I’LL BREAK YOUR FACE. If I have readers who wonder why there are comics, or what comics might possibly add to other narrative forms like movies and paintings and symphonies and novels… I think this video might help. Imagine if you could have the broken-faced panels and the action, while still controlling how fast you flipped the pages….

Imagine if you had God’s camera, and you were drunk–or in ecstasy, or caught in memory. Comics exist because we want action and suspension, sin and repentance, contorted faces and identity, all at the same time. Comics are time and judgment combined. Comics, because they’re endlessly re-readable and because you control how fast the page turns (if ever), are ecstasy as addiction. The panel is the sublime moment–unintelligible without its context, yet importantly separate from that context–and when you turn the page you place that sublime moment back in its necessary context of narrative: sin, and repentance or the lack of it.

We may love comics because they take us out of time. But if we want to understand them, we have to release them back into time. This is why comics are like music: Comics are time and eternity held together in one hand.

This is why comics are like regret.