The word 'novel' implies a whole, uninterupted story with a beginning, middle, and end. That's why JMS called Babylon 5 a 'novel for television,' as opposed to an episodic series in which we hit the reset button at the end of every one.
Comics kinda go both ways. There are individual issues every so often, but the vast majority work in six-issue arcs, thanks in no small part to the trade paperback market. Each issue then becomes more like a chapter. It usually has its own mini-arc, and it's also a uniform length/format, which is different from a chapter.
I think the closest kin to the comicbook is the serial novels that were published in the 18th century. Heart of Darkness and Great Expectations were both published serially, and R.L. Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde to be published serially (you can tell by all the section breaks in what is only a 60-page novella), but the publishers liked it so much they put it out in a single volume. Ironically, we now call all of these books 'novels' and read them as such.
I resist the term 'novel' for comics because I think comics do something slightly different, structurally, but by the reasoning that the difference is serial publication and serial reading, they can be novels if we read them like novels. Which is to say, if you sit down and read Sandman in one sitting (over the course of a week in which you never go to the bathroom), then it's like a novel. If you read it issue by issue over a six-year period, then it's a different experience, and therefore it's not a 'novel' experience anymore.
I gotta say, the eye removal was underwhelming. Sure, I read the spoilers, but even then... honestly, if I hadn't known ahead of time, I don't know if I'd have been able to tell just from the art. With something that greusome, something that's supposed to shock the reader, it's a good idea to make the art, y'know, shocking. The whole issue was one of those things where you can tell what the creators were going for, but also that they didn't achieve it.
The intent seems to have been, show Peter in denial about his impending death, show him going crazy for a way to avoid it, then show him finally accept it (hence the really quite good voice-over of him getting up in the morning), and then just as he's found peace, WHAM! He has to fight for his life harder than he's ever fought before.
Then the fight itself was supposed to play out just like 99% of action movies. Unstoppable villain walks very, very slowly towards hero who gives it everything he has, but gets beaten down anyway. This is the formula. Just as the hero is thrashed and humiliated, just as you think 'Wow, they're really going to let him die!', said hero gets up and lays the smack down on the villain using sheer willpower of some kind: fighting for a loved one/ideal, memory of loved ones, flashback to training/inspiration, or in this case reminding himself that, fuckit man, he's fuckin' Spider-man. Having run through the formula, they then have Morlun get up, looking no worse for wear, and say, 'Nice try, but it's over,' and proceed to tear him a new eyehole.
The intent was good. The intent was to mess with our preconcieved expectations of an action/adventure story, but the execution was a little too contrived, a little too planned. It had all its ducks in a row, but it didn't actually hit us at gut level. Too bad, really.
One of the things you have to wonder about is why people like the CIA and the NSA allow the dozens and dozens of movies a year that involve secret government conspiracy to continue being made. You have to know that if they really wanted to, they could halt production.
A friend of mine once pointed out how common government conspiracy theories were in television shows and movies, especially The X-Files, as opposed to corporate conspiracies, and I think she was on to something. I don't know if corps are more powerful than governments at this point, but Chomsky has some very powerful evidence that suggests that they, the corps, have been deliberately fostering 'anti-democratic' sentiment in the populace for the better part of a century. If the general population doesn't trust governments, they turn to corporations for support. Look at the push for privitisation, almost all of which is based on heresay and falsely 'self-evident common sense'--corporations are more efficient and fair than governments because they run on the principles of the free market, a supposedly 'natural' system--and you'll see the results of this kind of propaganda.
Even without the (in my case inevitable) turn towards identifying the corps as the real power-brokers of the 20th/21st centuries, there's still a very clear purpose to be served by exposing the most heinous of government crimes in films. And specifically, I'm thinking of action/adventure films, things like torture, black detention facilities, all the stuff that this article explains in detail, and that none of are particularly surprised to hear. First, by puting such things in a James Bond movie you cover them with a thing sheen of fantasy. If it's in a movie, it can't be real; therefore when you encounter it in reality it isn't real. "Government torturers? That's silly. You're talking about bad TV my friend!"
Second, though, working in the opposite direction but facilitating the first effect, you get viewers accustomed to it. I'm not quite talking about the tried-and-true concept of desensitisation. What I mean is that it's simply no longer a surprise. Most people would still be horrified and sick if they had to witness actual torture. But that's not important. What today's US government needs is for people to simply be okay with torture, in the abstract, much like we'd all be sick if we had to watch a pig being slaughtered, but bacon's a delicious breakfast treat. What they're going for is a lack of surprise that such things are happening, because it so easily leads to a lack of outrage. If you tell the average person that politicians lie, that person will laugh at you and say, "No shit!" as if that closes the conversation. In one sense, they're right. None of us have any right to be surprised at this behaviour, but its commonness should not diminish our outrage. If anything, it should increase it, but humans are not logical creatures. And it's exactly the same with secret detention centres and government sanctioned, not to mention government trained, torturers.