More comics, more story

It's been my medium of choice since I was a little kid. I love movies, and music can make me feel some extremely unique emotions, and a monumental amount of my life has been spent watching the daftest fucking TV shows. But I'm always, always about the comics.

I got hooked on them at a young age, and never fell out of love with this unique combination of words and pictures. I've bought, sold and traded tens of thousands of individual comics over those years, and despite some lacklustre attempts to dampen down the addiction, I still get a charge out of walking into the local comic shop every week, to see what new beauty they have.

And there has been a lot of beauty. I've been constantly exposed to incredible art in all those decades, pencils and inks and paints that are achingly gorgeous, extremely stylized and downright exciting. I never get tired of finding a great new artist whose work doesn't look like anybody else, and I deeply appreciate those who have built on the work of earlier generations to create something that still looks fresh and new.

The relative cheapness of the format has also kept me going - while there is significantly less bang for your buck in individual issues of many mainstream comics these days, there are things like some modern trade paperback programmes that give you a ridiculous amount of comic goodness for a cheap price.

But I honestly think the main thing that has kept me in comics is the sheer amount of story I get from the medium, and the bewilderingly different kinds of tales I have been exposed to. 

Mainstream comics are obviously stuck with some very particular genres taking up all the attention, but in terms of the sheer number of stories, I've read far more in comics than in novels or anything else. Not just superhero angst, but historical fiction, stylish biographies and innumerable slice of life stories. I read all sorts of things in the comics format - non-fiction data dumps, mindless slugfests and poetic musings about life, the universe and everything. 

And with the images doing so much of the heavy lifting, the format is so easy to get through, and you can get through a tonne of material very quickly - I can read through half a dozen trade paperbacks paperbacks collecting the latest X-Men stories in a lazy afternoon, and while I might be skimming some of the inevitably verbose text, I will still be taking the story on board. It might take me a couple of weeks to get through a chunky prose novel, but I could do any graphic novel in a day. I did all of Jeff Smith's Bone one Christmas afternoon.

So in the end, I've read far more stories in comics than I have in any other medium. If I am truly devoted to experiencing as many stories - as many points of view - as I can in my life, it would be remiss of me to avoid comics. They're just words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures. You can get through it quickly, and you can read about everything in the world.