Yeah. The Yamaha ad is one of my favorites so far. The first time I looked at it, I thought "Oh. A Yamaha bike ad. This is cool." It wasn't until I read the text and then took a second look at the helmet that I realized that the ad was really for an electronic keyboard. It's clever enough to make it a definite keeper.

I get trades myself, more often than not. There's a lot of benefits to them. You can display them on your bookshelf, they're slightly more durable (if they're printed from a good publisher), and you tend to save yourself about five bucks when compared to picking up all the individual issues. The only drawback is you of course have to wait for the trades and if the book you like isn't a popular title, the publisher might not release a trade for it.

As for learning to recognize comic book authors, you're in for a treat. You'll quickly come to find that if you're not actively looking for books by a certain author, you'll at least keep an eye out for their name in case they ever work on a title that interests you. For example, I love Rick Remender for his pulp sci-fi stories Fear Agent and Black Science. When I discovered that he did a story arch for Captain America called Castaway in Dimension Z (here's the Second Book for the whole story) I had to check it out. It didn't disappoint at all.

If you ever want title or author recommendations, feel free to give me a shout out. I'll be more than happy to share. Also, I know Reddit is kind of lame these days, but the people over in r/comicbooks often have some great suggestions too.