Comics/Graphic Novels

Help, My Pull List Is a Towering Stack that Might Kill Me!

Swapna Krishna

Staff Writer

Swapna is the Comics Editor at Book Riot. She's a Space Columnist for Paste Magazine and writes for Syfy Wire—Fangrrls, Tor.com, Bustle, and other sites. She co-hosts a podcast called Desi Geek Girls. You can find her incessant ramblings on Twitter at @skrishna. She lives outside Philadelphia.

You know that feeling. It’s been a busy month, and things have been crazy. Maybe you’ve been traveling a lot or work’s been insane or the kids have been really busy or you’ve just had a lot going on. And you finally get to the comics shop, and it turns out it’s been two months since you’ve picked up your pull list. It’s become a pull lost, a stack of comics so high it’s having an existential crisis about whether you’ll ever come pick it up. It’s a sad, sad, pull list that is also giant.

Supernatural-Dean

So what do you do? Some people might be excited—I love letting comics pile up and reading in chunks, rather than individual issues. But there’s a certain point where I feel overwhelmed, where I feel like there is just TOO MUCH to catch up on and I’ll never read everything I want to read.

SCREAMING

So you get your pull list home, and you do what you have to do: You slowly and methodically start sorting it into piles. The piles make it seem less giant and more manageable. Right? Maybe??

possibly

Now at least it’s a bunch of smaller stacks instead of one giant stack. So…that’s better then?

yes-no

perhaps

Maybe-gif

Okay, so maybe not better then. You’ve got all these comics everywhere, and they all want to be read, and you don’t know which to read first. They’ve all got complexes about being abandoned. You want to read them all at once.

choose

But do you pick the old favorite, the one you’ve been waiting to read? Or do you save that for the middle or the end? Do you start with a new comic you haven’t read yet and risk having your reading session ruined? Or, conversely, you might adore it and get excited about comics all over again. WHAT DO YOU DO?

jessica jones drinking

abbie drinking

cryingrobin

leo crying

Finally, you can’t put it off anymore. You close your eyes, grab a stack of comics…

…and start to read.