I’m reading the Atlantic’s piece about Alan Moore. It seems okay to me, nice writing and whatnot. But when he quotes dialogue, the author italicizes the words that were bolded in the original. I’ve seen a few people do this and the effect is always bad. A comics page is not the same as a text page. Words get bolded on the comics page only to break up the visuals; the emphasized words don’t jump out, they just give the eye enough traction to make it through bits of print that otherwise would be lost amid all the pictures. In straight text the words aren’t going to be lost; put words here and there into italics and they become a bit overbearing. So we get Dr. Manhattan, that limp, far-away personality with one eye on the tachyons, biting his words off like an undergraduate intellectual in mid-debate: