The first thing that jumps to mind when I hear "comic book type game" is Comix Zone:
Some things to note is that they deliberately make each panel smaller than what fits on the screen so that you can see the surrounding panels, and there's no scrolling whatsoever - both of them add more physicality to the paper. If your strength is making art and not animating things, this hopefully makes things a bit easier (you can just use concepts directly instead of having to make them tileable and have perspectives make sense when scrolling, etc).
For more "open world" feel, you could have a "choose your own adventure" style thing where each choice has a label like "Wanna go to the Blood Gulch? Flip to page 23". (Though keep in mind that "choose your own adventure" is trademarked and the guys behind it have sent out DMCA takedowns at people using the phrase, so don't use it directly.)
Another game that
could be an interesting source of inspiration is the SNES Jojo's Bizarre Adventure game: (timestamped to when interesting things happen, because it's
slow):
It's pretty much seen as a
kusoge (
game) because there's very little effort going into it (e.g. this weird aspect ratio so you don't need to animate character's walking animations and they can just reuse scanned closeups from the manga) but the interesting thing here is that it uses a different perspective from Comix Zone's to make characters more expressive.
Actually, a better example would probably be the first few Silent Hill games: use different camera angles in different panels for more variety. (E.g. establishing shots and map screens would have dutch-angled, very zoomed out views of a large area, fight scenes would have extreme closeups of faces when someone's planning their next move, etc).
Since characters can move around inside a panel, you'd probably have larger gaps in time/space between different panels than in a real comic (since each panel accomplishes more). This means you'll need to create more assets to make panels more visually different from each other, so keep that in mind and try to make modular sets that are easy to reuse in new combinations.