Coming Back to Comic Books | An Introduction

I used to read a lot of comics. I mean, a lot. The local comic book store guy would pull a precarious stack of singles from the racks for me every week, and every Thursday, without fail, I'd find myself practically penniless till the gods of pocket money - remember them? - next heard my prayers.

Then I grew up.

I hate to say it - I really, truly do - but I did. I got older; I got busier. I went to Uni; got a job; met the woman I aim to spend the rest of my life with, if she'll have me - not necessarily in that order. There are hundreds of things I could point to by way of explanation for my decision to leave behind a medium I'd held very dear. How I wish there was a single one that I could point to and say, "Of course! That's why I stopped reading comic books!"

But there's not. It just... kinda... happened.

I didn't go cold turkey, not quite. I read Lucifer and Y The Last Man through to the bitter end. I kept up with Fables for a while longer than anything else, and when everyone started exploding over The Walking Dead, I invested in the first few trades. There have been other odds and sods since, but not many, and less of them with every passing year.

But I never fell out of love with the medium completely. Though before this it'd been much too long since I devoured an issue of this or that ongoing, in all that time I'd have gladly mounted an argument in favour of comic books as an art form, and an equally viable means of mature storytelling as any novel or splodge of colour on a canvas - if someone had only asked.

Anyway, to make a long story less long, a little while ago I got myself a tablet, and quickly discovered the wonders of reading gloriously backlit graphic novels on my eee Pad Transformer. Marvel were (and still are) offering a free month's subscription to their Unlimited digital comics service, and though Marvel comics were never my particular poison, it was enough, in short, to get me to give a shit again. Since then, I've heaved the dusty longboxes out of storage... reread a few former favourites... I've even been back to the comic store! My old haunts are all gone, alas, but in their place others have risen - others, and the internet.


With which, the scene was set. I couldn't not blog about my experiences, now could I?


Coming Back to Comic Books is going to be a chronicle of my return journey into a medium much overlooked, and by me these past few years as much as anyone else. Going forward I mean to treat those comics I read with every inch of the respect I'd pay a given book, or movie.


Not to immediately contradict which statement, I have to admit that I don't know that there's enough meat in many single issues to justify individual reviews, but going forward, expect quick hits on anything and everything I read on a semi-regular basis, either grouped a couple at a time or covered 1:1 when the occasion calls for special treatment.

We're going to go in gently - as much for my own benefit as anyone else's - but already I've a backlog of comic books to talk about, and I'm rearing to get this show on the road before it gets as scary as my tower of regular books to be read.


Man oh man, what a lot of catching up I've got to do...


That is to say, man oh man, what a lot of catching up I've got to do! :D


Just to whet your appetite, over the next couple of weeks we're going to be talking about The Walking Dead - but of course we are! - as well as Batman: Hush, which I only just now read, and a couple of comics featuring scripts by writers we should all be familiar with, namely Strange Adventures, wherein Zoo City author Lauren Beukes makes her mark on a new medium, and Peter V. Brett's much ballyhooed-about Red Sonja: Blue, which I might as well tell you now would be better known as The Book of Breasts.


Exciting, right? And no, I don't just mean that last.