Ok, let’s see if I can articulate this.
1) Comics benefit from and lend themselves to rereading in really interesting ways, I think. TS Moreau talked about this a little in a recent episode of his podcast. Listen up! Image repetition, layering, visual or tonal cues that aren’t apparent on the first read….comics does things like this really well.
2) Comic books – pamphlets! – are much more rereadable than graphic novels. This isn’t just about the time it takes to read them, I don’t think, although that certainly helps. Pamphlets also facilitate a construction that benefits rereadability. In other words, a really dense 300 page book can be a bit of a slog, but a dense 40 page comic is perfect – at least for my taste. At that length, you have to make every page count, and every page is worth examining in detail. A longer work gives you more room to breathe, go on tangents, etc. but individual pages become less essential. I don’t know…I personally have reread my favorite pamphlets dozens of times (Crickets 3! Pope Hats 2!), but I’m lucky if I get through a graphic novel more than once, even if I really like it. That’s despite the fact that I cumulatively spend far more time with the pamphlets.
Just a thought. I could be totally off base. Nothing wrong with graphic novels, but I’ve found myself much more interested in both reading and producing pamphlet comics lately. I’ve been wondering why that might be.