Surely comics require more effort on the part of the reader than movies or television. I'm always learning new things you can do with comics that wouldn't work in any other medium, and often they require the need to process a lot of dense information. Of course, the trick is to make the complicated seem effortless and spontaneous.
Daniel ClowesMy feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.
Daniel ClowesI've felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.
Daniel ClowesYou need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.
Daniel ClowesEverybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!
Daniel ClowesYou have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that - I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in one certain scene.
Daniel Clowes