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Courtesy Scott McCloud, a couple of blog entries — this one first, followed by this one — about the relationship of comics to prose. The posts are interesting meditations on the sometimes troubling relationship between the two, and the way creators of one view the other. I’ve sometimes thought it would be fun to write comics, as a different kind of storytelling to explore. Occasionally I’ll hear a prose reader sneer at comics with a comment like, “I stopped needing pictures with my stories a long time ago”, to which my usual response is, “So you never go to movies or watch TV, then?” If not, fine — some people genuinely don’t — but visual storytelling tends to be held on a lower rung by a depressingly large segment of society, with comics being held to the lowest expectations of all. My take has always been that stories are stories, and everything else is just mechanics.