Posted by Sam Kressin in Opinion

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Here’s what I think about this before I even start to think about criticizing what this guy did. I asked myself honestly if I could do the same thing? Could I read one thousand Archie comic books and then write a one hundred chapter book on the subject? At this point, I would say the answer is no. Although I’ve tried several times, I have actually never read an entire Archie Comic book from cover to cover, therefore I don’t see how I would ever be able to read a thousand of them and we haven’t even got to the part about writing an entire book on it.

I think about my collection of The Batman Chronicles, a series published by DC Comics that began in 2005, intended to reprint every Batman story chronologically based on publication date. Today, there are 11 volumes in print and more volumes to come. I am a huge fan of Batman. I still haven’t read all 11 volumes, in fact, I’ve only read volume 1 and half of volume 2.

Reading all 11 Volumes of the Batman Chronicles is still something I’d really like to do. I would also like to read the entire Complete Peanuts, a reprinting of every peanuts comic strip from 1950 until the strip ended in 2000. I would also like to read the entire run of Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones, Milton Caniff’s Complete Terry and the Pirates, Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse, and several other newspaper strip runs. It’s often harder than you think to read and entire body of work like this.

When you take a character like Batman and read everything that was printed, in the order in which it was published (especially if you do it in a short period of time), you are able to witness the development of that character. You will learn how an idea develops. Often the idea did not start out as the best idea in the world, but over time it matured into something great. Finally, you can study the progression and growth of the artist(s) that worked on the project. As a comic book creator myself, there are many new ideas and techniques pertaining to storytelling, pacing, panel arrangements, and more I could discover studying these various bodies of work.

My final question is, could you take something that you are most passionate about and then narrow it down into one specific niche? And after that, read the equivalent of a thousand Archie comics books in that niche within a years time frame and write a book about it? If the answer is yes then why haven’t you done it?

fic niche? After that read the equivalent of a thousand Archie comics books in that niche within a years time frame and write a book about it? If the answer is yes then why haven’t you done it?

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