Hey Professor Phil!
My name is Stephanie and i reallllllllyyy want to learn more about comic
books and super heroes. Do you have any ideas of how i can start learning
more about them?!
Well, Steph, if you’re interested in current superhero comics, The Professor’s advice is to go to a well-stocked comic book store, go down the new-comic racks, and pull an issue or two of anything that looks interesting to you. If you buy 30-35 books, the bad news is that it’ll cost you a hundred bucks, and you’ll find that maybe 75-80% of it is childish, sexist, stupid or all three, but that’ll leave 20-25% that isn’t, and then you can start reading more of those, and spend your money much more efficiently. If you find an artist, writer, character, etc. that you like, the next move is to go look through the trade paperback/graphic novel selections, and see what earlier works by those creators, or about those characters, are available. (A cheaper alternative would be to go to your local library, and check out their graphic novel selection, but the disadvantages would be that you wouldn’t necessarily get the most current stuff, or that the variety of stories available wouldn’t be that great). The same procedure would work with non-superhero books, too; the percentage of childish/sexist/stupid books would probably be lower, although the percentage of boring/incomprehensible ones would go up a bit.
There are also a lot of magazines (like Wizard and Comics Buyer’s Guide), websites, etc. devoted to talking about new comics, but The Professor thinks that it’s better not to listen to any of them at first — go explore, see what you like, form opinions based on your own tastes, and then see what everybody else thinks about them. It’s just like music: everybody’s attracted to different stuff (what your friends hate might sound great to you), and it’s always the new or obscure groups that you find by yourself that give you the most pleasure.
