What usually grips me most in a story, aside from good character development and setting, is presentation -- like what is shown to us and, more importantly, what isn't. To elaborate, I find characters much more compelling when we're given enough about them to get attached, but are starved enough that we begin to hang on every word and analyze every action they make, in the hopes of discovering more about them and their intent. Basically, it's all about the subtlety with me. The character development in the game "The Last of Us" is a prime example, as they utilized this tactic beautifully. Every scene in that game had something impactful to convey, but it was done so by using as little as possible -- none of it was spoon-fed to you. It was all described in the few words they said, how they said it, what face they were making and how their body-language correlated with it. That stuff's kinda hard to emulate within a comic, but it's doable in certain cases.
Of course, this style of storytelling all greatly depends of what kind of story you're trying to create in the first place -- it won't suit all plots, but I think it is a good thing to keep in mind. When you somber down the overarching tone of your story, you give yourself a lot of headroom to make certain scenes much more meaningful without using something with drastic emphasis. The idea is, for example, to bring the reader to a point where they'll be moved by simple things such as a character raising his/her voice or letting out a bout of laughter.
Again, this isn't a style of storytelling that can be implemented into anything, but it's something I find to be very gripping. That's just my two scents.