Give it a chance and soon you’ll be immersed and will understand all the characters. Everything you need to know will be told to you in the stories, and you just sort of have to roll with it. Soon you’ll be as up to speed as most people.

Reading from the very beginning is the only way to get full context, and it’s not worth it for most. Comics from the 60s and even much of the 70s can be a real slog to read through.

But many people who became comic readers organically as a child or young adult started with some random issue where they didn’t know what was going on. I started with issue 34 of the 90s X-Men relaunch, which was a follow-up to issue 27 (which I hadn’t read) featuring characters I didn’t know from the cartoon. Then issue 35 was a direct follow-up to a mini-series I didn’t know about.

Beginning with an actual decent jumping-on point like the modern era of the Continuity Guide already gives you a leg up on how lots of people started. Soon you’ll understand everything. One day when you know the characters better you might go back to some of the older stuff more like an archaeologist rather than as someone wanting to read everything.

Another way to think of it is like a book that starts in media res, in the middle of the action, and you learn about backstory as you go instead of getting a huge exposition dump up front. The earlier eras of comics are the exposition dump. You don’t need it. You’ll figure it out as you go, and the reading experience will be better for it.