My Journey in Understanding Comics

Part 2

Part 1 is not required reading. In fact, I will refrain from even linking it here. Every blog post is someone’s first.

It shouldn’t be embarrassing to admit that I needed to have “comic books” explained to me. Yet I feel ashamed that I allowed the entire medium to exist within a hair’s breadth of my cultural understanding for so long. I’ve already gone over my select few childhood run-ins with comics, as well as the false-start that nearly was my first paper-comic obsession* (*See “My Journey in Understanding Comics” #1! - Ed.), so my story this time will start in November of 2023.

I was working a mundane job at a manufacturing facility. Full-time hours of applying stickers to pieces of foam, or punching out holes in paper, or assembling little devices of god-knows-what, praying that for every life-saving defibrillator adhesive pad I quality-checked that the insulation padding I was shape-forming wasn’t destined for a war machine. It was a place of room-sized printing presses, massive machines that shaped and cut materials with the power of water-jets, and dark laboratory backrooms with more nausea-inducing chemicals filling the air than oxygen. While I didn’t end up falling into vats of any of the horrifically powerful bleaches we used to clean the printing screens (although I did retire home early on a number of occasions from dizziness caused by breathing in acetone), it was here that I had way too much time on my hands and binged podcasts.

I was devouring 10 hours of audio content a day, from audio dramas to history lessons to comedy sketches. The hardest part of the job became satiating my hunger for endless content. After exhausting “Midnight Burger” and Penumbra’s “Juno Steel”, I listened through all of Tim Roger’s “Action Button” reviews in audio-form. On recommendation from my girlfriend, that made a natural transition into gulping down hundreds of episodes of “Insert Credit”. Among other branching paths (I recommend “They Create Worlds” and “Video Game History Hour”), I was led through Alex Jaffe to “52 Pick Up”.

“52 Pick Up”, hosted by Alex Jaffe and Gita Jackson, discusses DC’s 2006-2007 weekly comic book “52” issue by issue. I dipped my toe into it with hardly any context: it had been many years since I read comics, very little of that had been DC. Certainly none from around the time “52” was published, and certainly not any that would provide any helpful context to “52”. I cannonballed into the the deep end, albeit without risk of drowning: if the podcast hosts helped me stick the landing then I would be opened to a whole new world of possibilities, if I was just utterly lost by the interwoven plot threads and greater context of the comic then I would just shrug it off and go back to the comforting familiarity of learning about unreleased Nintendo knitting machines* (* “VGHH” #117! - Frank ( - not Frank)). This isn’t the iTunes review section so I’ll spare you from me simply pasting in the glowing review I left for them, but rest assured that “52 Pick Up” does its job of introducing someone to the context of comic books tremendously well. I was hooked, and have not missed a bi-weekly wednesday since.

However, it wasn’t enough to break the floodwall I had erected after the comic-related disaster I had beared the full brunt of so many years ago. I followed “52” and kept saying to myself “I think I’ll subscribe to that DC mobile app, and read some of the surrounding context”, but I never pulled the trigger on that purchase. My interest was piqued, I was given the on-ramps, taught all the techniques from a master of comics knowledge, and yet I could not begin the simple act of reading.

I hold the act of consumption on a higher pedestal than it deserves. I regularly find myself hesitating to consume. Is this the right time? How will this work affect me? “Are you ready?” I ask myself, fighting back my natural instinct to presume anything unknown to me is not “for me”.

In February of 2024 I finally made a concession: I would start with something I felt I was closer to. Something that wouldn’t be “out of character” for me to consume. I had already been into “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” for some years, so I turned to manga, and read “Dragon Ball”. This isn’t the place for me to put all my thoughts on “Dragon Ball”. Know simply that it was a prime example of works of fiction finding me at exactly the right moment in my life, affecting me tremendously, with Toriyama’s passing happening right in the nearly exact middle of my readthrough. My dad had treated “Dragon Ball” with the same disdain as Wrestling or Football as I was growing up, something that wasn’t “for me”, something dumber, barbaric.

Comic books were his thing, and manga was not my thing. Before I moved out I had to find ways to justify things as being “my thing”. Webcomics were a natural extension of an interest in video games, manga was an eventual gap bridged by years of anime expos and the absurdity of “Jojo’s”, but “Dragon Ball”, among many other things, remained unreachable.

Now that I live on my own there are no gaps between works of fiction that need filling. My brain still often tricks me into thinking I cannot leap over the vast chasms that separate genres and mediums, but it is only the residual fear of being perceived as not being myself. There is no longer anyone in my daily life that has known me for a great amount of time, no one to police me to stay true to my platonic self. I have to remind myself that I can choose to wake up and be a whole new person if I so wish. Any day could be the day I decide to start being a person who reads comic books.

In late July 2024 I found the catalyst: a copy of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art”. It was a book always on my radar as being something that I would get a kick out of, but I never wanted to just read a scan of it. I knew it deserved to be read physically, but I never had the drive to order a copy. In the end it needed to appear before me, on the shelf of the thrift store I regular, as a spur of the moment purchase. I’ll again spare you from a full overzealous review, but it was exactly what I needed. “This is what a comic book is. This is why it’s important. This is why it’s for everyone.” That’s what I needed to hear. I needed someone to lay it all out, label all the pieces, explain the history, and tell me that comics can be for me.

In August my friends decided to marathon some of the X-Men movies. All the stars aligned: I had the knowledge, the motivation, the relief from social permission. No, not a relief. A triumph. I had triumphed over a lifetime of social pressure, of expectations and preconceived notions. I didn’t need to hide my mood-swing dips into unfamiliar media. I didn’t need to be ashamed of stepping outside my comfort zone. The version of myself in others’ heads are their own flawed snapshots of pieces of my true self, not a script they write for me to follow and fear. I could be anything I wanted.

I could be someone subscribed to Marvel Unlimited.

The conclusion to our thrilling three-part epic is up next in our amazing tale of self-reflection and ceaseless inner-discovery awaits! You don’t wanna miss it true believers!