thinking about comics :3
Recently, I’ve been trying to get into reading Marvel’s comics, but there are just so many series, issues, characters, and even universes for me to keep track of. Fortunately for me, there is an online project working on compiling reading guides: marvelguides.com. Even with this resource, navigating the past 80+ years of comic publication from Marvel is a massive undertaking. I’ve decided to start with the Silver Age (consisting of the comics published between 1961 and 1970-ish), which begins with Fantastic Four #1 (1961).
Why comics, dani? Why are you so interested in reading all the Marvel comics in order? The short answer: I have access to an archive of Marvel comics, I’m more familiar with the Marvel IPs, and I am specifically interested in long-form serialized comic narrative made by massive creative teams with various levels of cooperation. My first (and most cherished) comic series was Jeff Smith’s Bone. Reading Smith’s fantasy adventure and adoring the art style inspired me to make my own comics when I was in elementary and middle school. I had a bunch of comic strips, including a Pokémon rip-off called Eye (which had an associated rip-off card game), a Looney Tunes clone with an uninspired and apparently forgettable title, and a massive creative project titled NINJA!—a series of stick figure comics with a shared universe and lore. I hand-made the NINJA! comics, stapling sheets of paper together and drawing comics in pencil on these zines’ (hand-numbered) pages.
As I matured, my interest in comics changed. I explored (both reading and making) daily comic strips, one-panel comics, pun-filled joke comics, dramatic comics, “serious” comics, graphic novels, webcomics, webtoons, and self-aware comics. I experimented with art style, preferring a more minimalistic stick figure over cartoony or realistic character forms. And then… I started college and got busy and stopped drawing comics for a while. And then the world ended.
So here we are, living in the apocalypse, and here I am, teaching game design at university (lmao what the fuck how did that happen?) and wishing I could get back into making comics.
