On Reading Graphic Novels (differently)

I stumbled across this blog post by Rick Kleffel this morning, I don't have time to comment on it properly, but it's a great essay on the differences between reading conventional and graphic novels, and the author's hesitation to move from the familiarity of text boxes to the relative chaos of comic format:

But damn it, it's the words and pictures that threw me at first, even when I wanted, I really wanted to read them. You see, as I pick up a graphic novel to read, I'd just speed through the words and glance at the pictures, applying the same reading sensibility to the graphic novel that I did to the typeset novel. That style of reading renders the graphic novel into an annoyingly vapid and underwhelming reading experience. The pictures then lack the fullness of illustrations and the words lack the richness of a novel. The experience won’t gel correctly if you read graphic novels like novels.

http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-31-04.htm