by Ben Erdrich

Created on: April 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

If you don't like comic books, more than likely you aren't looking to become an avid reader. However, there are many comic books out there that can change your opinion and turn you into an unintentional avid reader anyway.

If you flat out are opposed to the idea of reading a comic, then there's probably something wrong with you because the comic book is one of the greatest storytelling formats ever. They are a combination of art and writing, and when done correctly it can turn into one of the greatest stories you will ever read. Even if you don't like comics and are convinced they are all superheroes in tights fighting the same old bad guys day in and day out.

What you may not know is how evolved the comic book format has become since the heydays of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Black and White storytelling was how it was done. Good guy vs. Bad guy, silly and dated dialogue, all the things one thinks of when the word comic book is spoken but not that descriptive of today's standards of the industry.

One day, some up and coming comic book writer decided to throw some realistic parallels into his work. That man was Stan Lee with Peter Parker and his actual real world kind of problems however unrealistic and simplified they were for the time. At the time, most comics were whimsical and let you escape reality with some wild and crazy adventure with cartoonish characters. Today most comic books have a lot of realism in them in some form. While the story may involve the last son of some exploded planet fighting aliens to protect the Earth, it is usually done in a realistic fashion. Or at least as realistic as you can be with that concept, by using dialogue and more serious styles of drawing.

In the 1980s, a renaissance came over the comic book world. Darker tones were set and the writing evolved from there as did the art. A man from Britain came and wrote a story about superheroes in a real world setting and how politics changed everything for them. That story was "Watchmen" by Alan Moore. Then a fellow by the name of Frank Miller took Batman 20 years into a dystopian future and created "The Dark Knight Returns" and the entire industry was reborn. Campy characters, light and fluffy cartoonish worlds were replaced with a real world setting. That kind of writing exists today, more and more the superheroes are put in a modern world mirroring the real one.

But it's not just superheroes today. The industry has evolved into multiple genres, or actually revived multiple genres from

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