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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46395
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I am going to quote from a novel that in my opinion shows many stylistic overlaps of novels and comic books: The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey. I am holding that novel in my hand now.

1. The use of a lot of dashes
2. The use of a lot of italics to show internal character monologues. 
3. Single words being all in capitals in a sentence
4. Using words like "who" and "how" as nouns as in "the who" or "the how." 
5. The most important one: the use of colons in conversation. For instance:

After I finished reading The Rowan I called all of this a "comic book" style of novel writing. I don't mean that as anything derogatory; it's a great novel. I haven't seen any current novels that use a comic book style as in my 5 points above. The Rowan was published in 1990. Was it a short lived trend to write novels this way?

What's interesting is if I go to an earlier novel by Anne McCaffrey called The White Dragon and open it, published in 1979, she isn't over 450 pages using that Comic book style there; there are rare examples but nowhere near enough to be doing anything different to other authors.

Original score: 3