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There was a brief time during my childdhood when comic books were kind of mythical.

My dad lived in a pretty small upstairs apartment, and because of that, he had a storage unit that contained the morass of his belongings that couldn't fit inside. I had vague memories of the room that later became my sister's at my mom's house that was, when I was little, filled from floor to ceiling with crap. That storage unit could have contained the Ark of the Covenant for all I knew.

It didn't, for the record. It was mostly boxes of old Star Wars toys, comic books and some old furniture.

It wasn't until I got to be 11 or 12 that we ventured down to the storage unit with one goal in mind — the old man's comicbook collection.

Starting in the 80s sometime, my dad quit treating comicbooks as disposable and started hanging onto them. He was one of those collectors who bought 10 copies of issues that people thought would be worth hundreds of dollars someday, not the kind of collector who was all in on certain writers.

I don't remember how I even became so enamored with the idea of flipping through the old funnybooks, but it could have been any number of things. We spent a good bit of time at our local comicbook store because the owner was a family friend, and superheroes were in vogue. This would have been in the very early 2010s, smack in the middle of the Nolan Batman trilogy of films and during the nascent days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Beyond some books my buddy Kevin loaned to me around then, like the first few volumes of The Ultimate Spider-Man, I hadn't really read much of anything.

It reached a point where I had had enough of my dad referencing things he was pretty sure were in his collection, and I wanted to see for myself. That was how my education in cape comics started — chiefly from the hundreds of books my old man owned.

His collection was mostly composed of a few different heroes. The largest chunk was definitely Batman, and it was Batman from the grimdark 1990s era — Knightfall, the Frank Miller stuff, that kind of thing. The rest of the collection (at least the stuff that I read any of) was mostly composed of Green Arrow and books from the 90s era of the Star Wars expanded universe.

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with what I had access to. I had become a manga reader in the late aughts/early 2010s, but superhero comics seemed so dense and impenetrable. Naruto vol. 1 seemed a lot simpler to me than picking up no. 1 of a Batman book that was not actually no. 1 as a jumping on point, but was actually no. 1 of a story arc that fit into a much, much larger puzzle.

Eventually, my curiosity for books that came out after I was born won out, and it was good timing, too. In 2011, DC launched one of its many universe resets, this one intended as a jumping-on point for new readers. I was part of what I can only imagine was a growing group of people who had a passing familiarity with DC characters thanks to movies, but didn't really want to pick up a copy of Batman no. 600.

As a present for my 14th birthday, my mom picked me up a lot (I believe she won it in an eBay auction — shout out) of the first few issues from some of DC's New 52 relaunched books. It was a nice smattering of titles. I had some Batman, some Superman, some Justice League and a little bit of Green Arrow for good measure.

What I wasn't expecting was for basically none of these books to really do anything for me.

I'd say the big standout of those issues was Greg Capullo's stark artwork in Batman — and I've since learned that his run with Scott Snyder, the Court of Owls arc, is one of the more-beloved runs of the last few decades. Beyond that, though, none of them really did much for me.

I mean look at this cover! Capullo had a very neat way of drawing Batman. I love the stark color contrasts and how expressive his face is.

A big factor was that this supposedly fresh start for DC's universe still managed to feel impossibly dense. I wanted to read Batman, sure. But, to fully understand the Gotham City beat, was it necessary to also keep track of Batgirl? What about Batwing and Batwoman? Detective Comics? Catwoman? Nightwing? Hell, Superman famously confused readers because, when the New 52 launched, there was both an Action Comics book and a Superman book. And they were connected! With so many books running concurrently, and without the institutional knowledge of which writers or artists I should be following, it felt like having to bounce over to a Robin book to get the full story of the Knightfall run all over again.

Note to the folks at DC: FOMO might work as a marketing tactic for folks who have tons of money to spend, but it's a great way to lose a jobless 14-year-old who can only ask his mom to buy him so many $5 comics at a time.

I stayed on the pull list at my local shop for a little bit, snagging new issues of Batman every few weeks, but at $4-5 a pop (and with no income, lol) the story was not hooking me the way it needed to for me to really feel invested in things.

So, at the ripe old age of 15, I figured my comic career was over. I threw in the towel and stuck to, on occasion, pulling back issues of mature books from my dad's collection, like the Longbow Hunters Green Arrow run or the Frank Miller Batman books.

Even though I gave up on trying to keep up with any up-to-date runs, I still knew I liked superheroes. And I was still reading manga, too. By the time I graduated from college, my interest spiked a bit in indie graphic novels. Books by Gord Hill, Raven Lyn Clemens and Nadia Shammas (who I was lucky enough to interview for my podcast!) reminded me that even if I didn't really care to follow Marvel or DC, I adored the art form.

One thing that drew me to comics from the beginning was the fascinating things that good artists and writers could do with the medium. I love novels, but being able to use colorful, expressive art to help tell your story is incredible. Paneling is also fascinating, and when done well, comics can feel so kinetic, almost like animation. And that's just one example of how the medium can be used to tell stories you would be hard pressed to tell anywhere else.

OK, enough with the trip down memory lane

So fast forward to 2025. A few things conspired to get me to check out how things were doing at the ol' DC factory.

Chief among them was James Gunn's Superman movie. I caught the movie in theaters with my wife and enjoyed it far more than I expected I would. And the main thing that appealed to me, which might even feel like it runs contrary to what made me bounce off of comics as a teenager, was that I felt like I was being plopped into a world that was already rich with history and context. Instead of wasting the audience's time with an origin story nearly everyone already knows, Gunn took advantage of Superman's place in our collective consciousness and skipped right to telling a story rich with metatext.

The intro of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is another incredible example of this. All it took was one page, four panels and less than 10 words to bring you up to speed on Superman's origin. Now, this might not be as helpful if you haven't at least heard of Superman, but if you have even the slightest working understanding of Ol' Kal-el's story than this will do the trick.

Anyway, since then I've been a fiend at my local library (which has an incredible selection of comics!! I love libraries!!) trying to read as many DC books from the last 20 or so years that strike my fancy. I made this blog as an opportunity to spill my thoughts about some of what I'm reading that isn't Goodreads or Discord or some arcane comics forum. I'll probably mostly write about things I've recently read, but who knows! It's my blog!

Not every entry will be this long, I promise. But this is the problem with lots of blogs! No editors to tell you to stop!