Intelligent Life, on Earth and in the Universe

My son Alex has been on my case to read Invincible, a comic series co-written by Robert Kirkman (the writer of The Walking Dead comics) and now that I've finished the first volume, I can see why-- it's excellent: smart, funny, and surprising-- but it's difficult playing the role of the student-- usually I'm telling my children to read this or watch that, and then checking to see if they got it, but now that dynamic is reversed . . . when I asked Alex about a plot-point I didn't understand, I had to suffer his disdain and disappointment over my sloppy reading: he grabbed the book and turned to the page I missed-- a single wordless panel that explained everything I didn't understand, and I immediately knew what it was like to be a student in my Shakespeare class . . . I know where all the key quotations are in the sea of Elizabethan English, and I'm always pointing them out to lost students; anyway, I can see how Alex relates to the story-- it starts as a typical father/son adventure in the framework of a superhero milieu, and it seems the father has an archetypal escaped-from-an-alien-planet-Superman backstory but then you find out that the comic is playing with that trope, and the father is something of a lunatic, from a lunatic alien civilization, and he has a bizarre and abstract master-plan for Earth, his son, his alien people and culture, and everything else in the universe . . . and the son has to grapple with the fact that his dad is a callous overblown maniac in the guise of a father . . . perhaps I'll learn some valuable lessons from reading it.