Unlike the Myst comic, the Sandman story takes full advantage of the medium employed to orchestrate the telling, and the receiving, of the story.
Like the novels, the comics explore and illustrate all four of the characteristics of narrative, but therein lies a main difference. Comics literally illustrate them. The visuals in comics do the load of the work, the words are rather important, but serve in collaborative tension with the graphics. To be honest, the Myst comic is of such low quality that it is hard to discuss which narrative element is foregrounded and why. That said, I would like to discuss the Sandman comics. These comics push the edges of the medium into a dance of words and images that is unbelievably wondrous and overflowing with subtle and deep meanings.
It is a work that centers around themes, the theme of storytelling in particular. And Gaiman deftly weaves this theme into his characters, settings and plots. As a medium, comics favor the visual, which in turn builds up the characters and settings more than the plot and themes (in general). Gaiman, takes the theme of storytelling and makes it his palette from which he gives us an enigmatic character, Dream. So, this theme of the power and beauty of story is given a mercurial shape in the character of Dream (who often is not even present - or at most is in the background of other's stories - in the stories being related across the series). And from Dream we get the various storylines that culminate in an intricate rebirth of storytelling itself.
And these are just two illustrations of the potential of this medium. The highlighting of the narrative elements has less to do with the medium and more to do with the authors of the texts. Each of these comics may have had a different narrative element at the fore, but comics are capable of having any element foregrounded. With comics, readers now have words in conjunction with images. Immersion occurs as you see the elements before you. The story is refracted through the dance between words and images.
