The time a guy at a con showed me why I was reading comics wrong

I was at the Dallas Fan Expo last October and this older dude saw me flipping through a Silver Age X-Men issue way too fast. He stopped me and said 'you're reading it like a magazine, not a comic'. Then he spent like 15 minutes showing me how to look at the panels and the negative space between them. I've been collecting for 8 years and never once thought about reading the art before the words. Has anyone else had some random stranger at a con totally change how you look at a book?

3 comments

3 Comments

victorh811mo ago

Yeah @olivia_moore that backward flip thing is exactly what I started doing too. It's wild how once you slow down and look at the art first, you start noticing the same kind of storytelling everywhere in life like the way a movie frames a scene or how a store arranges stuff on shelves. There's always a hidden rhythm if you just stop rushing past it.

markh851mo ago

Jumped into a small con panel about Frank Miller's Daredevil runs back in 2019 and a guy next to me pointed out how the shadows in the background told a whole extra story. I'd read Born Again three times before that and never noticed how the dark panels got longer and longer as Matt's life fell apart. Now I always force myself to look at the art first, see what the colors and shapes are doing before I even read a word bubble. It changed how I buy books too because now I look for artists who actually use the whole page to tell the story, not just draw cool fight scenes.

olivia_moore1mo ago

Did you start flipping through books backward just to look at the art first too?