How to enjoy comics?

It varies. I don't necessarily adore the old 60s Stan Lee hyperbolic style but I can put up with it enough to get into the storytelling, concepts and art. Whereas the wordy 70s Marvel style - even in the hands of a master - I find much harder going.

Can we finally put the term "rockist" to rest outside of ILM if it's just Ilxor for "person who doesn't like some things"? Or is that word rockism?

Context is definitely key for me -- a lot of stylistic things, phrasings, etc., I'll read differently in a 1960s comic than one new today -- but that's no different from any other medium. If something like the Brando Streetcar Named Desire came out now, it would look ridiculously stylized and artificial, even though it was considered so realistic at the time; nevermind Shakespeare, even 19th century writing -- or much from the early 20th century -- would sound wrong from a modern writer; etc.

i have to admit i find bad "literary" writing in comics (i.e., neil gaiman) far more annoying than the ordinary bad writing you find in old marvel comics and the like. i think this makes me a comics popist.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Dr Strange unreadable -- it's no worse than Stan Lee's non-Spidey/non-FF stuff from the time, and it's shorter. Not every story was a winner, but you can sort of see the development from filler backup character to full-fledged protagonist (and eventually deus ex machina for the rest of the MU, long after the Lee/Ditko run ended). The way characters like the Ancient One are tossed in more or less for the hell of it at first, or arcane names rattled off left and right for flavor, and then those things get fleshed out as the character survives long enough for them to need to be -- all of that is done much better than most comics that went through similar evolutions. (Wolverine is the extreme example of how it can go terribly wrong -- too extreme to be a meaningful contrast, really.)

Yeah I thought the commenter was harsh on Dr. Strange. As Al says in the comment I'm about to put up, the art (which is the main reason to read it) forces Stan to respond.

Yeah, the wordy 70's Marvel style is really hard going...I've found you just kind of have to work your way through. When I first bought the first two volumes of "Essential X-Men" I was really hugely disappointed, and stopped raeding after the second story, pretty much. But then I gave it another try, and by the time I was done with the second volume it wasn't a problem anymore at all: the characters, despite their pompous dialogue, had become truly likeable and entertaining to me. Of course the question comes up here of whether or not one should bother investing so much time into learning a comic's "language"; I suppose wanting to do so requires some belief in the whole "approaching an artist on his own terms" line of thinking.

without wanting to let the word "rockist" infect the universe, the issue behind its use (as i use it: i have no idea what it's mutated into on ILM) is actually much the same as the wariness/amusement at the "COMICS GROW UP!!" trope ie the (anti-grownup?) values celebrated in the new um artform - what makes it DIFFT from what went before - being edged out in favour of values borrowed from what went before (viz the "good writing" in a literary and novelistic and sense; the idea that the plot-synopsis is what it"s "about", and the inking-colouring-framing etc merely secondary; indeed the whole assumption that there IS a reliable heirarchy to elements allowing us to judge quality) (what's interesting is that self-conscious attempts to break with the idea of hierarchy - wz stray toasters one of these? - often smuggle back in an even worse version of Establishment Art Snobbery... i way prefer sienkiewicz doin eg elektra to doin his own Higher Culture projects, cvz there's a useful frisson of inappropriateness - the objective correlative of his own irritation that he has to earn a living with this junk when really he's the LEFT-FIELD NORMAN ROCKWELL (or whatever he thinks of himself)

(high art anyway overvalorises pop these days, so it's just comical when up-scale pulp artists valorise the pre-popart high art worldview)

SHORTER MARK S: getting carl barks and herriman (or whoever) up on the Respectable Pantheon beside picasso and edward hopper (or whoever) might be more of a defeat than a victory, bcz maybe there's a problem w.who we are when we're excited by pantheons (?)

Re: Dr. Strange. Yeah, I guess I was harsh. Drivel is just me being flip. But I am a big Stan Lee fan, and I don't find his writing for Dr. Strange anywhere near as engaging as what he did in FF and Spiderman. Not enough humor, for starters. I don't think people would pay any attention to Dr. Strange if it had been drawn by, say, Don Heck. This is one case where the art (Ditko's best, in my view) overwhelms everything else. (I feel kind of the same about Little Nemo, too.) But with art this glorious, who cares if it's half a loaf?

Oh, it's definitely not as good, no doubt -- especially at the beginning (although I love the story that introduces Nightmare). You can tell how much more invested he is with some of his other work, especially Spidey -- there's very little character to Dr Strange, it's all Wild Ideas, whereas Spidey (and FF, somewhat less so, and even arguably X-Men at least more than Dr Strange) begins with character and then puts a costume on it.

But yeah, I won't deny that the art is a major plus -- it's one of the only three or four books on my ballot where art was a significant factor in my voting (none of them got votes specifically because of art, but it would make the difference between a #5 and a #10, for instance). Maybe my favorite silver age Marvel art, alongside Steranko's Nick Fury.

And to respond to the original question, I find it a lot easier to like a comic with great art and not-great writing than the other way around. There are some Harvey Pekar stories I don't care for that I know I would love if Crumb had drawn them, for example. (But this may be because I'm older and come from a time when there was a lot less interesting comic writing, so maybe it's just ingrained.)