Research point - Graphic novels

I have happy memories of reading comics when I was a child, particularly enjoying my brothers Victor, especially Alf Tupper. I stopped reading comics as I grew up and although the genre seemed to have so many possibilities stories seemed to be only about superheroes or science fiction neither of which appeal to me very much.
My interest was piqued by an article in the Guardian several years ago but the titles weren't on the shelves of my local bookstore and were a bit expensive for something I couldn't easily check out before I bought it to see if I really wanted to read them ( I appreciate that a graphic novel takes a lot of work to draw, so I'm not saying that they are overpriced but I did want to see before I bought)

For my research I bought Sherlock: A Study in Pink. (review here) I've read Sherlock Holmes stories before but I'm not very good at TV so I hadn't seen the adaptation that this was based on. It was originally published in Japan so the pages run from back to front for an English reader and the frames have to be read from the top right to the bottom left which took a bit of getting used to. The book is done in a Manga style but the characters look like Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.
The first 8 pages set the scene but I found them difficult to make sense of, maybe I would have understood more if I had seen the TV show. However after that the story was easy to read, (I finished it in about an hour and a half) The scenes are beautifully drawn and quite cinematic. I wondered how many were taken directly from the film so I watched this clip on YouTube and yes, the artist has copied the frames. For me this wasn't a problem because I got to experience the TV series through the novel and for a fan the novel is a concrete piece of the drama but it must have been rather frustrating for the artist, who is credited as Jay though I can't find out much about him online. So most of the work was done by the storyboard artist who was James Iles, sadly I can't find any Sherlock examples online. For this book the story is reliant on pictures and text to tell the story which is too complex to be told without words but the word count has been reduced by the pictures which both tell what is going on and create an atmosphere.

The second book is The Arrival by Shaun Tan. I am absolutely blown away by this beautiful book which wordlessly invites you to experience being an immigrant in a strange land. Tan has written about the conception of the book on his website (scroll down on this link) Generously he has explained how the book came together, his influences and references. The artwork is beautifully drawn in pencil on a white or sepia background. The story is told in a sequence of frames, it's not difficult to read but you can't rush through it, you need to slow down and interpret the drawings like a child with a picture book. I didn't want to rush through it anyway, although I was gripped and moved by the story I wanted to stop and think about it and make it last, I needed to savour the drawings and pull every bit of information from them. He cites Raymond Briggs' the Snowman as one of his influences, I had forgotten that the original book was wordless. He doesn't consider himself to be a comic book artist and referenced Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud which I can't access on the UCA online library.

I also looked at cartoons by Simone Lia because she features in the course illustrations. Wry humoured gentle observations. The text is most important here in delivering the message but the viewer is attracted to the story by the pictures and because the observations are quite short they rely on the illustrations to command a place on the page.