Variant Covers: Of Grad School and Funny Books

Man, I ain’t read shit in two weeks. There’s comic books piling up on my computer desk at an increasingly rapid rate. They sit there, begging to be read. I tell them, “Shh children, I will attend to thee soon”, and then I return to whatever activity I am currently caught-up in. All of this shit started when I began my grad school classes last week and I actually had to read real things.

The fucking pile continues to increase in enormity, and then it begins to intimidate me. I’m all “Holy fucking shit, I have ten comics I have to read”, and I say to myself that I don’t want to short change them, so I say “I’ll read them when I’m not exhausted and resentful of the written word.” Apparently, the time when that occurs is never. Sure, I could be logical and just read one at a time but that makes too much sense.

The entire thing runs tandem with a desire to actually comprehend the shit I’m reading. Earlier last year, I realized a several of things. First that I read comic books and things in general way too quickly. And because of this, two things happen, I retain very little of what I’ve read over the long term, and I analyze even less. I thought it was something just particular to me, but I asked around and some of my friends shared the same plight. They read a lot, but what happens and to whom slips their mind quickly.

Of course, it’s all compounded by the fact that you have to wait an entire month for the next installment, and you’re reading ten or twenty titles at a time. Everything begins to blur and blend and the next thing you know, you’re thinking of Daredevil fighting Cyclops while Batman jacks it in the corner. And as far as actually picking apart what was going on in the comic books? I really wasn’t.

So I decided to do what a college professor and mentor of mine recommended back in the day, “Read more, less.” Spend more time reading less material, and thereby ingesting that shit more thoroughly. But of course, that shit takes way more time than rushing through an issue, checking out the epic fights and the snappy dialogue. As well it requires a bit more of a higher brain function, and for anyone who reads this column regularly, it is apparent I struggle at composing sentences that are halfway intelligible, and don’t contain the word “cock” or “cunt” every other noun.

So along the way, and adopting something my bro told me, I really only allow myself to read a comic book every half an hour or so. It stems from him telling everyone and anyone to only read one issue of Watchmen a day back when all of our friends were checking it out prior to the movie release. It made sense to me, and since then I try and give every comic book its own time. Maybe the actual reading won’t take a half an hour, but then I’ll sit there, and rework what happened in my head. Recall the main characters, ask myself what is going on thematically.

I may be doing this while writing something up, or while vegging out to a video game. But there’s a secondary ingestion that goes on after I eat up the comic book itself. And by god, the shit has worked. My memory retention has gone up, my appreciation for the underlying shit has increased, and I have found it way more fulfilling that I did prior to adopting this method.

And then grad school came in and fucked it all up.

I’ve found myself reading five-hundred pages a week, going over dense literature and scholarly articles, and by golly, it vexes my brain. When I throw three or four hours a day into the wind by reading something by Sarah Fielding, my brain is spent. My eyes hurt, and I can’t fathom staring at more pages or giving them worthwhile attention. So I say to myself, “I’ll get to them when I can give them the attention they deserve”, which it seems, is never, lately.

Maybe my entire process is too rigorous, especially for a guy who reads almost exclusively books featuring aliens named Clark and fascists named Bruce and genetic freaks named Scott Summers. Maybe I’m digging too deep into them, but I’ve always thought there was something to be said for what is being done in the more “mindless” comic books featuring the typical tired tropes and enormous muscles.

Interlude out, regularly scheduled vapidity will return next week.