One thing that I cant understand that Ive seen a lot lately are people who, in their comic, put a word bubble or whatever with an arrow that says in phrase form (not a complete sentance) what the character is supposed to be expressing or explain something in the background needlessly when the character could easily say it or already has. It also seems that this is mostly common in the "manga-style" webcomic.

EXAMPLE:
lets say, oh, someone is fighting a big monster and there's a text bubble to the main character who is clearly scared that says that next to him.
in other words: o.o <--(scared to death)

I saw one recently where it had that same arrow and word bubble to describe an item with a mundane adjective that was already said by the character on the previous page.

Personally, I would hope that my artistic skills could represent that expression well enough without me putting in what its supposed to be or tell you what you're supposed to get out of it (though these usually arent for something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways).

What do you think about that?

Some Japanese manga does that, mostly in the shoujo genre. I guess some artists think it's cool to emulate that. I find most actual manga artists use it more effectively for comedic purposes. I still find it better than what old comics used to do. Old comics were overly wordy with drawn out explanations of what was going on or what characters were feeling during action sequences. It was like a running commentary which sometimes took up more space on the page than the art. Read some old X-men and you'll see what I mean.

.: isukun :.

its supposed to be done to clarify things... its too often used to make things japanised. One is sometimes useful depending on the quality of the art (yet kinda stupid) and one is absolutely retarded...

In manga it's usually done to be funny, but american made manga is rarely ever funny..... ever.

Typically I can't stand those little bubbles, especially in a book that is otherwise not funny. I've seen some books where I was reading along and all of a sudden there was an arrow saying "noodles" pointing to a bowl. I had to stop to figure out why the heck I needed to know it was noodles? I also remember an arrow pointing to an axe saying "axe". I find stuff like that kills the flow of the story for me.

Sometimes substituting these for sound effects bugs me as well. Where they describe what's going on instead of providing just the sound (like "rope breaking" instead of a simple "snap" and drawing the rope breaking).

I do remember reading some "What the???" books where they did it but it was entirely for comedic reasons and could be very funny (like an arrow pointing to a very deformed looking woman saying "back supplied by Rob Liefeld"). And I liked Monkey Joe's running dialog and such in the GLA series.