Reading Series: Jumping right in or playing catch up

One of my favourite super-hero comics these days is Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. If you’ve never read it, you really owe yourself a look. The stories focus on Astro City, which, like Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham, has more than its share of heroes and villains, but with Astro City, the stories focus on all sorts of different residents of the city, over the course of decades and seen through the eyes of heroes, villains, and regular folks on the street.

The problem for me is, the series actually started back in 1995, and although it has a relatively small run, the time between each new release is long enough I’m always forced to decide between trusting my memory of comics I read 20 years ago, or re-reading the entire series each time a new volume is released.

I'm currently two volumes behind the current trade (technically three volumes, but I only buy my collections in softcover, rather than the pricier hardcover versions which show up a few months earlier), and so I can either jump in exactly where I left off, or re-read seven other volumes first.

Luckily, the series is pretty excellent, so if I decide to re-read, my punishment is to read an awful lot of good comics and get myself extra excited for the new stuff.

Well look at that, I think I just answered my own question!