I’ve been thinking a bunch lately about the concept of a comfort read, in large part because I’m working my way through Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Volume 1, which feels like the platonic ideal of a comfort read for me specifically. I don’t mean that purely in the sense of, “I feel nostalgic for these comics, which I first read as they were coming out 35 years ago,” although, yes, there’s obviously the comfort of familiarity and nostalgia at play here.
Even when I was first buying them as a teenager, though, these were comfort reads to me. There were American comics that I bought at the comic store, and ones that I’d buy in the local grocery stores and newsagents; the distinction was that ones from the comic store were (a) two to three months newer than the ones in newsagents, (b) more reliably available, as newsagent hauls were based entirely on what backstock they had available, and (c) twice as expensive, if not more so, if my memory is reliable. That said, the cost was more than worth it for the comics I was truly passionate about, the ones I self-consciously told myself I “collected,” as opposed to the other ones, which I just… read, I guess…?
All of the Superman comics fell into that latter category, but I bought them every month without fail, and read them and re-read them. They were reliably entertaining, if rarely thrilling, with a mix of relatively low-key stakes and soap opera that made them simultaneously essential and inessential reads: something that I wanted to keep up with, without question, but not to the point where I felt like I had to rush the experience or, for that matter, pay extra for it. They were just solid, enjoyable, reads. The very definition of a comfort read, even back then.
I say that not as faint praise, but as praise, entirely: reading the stories today, I’m finding myself charmed by how low intensity they are, but perfect popcorn reading even now. More superhero comics should remember that not every story needs to save the world, and not eery story needs to be top of the stack reading, as long as it’s in the stack somewhere.