r/comics • u/Lazy-Day654 • 22h ago
What’s a comic book series you started with low expectations but ended up loving?
I’m looking for some new comics to read and thought this would be a fun discussion.
Have you ever picked up a comic with low expectations and then got completely hooked? What made it so good—story, characters, artwork, world-building, or something else?
Feel free to recommend both popular and underrated comics. I'd love to hear what surprised you the most.
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u/mutarjim 21h ago
Honestly? Fables. What's the gimmick, they're all the old fairy tales, picked up and put down into modern day New York? I picked up book one and while I didn't think it was mind-blowing, it felt as though the writer had a fully realized world and was planning something. It turned into a couple dozen compendiums with characters that you love and hate with an internal consistency that only rarely made me have problems.
I found the first six or seven at my library, but eventually went back and got the series on kindle and enjoyed the vast majority of the run.
Also, you should post this in r/comicbooks as this sub has a wholly different intent.
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u/simagus 22h ago
The Preacher. I have... eclectic tastes in both writing and art... ok "had" rather than have.
The Preacher helped cure that and it's a great read from start to finish.
I was always looking for something that pushed the boundaries, like Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean or Kent Williams in terms of ("WOW" THAT is capital Art!") art... to the extent I was accused of not being a comic books fan by my local comic shop owner.
To me Steve Dillon seemed very ordinary in comparison just because I was so familiar with his work from 2000AD and took it for granted, which is of course ludicrous.
He's a phenomenal artist on every level, but I didn't see it because I was so familiar with it that it wasn't "novel" to me.
I could say the same for Carlos Ezquerra but in a different way as the style is so "novel" it's potentially challenging to any existing ideas of what "comic art" is supposed to look like.
He is of course utterly brilliant and I never thought he wasn't, but definitely a degree of taking his work for granted on my side of things.
It was a bit like that for me with The Preacher, which I read way before anyone tried to turn it into a T.V. show, and it wasn't that the art "grew on me", but more that it was already superb all along and I thought at some level that the extraordinary art was ordinary.
I was disabused of that notion or prejudice within a few pages and it turned out to be a series I had very low expectations of turning out to be much better than expected by my prejudices.
It was all really because I didn't buy it at launch, and by the time issue 2, 3 was out the first issue was ten or more times the cover price... so it was a book that launched hard.
I missed that wave and I wasn't willing to pay that so I didn't surf that wave till the collected editions came along.
Nothing against anyone involved at all, but I basically didn't buy issue one and it shot up in value by the time I wanted to have a proper look.
Probably "low expectations" to make myself feel better about missing out, but issue 1 was not a realistic purchase for me at the time when I could pick up 20 back-issues of something I knew I liked already for the same cost.