The afternoon I figured out I was reading comic books out of order for like 5 years

So I was at this comic shop in Portland, the one off Hawthorne, going through their back issue bins. I grab this run of a series I thought I knew, and the guy behind the counter goes, 'Hey just so you know, that storyline starts in issue 12, not 1.' And I just stood there with my mouth open. See I always thought you read them by cover date, like oldest to newest, because that's how my dad did it with his old silver age stuff. Turns out for modern comics, writers jump around timelines and do these flashback arcs that start in the middle. So all these years I've been reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol totally scrambled, no wonder some of those scenes made zero sense to me. I even skipped a whole annual once because I thought it was a spin off. Now I have to go back and reread like 4 longboxes worth of stuff the correct way. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized a whole series you thought you understood was actually meant to be read in a completely different order?

2 comments

2 Comments

lopez.simon1mo ago

Stood there holding a Doom Patrol annual I'd skipped for years... turns out it was the key to an entire arc I never understood. Makes me wonder how many storylines I ruined for myself just by reading them wrong. Gotta start over from scratch now, man.

kim8191mo ago

lopez.simon you just described half my comic reading life right there. I bought a New Teen Titans issue #7 from a quarter bin once, and it turned out to be the missing piece for understanding why Starfire was suddenly acting weird in like 10 other issues. I felt like such a clown realizing I'd been reading around a whole subplot for years. Now I'm paranoid I've got like 5 other arcs where I'm just missing the point entirely. Maybe we should start a support group for people who accidentally speedran their own comic lore wrong.