Oops I Binge-Read Comic Books Again
It's like a freight train on the open road, when it starts it can't be stopped.
For the last few weeks, I’ve dedicated most of my reading juices1 to wiping out the stacks and stacks of comic book single issues and collections that were busily becoming nice paperweights on my writing desk. They haunted me, watching as I read other books from the library or other manga that I’d recently acquired. They dared me not to binge-read Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, or Kaiju No. 8, or Komi Can’t Communicate, dared me not to pick up a new manga to read weekly (WITCHRIV, Satanica). And they WON.
I’ve read so much. Is it too much to list?
Of course not.
There’s never enough lists.
The Awakening Storm: A Graphic Novel
Between Shades of Gray
Rogue Sun Vol. 4
The Dead Lucky Vol. 2
Radiant Black Vols. 6-7
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1
Absolute Superman Vol. 1
Absolute Batman Vol. 1
Fantastic Four by Ryan North #29-33
Metamorpho: The Element Man by Al Ewing & Steve Lieber
One World Under Doom
Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu
I’ve still got more in the stacks to read (Astro City Metrobook Vol. 1, Fantastic Four by Jonathan Hickman Complete Collection Vol. 1, Harbinger (Vol. 1) Vol.1 , Batman Incorporated (Vol. 1) Vol. 1, X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga…sorry, had a little more list in me) that I can’t wait to get to. It’s crazy to think that I’m so close to catching up on all of these comics but that’s only because I haven’t spelled all the ones I can/want to read digitally.
No don’t worry I won’t list them all out for you…in the main article2.
I was mum on getting back into comics after I’ve spent so much time this year either exhausted, playing video games, or catching up on other things. And while things started strong (Awakening Storm is good Middle-Grade fun, Between Shades of Gray is downright excellent) diving into some middling Massive-verse comic books put things in a bit of a downward swing for me. I’d only ever heard good things about most of DC’s new “Absolute” line and of course I was looking forward to getting back into Moon Knight3. My trepidation ended the moment I laid eyes on Hayden Sherman’s artwork and it was a boulder chasing a train from there4.
You’d think with how much it bugged me seeing that stack of comics/ that empty diaper box full of comic trade paperbacks (I will not elaborate) that I would’ve gotten to it sooner and paced myself, maybe tried to settle on finding some sort of reading rhythm.
My relationship with comic books has become somewhat fickle. Most modern comics are written with trade paperbacks and collections in mind. The best way I can describe it is my experiences with Absolute Superman, a book I had little interest in reading when I was picking up the single issues and only now, having read the trade and thus the first story arc all at once, am I chomping at the bit to get the next volume.
I find it difficult to pick up a comic trade, or run, and then set it down before heading off to something else. Unless it is a massive tome with a reasonable resting spot (say, a Moon Knight omnibus where one creative team’s run ends and another starts), I typically sit and read the whole thing either in one go or over the course of a couple of days. I want to devour the whole story.
Maybe that’s binge culture seeping its way into me, forcing me to submit to content brainrot. I must consume as fast as I can so that I can move onto another thing.
Truthfully, I believe it’s something else: I simply need to get to this so I don’t lose track of things.
There’s so much buzzing and fuzz in my brain these days, a fog that hangs over it from sleep deprivation5 or from a busy day job or from the mere existence of two eccentric and energetic toddlers. Keeping up with them, their needs, their wants, their futures makes it hard to focus on the things in front of me.
So if I come across a comic book collection I want to read and only get a couple issues into it before I put it down for a few days to deal with real life, I may as well have never read those first two issues and will have to spend time re-reading it.
Plus, so many of them are written to be read in quick succession. Metamorpho: The Element Man relies on a lot of small, funny details that reading it monthly felt impossible. I was missing jokes that I’d already read or forgetting set ups for things that occurred in the first issue. But, reading it over the course of 24 hours, I didn’t miss anything. I was able to get the whole story in one go.
It’s why manga is so much easier for me. Even though I’m reading 15 regularly published series (most of which are weekly, some monthly) they come back so fast that I haven’t lost so much of the information, and the stories usually don’t contain all that much and can be quite iterative while maintaining a solid level of entertainment and momentum.
Yet I don’t think reading comics in this way is harmful, nor is it reductive to the books that I am reading. It helps me enjoy them more. I’m not engorging myself to get through them and onto the next thing. I’m doing so because I can’t get enough of it. When I finished Absolute Wonder Woman I easily made my way through her Absolute Trinity counterparts. Then, from One World Under Doom to Metamorpho: The Element Man to Fantastic Four to Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu, I was reading entire series, or arcs, per day. I only now paused because I’ve been more pressed for time (and kind of want to get back to playing Final Fantasy X).
I’m not sure if this is going to keep happening. It won’t be long before I run out of physical comics to read, and there’s something much less exciting about a digital book compared to a physical one, particularly with comic books. Holding the book, feeling the progress, getting to see the art as it was meant to be printed, having all of the supplementary material interspersed throughout, it’s all far more immersive than flicking your finger across a tablet.
I’ll never be out on comic books. I think they, like manga, are arguably the best way that stories can be told. They’re a marriage of literature and artwork, with a litany of styles and methodologies to make stories feel unique.
I want to read wider (it’s why my list includes something as far as the piece of historic fiction Between Shades of Gray and the Golden-Age adventure throwback Metamorphosis: The Element Man). I want to continue furthering my knowledge of how comics can be moving, or effective, or even how they work.
The western comic book is far more than juts another reading experience, it is an immersion in storytelling unlike most things. It is a gateway into a dimension built on ever shifting layouts and compelling characters, a place where the impossible is always reaching out toward us, inviting the reader. It is interactive, in so many ways. A friend of mine, who runs the Comic Chaplain Substack that you should be reading, talks about this with me all the time: how gutters and paneling are a books way of inviting us into its story.
This idea often gets away from me. I get lost in the minutiae and find it difficult to get excited about reading, at times. When the days are long and nights so desperately short, why would I want to put my brain power toward something? I need to be writing, or editing, or brainstorming, or…I don’t know, sleeping!
And then, the neurons are fired the moment a comic book engages me. Hours pass. Days go by. And I close the pages of a trade, or slide the last single issue of a run back into its bag. And I am euphoric. Even if the book was middling, even if it wasn’t the most exciting thing in the world, there’s just something about simply reading a comic book that is, in itself, a fantasy.
It’s addictive. When I first got into reading comic books in college, after my first few trade paperbacks of New 52 Green Arrow and the initial single issues of Moon Knight I’d read, I hunted down everything. I voraciously read everything in my store’s bookstore, I ate up books the Big 2 pumped out (Justice League United, Supergirl, The Amazing Spider-Man, Original Sin, Inhumans). Sometimes I can get away from that.
I can be cynical, I can be nihilistic about the comics industry and how it feels, in many ways, like a relic simply limping along until one of these big corporations comes to bring it to pasture.
It’s within these pages that there is a magic unlike most anything else in the literary world.
How can you not binge your way through that?
Time otherwise spent reading The Silent Patient and nonfiction works such as The Yankee Way and The Caped Crusade
We just can’t help ourselves:
Spider-Man/Deadpool
Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda
Fantastic Four by Matt fraction
Marvel Knights: Marvel Boy
Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 1)
Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man
Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man Ominbus
Ultimate Spider-Man: Incursion
Ultimate Endgame
Warhammer 40K: Marines Calgar
Annihilator
Happy!
Nameless
Superman: Camelot Falls
Scarlet Witch by Steve Orlando
The Vision & Scarlet Witch
Sorcerer Supreme (2025) Vol. 1
Ninjak: The 7th Dragon
Skull Kill Krew
Uncanny X-Men by Kieron Gillen
Avengers vs X-Men
Power Fantasy Vol. 3
Lest we forget the full month I spent last year regaling you all of his history.
Thomas & Friends Season 5, Episode 26 “Rusty and the Boulder”…we watch this and many other episodes daily in my house. I ain’t gonna complain.
Don’t you dare blame it on me staying up late every night to watch the World Cup.