Postal: The comic that changed my reading life!

I’ve been collecting and reading comics for decades but for a lot of that time I was a complete Marvel Zombie! I was buying all those issues that my mum threw away when I was a child because “they’re messy!”. I spent many hours online and at comic shows searching through 1000’s of issues to find those precious issues of Fantastic Four, X-Men, the Avengers and Hulk that I used to idolise as a small boy.

Then one (probably) rainy day in February 2015 a friend of mine told me to jump on Postal #1 written by Bryan Edward Hill and Matt Hawkins and drawn by Isaac Goodhart. Apparently it was going to be “the next Walking Dead”. Not in terms of story (it’s got nothing to do with walkers!) but in money terms, this guy was convinced it was going to increase in value and earn me a fortune. Now clearly he was very wrong about that bit but I dutifully followed his advice and went around all the comic shops in my local area and bought a few copies from each and I even subscribed to it from my main comic shop.

I let the comics pile up for a few months but then (finally) decided to read it! Don’t forget, until this point I was a complete Marvel Zombie, if the main characters didn’t fly about in spandex or have ridiculously over hyped fights then I just wasn’t interested. As far as I was concerned, comics were for superheroes and that was that. I was into comics for the sheer joy of recapturing my childhood, getting every issue of a certain run from the 80’s, remembering how reading the stories back then made me feel invincible!

I’d obviously run out of Marvel books for the time being so I decided to pick it up and see what it was all about. Now before I continue I must say, Postal isn’t the best comic in the world or anything, it isn’t some literary masterpiece that should win the Booker Prize or the Eisners but what it is, is a bloody good story! You can read the first issue on the Image website. It opened my eyes to a whole new world of comics, it made me realise that comics weren’t just about over-powered heroes bashing chunks out of each other and constantly saving the world each month. Comics could be about great stories with hidden depths, long form masterpieces using the form of sequential art to craft and weave amazing stories. This literally opened a whole new world of comics for me!

From that very moment I completely changed my reading habits, I went straight to my local comic shop and raided the new releases shelf for anything I could find from Image, Dark Horse, BOOM!, IDW. I read so many different stories in those first few months and found different things to love in each one. I bought over 800 comics in the rest of that year and found so many amazing titles like East of West, They’re Not Like Us, Velvet, Fade Out, D4VE, Big Man Plans, Names, Chrononauts, Thief of Thieves, American Vampire…. I could go on and on and on, and that’s just 2015!

That one issue of Postal completely changed comics for me, I became an Indie Evangelist! I’ve read so many great titles since then and found some amazingly talented creators who I will follow to the ends of the world. People like Jeff Lemire, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Mark Millar, Robert Kirkman, James Tynion IV, Andrea Sorrentino, Nick Dragotta, Jason Aaron - yes I know lots of those have done Marvel and DC work too but I think it’s in the Indie world where they really shine.

Check out our Indie section on the site and find your next life changing comic and let me know in the comments some of your favourite titles!