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Do's and don'ts: The best ways to go about getting into comics

While comics are a fantastic way to experience the adventures of many of your favourite characters, the wider universes they are set in and their complex twisting narratives can make them feel a tad overwhelming for the uninitiated.

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Have you ever tried to recommend a new Final Fantasy game to an inexperienced gamer? "If you like action games, you'll love Final Fantasy XVI." This is always met with the same kinds of responses of "guess I better get through the other 15 first then..." Anyone familiar with Square Enix's series knows that this isn't nearly necessary or the case, as Final Fantasy games are basically anthological stories despite their numeric ordering. I bring this up because comics somewhat exist with the same problem. How do you go about getting into a hobby that has 80+ years of storytelling behind it? How do you possibly find a starting point to build upon and how do you go about then consuming this media in a reasonable manner?

This is why I've cooked up this guide as a way to somewhat eliminate any of the stigmas surrounding getting into comics these days. As we did recently with Warhammer 40,000, this isn't an essential reading list or anything similar, it's a few quick tips to make beginning a comic book consuming journey all the more simplistic.

Do's and don'ts: The best ways to go about getting into comics

Tips for getting into reading comic books

You need a place to begin and it cannot be the first comic book ever produced. For one, it's an astronomical amount of reading to begin at square one and catch up on eight decades of history, but for another reason, those forerunning stories are rare and absurdly valuable, so you'll probably never see one in your life unless you have millions of pounds available to throw around.

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Our solution to this is simple, find a character or a group that you like and simply start with one of their more recent stories. You'll know if it's the start of a story because each chapter of a wider comic tale, i.e. an issue, is typically categorised with a number and marked with the year that the run began. For example, there have been two The Amazing Spider-Man series launched within the last few years. Nick Spencer, Ryan Ottley, and Humberto Ramos' version began in 2018 whereas Joe Kelly, Pepe Larraz, and John Romita Jr.'s (you can see our interviews with Kelly and Larraz from San Diego Comic Con Malaga below) alternative started in 2025. So while the first issues are both dubbed The Amazing Spider-Man #1, one will have (2018) at the end of its namesake and the other (2025). This is vital information to remember as it makes finding and/or purchasing the relevant comics you are after all the easier and more straightforward.

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Following up to this, for the newer reader who is simply looking to get their foot in the door and isn't too bothered yet (or in general... I personally don't care too much about collecting, just about reading these remarkable stories) about having broad collections of each individually published issue, graphic novels and omnibuses are your best friend. These gather multiple issues of one story into one larger book, with the added caveat that some of the naming conventions we explained above are lost in the sauce. An example of this, and switching to DC this time around, is Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King, as you can read the eight separate mini-issues or a complete novel that brings them together in one seamless copy, all with the same namesake. Simple and easy. Lovely.

Things then get more complicated if we look at say, Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four: The Complete Collection, as while we're talking about rather coherently put together narrative in this story, the actual contents of this novel collection spans Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #1-5, Fantastic Four (1998) #570-578, and more from Dark Reign: The Cabal as well. So for instances like this, the best possible course of action is to isolate a writer or an artist that you enjoy reading and then find their collective works in a package such as this one. Again, it gets weird and complicated, but it's far easier than trying to find all of the separate issues that constitute Hickman's wider narrative, for example.

So to recap, in a quick summary:


  • Step 1: Identify heroes or groups that you like (Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America etc.) and then find one of their more recent 'reboots', if you will, determining the age by the year at the name of their title (i.e. 2022).

  • Step 2: Then backtrack to the first issue, expressed by the other categorised number (i.e. #1), and start your reading journey - or find a graphic novel bringing the entire or several issues of the wider narrative together and begin reading.

  • Step 3: From here, expand your horizons by either returning to Step 1 with another character or group or by identifying writers and artists that you appreciate and then follow their portfolio to experience their other works.

How to read comic books

As a final note, let's quickly discuss how to actually read comic books because it's not as simple as following lines left to right and tracking a page top to bottom (or right to left for some languages). For those familiar, it's no challenge at all, but if you're new to comics, you might want a few quick tips and tricks.

To begin with, you do still work left to right and top to bottom, but there's a catch as you have to identify each panel and not the written narrative on a page. A panel is the box that each 'scene', if you will, of a comic book is presented and each panel operates like a separate page, meaning you follow the written dialogue/narrative of a panel from left to right and top to bottom. You then move across a wider page following the traditional reading rules but in the form of panels.

For example, below are a few pages from Batman/Deadpool #1 (2025), and the idea is to follow the panels (again, treating each panel like a separate page of narrative) in the way that the arrows define.

Do's and don'ts: The best ways to go about getting into comicsDo's and don'ts: The best ways to go about getting into comicsDo's and don'ts: The best ways to go about getting into comics

Which comics should I begin with? What are some essential and iconic comic book stories?

To conclude, we'll bring the attention back to a previous slate of articles that we prepared that highlights some of the top and most famous comics you can read for some of DC and Marvel's most famous and iconic characters. These articles are just the beginning, so expect even more to be added down the line, but there are still tons of great comics and graphic novels worthy of your time in what we've already published.



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