Of course, it isn’t entirely one-sided. There are alot of things that can be done with a film that can’t be done with a short story or novel. Information can be presented visually in an efficient and measured fashion concerning character and environment that would take a lot of bulky description and exposition to convey with words alone. Also, since our current society has a greater visual orientation than a literary one, a visual flow of narrative gives a much more immediate and involving sensory impact to the work in hand, even though much of the emotional depth and resonance is forfeit in many cases.
Alan Moore in Writing for Comics telling us that movies have made our attention spans shorter, and as a result the comics form is richer because of it. This might explain why he his scripts are as long as they are.
In terms of intellectual and emotional effect upon the reader, this seems to represent an edge that comics would do well to exploit. In the end, it is effect which governs the success of an individual piece of artwork or a whole artform, and while abstract critical considerations concerning the inherent quality of a work might give us a few useful handles with which to grasp and appreciate a work more fully, art still succeeds or fails in terms of the actual effect it has upon the individual members of its audience.
What is effect in this context? What governs others in terms of their readership of comics comes through in their interest in the effect that it gives the reader. For the kids in my class when I talk about comics with them, they like it because it’s less actual text they have to read. It doesn’t feel like real literary work. The effect is in visual presentation, but now that they’re reading Zeitoun after AD they find more emotional depth, more character conflict, and a richer conversation in the prose version of a vaguely similar story. This is something I’m kind of sure we can say Moore gets but not totally. In this case, he chases his tail in both of these quotes, he probably understands and would acknowledge the fact that perception affects a reader but he doesn’t really acknowledge it.
