1 Monty: Grandad! But, weren't you killed in the zeppelin explosion in Berlin?!
2 {scene: double long horizontal panel showing a panorama of Monty, Prof. Jones, and Sallah silently looking up at Minnesota Jones standing on the dock}
3 Minnesota Jones: The boy's still a bit slow, I see.

Scott McCloud writes in his seminal book Understanding Comics:

In learning to read comics we all learned to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same.

He points out that a long panel conveys a feeling of a longer time than a shorter panel. Especially when used for dramatic pauses like this. You probably felt that without thinking about it (at least I hope you did). Next time you notice a long pause in a comic, take a look at what makes you think it's a long pause. It may be this trick, or something else...

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2014-01-16 Rerun commentary: Again an eerie coincidence, for just the other day I bought another book about comic artistry. (Although I suppose it's not that coincidental, because I have several such books.)

I was browsing a book shop and spotted Tintin: The Art of Hergé, which is a book published by the Musée Hergé in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, as a record of the museum and its exhibits. I still haven't fully flipped through its mammoth 480 pages, but I am looking forward to reading it with much anticipation.

If you are thinking about making comics, you can't get too much grounding in how other people have done them.