You can also use {} + adj for doing comparisons. It doesn't explicitly need another item to be compared to:
>
> This one is more expensive
If you do need something to compare to, it can be used in conjunction with :
>
> Apples taste better than oranges
Or you can even leave out, like Yuuichi Tam's answer says, in order to imply the superior object and just state which object was inferior.
You also can use the adverb to make an adjective comparative, but this just means "to a higher degree"; it's not used to compare to other things.
> !
> Faster!