Aside from the obvious differences in character development, overall scenery design, and more issues that I'm sure the experts can analyze better, one thing that stroke me was how "easy" it is in comic books to draw an alien invasion on Earth from weird-looking creatures, and how difficult would be to create this in a TV series.

In comic books, you can draw multiple green aliens with weird shapes, planets exploding, thousands of members of a cult in a giant and oddly shaped building... You instantly transport readers to another planet where everything is totally different: plants, moons...

It would take maybe too much budget to do this on a TV series. So apart from the quality, the creative liberty... This is one of the reasons TV series fail to capture fantasy, super hero, spectacular science fiction comic books.

The Titans series, apart from the excessive darkness and terrible plot moments, is weird because there never seem to be more than 5 humans or humanoid aliens on screen at once. And I'm sure this must be the case too in many other superhero series. But being able to "create" all those weird sceneries and creatures without spending hundreds of millions is a cool aspect of comic books that TV series just can't replicate.

And sometimes even big budget movies can't do it properly. So I was wondering if Byrne Robotics members have noticed any situation where a series or a movie is clearly missing something that "can only be done properly" in a comic book (or would take too much budget in case of TV).

And it's true that since DKR and Watchmen their prevalence in modern comics was greatly reduced. Both were good in replacing them, though. DKR with its TV "greek chorus" (not exactly replacing the character's thoughts but a good gimmick for the reader to get a sense of the "feel" of the time) and Watchmen with the journal and supplementary materials like book pages, newspaper stories, etc. that Carlos mentioned. Thought boxes were used just for Dr. Manhattan if I'm not mistaken.

It's much more organic, and that's impossible to translate to film. In the Watchmen movie having Rorschach doing it in voice over looked ridiculous (his rants are supposed to be a little ridiculous but I doubt Snyder got that), since those are words meant to be read, not heard.

Another example perhaps would be the use of color. Some comic books are in black and white and those have a very peculiar feeling. Others are colored "old style" using fewer colors, and this can create am impressionist effect that's harder to do with "realistic" coloring (Watchmen does this, and Gibbons explained he used color to create lighter or darker moods).

In comics, we can see and accept the use of Sue's powers because it's a medium in which we see stuff that the characters are not seeing (speed lines, baloons, etc.) Film doesn't work this way, and you don't get the same effect.

And Ben, of course. In comics, Ben is real and lives and breathes as much as anyone else. Sure, he's different, but he's part of that reality. CGI is not there yet, and anyway filmmakers don't want him to look "silly", so they'll never get him right.

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I thought shows like Magnum, P.I., MacGyver and Quantum Leap used the voice over to good effect to help get in to the characters' thoughts.