Samiul Bashar Samin
You may have heard of these things; they’re like floppy books with drawings in them. They’re for children and idiots. Pointless really, I mean… just read a normal book you nerd. There have always been misconceptions about comic books, and even though Hollywood turns out half a dozen movies based on them each year, it doesn’t seem to have afforded the source material any more legitimacy in the mainstream.
Movies like Captain America: Civil War and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice ought to be a gateway for new readers, but for a number of reason’s the customer base for comics has been stagnant over the last few years. The industry is still struggling, and publishers have been trying to find ways to attract new readers by giving them easy jumping-on points. They’ve rebooted, renumbered and reinvented, but they haven’t exactly made things simpler, in fact, the comic landscape is arguably more complex than ever.
The other challenge to overcome is bad advice. When newcomers are trying to navigate their way around a convoluted maze of continuity, entrenched readers can appear as knights or knaves.
Every time someone reaches out for help getting into comics, there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ll be told to read something terrible or incomprehensible, and when they ask what to read next they’ll be sent in a completely new direction. It’s like buying your first TV and asking a room full of strangers what channel you should watch.
Comics Through the Ages
Comics began as little strips in the newspaper, normally funny and written for children. Then in the late thirties people like Will Eisner realised the potential for long-form storytelling, and comic books as we know them now were born. For a long time they were still aimed at a younger audience, and a lot of them were churned out without much care. But as time went on, the medium aged with its audience, and by the late seventies and eighties, they were written almost exclusively for a more mature readership.
Early stories could be quite crude and over-written, as artists rushed out several issues a month and writers filled the page with text to explain what was happening and why. As time went on, the artists were given the room and time to tell the story, and the volume of text reduced accordingly.
Gold and Silver ages of comics gave birth to some really fascinating story ideas, but reading them now can be quite jarring.
Superheroes are just the modern equivalent of these pantheons, and they have a rich history in comic books. In fact, they’ve pretty much dominated the medium to the point where most people assume that stories about Marvel and DC heroes are all comics have to offer, but that’s pretty far from the truth…
Commonly referred to as Independent or Creator Owned comics, these books explore other genres such as Crime, Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, and even Romance.Thanks to publishers
like Image, comics cater to a variety of interests. You might not give a damn about capes and tights, but there are plenty of other stories that might tickle your fancy.