My experience reading graphic novels alongside prose fiction has been one of persistent calibration. The two forms have almost no vocabulary in common. A well-constructed page of comics is doing something completely different from a well-constructed page of prose, and judgment about one doesn't transfer to the other.

The graphic novel I use to explain what the form can do is Chris Ware's Building Stories. It's a box that contains fourteen different printed objects — newspapers, pamphlets, a board game, a hardcover — that can be read in any order and that tell a nonlinear story about a woman and an apartment building. The form is the argument about how we assemble a life from fragments.

Watchmen is the obvious recommendation but Building Stories made me understand what graphic narrative can do that Watchmen hadn't.