What it is that makes comics so exciting?
I myself have grown up reading comics and not only the ones you can get here in the US or more precisely the ones you could get in the US while I was growing up, which was pretty much only DC and Marvel comics. I had the fortune of going to Europe at least once each year and I spend a lot of my time checking out European, especially French comics. That is why, for me, everything that has to do with comics is exciting. However, I would like to look at this more realistically and try and come up with objective reasons why comics are the most exciting art form today and why they are superior to movies and TV shows in many ways. I know you will think that I must be crazy, but bear with me, there is background to my claims, background that I intend to share with you here.
The first reason why comics are so exciting is that they have no limitations that other forms of entertainment have. If you have a writer with great ideas and an artist who knows how to put those ideas to paper, you can have whatever you want. In most cases, they will be able to find publishers even if their comics are too controversial, too offensive, too explicit and whatnot. Even the weirdest and the craziest comics will one day most probably see the light of day and people will learn about them.
All of this has a lot to do with the fact that producing comics is so much cheaper than anything else. When you compare the costs of creating a top-shelf comic and the costs of creating an AAA blockbuster or even a fancy TV show, the comparison soon starts to look ridiculous. It is because of this that the publishers and the artists are ready to take significant risks with the comics. For instance, if you had a movie that costs 200 million dollars to make, you do not wish to include stuff that might cause people to avoid seeing the movie. And that is how you get crap like Battleship and some other Hollywood abortions that we have been treated to in the last few years. There was a time when Hollywood had balls, but that time is long behind us.
With comics, the things are much different. In comics, you can tackle issues like gay superheroes, incest, cannibalism, terrorist supervillains, you can address the issue of torturing prisoners of war, using, abusing and overabusing all kinds of drugs and indulging in devious sexual practices. Comics accept all that and they turn it into something that is more than exciting. They turn it into something that needs to be seen in order to be appreciated.
However, it is not only the edginess of the material that makes comics so exciting. It is also the diversity of themes, plots and characters, as well as some of the basic stories that are told in comics. To someone who only knows about Batman, Fantastic Four, Spiderman and other similar DC and Marvel comics, it may seem that it all revolves around superheroes and villains, but the fact is that comics provide us with so much more. This is especially true if you also consider comics made in other countries, most notably France and Japan, two of the comics superpowers besides the US.
Ultimately, the comics are exciting because of the level of freedom that you do not get with any other entertainment form. They have always been on the forefronts of experimentation, tackling particularly sensitive subjects and introducing new and advanced ideas. And the thing is that this is only going to become more and more apparent in the future as business completely takes over the movie industry and we are left with nothing more than sequels of sequels of sequels of sequels of crappy movies to begin with.