Marx for Beginners - Leandra Bourdot

Having been literally a red card-carrying socialist for a couple of years (before gravitating towards anarchism), I found Marx for Beginners to be on the irritatingly simplistic side. While illustrations could be a vehicle for heightened clarification and understanding of complex or unfamiliar concepts and theories, I found them to be here more of a distraction. They simply lacked any real cohesion with or necessity to the text, and lent the book the air of a doujinshi (amateur Japanese fan-created comic book, for those unfamiliar with manga culture.) The Communist Manifesto is written in a straightforward enough manner that I feel the time would have been better spent simply focusing on that.
My drift from socialism has less to do with Marx than with those influenced by him; communism and anarchism in effect come down to the same thing in ultimate outcome, and are simply approached from different angles of organization and struggle against the still-present capitalist system. I feel that his writings are invariably still relevant, and will continue to remain so for as long as capitalism staves off its own inevitable collapse upon itself. This comes down not simply to the areas of economics, materialism, and communist politics, those fields commonly associated with him. Marx's theories have implications for all social constructs which are today societally operational, including sexism, xenophobia, racism, etc - all those arbitrary and false divisions convenient for keeping the working class divided against itself rather than uniting and working towards the next phase in social development.
On a sidenote, inspired by Marx and not his fanboy: I've always found an interesting parallel between the teachings of Marx and the Buddha in that both deal with the topic of elimination of desire, taking up either side of the coin. Marx approaches this from a materialist standpoint, speaking to the political and economic process towards the goal of elimination of need through provision of necessary elements to all people rather than their withholding by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of their personal (insatiable) gain; essentially, elimination of suffering towards the end of desire. The Buddha-dharma, on the other hand, speaks to the process of spiritual and psychological elimination of desire, and thus the cycle of suffering / dissatisfaction. This is, of course, only a very simple summation of this idea.