Bear in mind that these are not the opinions of someone who feels that any medium is more legitimate than any other, or that film or print somehow sanctifies or confers respectability on something otherwise grubby or unreal.

One of the delights of comics is that the price of ink and paper remains pretty constant, no matter what you’re drawing. Film and television are expensive media. Cheap productions cost unimaginable amounts of money.

Comics, on the other hand, are cheap. If you have an idea for a comic, the odds are good that someone will publish it. And if they won’t and you believe in it strongly, why, then publish it yourself. You may not get rich, but you will get read.

I have a friend who had an idea for a comic, and self-published it for a while, and certainly didn’t lose any money, and had, at the end, a dozen or so issues of his comic, which he was fairly proud of. Then he decided to try the same tack with filmmaking, with a cast of enthusiastic amateurs, borrowed money, and a willingness to max out his credit cards. At the point where the production crumbled, he had eleven minutes of film in the can and was forced to sell his house to stave off utter ruin.

Comics are unlikely to do that to you.

Film is expensive. This is why it’s such a crazy medium.

I remember an afternoon in London several years ago. I was staying in a friend’s flat, overlooking a canal. I was writing two different things that afternoon. One was a scene in which the Endless made a man out of clay, building him up from twigs and mud, and breathing life into him, before sending him to a hidden room in a monstrous underground necropolis. That was for Sandman. The other scene had an encounter, underneath a bridge in the fog, on a mud bank, between three travelers and some monks, during the course of which one of the travelers was pushed into the mud.

A few days later I had Michael Zulli’s pencils of the comics sequence pinned up on the wall, and they were exactly what I’d imagined, and just what I’d hoped for and called for in the script.

A year later I found myself sitting in a freezing cellar, watching a dozen actors being frozen stiff, breathing thick smoke, while about fifty crew, including makeup people, lighting people, electricians and so on, stood around shivering watching the actors doing take after take of getting knocked down into the mud.

I didn’t have my bridge. It wasn’t really the scene I’d had in my head, and mostly I just felt guilty that real people were being put to so much trouble for something that had seemed like a good idea in a warm room a year before.

In comics you are unlikely to have to lose a character halfway through the comic because he broke his leg. You won’t lose locations the night before you’re meant to be shooting. You won’t hand in a twenty-four-page script, and then be told that the artist drew it as a thirty-seven-page script, so thirteen pages have randomly been removed.