A Reading, A Rereading, and a Question

About a month ago, I bought a comic book, read it, jotted down my response thoughts and moved on. As it happens I did not publish these thoughts. A little bit ago, I reread my written response. Then I reread the comic book itself. Then I set about crafting a new response. The second attempt at a response was worse than the first. The second reading of the text was less appreciative than the first reading. Time had passed. My opinion of the work had changed.

Since comic books are rooted in a periodical, serial paradigm, many of them are not even designed to be reread too many times. They become outdated the moment that a new installment become available for purchase. Those first impressions become our sole impressions.

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One of my personal short term goals is to read fewer comics. Read fewer things but read them harder. Read deeper. Soak them up and find things that a Wednesday-evening spree-reader might overlook. Perhaps those somethings that I seek simply aren’t present in many comic books. That’s fine too. I need to do fewer things. I need to be less frantic.

I need to relax. In all possible senses of the idea.

But my enthusiasm for sequential art burns bright as always. What I think that I would like to do is attempt to focus my enthusiasm on a handful (or fingerhold) of things rather than attempting to shovel a stack of magazines into my face every Wednesday evening.

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Cartoonists spend enough time making comics, the least we can do as readers is spend some time reading them.

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What is gained? What is lost? What changes for you as you reread comics? Do you reread comics? I don’t mean skimming or flipping to favored scenes. Do you restart a comic book and read it straight through the way you did when you first encountered it?

Here is my prompt for you: which comics have spent the greatest amount of time reading? For academic reasons, for your job, for fun, for nostalgia, to settle arguments–what are the comics that you personally read and reread?

And why?

22 thoughts on “A Reading, A Rereading, and a Question

  1. I’ve reread Watchmen a lot…and of course it sort of calls for that, with all the hidden clues and intertwined narratives and so forth.

    I’m actually rereading Nana now, which is a lot of fun — I don’t remember a lot of it, and it’s nice to be following it in bigger chunks rather than one book at a time as it comes out. I’d forgotten, or hadn’t realized on first read, how little time Nana and Nana spend together; the book is almost about their separation and the consequent longing….

  2. First off, I never read with the sole intent to analyze. That’s something I worked hard to shake off thanks to graduate school, I think the primary read-through should be sheer entertainment. Otherwise, you aren’t reading right.

    I reread all the time, books, comics. I tend to reread one-in-done collections a lot, or shorter multi-volume series. I reread stuff to enjoy it, pick up little newer jokes and artistic things.

  3. I think Rohan at the Louvre is the last book I actually re-read. I think your suggestion is a good one. There are books I constantly have open and am looking at, but sitting down and actually reading the thing is not something I do enough.

  4. I used to read every comic I reviewed at least twice, mainly because I wanted to be able to experience it first purely as a reader. I wanted to just let it sweep me up the first time around, without worrying about stepping outside of it all the time so that I could analyze it (or my thoughts about it). I wanted this, not only to preserve my own enjoyment, but because I thought it gave me the most well-rounded perspective as a reviewer. If I didn’t ever let myself be pulled completely into the comic, how could I assess it fairly or even usefully?

    Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly found that I simply don’t have the time for this process. Re-reading a comic has become a luxury I can seldom afford. Still, I really *love* to re-read, and I do it whenever I can. Now, my choices for re-reading are favorite series that always seem to have something new for me to discover (Fumi Yoshinaga is always good for this–I’ve probably reread Antique Bakery, Flower of Life, and Ichigenme…the First Class is Civil Law each more times over than any other manga) or epic favorites I’ve been able to justify as fodder for leisurely roundtable discussion, like Banana Fish, Please Save My Earth, NANA, Tokyon Babylon… This kind of re-reading is especially rewarding, because I get to talk to very smart women along the way as well.

    The truth is, if i had all day, every day available for reading, I would probably spend more than half of that time re-reading.

  5. I always reread anything I write about at least once. I think my first readings tend to be a little quick and careless.

    I’ve always been purposefully reading a lot the past couple years. Comics I’ve reread lately: Red Colored Elegy (for like the 5th time), Olivier Deprez’s Lenin Kino, Huizenga’s Gloriana. I reread Porcellino a lot (it helps his work is short so I can just grab a volume and read a few comics). I tend to reread manga, especially series I’m reading in progress that don’t come out frequently. I’ve gone through most of Vagabond more than once.

    I definitely feel more is gained in rereading (or rewatching or relistening depending on the medium) if the work is good. Poorer works tend to read best the first time and only get worse the more you pay attention to them.

  6. It’s interesting that people feel that analysis interferes with reading pleasure. That’s just absolutely not the case for me at this point, if it ever was. Thinking through how a piece of art I love works almost always makes me appreciate it more and see things in it I wouldn’t have otherwise. And really, I don’t even know how I’d separate analysis out from reading pleasure. I don’t feel like my brain is split into immersive and analytic…so, for example, the way an artist handles gender roles is something that is a pretty visceral part of how I respond or don’t respond to art, I think.

  7. Noah, analysis is pleasurable for me as well. But it requires me to distance myself from the work a little, and if the story is good enough to really immerse me in its universe, I don’t want to have to force myself to stop or to stand back from it. This is especially true for me, I think, because it really takes *work* for me to find words for my thoughts, and though that’s work I ultimately enjoy, it’s not something I want to have to do while I’m reading something for the first time. I’ve never been a strong multitasker. :) I agree that certain strong reactions can be part of that immersive experience, but it still requires distance and work for me to translate that into language, or even just into linear thought. The exception would be if I’m reading something I really loathe. In those cases, my mind instinctively leaps to a distance and starts creating words with which to describe my loathing.

  8. There were comics before 1958? Anyway, I will reread those early storys of Amazing Spider-Man for the rest of my life. By ‘early’ I mean until the moment Gwen Stacy dies and the Punisher appears. Loss of innocence and all that.
    Goes for Carl Barks´ Lost in the Andes too but without the cathartic moments. Oh, and McCloud´s Understanding Comics, which refreshes my knowledge on funny books and is always very entertaining either. For anything else there´s just not enough time left, with the exception of Bloodstrike #5.

    And finally: Nice to see some women around here.

  9. I want to second Derik’s mention of Red Colored Elegy. I think that’s probably the comic that has yielded the most fruitful re-readings for me.

    But I’ve probably reread almost every single comic I own. I thought it was an obvious, ubiquitous habit for comics peeps. In most cases it’s swifter, even, than rewatching a movie.

    Is Kevin Huizenga still advocating for a Read Comics All Day Day? Because I thought it was a terrific idea and I think I sometimes celebrate it accidentally.

  10. Michael L: I’m actually, right now (almost literally if I were able to type 2 places at once), writing an essay partially about Red Colored Elegy for that Secret Prison Garo issue.

  11. I read most of what I read once all the way through, then I read it again in chunks. I rarely read the same work sequentially more than once unless its been years and I’m either feeling nostalgic, or I’ve forgotten that I’ve already read it. This is going to sound terrible, but over the years I’ve gotten increasingly mercenary about second readings, probably because there’s a lot I want to read. In that regard I’m sort of going in the opposite direction from Darryl.

  12. I’m kind of with Nate: there’s so much brilliant stuff still to read, it’s hard to justify the time spent re-reading. Still, I’ve been looking at my straining bookshelves lately, thinking, geez, I wish I had time to re-read that, or that, or that.

    Yet, counter-intuitively, I’m more likely to re-read something I disliked the first time around, to make sure that I wasn’t just not “getting” it the first time. Sometimes I change my mind (Young Liars), sometimes I don’t (Final Crisis, the various Leagues of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Evidently I should re-read Red-Colored Elegy

    I also always re-read stuff that’s originally come out serially, since the earlier parts usually make more sense with knowledge of what comes later, and it’s easier to keep track of who’s who and what’s what. Naoki Urasawa’s Monster reads *much* better in one chunk (more or less) than as a serial, at least for me. I wonder if that will also hold true for 20th Century Boys, since I already like the hell out of that one in serial form.

    Most re-read: From Hell in total; parts of Seven Soldiers, Cerebus, Acme Novelty Library and Frank; and various Jack Kirby and Johnny R. comics. You’d think you couldn’t get much out of re-re-re-readings of one-page gag strips, but…

  13. Nate/Jones:

    I don’t understand at all. It’s harder to justify buying more and more books if one isn’t going to take the full pleasure of ownership and revisit one’s bounty. Not to be a jerk but why even buy books? Why not borrow them from the public library?

  14. One answer is that I do borrow a lot of books. Either from the library or friends. If I think I might want to revisit it, I’ll buy it. Otherwise I give it back.
    I do this with books I buy, also. If it’s something that’s just trashy fun (Golgo 13) I’ll read it, and send it off to a friend for his amusement.
    The other reason is that I do go back and re-read, but that I do it in chunks, or just skim something for the art. For example, I recently re-read a few pages from the most recent Eddie Campbell book on money,and that led me to re-read a chunk of Bacchus. Other times I’ll be reading something new, and that will put me in mind of something I read earlier, and then I’ll read part of that something… you get the idea.
    This is all just a roundabout way of saying that I keep books because I never know when I’ll feel compelled to look at them again, or even to re-read them.
    I should also add that all this tends to go in ebbs and flows for me. I’ll have periods when I do a lot of re-reading. When that happens, I want to have stock on hand.

  15. I reread for a number of different reasons. I can break it down to three basic categories. There are comics I reread for comfort/nostalgia, mostly stuff from my teenaged years thats solid enough to still hold up; and then comics I read to try and figure out what/how they do what they’re doing or trying to “decode” them or stuff that I keep pulling new reactions from. The third group, there are actually less of. These are comics I keep coming back to cause they give me a seriously visceral kick in the eyeballs (I call it an eyegasm). I reread these for an as yet ill-defined, purely visual interest. That is, I don’t quite know why (or cannot articulate) but I do.

    Specifically, I’d put things like Concrete, Madman, Nexus in the first group (I guess I’ve got a thing for 80s/90s alt superhero stuff), some of Spiegelman’s Breakdowns stuff and Hankiewitz’s Asthma in the second (or even some of Alan Moore) in the second, and things like Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie, or Mark Beyer’s stuff in the third. There’s a lot of overlap too. Jason Overby’s comics could go in both 2 and 3. Krazy Kat: 1 & 3, sometimes, etc… And there’s stuff that I wouldn’t even know how to categorize, but I keep coming back to it for one reason or another.

    Keep in mind I’m too poor/cheap to buy a lot of comics, so most of what I read does come from the library (i picked up Josh Simmon’s The Furry Trap the other day, and I’ve actually read it twice already.) I have gone on to buy some stuff after trying it put at the library. I’ve never really thought much about it, but it would be (personally) interesting to take a look at what I’ve checked out multiple times but not deemed ‘buy’ worthy…

    So, I do reread quite a bit, but I’m also quite out of the “Wednesday rush” life you talk about. Hell, I don’t even have a comics shop near enough to support that kind of habit (even if I could afford it.)

  16. Tym,
    It’s funny because the three-part system you laid out pretty much defines the comics I re-read (when I re-read).
    Your point about the library and multiple check-outs is interesting. I wonder if I’d keep some of the nostalgia comics I have around if I knew I could easily access them online in a readable format. I suspect a lot of my old comics would would get boxed and stored.

  17. Tym: the three categories, right on

    Darryl: fair question, not jerky. I buy in the hopes that I’ll (a) like the comic enough to want to re-read it and (b) get the chance to do so eventually. Also (c) it’s not that easy to get a good range of comics from the library in Sydney (because, until very recently, the exchange rate made them very expensive) and (d) sadly, I’m a hoarder. I just like having the physical books to look at on the shelf. I’m not proud of myself.

    I do ultimately re-read everything, it just can take a long time to get there, especially since the explosion of good comics/reprints/translations in the ’00s

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