Not everyone who reads comics likes superhero comics, which is a little (only a little!) weird, since it is the predominant genre of the medium. It’s like enjoying fast food but refusing to eat french fries. Or, if that makes comics sound too trashy, it’s like enjoying a delicious and well-prepared steak but refusing to eat a roasted potato or whatever.

Before this metaphor falls apart any further, let’s get to the point: One of the very fun things about comics is the way that they assume (and reward) a basic familiarity with the language of the superhero genre.

For example: Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá’s Casanova, a comic that is at least partially built on the joke of increasingly obscure and nonsensical acronyms — which we know from the language of superhero comics is riffing on Marvel’s super-spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (plus H.A.M.M.E.R. and A.I.M. and many others). Casanova is about a thief named Casanova Quinn whose father is the head of a super-spy organization called E.M.P.I.R.E. (Extra Military Police Intelligence Rescue and Espionage), and the first issue quickly makes the joke of there also being a villain who refuses to say what the acronym name of his evil organization (W.A.S.T.E.) stands for.

That’s a good joke! And it might play well in any other medium (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby didn’t invent the idea of an intelligence organization having an acronym for a name), but it plays specifically well in a comic book because it’s a comic book referencing a thing that comic book readers recognize from comic books.

The acronym-based humor is also a good signpost for the tone you can expect from Casanova, which is full of wackadoo comic book nonsense (and that’s a complimentary use of the word “wackadoo”). The first issue introduces professional thief Casanova Quinn, the black sheep son of the guy who runs E.M.P.I.R.E. and the brother of E.M.P.I.R.E.’s top agent, Zephyr Quinn. After Zephyr is killed on a mission, a villain named Xeno (leader of W.A.S.T.E.) transports Casanova into an alternate universe where he was the super-spy who got killed and his sister is the professional criminal. In order to stick it to every version of his dad in the multiverse, Casanova agrees to work with W.A.S.T.E. to infiltrate E.M.P.I.R.E. and bring it down from the inside.

Complicated wackadoo nonsense! Even as comic book stuff has become hugely important to the global monoculture, that kind of absurd logic is still at its best in the floppy pages — or onscreen in an unnamed corporate comic book app, wherever you do your reading.

Let’s check out some manga! I understand that Blame! is hard to follow, but what I’ve seen so far is cool.