As a nerd, it really does seem that I ought to be into comic books, but it just never happened. As a pre-teen, eventually I became devoted to The Transformers comics, but that had more to do with my love of the bots than any inclination toward comic books. I also dabbled around that age with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (pre-Archie) and Usagi Yojimbo, because they seemed safe, graspable, and I think also not overtly hyper-masculine. I briefly had a subscription to Web of Spider-Man, but even then I felt alienated by the idea that this was one version of a franchise that had multiple incarnations, with no sense of where I was in the story’s arc, or whether this arc even “counted.”
Now, all grown up and no longer in need of a ride from my parents to a store that actually sold comic books, and with the vast trove of comic knowledge now available on the Internet, it seems a ripe time for me to try again. And yet I pause.
(Let’s presume for the sake of this post that we’re just talking about big, established franchises, your Batmans, your Supermans, your Avengers, etc. I know it’d be easy for me to pick a more recent and independent universe, but goddamn it I want Batman.)
First, there’s the whole fact that money doesn’t grow in my carpet, and these things ain’t free. But mainly, I know that I’d have to choose a franchise and then pick a spot, more or less arbitrarily, to start from. What will I be expected to know in advance? What will it be assumed I have read already? If I haven’t been sufficiently saturated in the mythos of the given superhero, will I reap the full experience?
It’s all too much stress for what’s supposed to be fun.
Andy Ihnatko just wrote about this very thing, and it carries weight for me because a) Andy is awesome and b) he’s a comics-nerd’s comics-nerd, a true blue fan of the art form, and even he is now ready to throw up his hands:
My obstacle with Marvel is that I have no idea how to get a single unit of story from them. Stories start in the middle and they’re resolved later (sometimes after months) in another book entirely. Marvel’s “Avengers” books are such a mess that they often include a little chart of what books you need to buy and what order you need to read them in. Good lord! [ … ]
I rarely get to the end of a Marvel comic and feel like the curtain has closed and the lights in the theater have come up. It’s frustrating and unsatisfying. And Marvel isn’t entirely immune to DC’s troubles, either. Marvel’s story continuity is deeply contaminated with characters who are someone’s son in an alternate-reality, but a future alternate reality, from an Earth that’s a parallel-Earth to the Earth of that alternate reality, who traveled back in time to reach this character who turns out to be a clone of a robot of…
ENOUGH!!!!!
I know, right?!? It’s my understanding that what Andy is describing here is a somewhat recent phenomenon, such that the situation’s complexity dwarfs the one I faced in the late 80s and early 90s. So if it’s crazier now than it was then, I really have no hope, and should settle for enjoying the movies (when possible – Transformers is even now split into a thousand sub-incarnations, and the movies are terrible).
Maybe there’s some self-contained storyline I can get into and be content with. But even then, you know, them comics get expensive. So I dunno.
Near-Earth Object 