By Jacob Cordas — My first introduction to comic books was through the funny pages. I remember reading a Spider-Man strip in the newspaper every week next to Hagar the Horrible and Pearls Before Swine. It was all so silly and so fun. And then I got my first comic book, a beat up copy of Spider-Man #68 from a flea market. I was blown away by the seriousness of it. I was nine years old but, with only comic strips to compare it to, this was what I imagined adult art looked like. I was a tween dragged into the tail end of ‘90s nihilism and carried away into the edginess of the ‘00s. Adulthood in the art I consumed became synonymous with darkness. For a minute, I was even a fan of Mark Millar. And, while I aged out of this for the most part, there was still a “seriousness” to my comic reading.