I'm trying to figure out what it is that I know. There's so little scholarship and attention to comics, there's no point in looking at differences between them. I'm fuzzy-minded enough to say that if it looks and smells like a comic, then that's cool. I'm interested in what happens when words and pictures collide. They give different orders of information, and it's wonderful when they start colliding.
Pictures scare the hell out of anybody who works with words.
Comix 101 explains how to look at a comic, what there is to see in it. People confuse comic books with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. They're incredibly complex. With prose, you can blather on for a while, then find out what you're saying. I just did a three-page strip about Peanuts and Charles Schultz for The New Yorker.