Clever Writing or Pretentious Rubbish?

While some comics rely on action-packed fights or fun characters, some writers like to add a little bit of intelligence into their work (or, at least, some would think of it as intelligence). For example, The Sandman is known for being a pretty clever series. It can be handy to have the internet on hand when it comes to pages like this:

Above, Morpheus meets The Three Witches and greets one of them with the name Atropos to which she replies that he might as well call her Morrigan. Unless you're an expert on mythology, you'd have to look up these names to get the references: Atropos is one of the Fates in Greek stories and Morrigan is a figure in Irish folklore.

What do you think of this style of writing? Do you enjoy the obscureness of it or is it just wack?

I enjoy writing like that.

Love it. However I get what you mean when you say some writing is just pretentious.

I like it

Neil Gaiman is a pretty decent writer. It's a fine balance between clever and pretentious. A good reader can pick up on which it is pretty quickly./

It isn't really pretentious, I guess you could argue that its unnecessarily showy but that's about it.

I don't see how that's even remotely pretentious.

For the record I'm not saying I don't like Neil Gaiman, I did struggle a bit with The Sandman series but I was a young teen when I tried to read it so that probably had something to do with why it was confusing. Here's what I personally think is over-elaborate in the language department:

Gallery

It just seems to be Morrison trying to add as many metaphors in as little pages as possible in my view.