The Comic That Made Me Love Comics: A Retrospective on 8-Bit Theater and Other Webcomics

Every love story has a beginning. This is a relatively innocuous truth, but it’s an important one to remember especially the older you get. The love I’m talking about today is not romantic in nature although there is a deep-seated passion underlying the contents of this article. No, today’s story is more akin to an origin story of how I became the prolific comic reader I am today, although there are surprisingly few superheroes involved. Before I was a staff writer here at Black Nerd Problems, I recounted how my journey into physical comics started in 2010 when I discovered a shop on the Delmar Loop in St. Louis. Before that I loved graphic novels from the greats like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. But before all of that happened, there was a different inciting incident, a particular story that itself starts with a search for something special…

Gateway Media In middle school, I was very much a nerd, although back then I spent a disproportionate amount of time playing video games compared to the rest of my nerdy hobbies. You may or may not remember the pre-YouTube/pre-Reddit era of the internet where information was mostly given in text-based format, and thus you may or may not remember a site called GameFAQs, a hosting site for various user-generated text based guides. This was the pinnacle of video game aides given that Prima Strategy Guides cost money that exceeded allowances. I used the site daily, voting in their polls, looking up information for my limited play time, and…