I am going to assume you haven’t read much more of my blog than this post. If you do, you’d probably see that I am very much pro-comics for everyone and I’m definitely not about dividing people.

I like both The Sandman and Strangers in Paradise. I have and I will recommend them both to women and men who’d like to read comics.

My point here is that a woman who has expressed interest in comics like How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and other down-to-earth autobiographical comics may not be particularly interested in the soap-opera melodrama of Strangers in Paradise or the epic rambling narrative of The Sandman. (She might be — this is true — but I’m just going by the books she’d said she read.) That doesn’t mean those two comics are always going to be the wrong answer to the question of “What comics should I read?” Just that I don’t think they’re always going to be right ones, either.

So John, if a friend came to you and said she’d read the comics in that particular list in the question I’d linked to and wanted to know what to read next, what would you recommend to her? I am honestly curious.

I think in some circumstances, the usual choices can be the best choices. After all, they became the usual choices for a reason. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. And I think too many people turn those choices into that.

There are certainly times when The Sandman or Strangers in Paradise are going to be the best answers. In this particular case, though, they weren’t. People don’t need to know of obscure things to give good answers, but I just want them to try a little bit harder to give an on-point answer.