Comics aren’t movies.

If you try to eliminate everything you can’t do in movies — captions, thought balloons — in writing comics, that’s a legitimate choice, but it’s not an inherent virtue.

Comics are words and pictures together, not pictures with words as a necessary evil.

Comics are an artwork. They’re not movies, they’re not novels, they’re not stage drama, they’re not poetry, they’re not fine art or illustration. They’re their own thing with their own strengths.

Movies are cool too, but they’ve got motion and sound and tone of voice and all...

…they do things comics can’t.

But comics can do things movies can’t. Eliminating techniques from comics because other forms don’t (or can’t) use them makes comics less than they can be.

Comics use words and pictures together. The words are not an intrusion.

Comics can be text-heavy and still good. They can be text-light and still good.

But the graphic juxtaposition of words and pictures is one of the things that comics have as a strength that few other forms have — print advertising has it, too.

It doesn’t just matter what...

…the words are, it matters _where_ they are.

A caption in the upper left and a caption in the lower right have different effects. A sound effect in the foreground and a sound effect in the background have different effects.

Comics are graphics as well as drawing, and words...

…as well as pictures.

The images can carry the narrative, with the text adding to it. The text can carry the narrative with the images adding to it. Between text and art you can have two (or more!) narratives happening in a single panel.

Comics are their own artform.

I broke in in the 1980s, so I learned a lot from comics of the 70-80s, but a couple of my go-to examples for varied use of text narratives in comics are DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, where Miller & Mazzucchelli tell their story using first-person and third-person narration, shifting...

…the spine of the storytelling from visual to verbal and back again as needed. And ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, where multiple narratives, visual and textual, braid together in ordered chaos.

But Jaime Hernandez’s “Locas” in LOVE & ROCKETS used text and graphics well — there’s one bit where Hopey is screaming so loudly the panel can’t contain it and the words are cropped by the borders.

And Simonson’s THOR. Chaykin’s AMERICAN FLAGG. Sound effects as design elements.

Comics can be as deceptively simple as DENNIS THE MENACE, or as narratively varied as THE SPIRIT or as controlled as ON STAGE or as florid as the Moore/Bissette SWAMP THING.

There’s such a wide range of techniques.

Some people use the techniques well and others use them badly, but it doesn’t make the techniques good or bad.

Craft tools are only as good as the craftsmen weilding them.