Dialogue Overload

A friend of mine is currently reading my story, Codex, and asked, "Why is there green writing?" In short, there are times where I feel like I overuse dialogue and then - being the neurotic, anxiety ridden guy that I am - I worry that my conversations are also one sided. So I started colour-coding SOME (not all) in order to keep track of it. The extract below is from chapter one and I think there's too much talking just on this one page. Opinions?

“Here we go buddy. I’ve been saving a window seat for you. You have no idea how dull this place has been without my buddy. These people, they don’t even know the difference between Marvel and DC. Blasphemy.”

I couldn’t hold back a smile. “Those monsters.”

“I know, right? Eesh. So, how we… how we doing?”

I shrugged, looked away quickly and stared pointedly at the desktop in front of me. There goes my heart rate again. Was the air getting thin? It was definitely getting hotter. If I could just…

“Check it out.” Elmo slapped a sketchbook down in front of me. The picture was an incredible comic book version of two teenage boys standing back-to-back. Their clothes were tatty, worn and blood stained. One had a bandaged forearm, while the tall, skinny one had a bandage around his head. Arm bandage held a baseball bat while head bandage carried a large butcher’s cleaver in either hand. Surrounding them were the hideously deformed and decomposing shadowy forms of what were undeniably zombies.

Again, I couldn’t hold back a smile. I knew that it was the two of us, it looked like us to be fair. I told him so as I flicked over to the next page where there were comic book panels that told the story of how the two boys had been at the library on the day of the outbreak. Another page showed Comic-Elmo use a rather large encyclopaedia to beat the head in of a librarian that tried to bite them.

“This is awesome.”

“Thanks, man. Been working on it in all my free time while you’ve been…away. And I now realise that I showed you this in order to get your mind off thinking about WHY you’ve been away and now I’m talking about you having BEEN away so now you’re probably thinking about why you were away again and…”

“Take a breath, Elmo. It’s okay. I’m – I’m okay. The comic looks great.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Please. It’s a graphic novel. It’s classier, more sophisticated.”

I held up my hands defensively. “Sorry. I apologise. The graphic novel looks awesome. Though you,” I turned back to the first image he’d shown me, “are not that much taller than me.”

“I kinda am… Short stack.”

“Uh – no. You are not calling me that.”

“Half-pint?”

I shook my head.

“Little man?”

“Seriously. I get mocked more than enough by my brother and his friends. They too are not as much taller than me as they think. You can just stick with Toby. I think that’ll be for the best.”

“Fine – fine. I’ll leave the height-based name calling to Linc – he’s better at it than I am anyway. I saw him earlier. He had already been assimilated into the hive mind of the seniors.”

“Tell me about it. Nothing seems to faze him.”

“Don’t you just hate guys like that?”

“What, confident…? Good looking…? Socially gifted…?”

“Yeah. It’s disgusting. It makes me want to hurl.”