#comic lit

I've been a comics fan for most of my life, although until recently I was never a regular comics reader. Mostly I would just hang around message boards full of people who were regular readers and pick up things via osmosis, along with a very healthy attitude towards women and the role of government in not providing a social safety net. /s

I only ever actually read the few times when a big crossover event got published into a TPB that I could pull from my library, such as Crisis on Infinite Earths. I loved those, but outside of the few people who had trickled out into the mainstream, I didn't really have an idea of what was going on or why.

As I hung around, I began to pick up the lore, like how Pre- and Post-Crisis DC comics were massively different beasts, and that expressing a preference for the wrong one made you an unmitigated fool fit only for public mockery. Which one was the wrong one? You were a fool for asking. As years went by I picked up on more building blocks of comics history, like Age of Apocalypse and Zero Hour, and the more I learned, the angrier the energy around me became. Around the late 2000s-early 2010s, it became so toxic that I had to bail.

The truth is, I had always been primarily interested in the massive crossover aspects of these big shared universes and how all the different pieces fit together, or how the creatives wrote their way out of a mess. The vibes in the community were so repugnant that I just lost all the desire, but once I had purged those influences, the main barrier was just the sheer weight of material. Crisis on Infinite Earths, for example, was the culmination of fifty years of comics history. If I really wanted to understand the story, would I need to have those fifty years under my belt? Could I even accomplish that?