5 Classic Comics That Are Difficult To Read Today

Both Marvel and DC have presented some revolutionary comics that have failed to withstand the test of time. The comic book medium has evolved dramatically since its earliest days. The Golden and Silver Ages are vastly different from what readers expect today, as storytelling and visual language have all grown more sophisticated over time.

What ultimately determines whether a comic ages well or poorly is how closely it's tied to the conventions and sensibilities of its era. Of course, becoming “unreadable” by today’s standards doesn't diminish a comic’s original impact or importance. But while many of these works were groundbreaking in their time, their execution may now feel outdated.

5 Golden Age Batman (& Other DC Golden Age Comics)

Batman Is Unrecognizable In His First Comics

Batman's first comics are essential to comic book history, but they can be deeply jarring to modern readers. In his earliest appearances, Batman is far closer to a pulp vigilante than the Dark Knight audiences recognize today. Golden Age Batman routinely kills criminals, uses firearms, and shows little of the moral code that later became central to his character. Many of his defining traits like his strict no-kill rule and the Batcave are either missing or only loosely formed.

Beyond Batman's characterization, Golden Age comics in general are often difficult to reread due to their storytelling style. These stories are extremely wordy, with excessive narration and dialogue explaining what the art already shows. Plots are straightforward to the point of being simplistic, and they often resolve conflicts quickly with little thematic complexity. While groundbreaking for its time, the art is visually plain by modern standards, with stiff figures and limited colors.

This issue extends well beyond Batman to most Golden Age DC Comics, including Superman. Early Superman stories also lack many of the elements that later defined the character, including his full power set and his rogues gallery. While Golden Age comics laid the foundation for everything that followed, they often work better as historical artifacts than as engaging reads. Their importance is undeniable, but their readability hasn't aged as gracefully.

4 Silver Age Spider-Man (& Other Marvel Silver Age Comics)

Old-School Superhero Comics Are Difficult To Get Through

Like Batman's earliest appearances, revisiting Spider-Man's first comics can be a surprisingly difficult experience. While Peter Parker’s main appeal is present from the start, those early stories often portray a rougher, less nuanced version of the character. Spider-Man frequently swings between self-pity and moral grandstanding, and many of his defining relationships and long-term themes are still embryonic. Much like other early Marvel heroes, Spider-Man reads more like a concept being tested than a fully realized figure.

Readability is the biggest hurdle. These comics are intensely wordy, often drowning panels in narration and internal monologue that restates the obvious actions. Dialogue is blunt and overly expository and stories tend to resolve within a single issue, leading to an aggressively episodic, villain-of-the-week structure. Conflicts escalate and conclude so quickly that very little dramatic weight has time to settle. While energetic, the art is comparatively simple and static, relying heavily on captions.

Other comics like Chris Claremont’s X-Men are also famously dense and wordy, though X-Men benefits from longer storytelling and character arcs that unfold over years. As influential as early Marvel comics are, their rushed pacing and heavy-handed storytelling often relegate them to historical study. Although their legacy endures, their accessibility has undeniably eroded with time.

3 Marvel's Ultimates

Ultimates Shows Its Age And Falls Apart At The End

Marvel’s original Ultimates line was genuinely transformative when it launched in the early 2000s. It reimagined the Avengers with a cinematic sensibility years before the MCU existed and updated them for modern readers. Bryan Hitch’s widescreen art and Mark Millar’s decompressed storytelling helped redefine how blockbuster comics could look and feel, influencing not just Marvel but the entire industry. Even two decades later, The Ultimates and Ultimates 2 clearly deserve to be called classics for how decisively they reshaped mainstream superhero storytelling.

That said, The Ultimates has aged faster than many of its contemporaries. Its aggressively edgy tone, once seen as bold and mature, now often reads as mean-spirited. Several character portrayals like Captain America and Hulk lean too hard into shock value. The Ultimate Universe's obsession with brutality and sex overwhelms large portions of the series.

The entire Ultimate Avengers experiment collapses with Jeph Loeb's Ultimates 3, which abandons the grounded tension from earlier volumes and replaces them with wildly inconsistent characterization and gratuitous shock twists. Ultimates 3 doubles and triples down on its universe's nihilism and launches the beginning of a tragic end for the whole continuity. Knowing that this is where the Ultimate Universe collapses makes the journey feel incomplete and unrewarding.

2 DC's Crisis On Infinite Earths

Crisis On Infinite Earths Gets Increasingly Harder To Re-Read

Crisis on Infinite Earths was one of the most monumental events in comic book history. Conceived as a line-wide reset, it aimed to collapse DC’s sprawling multiverse into a single, unified continuity, bringing together decades of characters and alternate timelines. At the time, it was unprecedented in scale and ambition.

Crisis on Infinite Earths' influence is undeniable, as it effectively created the modern concept of the crossover event as a publishing centerpiece. However, it's also deeply flawed as a reading experience, especially by modern standards. The plot is stuffed with hundreds of characters who appear, disappear, and reappear with little room to breathe. Even worse, it assume an encyclopedic familiarity with DC lore that many readers simply don't have.

This latter problem only gets bigger with time, as DC drifts farther and farther from the original context. The event was designed to solve very specific continuity problems rooted in the pre-Crisis multiverse, many of which no longer exist or even matter. DC has since rebuilt, discarded, and reinvented the multiverse multiple times, rendering many of Crisis’s details irrelevant. As a result, large portions of the story now read like a historical document, worthy of respect, but progressively less accessible.

1 Watchmen

Watchmen Will Never Be As Groundbreaking As It Was Originally

Watchmen fundamentally changed how superhero stories could be told. Upon release, it dismantled the genre’s idealism through sharp political satire. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons questioned power and hero worship at a time when superhero deconstruction was still novel.

Yet, Watchmen will never feel as groundbreaking as it once was, precisely because its innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed by the medium. In the decades since its publication, countless stories have refined and modernized Watchmen's ideas. Modern audiences have been shaped by generations of institutional distrust and meta-commentary.

This doesn't diminish Watchmen’s quality, but it does alter its readability and impact. Many of its themes are tied closely to Cold War anxieties and 1980s political paranoia, which can feel distant to newer readers. Like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen has become a historical landmark whose revolutionary nature has been softened by the genre it helped transform.