The appearance of the Punisher in season 2 of the Netflix Daredevil show reminded me of this. I used to be an avid comic book collector, but I just could not get into Daredevil. My first experience with the character was in a two-issue crossover with The Punisher; the story started in one title and ended in the other (can’t recall which order). I liked DD in that story, so I decided to pick up his title on a regular basis.
I thought it sucked ass. This was somewhere around 1988-89, and the ongoing story at the time involved DD/Matt Murdock’s relationship with the Typhoid Mary character. Issue after issue of, basically, Typhoid Mary fucking with DD/MM’s head. I dropped the title after a few issues because I couldn’t make any sense of what was going on. I didn’t enjoy a superhero story where the main character is constantly getting his ass handed to him because his head was messed up. It was just bleak, bleak, bleak, with no end in sight, and having not read the beginning of the story arc, I had no context for what was happening. John Romita Jr.'s godawful art made it even worse. I gave up on it and never went back to the title.
Some years later (2004-2005?) I decided to try out DCs JSA, because I was a huge Justice League fan and assumed that the Justice Society would be similarly appealing. Unfortunately, it seems that I came in just after some major event, and the members of the JSA were now dealing with the aftereffects, which appeared to be mostly interpersonal relationship problems. And that went on, and on, and on … A full year/12 issues later, I came to the realization that I couldn’t identify most of the characters by their code names (largely because they constantly addressed each other by their “real” names), nor did I have any idea what superpowers most of them had. For example, I saw that Mister Terrific had these floating ball things, but I had no idea what they did. Realizing that, after a whole year, I still didn’t “know” these characters, just dropped the title.
*Fringe. *I hadn’t seen the series at all, then a network started showing them . . . in random order. I watched maybe 15-20 episodes, then gave up trying to make sense of it all.
Park and Recs first season is unbearably uncomfortable…Is Leslie going to be stupid like this all the time? Is her mom going to torture her like this the whole season??
I do this all the time with comics, because I can only afford the 2/$1 ones (“Fiddy Cen’ Bin” in street patois). So that means instead of spending $20 on Daredevil #1-4 of the new current series where I could follow the storyline, I’ll come across some gems from The Good Ol’ Days that have nothing to do with each other:
“Hey, here’s a classic Frank Miller starring the Kingpin, and a weird one where DD’s a zombie. And here’s an old one where he’s fighting… Stilt-Man? WhaaaaDaFuuuh… a guy who just wears…oh, I gotta get this!”
I have almost no hope of connecting these different continuities, so I just go with the flow: “Wow, guess everyone’s heard that he’s Matt Murdock in this series. Oh, but here’s one where no one knows, and here they ‘know’ that DD is really Mike Murdock, Matt’s swingin’ twin brother!”
I somehow missed the original Terminator movie and then for some reason I went to see Terminator 2 when it appeared in the movie theaters. Boy was I confused, but I still liked it. It made a lot more sense when I finally got a chance to watch the first movie.
I watched the first episode of an anime called Azumanga Dioh and I didn’t think to much of it. Later I saw a clip of another episode which was absolutely hilarious. So I decided to rewatch it. I’m glad I did.