Comic Genius

Spoilers are everywhere. Casual fans of anything, not just comics, can find spoilers online if they know where to look. Finding–and reading–those spoilers is usually what makes a casual fan a fanatic who actively searches out the spoilery information on a regular basis.

Spoilers can be found for anything–TV, movies, comics, books, you name it. And even though I would consider myself a fanatic of all those categories, I’ve noticed that my philosophy on spoilers varies from case to case. When the Harry Potter books were getting ready for release (Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hollows, especially), I actively searched for spoilers about what was going to happen, who was going to die, etc. I regularly read the spoilers for Smallville, too.

A little while ago I was perusing Newsarama and saw that some Batman RIP spoilers were popping up in the DC forum. Yes, they were in the solicitations for the book, but solicits aren’t exactly read by most comic book readers. One of the things I don’t mind about comic spoilers though, is that while you might learn about how things are going to end up, you can still enjoy the journey it takes to get to that point. So while for book A, I might read a spoiler that character E is going to die, I still don’t know what happens with B, C, and D to get to that point where character E dies.

I do, of course, have situations where I don’t want to have any prior knowledge about what is going to happen. With Breaking Dawn, the recent Stephenie Meyer release in the Twilight Saga, I purposely stayed away from any kind of news that could have potentially been spoilery. I just didn’t want to know.

I guess the important thing to remember is that the reading of spoilers needs to be done with caution. Reading them could potentially ruin your experience. But then again, it could also enhance it by giving you the chance to focus more on aspects of the story like the character’s motivations or back stories of minor characters. Read at your own risk.