Shoutout to the guy at the Erie con who showed me how I was reading panels wrong
I've been reading comics for almost 15 years and last month at a small con in Erie this older fella watched me flip through a book and said I was reading the panels in a weird order, skipping the gutters too fast. He sat me down for like 10 minutes and showed me how the art actually points your eye, how a character's line of sight or a hand or the background shape carries you to the next panel. I grabbed the same issue I'd just read and went through it again right there, and it was a totally different story. I'd been reading words and treating the pictures like decorations, basically. The before-and-after was wild, I went from confused about a fight scene to seeing exactly why the hero lost. Now I'm going back through my shelf and I swear half the books make more sense. Has anyone else had somebody point out a reading habit like that and felt kind of dumb but also grateful?