Fighting the system?

I'm currently in the midst of expanding my design skill set to include comic book lettering, as well as designing the indicia pages and back covers. In teaching myself to do this, I've run into several stumbling blocks.

The biggest one is the perception of how typography should work with the illustration in graphic novels.  Type in graphic novels is more than just the medium in which the dialogue and sound effects come across, it really needs to be integrated with they style of the artist and the mood of the script.  Apparently, this usually means making things huge, brightly colored, and stroked every which way. I find that this is usually a huge distraction, and tends to make even the most intelligent, well written book look like a cheeseball 1950's pulp story.

However, when I attempted to use a subtler hand in the story I was working on, it was immediately shot down by the editors.  Now, I realize that its very difficult to undermine nearly  a century of convention, but I'm curious to see how other people would try to subvert what's going on, especially when the dominant idea seems to conflict with what's being created.  Not every "Splortch" needs to be in 26 point, drippy red typeface, especially when it's a carefully rendered oil painting of the scene. I need to be able to convey to my editors why making these changes is important, regardless of convention.