Welcome to Comics Connoisseur! I read, review, and recommend comic books and graphic novels in the Marvel and DC universes and beyond.
In my reviews, I’ll guide you through excellent comics to suit your tastes and moods. You’ll get to know each comic series, receive a crash course in any required continuity, and discover where to find the first volume. If you want to get started, have a look through the blog!
Recommendations are also tagged for easy searching. If you’d like a comic where you don’t need a comprehensive background on the DC and Marvel universes, you can click the beginner tag. If you want a comic you can share with your children, there’s kid-friendly. If you want recs by company, there’s Marvel, DC, and Independent. For length there’s mini-series and full series; for diversity there’s woman-led, bipoc-led, and queer reads; and for mood there’s lighter reads, dark and gritty, suspense, strange tales, and the like. Recommendations will be posted once every two weeks.
This blog rests on three principles:
- Individuality: Everyone has different tastes. I love a good sangria, my mother will stick to a dry red; I love tomatoes, my partner hates them. A comic that I love — one that is near and dear to my heart — may be practically abhorrent to you, and vice versa. Not every comic is for everyone. In fact, it’d better not be. That’d make a pretty terrible comic. Therefore, my recommendations will include comics that aren’t necessarily to my taste…but they might be to yours. Preceded by my recommendations are short lists outlining the big draws of the comic — or what might be a drawback — so you can see at a glance if the comic is worth your time.
- Accessibility: The DC and Marvel comic universes are dense, unwieldy messes. Comics have also been around for a very long while, and some are difficult to buy outside of special collections. That means I won’t be recommending some wild Venom comics from the 90s that are impossible to find, as near and dear as they were to my 12-year-old heart. Most comics will be recent — post-2000s — but I’ll recommend some oldies that are still alive and kicking.
- Thrifty: Look, comics are expensive. If you’re going to buy one, you want to make sure it’s one for you. Better yet, you might even be able to get your comic for free! Just like I want to make comics accessible, I’d like to make them easy on your wallet. Therefore, all the comics I recommend are ones that I could find through my own library to encourage you to look for them there first. The only thing better than a good comic is a good free comic, supplemented by support for your local library.
I rec mini-series or full runs rather than individual issues — comics you can really sink your teeth into while getting to know and love these characters. I will be doing a mix of Marvel and DC, with a few independent comics thrown in to liven things up. Some of those independent comics will include comics outside of the superhero fantasy/sci-fi genre — in case superheroes aren’t your thing, but you’re still a fan of the comic genre.
Have your own comic series or graphic novel that you’d like me to review? Feel free to contact me on Twitter, Facebook, or tumblr, or email me at mycomicsconnoisseur@gmail.com.
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Comics Connoisseur 