Dolly Kill Kill is a post-apocalyptic comic by Yusuke Nomura and Yukiaki Kurando (no translator/letterer credited?) that I like, even from back when it was on MangaBox. It's violent and funny, thanks to the giant dolls that invade Earth and devastate humanity. This page was nice:

I talk about how comics can do things nothing else can. Storytelling can focus on certain things that are difficult or ephemeral in live action. This page is an example. "Guy draws a sword, other guy dodges" is easy to imagine IRL. It would be a smooth move, a Michelle Yeoh dodge

In comics like Nomura/Kurando's Dolly Kill Kill, you gotta find the best still image to get the point across. Here, that means a completely still background (they're in a forest) and making the ground entirely out of speedlines stacked on one side

You can see a different speedline technique in this fight from Emma Ríos, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Jose Villarubia's Osborn. These tools make action comics fun. They take a moment and stretch it out in one direction, compressing it in another.

The body language is fun in Dolly Kill Kill too. The facial expressions, yeah, but the sheer urgency and unlikeliness of Dodger's pose, plus the focused explosion implied by Swinger's pose...iaido is tough in comics, so creative execution always bangs. Kickstarting imagination

Animation has a lot of cool options when it comes to my kinda action. You can see how the sword turns into light during this Samurai Champloo moment. Live action tends to execute similar to this in my experience, but more grounded. Each medium plays to its strengths.

Some movies, like 13 Assassins, use big, weighty swings and (unlikely) sudden deaths. The act is the same, but the execution is way different. Still wild fun though. Comics are my fave but action storytelling in every medium is cool as heck

This moment from Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal, where he renders a swordfight as a dervish and then gives us the slo-mo close-up is an incredible flex. The close-up here is going for the same effect as panel 2 on that Dolly Kill Kil page, btw.

Ken Akamatsu's UQ Holder has a good gun x sword bit, where it starts slow and then he increases the speed over time. This would be good up to a point in live action, and then it would look like Agent Smith dodging bullets. Comics can really bring the thunder and lightning

Tite Kubo's Bleach mostly has swords shooting magic at each other, but Kubo...his whole thing is drawing something wildly cool/finding a perfect moment, like opening a chapter on a tight close-up of a sword or suggesting speed two different ways on one page. Kubo invented comics