I didn’t really get into comics until late in my life. I didn’t read them much as a kid – hell I didn’t really read much of anything as a child.
I was more of a watch-or-listen-to-something-kind-of-kid. And being an ADHD-ridden youngster with a very small attention span and the need to do anything but stay still and read, it made it very hard to get into a media like comics.
It didn’t help that I was a very bad reader, speller and writer as a kid. Hell, I was bad at English in general. It wasn’t a shock to me that I didn’t see myself doing something that involved any of those things when I grew up. The few times I did have a comic in my hands, I would normally look at the cool pictures, read any word I could, and just fill in the blanks of the story as I went along.
But my first experience of doing anything with comics, was when I was in middle school; I would get bored in class and start drawing on a piece of paper – making up short comic strips to show my friends. It would eventually evolve into drawing fully flagged comic books.
I would show them to my friends and classmates, but being someone with very bad English skills, I didn’t have too many panels with words. So, they were very easy to get through. When I did do dialogue, I was very careful about it and made sure that nothing was messed up. I even had one of my friends proofread it for me after I was done drawing. I was still proud of them, nonetheless. I can’t remember much about them like what it was called or the character’s names, but I do remember that it was a superhero comic, and the art style was very, very simple.
But I was a little perfectionist back then, and I would use things like rulers and protractors to make sure that all my lines and panel borders were straight, and had no loose ends. My first real experience reading a comic was not too long ago, maybe a year or two ago when I was in grade 10; so 15 years old. It was a Walking Dead comic. I was with a friend one day and we were over at his house. And I saw on his shelf a Walking Dead compendium. Now I had seen it sitting there before but I never really cared to take a look at it.
At first, I was just surprised that The Walking Dead was based on a comic, nothing else. For some reason this time was different, I was truly curious and wanted to see what it was like. I had flipped through many comics before and normally would get scared by the speech bubble packed too much with words that were tied along with hard-to-fallow panel design.
On this occasion, I took the compendium off the shelf. Just for some context, a comic compendium holds about 50 issues of a comic and a single issue is about 30 pages, so it had some weight to it. I put it down on the closest flat surfaces I could find and came to the pleasant surprise that The Walking Dead was different – very different, in fact. It was in black and white, which really helped its aesthetic, and it had smooth panelling that made the dialogue easier to read. It had a great attention grabber with an opening scene of the deputies getting shot at by a crazed gunman; it also had good overall writing. The rest of the comic involves Rick Grimes trying to get a feel for his surroundings having just woken up in the hospital, then finding out he’s in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
I was so engrossed in it that I must a read a least two or three issues right then and there. And that’s how I got myself into comics. I do believe that The Walking Dead was a great comic to start with if you wanted to get into comics as a whole. It really did help me branch out to other genres in the medium. Plus got me into some of Robert Karman’s other works as a writer.
Overall if someone wanted to get into comics, I would happily suggest starting small. Gradually making your way through it on your own time. That’s all I have to say about that for now. Thank you for reading this far ahead, and I hope to be back soon.
Written by Wes Daniels
Wes is a co-op student with Rrampt
