When I was a child, I would read the comic strips in the paper as a daily ritual. The subtleties of Cathy, Hagar the Horrible and Wizard of Id were perhaps lost on my tiny self, but I was thrilled by the meticulous minutiae of these characters’ actions—three or four small squares telling a little story, a snippet of a life, their movements represented so precisely. I devoured Peanuts and Far Side books at my cousin’s house, but at some point I stopped reading comics. They were for kids or men or nerds who liked superheroes—they weren’t really for me.