You want people to think you’re interesting, so you decide to swot up on graphic novels. Oh, how times have changed. Not so long ago, if you were caught reading Superman behind the bike sheds, you’d be upside down in a trash receptacle before you could say “Kryptonite.” Now, if you can hold forth about the cultural repercussions of the caped crusader being cast as a loyal servant of the Soviet Union in Mark Millar’s “Red Son”, you’ll have the cool kids falling over themselves to invite you to their birthday parties.

You see, right now graphic novels are having a bit of a moment in Britain. They get featured in the Guardian. They win Pulitzers. Yet, in all honesty, the whole idea of comics having a "renaissance" is vastly shortsighted. If we look at the global context, European countries have been producing comics with a more ‘literary’ content better and for decades, creating works ranging from Cyril Pedrosa's little known study of bereavement, Three Shadows, to Frederik Peeters's Blue Pills, an unflinchingly honest account of the effects of HIV. In typical British fashion, just because we arrive late to the party, we pretend we invented it.

Grumbling digression aside, lets return to your current epistemological predicament. You’ve flicked through A Contract With God. You’ve got a couple of nice sound bites swimming through your brain about the depiction of people as animal’s in Art Spiegelman's Maus. If you said them at a dinner party, people would probably think you were pretty smart. But you still feel curiously inadequate. You feel like you’re floundering. Faking it. Something is missing.

First of all, it’s probably time for you to take a step back and make sure you’re doing the right thing with this whole getting into graphic novels malarkey. It’s not like adopting a cute dog that you can just tie to a gate after Christmas. It’s most definitely long term. For starters, you’re effectively committing social suicide. Most of your new friends will have acne, body odour and crippling social anxiety. I’m kidding, I'm kidding. Comics are cool now.

My main advice to the budding comics connoisseur would be to get up to scratch on Dennis the Menace, Tintin and Asterix. I’m being deadly serious – lots of the pretentious stuff that gets churned out by indie publishers can’t hold a candle to classic ‘kids’ comics. Dig out your old Beanos. Excavate those Christmas annuals. It’s amazing what a more jaded perspective can do to your old favourites. Calvin and Hobbes is an absolutely heartbreaking. The things that Charlie Brown says in Peanuts are genuinely, terrifyingly, profound. And, take the cat out of Garfield, and you’re left with a grimly accurate portrait of neurotic suburban isolation.

If you want to adopt a different tack, you should do the same thing that Phd students do when they write their thesis about the gender specific significance of cowbells in in New Guinea, or the hitherto unexplained prevalence of blue-eyed children in marmite advertising circa 1976, and go totally and utterly obscure. Forget your Moore and your Gaiman. Take your comic smarts so far under the radar that you can't help but appear dazzlingly avant garde.

Joe Sacco is doing really interesting things with the genre, by using as comics as a means of journalistic reportage. His Palestine is utterly compelling, and as affecting as the work of any war photographer or poet. Memoir is another classic road for the graphic artist to go down. Persepolis attracted huge critical acclaim, paving the way for other retrospective works such as Katie Green's chronicle of her struggles with anorexia Lighter than My Shadow.

So you've cut your teeth on a few major names. Now it’s time to really take the plunge. You'll find that once you step outside of your comfort zone and get beyond what’s seen as ‘literary’, a beautiful and bizarre world will open up to you. Get acquainted with the salt-of-the-earth crazies. Read Maggots by Brian Chippendale, all jumbled, scribbled frames and pidgin english. Reading his work is the equivalent of having an appointment with a wise but utterly bonkers witch doctor. You'll emerge blinking, elated, and very confused.

As you might expect, it gets a lot weirder. Michael de Forge's stories are strange, melting concoctions, featuring limbless beagles and terrifyingly vicious college drop outs. In Spotting Deer he's actually gone to the trouble of coming up with his own species, complete with a biological and sociological history and a creepily detailed fictionalisation of their mating preferences, involving a "caudal mucous pit" and a "sexual aqueduct".

Traditionally, comics have been branded with the dumbed down stereotype of pretty picture books, which is a crying shame, because they honestly deserve recognition as a serious and rapidly evolving branch of literature. Once you've glanced through  Ray Fawkes One Soul, or been engrossed in the blackly comic work of Charles Burns, you'll begin to realize that the world of the graphic novel is an ever expanding treasure trove of the personal, the profound, and the downright strange. Eventually, you might even find yourself reading these things for sheer enjoyment instead of conversational fodder. If so, be warned: your chances of coming back out of the rabbit hole are remarkably slim.