Color

I really enjoy thinking of particular colors as pseudo-iconic modes. Like McCloud mentions, color is a very powerful thing. He's right, of course, even someone with very little exposure to comics, like myself, knows that Batman's uniform is blue, yellow, and grey (until he turned into Christian Bale... but that's another story). I could think of many other instances that would show that color itself can become an icon.

The best instance I can think of to illustrate this point is flags. Each nation in the planet has a specific banner, as we know. We use these symbols (which are often simple bars of color, and sometimes shapes. The American flag is pretty gaudy in comparison...) to identify ourselves as members of a certain country. These icons grow to be very meaningful to the citizens of a country. We love our flag so much we wave it at sorting events, display it in our offices, we even make it into underpants. 

Our world is in color; unless there are only two prisms in your eye(this CAN happen, actually) you see the world in color, so why not express yourself in color as well? I think this is where the comics have a distinct advantage over alphabetic text. I can tell you that this apple is red. I can attempt to describe the water droplets glistening on the skin of it, but I cannot, with text, show you this apple. It's impossible. 

With a picture of it, drawn as a comic or imported as a .jpg, I can express to you exactly what I mean when I say, "The apple is red,".

So why the resistance? Why do we feel, even now that comics are a lesser art form? (I'm sorry. This is the stigma. This is going to remain the stigma.) Do they not let the writer conversation a deeper, more connected visualization of the story? Of course they do.