kind of simple power as the others, but it's a marvelous example of the use of different visual ranges to tell a story and the use of different spaces to contextualize the images with one another. Besides, it's got both Lorena and Koryak.


I'm still trying to figure out where to display these in my house and which (if any!) should be at the DC Big Monkey store.

I think the dead floating panda one will just go over my bed.

BIG MONKEY PODCAST IS UP!

THE FIRST BIG MONKEY COMICS PODCAST is now available on line!

Thank you for your suggested "Do's and Don't's"; they were very helpful and we did our best to follow them. I hope you enjoy the show, because we certainly had fun doing it. Please be merciful with your feedback (it is our first attempt at such a thing and we hope to improve).

Once Ben figures out how to set up "the RSS feed", it will also available on what my grandchildren call "the I-Tunes" so you can listen to it on something called "the I-Pod". If you know how to do that, please go tell him.

The podcast features some bloggers you just may have heard of before:

• Ben Hatton of Those Wednesdays as "The Voice of Moderation";
• Devon Sanders of Seven Hells as "The Voice of Black Manta"
• Scipio Garling of the Absorbascon as "The Voice of Aquaman"
• Jonnie Brooks of Jon Hex Lives as "The Voice of Experience" and
• Jon Carey of Facedown in the Gutters as "The Voice of Johnnie Walker".

Our topics are the current writing on JLA, Marvel's 50 State Initiative, and Decompression in Modern Comics Writing. Any topics you'd like to see us discuss on future podcasts? Just write Ben and let him know.

This podcast was easy for us to arrange because conversations like this go on all the time at Big Monkey (and I mean ALL the time). Please join us at Big Monkey, where the Conversation About Comics is non-stop fun!

The Long Game

I believe I know who is responsible for decompression in DCU storytelling.

In recent conversation, a friend and I were marveling at a paradox in the creation and consumption of modern entertainment.  It's supposed to be common knowledge and  unquestioned wisdom that "our average attention span has grown shorter and shorter." TikTok, Twitter, and memes, those repositories of contemporary sententiae, are proof of our current desire for 'fun-sized' infotainment.  We consume popular culture byte by byte at a buffet, rather than ordering a several-course meal from a menu.

Yet, at the same time, our entertainment formats are increasingly long-form.  Television used to be primarily, if not entirely, episodic; shows were written to be watched in any order.  Nowadays series are much more, well, serialized.  Not only is there an order the episodes are to expected to be watched in, but there is one or many overarching storylines that will be ruined if you do otherwise.  Cinema, formerly composed of individual films, is now composed of franchises and universes.  

Once upon a time, television teemed with variety shows (like Sonny & Cher Hour of The Carol Burnett Show or the Ed Sullivan Show).  What kind of people watch AN HOUR of Sonny & Cher? EVERY WEEK?!

 I bet you can't last ten minutes.  

Trapped people, that's who; there were only three networks, after all; at any point in the evening you had only three choices of what to watch, and, boy, did the networks take advantage of that fact.  Late night shows still have embedded vestiges of that era; could anything be more objectively incongruous than the musical guest spots in sketch show Saturday Night Live?

Similarly, vignette shows (like Love, American Style, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island) used to rule the small screen, like on-air retirement communities for faded and secondary stars.  Whitman used to make SAMPLERS, for heaven's sake.

All those are gone (except for SNL); even Sabado Gigante was cancelled. 

I would have imagined such entertainment as immune to time.

So, too, comic books.  Originally, comic books were full of, um, comics. Comic strips, that is, reproduced from newspapers.  These books were also variety shows; one book would contain features with wildly different tones and styles.  Those were the days of broadcasting; entertainment was designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, since everyone was vying for the same audience (unlike today, where the world of on-demand entertainment fosters "narrowcasting" to niche audiences).  

Even the Justice Society was a variety show. Most modern comic books readers think of the Justice Society as a 'team', which shows only that they've never actually read a Golden Age Justice Society comic book, which was as anthology series of different heroes having different adventures in different styles of art and writing, with a wraparound plot summed up by Captain Stubing and Mister Rourke. 

Or something like that.

I've been reading the early adventures of Doll Man lately (as you may have noticed) and they take place in something literally called "Feature Comics".

This month's special guest star: DEATH.

Here's a SAMPLER of the kinds of co-stars in "Feature Comics":

At home activity: kids, arrange these characters in order of gay joke potential!

If you want to sleep tonight, do not think of Blimpy.

It's hard to believe those characters were in the same comic where Baby Groot tried to rape Doll Man.

Over time, the new longer-form features (usually costumed crimefighters) created to flesh out these anthology books started to push out the comic strip style features.  "Comics" became "superheroes", with a main story and maybe a back-up feature (of another, less popular, superhero, like Green Arrow), until back-up features were also pushed out.  

As mainstream superheroes expanded to squeeze out their smaller co-stars, they took over their original books (such as Action, Detective, and Sensation), then got their own titles (such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman), then started to take over other titles (such as Brave & The Bold) and sometimes generating their OWN PERSONAL anthology titles (such as Batman Family and Superman Family).  

After that, their STORYLINES expanded beyond one-and-dones, into two-parters, then three-parters, until "arcs" became a thing and that thing became the norm.  "Writing for the trade", as it was called. facilitated the 'binge-watching' habits of modern audiences. Thus, the average comic book evolves from being a bunch of appetizers to the world's longest hoagie.

And often just as stale and dry.

In truth, shrinking attention spans and lengthening pop-culture formats are related.  Increasingly impatient consumers, no longer trapped in a three-network world, are ready to bolt if you don't grab their attention immediately; as a result, content producers are increasingly desperate to keep that attention, and so drag out their storylines as long as possible to keep the audience hooked (by the sunk-cost fallacy, if nothing else).  

But where and when did this begin? Longer ago than I would have thought and in an unexpected place...

Fawcett City.

It's a little hard to imagine now, but there was a time in the early history of superhero comics that Shazam (then known as Captain Marvel) was more popular than Superman. A LOT more popular.  It's not surprising, in retrospect; Superman, after all, was just another adult adventure strip (except that the adventurer had superpowers).  Shazam was actually clearly written for kids, with a boy using a magic word to become the world's mightiest mortal, and talking tigers, and evil alien worms, and no child labor laws. 

Superman may be vulnerable to magic but
Shazam is vulnerable to lawsuits.

Shazam, in fact, was the star of one of the most popular movie serial of its day (1941) and one of the only ones considered remotely watchable by today's standards.  Inspired by its popularity at the cinema, the Fawcett comics publishers decide to try importing the 'serial' format into their books, as of Captain Marvel Adventures #22 (1943).

Just like Brad Meltzer!

It's the future of comics, Billy, and you're to blame.

Or, at least, your villains and publishers are.

This was the introduction of Mr. Mind and his formation of the Monster Society of Evil.

Oh, and "also the Nazis and Japs." 
One needs manpower, after all.

Mr. Mind didn't show his face because, of course, they were holding back for the eventual ironic reveal that he was just a tiny worm.  But the deeper reason is that Mr. Mind represented the perceived potential danger of the persuasive power of RADIO.  Mr. Mind's physical form wasn't important (as his very name implies).  Through the medium of radio he could be everywhere, direct a universal organization of evil, and safely effect spooky action at a distance.  It's no coincidence that Mr. Mind literally has a tiny radio hanging around his neck.

Even the later, post-Kingdom Come, interpretations of Mr. Mind preserve the idea that he control minds through invasive means (from inside their brains).  

As his taunt states, his long-game was to throw pawn after pawn at Shazam, eventually wearing him down to the point of cracking.

And, yes, this IS where Bane got the idea.
They still read Captain Marvel in Santa Prisca.

The key phrase here is "plot after plot".  The introduction of Mr. Mind teed up a serial format, where the plot of each segment was the "Monster of the Month" that Mr. Mind was throwing at our hero.  

Eventually, Mr Mind was caught;

This is what it sounds like
when worms cry.

convicted;

"FAKE NEWS!"

and executed.

What did you expect? It's the Golden Age, of course they fried him, stuffed him, and put him on display.

This storyline had some 27ish chapters and took two years (as Billy Batson notes); now THAT is long-form.  And once it was over, the publishers asked for feedback about the character AND the format.

I am SO tempted to check yes/yes/NO, and mail it to that address, but I can't find a penny postcard any more.

There was an outpouring of support, according to writer Otto Binder (as quoted in the article linked above):

"We truly were amazed at the electrifying response...letters pouring in...and believe me, with a readership of over one million as we had in those days, the mail can become pretty imposing. A rousing consensus simply loved Mr. Mind! Why? We never figured it out.

As a result, the writers revivified Mr. Mind.

With a renewed joie de vivre.

Apparently, the readers loved not just Mr. Mind, but the serial format as well.  As much as they enjoyed the immediate fix of an exciting story, they also loved the payoff of longer-term commitment to a title.  

We are still paying the price of that discovery.