Comics offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and paintings plus the intimacy of the written word.
About Comics
Even though I started to like reading comics at a very young age, and like reading comics rather than watching cartoons, I have never really thought about the magic behind it. What makes some static images more attractive than moving pictures? By taking all the styles, trends, themes away, we can now look at comics as an art form. I like how Scott McCloud describes comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence”, and really as “sequential art”. The magic behind comics is brought by maybe precisely sequential static images. Compared to cartoons, it is more open to re-interpretation in your brain. It leaves room for breathing. It allows artists and characters to play with frames.
About Transitions in Comics
Since I read both comics by European artists and Japanese artists, I also noticed that these two groups of artists have different “camera language”, which brings me a very different reading experience. And I found it easier to follow the path and to immerse myself in comics done by Asian artists, probably because Asian countries share very similar aesthetic values and cultural symbols. Scott McCloud summarizes it perfectly with the graphs that show how Japanese artists use Aspect-to-Aspect transitions to establish a mood or a sense of place. For example, I remember when a character dies in Naruto, the frames don’t show the character, but zoom in to a flower with its petals blown away by the wind, to symbolize the loss of life.