Read this.

Jeff Parker writes about the “value” of comics and how it affects his writing:

Obviously I’m only talking about monthlies and not even touching all the excellent stand-alone works, that again, require Active rather than Passive viewing. One of those is just way better for you, but I risk lapsing into my Everyone Watches Too Much Effing TV rant. Instead I’ll get back to that control-of-time point I mentioned. You’ll notice in 2009 that many of the books I work on, in particular Agents of Atlas and Mysterius The Unfathomable, will require you to slow down your reading speed. These books are packed fairly dense with information, and that’s not just wordiness. Many times the artist will be conveying information that adds far more to what is being said or narrated, often contrary to the image. This isn’t really because we’re trying to cram value into the books, that’s just a nice side effect, but because that method of storytelling works well with them.