This comment is funny.
The article complains that comics are not for kids anymore because they treat adult themes.
This comment complains that adults are somehow children because they engage with entertainment formats that were traditionally geared towards children.
I remember comics in the 1980's and they weren't pure escapist fantasy written for children. They tackled very adult subjects like reparations and slavery through the Genotia series in the X-Men and how the mutants were the stand-ins for the African Americans, where Genotia (a fictitious nation) enslaved them and America stripped their rights away, using the force of the Sentinels to do so. I was maybe 12 during this story line and it was foundational on how I treat and view people.
Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).
Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(
Comic books were only infantilized for a brief period. Have you ever read the original Dick Tracy, which was perfectly fine entertainment children in the '30s? It's hardcore. There are scenes with Tracy torturing gang members with fire. Pulp, western, romance, and horror genres dominated. All would be deemed in appropriate by this author. Children read them anyway.
Then came the Comics Code Authority, which it seems this author would like to see return. It started in the '50s and didn't officially end until much more recently. But even under the CCA in the '70s and '80s you were seeing plenty of material "inappropriate" for children. In the US kids could be found reading Claremont's X-Men, a run of comics absolutely boiling over with everything that makes conservatives angry. In Japan, where the CCA did not exist, you could find children reading things like Fist of the North Star.
Those children Are now in their 40s and 50s. Purely anecdotal, but I've never heard of even one person who was traumatized or devastated because they read such a comic book at a young age. I have heard many stories of people who's lives were dramatically positively influenced by those books such that they still remember and revere them to this day.
Let your kid read (almost) whatever comic book they want. It's not hard to avoid what truly XXX-rated material that's out there.
Having recently been on a comics binge after 20+ years of reading very few US comics and only slightly more European comics, and definitively not being very sensitive to this issue, I must admit it's still very much more noticeable today. The number of "lets make sure her ass shows" "shots" is much higher than I remember. Occasionally you even have characters comment on it. I'd think that if this was as prevalent when I was in my teens, I'd have much more vivid memories of it.
Most of the characters that were clearly targeted at children when I grew up are now clearly targeted at adults or at least teenagers. E.g. compare X-Men, Spiderman or Avengers from the last 10 years with the 1980's. The dialogue and over-exposition and extensive abuse of soliloquies alone in the 80's Marvel was something I didn't even remember from when reading it as a kid, but which makes a lot of them unreadable to me except for the nostalgia today (compare with Alan Moore's legendary Swamp Thing run which has kept fantastically), but the drawings were also lot less "realistic" and so I at least don't remember the same amount of overly sexualized images.
But at the same time, as some of the commenters on the article points out, there are also a number of titles with characters that fit better for younger readers, and some of them with female leads, and generally more diverse such as the new Ms Marvel (which is a teenage muslim girl of pakistani descent) as Marvel in particular seems to want to capture a wider audience.
> The main titles have narrowed their focus even more compared to the 80's and are now overly sexualized and aimed squarely at men in a very narrow age bracket.
They're aimed at the people who are left reading comic books: men who grew up reading comic books. Who are now adults. Kids don't read comic books and don't care to. It's been that way for quite a while. I'm willing to bet the comic book companies have done a little market research before going in this direction rather than intentionally alienating younger readers.
> and then you wonder "where are the other sections? Where's the comedy stuff? Where's the rest of the newpaper strip collections? Where are the westerns? Where are the rest of the serious graphic novels?
If those genres sold well, there'd be more of them.
> Maybe in the US.
Well, we're talking about comics in the US here aren't we?
Well, for the past 10 to 20 years kids have been reading comics less and less because they have TV and the Internet. Kids don't even go outside as much as they used to. Things change, and the comic book companies are adapting as best they can.
> Kids don't read comic books and don't care to.
> And it's interesting to ask why, when kids elsewhere do, and when US kids used to.
Yeah, interesting question. I believe the reason is many more easily accessible alternatives for entertainment. Computer games are a major factor, but also a larger amount of animation and childrens tv.
> Comics were never supposed to be educational or have any non-entertainment value and primary tarted at hormones soaked male teens.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.
I was never into comics as a kid, but started reading some after a podcaster I like sold me on how good they can be. I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, and started reading the older comics (from the 40s, 50s, and 60s)
They are a lot of fun once you understand the art form, but there are a lot of problematic things with them, just like any work from 80 years ago.
I got into reading some of them with my 5 year old daughter, and she loves the old ones. I sometimes have to explain some things to her, and why some things we read aren’t ok, but she likes them.
We also found quite a few more modern comics that are perfect for kids her age. We love reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur together, and we also love reading Squirrel Girl comics. We stay away from some of the more dark comics that feature the most popular super heroes.
I guess my point is that there are a lot more super hero comics than just the MCU ones, and some are much more kid appropriate than others. I appreciate a world that has adult and kid comics. Why can’t we have both?
One other thing I noticed with my two kids (6 and 3 now) is that what scares and traumatizes them the most aren’t the things that scare adult me the most. For example, I am way more disturbed by death than my kids. Characters dying don’t bother my kids like it does me. I think it is likely due to not really understanding what death is, exactly. They have not lost people and don’t understand the permanence.
On the other hand, random things that don’t seem scary at all can scare the crap out of them. My 3 year old will want to watch the fight to the death between sharptooth and little foot’s mom in Land Before Time over and over, but freaks out over the opening montage in Moana.
I know some people like to make fun of the Comics Code Authority, but given that comic books have always been intended primarily as entertainment for children I'm not sure what the big deal is. It was voluntary, and the restrictions required in order to get approved don't seem entirely unreasonable for children's entertainment.
Garfield, Dilbert, Foxtrot and Calvin and Hobbes is about the extent of my comic repertoire
Taking a 7 year old to a comic store is like tasking her to a pg 13 movie.. . Not too surprised it didn't work out. Comics tend to deal with adult themes and are aimed at older people.
The article and the thread leading comment are both nonsense in many ways, because you only have to look at the Comics Code[0] to determine what made comic books and superhero stories "for kids". They were sanitized to the point where they weren't telling "adult" stories and were stripped of many interesting possibilities.
Over time, the code lost its value and as of ten years ago, no comic company is following it anymore. Good riddance.
And this is a huge problem for Marvel and DC, as if they don't address the decline in popularity with children, the US comics market is set for continued decline.
They can't continue to reap the benefits of that market segment if they don't ensure there's ongoing recruitment into it.
I'm more than old enough to have a 13-year old offspring without any age-of-consent laws being broken¹, and I distinctly remember there been dark tones in comic books and² related cartoons back in my youth. It isn't a new thing.
I suspect that either there is some selective memory going on here, or the writer's parents were very careful about what parts of the comics world they were exposed to.
[1] old enough to have a 26-year-old one even
[2] though much less so as the grimier ones didn't get the TV treatment, or the grime was mostly washed off
I was more referring to ancillary incidents like the GTA V recall with the line about protesting etc, but come on. There has probably never been more comics available for young girls in history. That article reads as half "I took my kids to a seedy place because I'm a shitty parent that can't be assed to do any kind of research, and it's your fault" and half "I'm wildly exaggerating my experience because it will make for a great piece of anti-sex feminist agitprop."
> “All their…” …and her voice dropped to a whisper… “boobies are hanging out, Dad. These can’t be for kids, and comic books are for kids, and kids aren’t supposed to see that. That Wonder Woman looks like she’s in a video, and I don’t know who that is, but it’s not Harley Quinn. Harley Quinn wears clothes.”
Yeah, I'm sure his kid said this.
EDIT: Damn, random anonymous downvoter on HN, downvoted within less than a minute of my reply to an article that fell off the front page hours ago. This is not the first time you've done that, either. Do you just sit there refreshing the comment pages of "problematic" posters all day? Do you have an RSS feed of my posts? Did you actually write a downvote bot to police a glorified reddit clone? I'm flattered to have made your list, but jesus christ, go outside or something.
Children have not been the primary demographic target of comics since the mid to late eighties.
reply