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I left some pages inbetween out because those pages exemplify how drawing enhanced the scene.
Already in the first scene, the most obvious thing is how donnie's face is not 'angry pissed manga face #3' but a rather deformed image.
Donnie does not look intimidating here. He looks (and is) an angry child in his jammies.
Gilda is not some Moe character which people just find cute, but she is a scared shy girl with classes who is smarter than she is given credit for.
Her bodylanguage alone expresses that. She is behind donnie in the first picture and you can see she does not know how to handle the situation and reacts in a way many children do when suddenly there is conflict: Keeping her hands up and going into a cowering and hiding position.
Even on the second picture where donnie hits the other children, he does not look very intimidating but just like this situation is too much for him and Emma's mouth and eyes does not give her some cool and defiant 'go hit me but you are just angry about yourself' expression many manga would have given her in that situation, but emma still reminds us that she is just a little girl who does not want to be hit.
There is nothing cool about them here (and even ray, who is our bonafide 'cool' often looks like it is just a mask, but we'd have to discuss him in more depth).
That point is driven home the most in the third picture: Just look at donnie.
He looks like an angry toddler who just threw a tantrum and now starts crying. And while this would look ridicoulus in most manga, i found it touching here.
Because Donnie might be emotional and somewhat too easily to anger for his own good, but we have to look at a young boy here who just got to know he was being lied to, considered useless and his siblings have been killed, a fate that will soon meet him too in all probability.
And while she are shown that it affects him just like any other child his age, the writing contrasts it by letting all kids including him come to a very mature conclusion of this conflict and apologize to teach other.
This scene would have played out HELLA less touching if we just saw 'cool' character designs making staple manga faces.
Since i do not have much time, i cannot talk about c) in depth, but aside from the foreshadowing given in the drawings (which are probably to the credit of the author more than the artist really), Neverland has many limits.
The biggest one is that is, so far, has only one location and in all probablity will usually play out in closed areas in the modern time. That is not a big variety to go by, BUT:
We get lots of pictures like these, which seem horribly out of place from the usual art but work really well DUE to that contrast.
I know i laughed when Connie died. Call me heartless, but i see it coming from a mile away that it'd happen, so dead connie didn't startle me.
But the sudden picture of the monsters did startle me. I didn't exspect it and it seemed obnoxiously out of place with the usual art.
And it should be, it is alien.
Pictures like these remind us the peace in the orphanage is not real, even if all the children would love it to be real (see Omake, I can honestly say that i might read just the story of some kids having fun in an orphanage, god knows i WOULD want to read the stories of happy emma norman ray and so on and that enhances neverland a lot. we know what peace is lost by the contrast of cute cuddly art with THAT picture above).
Simlarly, Mama usually gives a very caring and warm look, that means that a picture like this:
Creates tension by just having a character look at another character in a noncute way.
That scene simlarly wouldnt work as well if the usual art was not all cuddly and deformed.
Aside that, since i am out of time: I dare you: Read through neverland just looking at these two things:
How often characters are exemplified by dreampictures or coverart (like ray in the library, krone the bug catcher, mama looking at the children as miniatures and so on) and how often the artist does crazy things with the backround and environment, deforming the monastery to show and changing angles just to show something in a nonordered or distorted way.
These things might not be understood at once, but they do add a lot to the atmosphere of the manga.
