I believe this thought reveals the truth of Fred Brooks's famous aphorism that there is "no silver bullet" when it comes to managing complexity in software. There is no shortcut to comprehension. Comments can only help a certain amount, whether they be written by/for the original programmer, or someone following them. Often they actually cloud things, or are a distraction, and often do not keep up with the code as it itself is changed.
The proof of this is in coming back to a piece of code written by yourself or another, and trying to understand why it behaves in a particular (wrong) way when it shouldn't. By definition, comments (and indeed code) are written with the amount of understanding available to the programmer(s) at the time they wrote it, which is by definition finite. There is no shortcut to simply putting in the effort to understand what it is actually doing.
