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| "Paper Girls" by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang (Image Comics) |
Comic folk are extremely passionate and knowledgeable about their favourite subjects, and it's quite often extremely interesting to see them losing their shit when a lazy journalist lets their cat dance over their computer keyboard to cook up one of those tiresome "Comics and Graphic Novels are becoming cool again - here's what you should be reading" lists that instantly delve into the same tired old pool of titles that these articles have been rehashing for the last 35 years or so.
The main problem is that the tired old cliches that they always haul up, mostly written by Alan Moore (who would probably be the first person to express his ire that "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" - as great as they are - always seem to be on those lists), and mostly showing just how out of touch with what has gone on, and is still going on in comics over the last 20 years.
Now, I would like to point out that I'm definitely not the person to put together a definitive list, mostly because I don't have a colossal amount of disposable income to spend on them (comics are and always have been a pretty expensive hobby if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the cool stuff).
I also had a huge period of not reading comics at all, and it's only been in the last 10 years that I've managed to claw back the time (and the monetary resources) to begin dipping back in, so I share the frustration of those who are also sick and tired of seeing fluff pieces, spun off the back of the various Amazon / Netflix / cinematic obsession with bringing various classic and more contemporary comics to life.
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| "Sweet Tooth" by Jeff Lemire (Vertigo Comics) recently made into a Netflix adaptation to huge critical acclaim |
So where on earth you do start with comics and graphic novels?
Where would you start if you were put in a library? A real bricks-and-mortar book-filled library containing fiction and non fiction titles on a huge range of subjects (and yes, amazingly, some even have really decent collections of comics and graphic novels too - if you're lucky enough to have a library in your home town still, of course!)
That's how it should always be, any article should start out by making it clear that there are so many nuanced themes in comics that cover practically every single subject you could possibly think of. Forget the traditional view of comics being all about cape-wearing superheroes, there really is something for everyone out there and quite often the mix of visuals and tight writing can bring a subject to life in ways that a mere text-based novel cannot.
The journalistic view that "I like this, this is cool, therefore I'm gonna recommend it to you" feels jaded, lazy and an example of how most fluff pieces on comics don't bother to do the research, and often don't engage with the publishers, authors and illustrators who create these things. For every genius writing or drawing comics, there'll be a wealth of process information that they also share on the web as part of their own promotional stuff, but again quite often we see modern articles hauling out interviews with comic luminaries from donkeys years ago (poor Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, how many times must they have seen the same quotes from them cropping up year after year?)
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| "Watchmen" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC Comics). Amazingly, there are other comics available |
These grand masters of comics don't deserve to be ignored, but they also don't deserve to be allowed to coast on their previous merits. Each and every time I see Watchmen being recommended in "New to Comics?" lists, I wonder what it must feel like to someone who hasn't got any kind of grounding and background in reading comics. Would it be unapproachable enough to put them off comics for life, in fact?
Since trying to get back into comics myself, I took probably the simplest approach possible - I read a lot of plot summaries, looked at a lot of art, and read a lot of creator interviews to pick and choose between various series. For anyone trying to break into an existing (and in some cases decades long) story arc, it can be pretty daunting and that's a bit sad because it makes it extremely difficult to recommend certain series when logically most folk would want to read a story from its very beginning (can you imagine how much it would cost you to pick up the entire "The Walking Dead" - even if you opted to grab the collected versions, for example?)
Similarly, the "Big Two" (DC Comics and Marvel, disputable whether they still deserve to be called the big two I guess) live and die by their long-running character-driven story arcs, splitting their various comic universes into multiverses with constant alt-realities and crossovers between series. It's the literary equivalent of trying to unpick a whole box of wired headphones (I always wonder how those folk who give these out on planes and bus tours cope with that onerous task) and means that, aside from a few standout (or short-run / standalone titles) they seldom crop up in recommendation lists, missing a huge swathe of important comic storytelling.
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| "Spider-Verse" by Slott, Gage et al (Marvel Comics) - A colossal chunk of awesome spideyness |
Shaking the "Toxic / Nerdy Comics" image
One other factor worth considering is that in some cases those traditional comics were wrought at a time when comics in general still carried with them the expectation that they were read by nerdy geeky males, with titles tailored more to titillate rather than to push forward the medium as a way of telling relevant and timely stories. In some ways may creatives still long for a return to that time, and some comic fans hold fairly toxic opinions on the rise and rise of creator-led comics that put a purple sparkly Doc Marten boot through that notion that all female comic characters have to be gigantic-titted bimbos in tight costumes, merely there to provide eye candy. In fact if there's one clear theme of the past 20 years that really does seem to get missed a lot in rollup articles, it's that comics created by (and with far more appeal to) women, LGBTQ+, kids and practically every fine-grained audience you could ever think of. These titles now far outnumber comics that are nothing better than slick versions of a Tijuana Bible, and the comics industry is (arguably) a far better place for it.
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| "The Wicked and the Divine" by Gillen and McKelvie (Image Comics) |
These titles have the power to address issues that hit the headlines on a daily basis, driven by themes and discussions that erupt like volcanic activity across social media platforms, but again it feels like the easiest dot-connecting exercises in what's cool and what relevant are totally missed by comic articles in the usual press or media coverage.
Perhaps ultimately the best place to look for recommendations then is to dive onto those social media platforms and start looking around. Before long you'll find a ton of passionate folk out there who will only be too pleased to talk about comics until your ears drop off (like me @readitdaddy) - and only too pleased to give you a stack of suggestions based on your own literary tastes. There's so much out there to discover and I guarantee you that out there, right now, in comic or graphic novel form, is your next greatest reading obsession.
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