It was very hard for me to come over the boundary, and even after trying to read American comics for 2 years, I find myself having to stop and backtrack and reread things, and I find it annoying to have to keep my eye still and read an entire speech bubble when the images aren't moving. To me, it sort of feels like reading PowerPoint slides at a slower pace because a presenter reading out loud off the slides talks much slower than I can read.
You fascinate me, as you are exactly the opposite of me, and what I have never elsewhere encountered: someone who went from manga to American comics, instead of the other way around. I can tell you that I had a similarly slow learning curve from comics to manga: my first encounter with manga was probably in 1997, and I would have considered myself an enthusiast no sooner than 2005 or so; it's taken a lot of manga, and a lot of really good and interesting manga, to win me over from what I read as a child. It's a radically different experience, isn't it? Yet, I can't dismiss that PowerPoint slide experience as an inferior one. I remember reading reprints of original Hal Foster Prince Valiant comic strips when I was a kid, and maybe it was just the practice with comic books that enabled this, but I was totally engaged by those Prince Valiants; as utterly enthralled as I would have been with any book, with no sense of distance, no processing time. Those, somehow, managed some real fusion of word and image, despite the fact that text was always confined to narrative boxes, even the dialogue, and image always illustrative.
pt 2
You fascinate me, as you are exactly the opposite of me, and what I have never elsewhere encountered: someone who went from manga to American comics, instead of the other way around. I can tell you that I had a similarly slow learning curve from comics to manga: my first encounter with manga was probably in 1997, and I would have considered myself an enthusiast no sooner than 2005 or so; it's taken a lot of manga, and a lot of really good and interesting manga, to win me over from what I read as a child. It's a radically different experience, isn't it? Yet, I can't dismiss that PowerPoint slide experience as an inferior one. I remember reading reprints of original Hal Foster Prince Valiant comic strips when I was a kid, and maybe it was just the practice with comic books that enabled this, but I was totally engaged by those Prince Valiants; as utterly enthralled as I would have been with any book, with no sense of distance, no processing time. Those, somehow, managed some real fusion of word and image, despite the fact that text was always confined to narrative boxes, even the dialogue, and image always illustrative.