Cartoonist Joe Sacco discusses his new illustration/book The Great War in an interview at Salon:
I think every medium has its strengths. But I think illustrated work puts the reader directly into a picture. You open up, let’s say, a comic book, and I’ve drawn a Palestinian refugee camp — you’re inside it, and with the multiple images, you’ll hopefully get an idea of the atmosphere. As a cartoonist, you’re concentrating on giving visual information — especially in the background — that can be conveyed by multiple images. And things follow the reader around. You know, the architecture will follow the reader from one panel to another, so it becomes part of the atmosphere that the reader is imbibing. With the written word, you can describe the architecture, but you’re not going to keep mentioning it as a figure is walking down the street, you’re not going to keep mentioning what the background is. With comics you can do that.