RPGs are better than comic books at...what?

There are a number of pieces that talk about what works in comics but not at the table. The first time I saw one was in Aaron Allston's Strike Force where he listed the things that didn't work at the table (implicitly for him):

• Separating heroes for long stretches
• Capturing heroes
• Skipping over long stretches of imprisonment
• Having NPCs rescue PCs

Essentially these are two different problems:

1. Leaving most players without something to do (you know, if Kid Cosmic isn't in the room with Imitation Gaymer and Fuzz Lightyear, how does he participate in the conversation? If all three are separated, each can only participate in one-third of the scenes.)
2. Removing player agency (You want to get from Monday to Thursday, but the players want to try something on each day)

There's a third problem which might be considered a subset of that second one: Writer convenience is not player convenience. Things can happen just because (or for good reasons that we don't get into) but might not work because player characters will poke and prod.

One thing that works in a story but not necessarily at the table (my bete noir), is complicated plotting. (You'll get to hear me be overcomplicated if we ever finish this actual play for BAMF.) It falls out from the fact that if the players don't see it, it didn't necessarily happen, and I generate an awful lot of "Well, A means B, and C will be upset, so C tries this and the players find out when D approaches them..." kind of storylines.

It might be that the problem there is that I don't have a fine enough hand at exposing villain motivation.

All of which is prelude, because what I really want to think about and ask is, "What works at the table that doesn't necessarily work in a comic?"

A couple of things come to mind.

• Because you never re-experience the game session (okay, not true if an actual play is recorded, but generally), you can be looser about tight story logic. You don't necessarily need A leads to B leads to C leads to D; if it plays out in the order ACBFD, where F is something you had to invent on the fly, hey, that's okay, if you all had fun.
• Roleplaying is much more improvisational, so you can go off in a totally different direction.
• Character empathy is a lot higher because the players are being the characters. This means that you can (on purpose) have the characters doing less admirable things without losing your audience of less-than-ten.
• You can use props. I don't do this, but you can: you can enrich the experience with all sorts of things that wouldn't be possible in a book. Call of Cthulhu is great at presenting handouts and props, but thinking of them is a skill that I don't have. Anybody who uses a handout or a newspaper that presents in-world material does this.

I'm going to ignore the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall thing because I think the real point is less can you break the fourth wall (you can in both forms) and more doing it well.

Any other ideas for things that work easily in roleplaying but not so easily in comics?