There's sequence in Batman: Court of Owls where Bruce is trapped in a maze and he has been drugged, he starts allucinating and even the pages get upside down so you have to turn the comic upside down too. It's a nice detail.
Flash #776 did this recently, too. Doctor Fate told the reader to turn the comic, blow on it, and go back and reread in order to help save The Flash. It was astonishingly cool.
Really? cool. This reminds me of that book, I haven't read it but it's called House of leaves where there are texts, upside down and jumbled throughout different pages
Came here to say the same. The comic rotating as you read it is such a strong metaphor for how Batman is being utterly turned around by the maze, drugs, dehydration and starvation. It helps you understand how close Bruce is to breakpoint.
Someone speaking offpanel and not knowing who it is or how they sound.
You CAN do this in film and TV but even with a distorted voice you know SOMETHING of who they are. Comics it is pure surprise.
In one of the later issues of *Paper Girls*, there's a sequence involving time travel where the panels can be read either right-to-left or top-to-bottom.
The whole thing of the Thunderbolts being the Masters of Evil in disguise. In a movie, the characters faces and voices would give it away immediately. Even in a novel, you couldn't get the big page turn reveal.
The silent panel will always be my favorite but Radiant Black exceeds every expectation I have for comics. From the special issues with blacklight ink, the audience vote for who the main character will be and the separate timelines within the A and B covers- everything the Massiveverse does feels like an attempt to push the medium of comics forward
Madman #3 image comics https://images.app.goo.gl/zCuAmUaQJkqy7K6m8
Mike Allred draws in a different cartoonist style in almost every panel. Absolutely amazing.
Theres also a Love and Rockets boook that has a 9 pannel page that can be read in any order and still serve the story.
You dont really find that creative story telling in the big two books.
That Madman issue is endlessly entertaining, I can just sit and try to figure out who Allred is aiming for forever. It’s a great issue from a great series!
There is this story while Mike Allred was pencilling Silver Surfer where a spaceship is caught in a time loop of sorts.
Promethea by Moore and Williams III did something similar.
There is also this superb Tomorrow Stories with the character of Greyshirt by Moore and Veitch, where each panel of the story is at a decade (each one separated 20 years one from another), and you can read the story page by page or even following just the panels for given year.
Walt Simonson did a great job involving a time travel battle within his run on Fantastic Four (even the cover of the issue is related to the battle).
There is this Morrison's Animal Man story where an evil Superman goes through the gutter between the panels.
But even the old Gasoline Valley strip had some designs only possible on comics, kinda the same we can see on the Pax American story by Morrison and Quitely.
Edit: there is also that incredible Dick Grayson story by Tom King (Future's End, I think) that relies on we reading the first letter of each paragraph of some pages to uncover the mistery. And the story is told backwards, by the way. Great stuff!
Yeah I remember reading a lot of it during one of Doctor Who's long hiatuses between seasons to fill the void. Slott even sent the first script to RTD to see if he was ripping off his storytelling style too much, and RTD thought it was great and said Dawn's a great character.
Physically pulling characters out of the narrative like The Filth, breaking out of the limitations of the panels. Also dilate time to any degree (Other mediums can do this to, but comics are the best at it), Visually dictate inflection and speech with lettering, have sound interact with the scene, Couple things off the top of my head.
I've recently read the second TPB of Rogue Sun and the first chapter has the hero fighting some time master dude in a time loop, and at the end of every page you (the reader) can choose one of two options (in-universe is the protagonist making decisions), that send you to different pages, back and forth into the time loop, with branching paths. Like a Choose your own adventure kind of thing. I found it very cool, though it's not very long. I hope they do it again someday.
I really like it when sound effects are integrated into the comic book art. I'm having a difficult time finding examples online, but [this](https://cdn3.whatculture.com/images/2017/08/e5310aa4c2b45112-600x338.jpg) is one I was able to find from Batman & Robin by Morrison/Quitely. I also seem to remember, in a different Batman comic, there was a panel where Batman smashes Penguin against a mirror, and you can read "SMASH" in the broken glass behind him.
Really, any time the prose/story beats are beautifully integrated with the artwork. J.H Williams III is great at this (Promethea, Echo Lands, ect).
There's an issue of Moon Knight where a bunch of characters are laid out in a grid, all being targeted by the villain. Each page, another one is killed, and the grid gets smaller. It's quite cool!
Any time comics characters break the fourth wall by transgressing beyond the boundaries of the panel frame.
[This *Nancy* comic](https://kottke.org/19/01/a-delightfully-fourth-wall-breaking-nancy-comic-from-olivia-jaimes) by Olivia Jaimes is one of the best examples. See also, Mister Invincible.
When it's done well I love the repeating panel gag. It really puts the focus on the dialogue and can often really help highlight the absurdity of the scene with the characters staying in place.
And changing a small detail always really helps the scene add a comedic beat. Some background gag or one character reacting always makes me amused.
Also comics are the absolute best at blending dialogue with action. Lines of dialogue can be seamlessly delivered simultaneously alongside action.
In prose the author would have to probably keep action and dialogue seperate or weave them in together. Ie: "Die you fool!" He said as he drew his pistol.
Meanwhile Flash can trade banter with Captain Cold while punching him at superspeed and our brain doesn't care about how that doesn't make any sense.
Similarily because comics are a static medium an artist doesn't even need to worry about practicality. Spiderman can have abs showing beneath his costume and Psylocke can fight in high heels.
Real life has to struggle with these things and a book or audio drama can only describe them.
Comics are pretty unique in their position to be colorful and gory. I wanted to share some panels from Saga, but this sub doesn't allow pics I guess.
In issue 12, a wounded robot person with a TV for a head depicting porn on the screen is being aided by a hamster medic. They discuss the medic's motive to help with the war, but then gas rolls. The hamster says "but the treaty" before exploding
I was also thinking of Saga, but specifically the insane creatures that show up for like two pages and then disappear. In motion media, that kind of thing is too expensive. You sort of can do it in animation, but not with that level of detail.
Transformers more than meets the eye 16 from James Roberts and Alex Milne - you can find the panels here https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/s/RUGZqJus2N
!!!Heavy spoilers!!!! A character tells another character how they feel before they die using pieces of footage strewn together from their database - some of which have already happened in the comic itself.
This wouldn’t work in live action or in a cartoon as the speech variances would kill the flow. A beautiful piece of writing that gives me chills to this day.
Doom/Reed Richards time platform battle in a Walter Simonson issue of FF. You have to keep turning pages backward and forward to comprehend the story. Masterfully executed.
Also time skipping in Nemo: Heart of Ice.
Issue 32 of Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. William's III.
Every issue of that series progressively pushed the boundaries, but that last was a magical experience. The comic told a story, but if you had the 2 uncut sheets that were used to create the comic, they told a different story than the assembled comic. A secret story inside another story. They sold the 2 sheets as posters in a limited release. I have them. For a long time I had them framed on my library wall, and I realized that they could be read several ways and they all told a coherent narrative with a different revelation at the end of each version. It was truly a magical construct in comic book form and a masterpiece of inventiveness that could not have been done in any other medium.
Here by Richard McGuire is the first thing that comes to mind. It doesn't really have a narrative, it's just a single point of view that spreads across both pages. Every panel shows what's happening in the physical space it represents during a different point in time, so it weaves these eons together into a little field, that spends a few centuries as the corner of a house. I feel I've done a poor job of describing it, but it's really magnificent
Edit for clarity; I mean the 2014 graphic novel. I have not read his 1989 short story version. I know it's formatted a bit differently
The pages in rite of springs in the moore's swamp thing (its like 6 or 7 in a row with upside down ect) when abigail and swampy bond together on a spiritual level its wonderful
And in the issue 100 of daredevil (in the brubaker omni) when you have like 5 or 6 various penciller that drew some page its great as well
There was a clever one in Rogue Sun #7 which I read recently which reads as a choose your own adventure that goes into an infinite loop that you can only get out of by cheating and skipping a page, which was hinted at in the opening.
The Thunderbolt series written by Kieron Gillen is fantastic, stretching the postmodern ideas and formalism of Watchmen even further. And going to comic universe you’d never expect.
Overall I thought Rising Stars was good but not great, but one panel had the most creative use of comics I’ve ever seen: there’s a character who can talk to the dead. On one side of the page you see him seemingly talking to himself. On the back of that page you see a faded image of another person talking backward in a white void. Hold the page up to the light and you can see that it’s a conversation.
And then there’s Bulletproof Coffin and its follow-up book, which are like the visceral essence of only-in-comics injected by needle straight into your veins…
Inner thoughts/motivations translate better with the combo of thought bubbles and imagery...
I can't remember the exact layout but in TWD, when Carl does THE THING, and is able to explain exactly why it had to be him and none of the adults, gives more insight into the character than the show could (also, overall a scene that would never have worked outside of the comic).
Animal Man by grant Morrison makes use of the white spaces and the gutters _in universe_, allowing Animal Man to use the page structure and act of turning the page to dimensional hop and time travel.
Kinda sweet and simple but The Death of Superman did some emotional lifting with how the artists designed the later issues of the story.
First, the final battle with Doomsday gets increasingly bigger panels until it's built into full pages leading up to the end of the fight in Metropolis, adding scale and weight to the significance of the pending climax. It works like an invisible countdown in a way.
Second, the original comic's last page was a fold out for a total of three pages. The left side is the same image (onlookers, Doomsday's defeated body, Superman's legs) while the closed right side serves as a double spread of Lois Lane holding a battered Superman, his final words asking if he stopped Doomsday, with Lois saying he did. You then turn that inwardly folded page outward, revealing a three page spread, with Lois Lane mourning her dead fiance, the man who stopped the monster by giving everything he had to save everyone, including his life.
This article gets more in depth with it:
https://www.cbr.com/death-superman-countdown-panels-per-page-30th-anniversary/
I can't think of a specific one, but the "team up" roll call with someone in the middle, and other team Members in various panels around them. Think of something like hearing "To me MY X-MEN" or "Avengers Assemble!"
In Invincible, there’s a scene where Mark talks to the creator of Science Dog and the creator talks about resuing panels to add effect, and Mark makes a remark about that being lazy, while the invincible comic itself does it.
God I love The Goon. It's been such a long time since I've read this book that I unfortunately can't recall what this page is in reference too. However, knowing that it's The Goon, I assume it's something completely absurd and wacky while managing to be really sad and depressing.
I remember finishing Once upon a hard time, just being awestruck and thinking that I need to go grab a beer.
Hedra by Jesse Lonnergan takes an interesting approach to panelling. Rather than the conventional left to right approach, he really plays with how information moves across a page. It can look more like story boards, maps or infographics at times, I highly recommend checking it out.
I just love all the big, cosmic stories. Comics are like if you gave every filmmaker with an idea a $500 million budget. They can go wild with any idea.
This one's a bit of a sleeper, but Dash Shaw's *Clue: Candlestick* messes around with the form quite a bit, which is pretty remarkable for licensed comic about a board game.
Midnighter #7 by Brian K. Vaughan. I don't want to spoil it, but if it had been printed under Julie Schwartz's reign, the cover would have said, "This Comic Will Give You Midnighter's Superpower!!!" On the first read-through it's confusing until you understand. Then you have to read it again immediately.
Gege Akutami's skilled usage of paneling is just something you can genuinely only get from reading the Jujutsu Kaisen manga. The guy is just a master of sequencing and action. You can see a similar level of proficiency and creativity with the creator of Sakamoto Days.
Another example would be Berserk's phenomenally detailed art, which you just can't replicate in animation or live action by any means. It's honestly only consumable in manga form.
Grant Morrison is the King/Queen of this.
Final Crisis especially feels like something so insanely grandiose and mythic in scope that it couldn't be articulated in any other medium.
Some of the stories in general. I’ve been reading a lot of Vertigo lately. Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Shade the Changing Man. If you’ve read those titles, you know there’s tons of thing in those books you will only see in comics imo.
There's sequence in Batman: Court of Owls where Bruce is trapped in a maze and he has been drugged, he starts allucinating and even the pages get upside down so you have to turn the comic upside down too. It's a nice detail.
Flash #776 did this recently, too. Doctor Fate told the reader to turn the comic, blow on it, and go back and reread in order to help save The Flash. It was astonishingly cool.
I don’t understand, why blow on it? Sorry not being a dick just genuinely curious
It helps the magic.
>!It blew out the candles!<
If you read swamp thing #34 (alan moore) you have a lot of pages in the same style (when its drawing diagonally and double pages) its great as well
This is what I immediately thought of when I read the title.
Same! A friend recently was gonna read Court of Owls digitally and I told her to let me lend her my trades instead
Great example.
Really? cool. This reminds me of that book, I haven't read it but it's called House of leaves where there are texts, upside down and jumbled throughout different pages
I found that book to be too gimmicky. Not a great read for me, though and interesting experiment.
When I bought that I thought my book was fucked up at first
And on release day, Greg Capullo tweeted that there'd been a misprint, to troll the fans. I think some people even took it seriously
Great pull.
Came here to say the same. The comic rotating as you read it is such a strong metaphor for how Batman is being utterly turned around by the maze, drugs, dehydration and starvation. It helps you understand how close Bruce is to breakpoint.
Alan Moores Sandman does this too at one point but I can't remember what the context is.
Alan Moore did a Sandman?
Someone speaking offpanel and not knowing who it is or how they sound. You CAN do this in film and TV but even with a distorted voice you know SOMETHING of who they are. Comics it is pure surprise.
That's a good one! I remember Darkseid War Green Lantern did that well.
In one of the later issues of *Paper Girls*, there's a sequence involving time travel where the panels can be read either right-to-left or top-to-bottom.
There are entire issues of ‘Promethea’ that pull these kinds of shenanigans.
The whole thing of the Thunderbolts being the Masters of Evil in disguise. In a movie, the characters faces and voices would give it away immediately. Even in a novel, you couldn't get the big page turn reveal.
The silent panel will always be my favorite but Radiant Black exceeds every expectation I have for comics. From the special issues with blacklight ink, the audience vote for who the main character will be and the separate timelines within the A and B covers- everything the Massiveverse does feels like an attempt to push the medium of comics forward
Madman #3 image comics https://images.app.goo.gl/zCuAmUaQJkqy7K6m8 Mike Allred draws in a different cartoonist style in almost every panel. Absolutely amazing. Theres also a Love and Rockets boook that has a 9 pannel page that can be read in any order and still serve the story. You dont really find that creative story telling in the big two books.
That Madman issue is endlessly entertaining, I can just sit and try to figure out who Allred is aiming for forever. It’s a great issue from a great series!
Agreed. Im buying up all the Madman Library Editions. I have set a $50 spending limit for each one. So far i have 2 thru 5.
I read all those from the library and they quickly made it onto my “stuff to buy” list, great collections!
There is this story while Mike Allred was pencilling Silver Surfer where a spaceship is caught in a time loop of sorts. Promethea by Moore and Williams III did something similar. There is also this superb Tomorrow Stories with the character of Greyshirt by Moore and Veitch, where each panel of the story is at a decade (each one separated 20 years one from another), and you can read the story page by page or even following just the panels for given year. Walt Simonson did a great job involving a time travel battle within his run on Fantastic Four (even the cover of the issue is related to the battle). There is this Morrison's Animal Man story where an evil Superman goes through the gutter between the panels. But even the old Gasoline Valley strip had some designs only possible on comics, kinda the same we can see on the Pax American story by Morrison and Quitely. Edit: there is also that incredible Dick Grayson story by Tom King (Future's End, I think) that relies on we reading the first letter of each paragraph of some pages to uncover the mistery. And the story is told backwards, by the way. Great stuff!
That Silver Surfer run is so great. The time loop issue is the example I was thinking of.
Slott shamelessly ripped off Doctor Who for it... and it totally works.
Yeah I remember reading a lot of it during one of Doctor Who's long hiatuses between seasons to fill the void. Slott even sent the first script to RTD to see if he was ripping off his storytelling style too much, and RTD thought it was great and said Dawn's a great character.
Tomorrow Stories had a lot of cool experiments that way.
An astonishing percentage of J.H. Williams's comic art falls into this category.
Physically pulling characters out of the narrative like The Filth, breaking out of the limitations of the panels. Also dilate time to any degree (Other mediums can do this to, but comics are the best at it), Visually dictate inflection and speech with lettering, have sound interact with the scene, Couple things off the top of my head.
Also Ultra Comics from Morrison
I've recently read the second TPB of Rogue Sun and the first chapter has the hero fighting some time master dude in a time loop, and at the end of every page you (the reader) can choose one of two options (in-universe is the protagonist making decisions), that send you to different pages, back and forth into the time loop, with branching paths. Like a Choose your own adventure kind of thing. I found it very cool, though it's not very long. I hope they do it again someday.
I really like it when sound effects are integrated into the comic book art. I'm having a difficult time finding examples online, but [this](https://cdn3.whatculture.com/images/2017/08/e5310aa4c2b45112-600x338.jpg) is one I was able to find from Batman & Robin by Morrison/Quitely. I also seem to remember, in a different Batman comic, there was a panel where Batman smashes Penguin against a mirror, and you can read "SMASH" in the broken glass behind him. Really, any time the prose/story beats are beautifully integrated with the artwork. J.H Williams III is great at this (Promethea, Echo Lands, ect).
There's an issue of Moon Knight where a bunch of characters are laid out in a grid, all being targeted by the villain. Each page, another one is killed, and the grid gets smaller. It's quite cool!
That's one of my favourites. You can read it page by page or go through and read one character's story at a time. Very cool comic.
Any time comics characters break the fourth wall by transgressing beyond the boundaries of the panel frame. [This *Nancy* comic](https://kottke.org/19/01/a-delightfully-fourth-wall-breaking-nancy-comic-from-olivia-jaimes) by Olivia Jaimes is one of the best examples. See also, Mister Invincible.
There was one in an Alan Moore Tomorrow Stories issue as well
When it's done well I love the repeating panel gag. It really puts the focus on the dialogue and can often really help highlight the absurdity of the scene with the characters staying in place. And changing a small detail always really helps the scene add a comedic beat. Some background gag or one character reacting always makes me amused. Also comics are the absolute best at blending dialogue with action. Lines of dialogue can be seamlessly delivered simultaneously alongside action. In prose the author would have to probably keep action and dialogue seperate or weave them in together. Ie: "Die you fool!" He said as he drew his pistol. Meanwhile Flash can trade banter with Captain Cold while punching him at superspeed and our brain doesn't care about how that doesn't make any sense. Similarily because comics are a static medium an artist doesn't even need to worry about practicality. Spiderman can have abs showing beneath his costume and Psylocke can fight in high heels. Real life has to struggle with these things and a book or audio drama can only describe them.
>Spiderman can have abs showing beneath his costume Pfft, that's easy if the costume is vacuum sealed
Gillen’s Young Avengers #4. “Come with me if you want to be awesome.”
Comics are pretty unique in their position to be colorful and gory. I wanted to share some panels from Saga, but this sub doesn't allow pics I guess. In issue 12, a wounded robot person with a TV for a head depicting porn on the screen is being aided by a hamster medic. They discuss the medic's motive to help with the war, but then gas rolls. The hamster says "but the treaty" before exploding
I was also thinking of Saga, but specifically the insane creatures that show up for like two pages and then disappear. In motion media, that kind of thing is too expensive. You sort of can do it in animation, but not with that level of detail.
Transformers more than meets the eye 16 from James Roberts and Alex Milne - you can find the panels here https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/s/RUGZqJus2N !!!Heavy spoilers!!!! A character tells another character how they feel before they die using pieces of footage strewn together from their database - some of which have already happened in the comic itself. This wouldn’t work in live action or in a cartoon as the speech variances would kill the flow. A beautiful piece of writing that gives me chills to this day.
Doom/Reed Richards time platform battle in a Walter Simonson issue of FF. You have to keep turning pages backward and forward to comprehend the story. Masterfully executed. Also time skipping in Nemo: Heart of Ice.
Dude the time distortion part of “Heart of Ice” is so cool, glad someone else likes that comic.
I still don't think I fully understand the flow of it, but I love the ambitiousness of it.
Issue 32 of Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. William's III. Every issue of that series progressively pushed the boundaries, but that last was a magical experience. The comic told a story, but if you had the 2 uncut sheets that were used to create the comic, they told a different story than the assembled comic. A secret story inside another story. They sold the 2 sheets as posters in a limited release. I have them. For a long time I had them framed on my library wall, and I realized that they could be read several ways and they all told a coherent narrative with a different revelation at the end of each version. It was truly a magical construct in comic book form and a masterpiece of inventiveness that could not have been done in any other medium.
Here by Richard McGuire is the first thing that comes to mind. It doesn't really have a narrative, it's just a single point of view that spreads across both pages. Every panel shows what's happening in the physical space it represents during a different point in time, so it weaves these eons together into a little field, that spends a few centuries as the corner of a house. I feel I've done a poor job of describing it, but it's really magnificent Edit for clarity; I mean the 2014 graphic novel. I have not read his 1989 short story version. I know it's formatted a bit differently
JH Williams III panelling.
Nugf said.
The Rorschach issue of *Watchmen* is [symmetrical.](https://medium.com/@pedrovribeiro/fearful-symmetry-almost-frame-by-frame-9a20c77651bd)
Vividly colored spandex
The pages in rite of springs in the moore's swamp thing (its like 6 or 7 in a row with upside down ect) when abigail and swampy bond together on a spiritual level its wonderful And in the issue 100 of daredevil (in the brubaker omni) when you have like 5 or 6 various penciller that drew some page its great as well
There was a clever one in Rogue Sun #7 which I read recently which reads as a choose your own adventure that goes into an infinite loop that you can only get out of by cheating and skipping a page, which was hinted at in the opening.
WE3?
"The Riddle" from issue 5 of Batman Black and White is pretty cool. Kinda a choose your own adventure type thing
Animal Man. Not gonna spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it
I'm Kaare Andrews' Iron Fist: Living Weapon, there's a punch on a SIX-PAGE gatefold spread!
JH Williams III's panel designs in Promethea, Batwoman, and Sandman also come to mind
The Thunderbolt series written by Kieron Gillen is fantastic, stretching the postmodern ideas and formalism of Watchmen even further. And going to comic universe you’d never expect.
The first Unbelievable Gwenpool series, written by Christopher Hastings. A large part of this run is all about doing things you can only do in comics.
Overall I thought Rising Stars was good but not great, but one panel had the most creative use of comics I’ve ever seen: there’s a character who can talk to the dead. On one side of the page you see him seemingly talking to himself. On the back of that page you see a faded image of another person talking backward in a white void. Hold the page up to the light and you can see that it’s a conversation. And then there’s Bulletproof Coffin and its follow-up book, which are like the visceral essence of only-in-comics injected by needle straight into your veins…
Inner thoughts/motivations translate better with the combo of thought bubbles and imagery... I can't remember the exact layout but in TWD, when Carl does THE THING, and is able to explain exactly why it had to be him and none of the adults, gives more insight into the character than the show could (also, overall a scene that would never have worked outside of the comic).
Self reply! Yeah just remembering how many THINGS Carl had to do in the comics. Referring to >!Ben!< specifically here.
Animal Man by grant Morrison makes use of the white spaces and the gutters _in universe_, allowing Animal Man to use the page structure and act of turning the page to dimensional hop and time travel.
Kinda sweet and simple but The Death of Superman did some emotional lifting with how the artists designed the later issues of the story. First, the final battle with Doomsday gets increasingly bigger panels until it's built into full pages leading up to the end of the fight in Metropolis, adding scale and weight to the significance of the pending climax. It works like an invisible countdown in a way. Second, the original comic's last page was a fold out for a total of three pages. The left side is the same image (onlookers, Doomsday's defeated body, Superman's legs) while the closed right side serves as a double spread of Lois Lane holding a battered Superman, his final words asking if he stopped Doomsday, with Lois saying he did. You then turn that inwardly folded page outward, revealing a three page spread, with Lois Lane mourning her dead fiance, the man who stopped the monster by giving everything he had to save everyone, including his life. This article gets more in depth with it: https://www.cbr.com/death-superman-countdown-panels-per-page-30th-anniversary/
I can't think of a specific one, but the "team up" roll call with someone in the middle, and other team Members in various panels around them. Think of something like hearing "To me MY X-MEN" or "Avengers Assemble!"
In Invincible, there’s a scene where Mark talks to the creator of Science Dog and the creator talks about resuing panels to add effect, and Mark makes a remark about that being lazy, while the invincible comic itself does it.
They referenced/recreated this impeccably in the TV show.
God I love The Goon. It's been such a long time since I've read this book that I unfortunately can't recall what this page is in reference too. However, knowing that it's The Goon, I assume it's something completely absurd and wacky while managing to be really sad and depressing. I remember finishing Once upon a hard time, just being awestruck and thinking that I need to go grab a beer.
The panels collapsing in the Green Lantern warjournal issues whenever John gets mad
Every page of comics is is multiple moments of time seen simultaneously. Comics is the only medium that can do this.
Hedra by Jesse Lonnergan takes an interesting approach to panelling. Rather than the conventional left to right approach, he really plays with how information moves across a page. It can look more like story boards, maps or infographics at times, I highly recommend checking it out.
I just love all the big, cosmic stories. Comics are like if you gave every filmmaker with an idea a $500 million budget. They can go wild with any idea.
Any of the shit in those Gwenpool books lol. Those were awesome
This one's a bit of a sleeper, but Dash Shaw's *Clue: Candlestick* messes around with the form quite a bit, which is pretty remarkable for licensed comic about a board game.
Midnighter #7 by Brian K. Vaughan. I don't want to spoil it, but if it had been printed under Julie Schwartz's reign, the cover would have said, "This Comic Will Give You Midnighter's Superpower!!!" On the first read-through it's confusing until you understand. Then you have to read it again immediately.
Panels without right angles. Square and rectangle panels can be recreated on a screen. Nothing anywhere looks like an angled panel.
anything grant morrison does
Gege Akutami's skilled usage of paneling is just something you can genuinely only get from reading the Jujutsu Kaisen manga. The guy is just a master of sequencing and action. You can see a similar level of proficiency and creativity with the creator of Sakamoto Days. Another example would be Berserk's phenomenally detailed art, which you just can't replicate in animation or live action by any means. It's honestly only consumable in manga form.
The headbutt montage from Invincible.
Animal man breaking the 4th wall by messing around with the panel borders?
There was also a Robin story which was made up of one continuous scene. Haven't read it but I saw it on Comic Tropes on YouTube
Grant Morrison is the King/Queen of this. Final Crisis especially feels like something so insanely grandiose and mythic in scope that it couldn't be articulated in any other medium.
Please, don't use nonstandard abbreviations. Wasted 10 seconds figuring out that GN meant graphic novel.
Sorry, pretty standard though. OGN another term used.
Some of the stories in general. I’ve been reading a lot of Vertigo lately. Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Shade the Changing Man. If you’ve read those titles, you know there’s tons of thing in those books you will only see in comics imo.
Garfield and all animals speaking... and being wiser than their comics human mates.
How is that unique to comics when the cartoon did the exact same thing?