I picked French in school as third language in the hopes to be able to read comics (because I wanted to read some by my favorite artists that hadn't been translated), but it turned out that at least for me it's hard to read comics with so little text for context, even with the pictures to help. So after the three years (actually I did take courses for a year after school even, so actually I had four years of French) I still couldn't read comics properly, which did nothing for my motivation. I then wished that I hadn't let my parents convince me to take Latin as second language, because that turned out utterly useless, no matter what anyone claimed.

ETA: Which was supposed to express that I don't think you are that badly off if you can still follow French comics, because I never really got there even with four years of fresh language knowledge. Though admittedly I'm not really good at languages.