Think about the last time you read something for fun that wasn’t a Snap chat group chat or a TikTok caption. For a lot of us at Fallston, the honest answer is probably “a really super-duper long time ago.” We live in an era of instant scrolling. In our hunger to consume media as fast as humanly possible, we are missing out on one of the best twists of creative storytelling and art: the comic book.
To be fair, part of the reason we don’t read them is a lack of access. If you suddenly decide you want to pick up the newest issue of Batman or Spectacular Spider-Man on a Wednesday after school, where exactly would you go? Harford County has become a desert when it comes to local comic book shops. Sure, you can go into Barnes and Nobles and maybe find a good comic book or graphic novel, but that defeats the purpose entirely. A real comic shop is a community hub. It’s a physical space where you can wander the aisles, flip through the physical pages, and step away from the algorithm deciding what you should look at next.
Since we don’t have these physical spaces locally, a lot of kids today are losing the actual skill of reading a comic book. That might sound ridiculous, it’s just words and pictures, right? But it actually requires a specific kind of focus that we are forgetting how to use.
There is genuine art for reading comics. The real magic happens in the blank space between the panels, which artists call the ‘gutter.’ When you see a character throwing a punch in one panel and the bad guy falling backward in the next, the comic didn’t actually show you the impact. Your brain did. You must actively participate to fill in the missing pieces and make the story move. It’s a completely different and much more engaging mental exercise than passively sitting back, letting a Marvel movie do all the heavy lifting for you.
You can’t solve a problem if you can’t see a problem. And the problem right now is that without local comic shops to anchor the hobby, this incredibly interactive art form is just fading into the background for kids our age. We are losing a format that forces us to slow down and engage our imaginations with careful artwork.
We need those local shops back in our area. But until someone opens one up, do yourself a favor; borrow a graphic novel from the library or hunt down a physical issue somewhere. Sit down, unplug, and actually turn a page. You might be surprised by how much of the story your own brain fills in.
