Can we talk about the time a kid at a con told me my 'reading order' spreadsheet was stressing him out?

I was at Phoenix Fan Fusion last spring, showing a buddy my color-coded spreadsheet for getting into the X-Men. It had tabs, links, footnotes, the works. This teenager next to us at a booth just goes, 'Dude, that's a whole second job. My uncle just told me to start with 'Giant-Size X-Men #1' and have fun.' It was so simple and blunt. I deleted the whole file that night. Now I just pick a cool starting point and follow what looks interesting. Anyone else get some brutally honest advice that actually helped?

3 comments

3 Comments

joseph_torres27d ago

Were you trying to actually read everything, or just making a perfect map for the sake of it? Sounds like that kid might have saved you from a rabbit hole that wasn't even fun.

jana_fox501mo agoTop Commenter

Oh, that's a great story. It makes me wonder, what was the most complicated part you were trying to solve with that spreadsheet? Was it just the reading order, or were you tracking something else, like character appearances?

lindaowens1mo ago

The reading order was actually the easy part, @jana_fox50. The real headache was mapping out all the alternate universe crossovers and which canon they pulled from. It got so messy trying to keep the timeline logic straight, lol.