Just start anywhere

The few social media feeds I still follow periodically get clogged up with the same old banal arguments, and a hoary old chestnut came up again recently - is Watchmen a good place to start reading comics?

There were all sorts of good points made for and against it, but my answer is, was and always will be: fuck knows? You never know what comics is going to grab somebody's attention. Everybody is different

There is basically nobody left alive who remembers starting Superman and Batman when they first began - and there are fewer and fewer who can remember the first Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, so if you want to read any of their adventures, you just gotta jump in there somewhere. Sink or swim. 

It's not for everyone, and most rational people bounce right out of that kind of commitment, but a certain person just wants to know more. They want to know what the backstory comes from and what this all means, and they will never stop looking for those answers.

Just start wherever the fuck you want. Jumping on points get a certain audience, but there is also an audience that comes to Uncanny X-Men after sixty years and just fucking goes for it. Maybe people respond to the art, maybe they get hooked by the soap operatics, it's different for everybody.

(And it's not limited to comics, by a long shot. Where do you start with Dr Who? Wherever you like. Here's good.)

It's still a huge appeal of the medium for me, I still buy random comics of various long-running sagas and have been intrigued enough to go back and see where it all starts. Filling in the gaps is just as much fun as seeing where it goes next.

It took me years to understand the complex families and friendships in Love and Rockets. I came in years into the run, and it took me so long to track down the earlier issues, I had no idea who was related to who in Palomar, or who Speedy was. I'm still making weird connections, decades into a full Hernandez obsession.

Watchmen is a very well written and drawn comic book, it's smart and complex and very human, even if you don't know that Night Owl should be Blue Beetle. If you like it, there's lots more like that. If you don't, there's even more that are nothing like that. There are many self-contained comics, in and out and gone again, but also ones that just go for it forever. See what you like.