Why do you like comics as a medium? does it provide anything you can't get in other mediums?

why do you like comics as a medium? does it provide anything you can't get in other mediums?

i like comics because i have to push the story forward by reading the dialogue and observing the artwork myself. my favorite video games use to be role playing games but the part i hated was the tedious battle gameplay. i wanted to just look at the cool graphics and read the story. when i found out comics were very interactive in that sense, i fell in love with the medium.

that reader control of pacing shit

It's like a book with a fixed vision.

It is a unique blend of art and writing that cannot be duplicated 100% accurately in any other medium. The storytelling tricks that comics can employ cannot be found in straight prose. The pacing is totally controlled by the reader, unlike movies and TV, where the viewer is at the mercy of the creators in terms of pacing.

basically just for the content that isn't allowed in other media

It's stupid stories that hold no weight and are like fast food. Bright colorful and easily consumed. Nothing ever changes and it all stays the same and any changes are reversed in a little but of time. It's like popcorn. You can easily consume it and it doesn't require extra thought

>It's stupid stories that hold no weight and are like fast food. Bright colorful and easily consumed. Nothing ever changes

> comics as a medium

Thats really only capes and slice of life.

I can answer your question with a single page.

>never read a comic in his life

Nothing in particular about the medium. I still like bookss, music, movies, and TV shows a lot. I just read/watch/play/listen/etc whatever looks appealing. Started reading comics in college because my roommate had a huge collection and recommended his favorites to me, most of which I liked.

Also because as much as I like reading novels, college REALLY sucked the fun out of reading books for me when I had to read an obscene amount every day for coursework. It's a nice middle-ground somewhere between reading a book and watching a TV show in terms of effort required.

...

Using still imagery to tell a story is fairly unique and creates a tone and pacing unlike anything else. Other mediums almost always use moving imagery and the brain interprets/responds to moving images very differently than still images. That's really the only thing that sets it apart.

based Harvey Pekar

Visual affordable medium
All you need is a good artist and a decent writer and ya got a comic

Which means much more experimental stuff can be greenlight.
I mean nobody in movies gonna give another Freddy vs Jason the time of day.
But thanks to comics we got multiple volumes of Freddy Vs Jason vs Ash

>why do you like comics as a medium?

The same reason I like manga

found the capeshit

art and literature teaming up. entire colleges waste peoples' time by ignoring comics

writers can take a concept and follow it to its logical conclusion

imagery, prose

artists, authors

commercials are easily skipped

The potential to craft a story specifically to your own visual expectations and allow for unique experimentation if you're skilled enough.

>thinking capeshit is representative of all comics

Kill yourself

I think, when you get down to it:

1) Comics can pretty much be anything. Flipbooks and storyboards for movies; choose your own adventure stuff for vidya; text-text-text for literature; and so on. There are a lot of "accepted" standards in modern Western comics, but the definition of comics is extremely broad.

2) Even from the standards of the average comic/manga/webcomic, you have a specificity of vision that can't be done so easily with literature. You also have that specificity but at a low cost, compared to the man power necessary for film and TV. And, of course, you have the ability to tell a story that's as short or as long as you want, which paintings can't quite do.

They can tell stories that would be good animated films, but often the budget isn't there for it.

Art
Unlimited special effects

Kirby probably knocked this off in less than a day

In a film, a scene like this would employ 100s of people, cost millions of dollars, take weeks to film and months to add CGI.

And of course I forget the pic.

>does it provide anything you can't get in other mediums?

Unlimited Special Effects, easy access to a wide range of stories not covered by any other medium I can consume much faster than either all-text stories or movies.

i agree with a lot that has been said so far but i'll elaborate on one point in particular.

in literature, film, comics, etc., there seems to be a struggle between artistic expression and entertainment. not to imply that a piece of media cannot be both entertaining and artistically genuine, but rather that the business side of art often pushes things to be more hollow, soulless and forgettable--but entertaining.

the more people (and money) involved in a project, the more likely it seems that the project will deviate from artistic expression to cash-grab entertainment. the production-by-committee hollywood blockbusters are a perfect example of this. in fact, most major films and television shows seem to lean this way. there may be someone who genuinely cares about the artistic merit of the work, but his or her voice can easily be drowned out by slews of producers.

but comics (and written literature) are different. they require a much lower budget, so there is less executive meddling (especially for indie comics). There are often only one or two artists involved in the project, ensuring that there will be little interference with any artistic vision they may have. this doesn't always come out right (plenty of single-creator, low-budget webcomics that suck ass) but it's a great medium for more "pure" artistic expression to arise.