As the child of a megageek, I have grown up around superheroes. Giant, glossy-paged Marvel and DC character guides are lined up with mythology collections and anthologies on my parents’ bookshelves.

As a young, impressionable child, I quickly developed a marked preference for the X-Men. Their origins were cooler than your average government-experiment-gone-wrong story. Their costumes were (usually) less mesh, more leather.

They dealt equally with social issues and the problems that come from putting a bunch of super-powered teenagers in an enclosed location. I learned a frankly, disturbing amount of trivia about my favorite characters and proceeded to dominate at those sections of the Marvel Scene-It game.

I can’t unfailingly declare myself an X-Men fan, however, for one very simple reason: I’ve never read X-Men comics. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. As a teenager in the 2000s, looking through the list of X-Men continuations alone is a daunting prospect.

The cyclical nature of comic books and the constant reboots, retcons and offshoots means that, according to the Marvel database, there are 20 broad categories of X-Men comics. These series add up to well over 1,000 comics to go through, all with different storylines and continuity issues to deal with.

In short, no part of this medium is conducive to new readers just ‘jumping right in.’

I read comics and have been for a few years. I’ve been working my way through Darkhorse comics’ “Hellboy” and B.P.R.D. volumes after watching the Guillermo del Toro movies several years ago. These publications have a broad, overarching plot with several volumes intended to be read in chronological order, but even more are framed like short stories that can be consumed without need for extensive context.

I recently picked up Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics, a 10-volume run published by DC. The issues are fairly substantial for their price, clearly labeled so that the story can be followed in order, and are not a huge reading commitment, together or individually. But I am afraid that when it comes to the huge comic franchises, my experience may be limited to movie-watching.

Marvel and DC may have become too overwhelming for new readers, those of us not raised in a time period and culture where comic book reading was the norm. Prior generations had the benefit of years in which to latch onto this genre and keep up with the reading.

Beginning with the original series would be like a brand-new “Doctor Who” fan watching every single original episode before starting “New Who,” the revival that began with the introduction of the Ninth Doctor in 2005, a natural starting point for many millennial fans.

If anything can fix this problem, it is the fact that comics inevitably reboot themselves. A new series of Ms. Marvel, featuring a brand-new heroine, in February 2014. Its use of a Pakistani-American teenager has already earned decent reviews, and other timely regenerations could allow younger fans to make their way into the comic world.

As it stands, the inadvertent exclusion of newcomers means that Marvel and DC are missing out.

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