Comicstorian Tribute: My Journey Into Comics

So i'm a bit late to the tributes. It's been about two weeks but a lot of reasons played into. First of all, I wanted to wait a bit until more details were revealed and then I had some personal issues to deal with ranging from issues with my job and having to deal with a family emergency as well so only now did I finally get the chance to write this.

For those who don't know, a few weeks ago, Youtuber Ben Potter died in a car accident at the age of 40. He was best for doing dramatic readings of comic books on his channel Comicstorian.

I really wanted to pay tribute to him because while I didn't regularly follow his channel, he was one of the three channels that really got me into comic books (the other two are Linkara and Comic Drake if you're wondering).

Funny enough, despite me just saying that, I didn't initially come to his channel for comics but rather for video games. Back in 2013 or 2014, I was really into the Assassin's Creed franchise and I wanted to learn more about the lore, the backstories behind the Assassins, the Templars, Desmond, Altair, Ezio, the Kenways, the First Civilization, etc. So I was looking up lore video on Youtube, I stumbled upon Eligible Monster, a channel in which Ben would recap stories in video games. I really enjoyed watching those Assassin's Creed videos and I would constantly replay them. Now it didn't immediately make me go searching for his other works but it was important as he had a very recognizable voice.

Years later, I stumbled upon the Comicstorian channel. I don't remember exactly what I was doing to discover it. I think I was looking up videos of Planet Hulk after seeing a review of the film adaptation and a review of the comic's sequel. World War Hulk. I eventually tumbled upon a 100 minute reading of not just the Planet Hulk comic but also World War Hulk. I recognized his voice as guy who did those Assassin's Creed videos and that's one of the reasons that got me more invested in his work.

Like I said earlier, I wasn’t subscribed to him nor did I watch his videos constantly. Usually because I wanted to read the comics first before getting a reading. Additionally, he uploaded so much that we just so many stories I wasn’t interested in. I had watched some of his more popular videos just the injustice and civil war videos. His Injustice video even got me more into the games as prior to that, I just viewed it as some DC fighting game I didn't care about.

Last year, I actually starting to watch more of Ben's videos than I was before. This primarily came from me seeing a Comic Drake doing a video on comic vs manga industry and the manga industry has been more commercially successful even here in the states. Shortly later, I was recommended a similar video from Ben comparing comics to not just manga also to regular books and webtoons. Shortly after, I looked up some videos reviewing manga and I found that Ben make a channel reviewing manga. Most famously on this channel, he had been covering the One Piece manga which of this post, has over 1000 chapters. He got pretty far, making it up to chapter 902. In fact, he got more interested in One Piece. Still have read or watched it yet since still, it's pretty long. He even started Black Clover, while it had a rough start, I heard it got a lot of praise by the end its run on Weekly Shonen Jump.

Sadly though, he never got a chance get far into it as his not only did his first Black Clover video ended up being his only one but also his last manga video ever. On June 10, his widow, Nathalie, announced his passing.

R.I.P. Ben. You'll always me and many other comic book fans' hearts and your videos will continue to grow in popularity and will continue to bring in new generations of fans.

To lead us out, here's a song related to a comic he sadly never covered but is somewhat fitting to recent events:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0tHOTQBn2M4CD2dcyHivth?si=45eea34324ee45e4