- Lemony Snicket is gonna be a touchstone here, for pairing if-anything-TOO-sophisticated wit with a very accessible, parsable flow.
- Handler's Adverbs, meanwhile, is pretty much my ne plus ultra for what style can be.
- Charles Portis and the "Army Man" zine both speak to how colorful prose can get.
- Achewood's handling of dialogue feels as precise as Pogo's lettering of dialogue.
- Calvin and Hobbes taught me just how much can be said with very little. (And how much dialogue-first mediums makes it easier to write less.)
- Cloud Atlas (the book, not the movie) is a great exercise in varied epistolary styles.
- Succession is probably the best-written show I've seen; the way it offers up hints of who people are without giving any more than that is a fascinating insight into how to avoid "prosaic" and unnecessary revelation.
- [Twin Peaks][Twin Peaks] has such a fascinating pairing of broad comic outlines with memorable dialogue, where comic slips into poetic, surreal, and ominous without getting less... comic.
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