I can already hear the debate raging about weather or not the images or particular examples in this article are acceptable or defensible or not. I think it's totally fine for the comics that this one shop has are there. Artistic freedom! Great! What's not super is that it's really the only kind. It's like netflix with only action movies.
This article should feature a bunch of blank photos representing the comics that don't exist. Those are the problem. It's ok to have super sexed-up comics in the store, but it's really sad that's all they have.
Japanese manga is fully of sexy, weird, objectifying stuff that most people really wouldn't want their kids to see, but go to a bookstore in Japan and you'll also see bookcase after bookcase of manga totally appropriate for all ages with young girls pressing their nose into them. Stories about teenage girls getting picked on at school or trying to meet the right guy or saying stupid things in class. Stories about girls who are in bands and office workers and every possible thing.
I think the comic industry, video games, tech, and geek culture in general are all going through growing pains as they find adoption in a larger market. We need more articles like this helping people realize what a "normal" comic shop could look like. The comics we have today would still be in there, there would just be more variety and the market for comics would be healthier.
> You'll country after country where the most popular comics have little to no sexualized content.
First of all, you're making the assumption that our popular comics are popular because of sexualized content (i.e., no MJ with big tits = no one is gonna read Spiderman; doubtful).
Second: Japanese Manga. When you put it in perspective, a couple scantily-clad women, eh... could be a lot worse!
> There's been a drastic change in them to in the last 20 years or so. They used to target boys, not men.
You might want to dig up some of your old comics. The women were always drawn "sexy", it's just that the boundaries of good taste have shifted. You can get away with things in terms of sex and violence that you never could decades ago.
And is it really puzzling why comics are targeting men more? It's because they're the only ones left reading comic books! Kids don't read them and don't care.
Exactly. More importantly the store owner stocks what he sells, or what he thinks sells. If more 7 year old girls came into the store everyday, he might stock something more appropriate for that audience. It is like asking a Harley Davidson dealer whether he stocks Toyota Prius's.
Young teen males buy these comics because there are half-naked, caricatured, over-sized breasted women in them. Later on they just buy porn mags, or more often these these days, just download porn from the internet.
Shouldn't all works of art be given the same treatment regardless of medium?
In any case, claiming comic books should be treated like movies, but not like books is an odd take. Comic books are like movies in the sense that they are sequential works of art, but at that level, so are books. Many illustrated children's books are, in fact, comic books.
> The graphic novels being "banned" can't be posted to Instagram or Facebook or network TV because: pornographic
This is wrong on two counts. First, many of these comic books are banned for issues unrelated to sex. Second, even explicit sexual content isn't ipso facto pornography.
I had the exact same experience about 6 years ago...my second oldest daughter (I have four) wanted comic books. She'd found some cool ones about Mary Jane Watson that were probably young adult-ish in story, but the drawings were pretty okay (nothing overtly sexual).
So we went to a comic book store and immediately the guy behind the counter jumped out and steered my kids to a very small corner in the front of his store. He looked me in the eye and said, "They really need to stay in this section."
I look at the rest of this very large store and it's a few teenagers, but mostly middle-aged men. The image I got in my head was not one of the defensible comic-book reader, but of a soft-porn environment.
So we looked at the kids comics and it was Archie and stuff. Nothing that my daughter wanted because she wanted the "drama" and "serious" tone...without the hyper-sexualized stories and images. We asked the owner and he said there was no market for those comics. They (the publishers) tried a few, and he named the exact comic my daughter had found, but those just didn't sell.
So we left with a handful of replacement comics, but we never went again and my daughter moved on, never even considering a comic book again. She reads YA novels now.
The YA novel industry is huge. I really don't understand why there's no market for YA comic books (not graphic novels). It seems odd and sad.
For those who honestly believe that women will never want to read comics - look into webcomics. A huge proportion of the reader base for a good, PG-13(-ish) webcomic will likely be female, and there's a number of webcomics that are targeted towards women. A number of these comics will eventually be printed and sold, usually via the Internet, sometimes at conventions.
I went to the Thoughtbubble Comic Convention last year in the UK, and returned with a hefty bag full of comics that do not exaggerate sexual characteristics (or, in fact, mention sex at all in most cases), focusing on good art and a compelling storyline. Some of these are webcomics, some were designed to be sold as graphic novels and serial comics.
The comic book store is a remarkably poor selection of what's out there, and I think they might've got themselves into a recursive image problem - they stock primarily comics for a certain audience, so only that audience go there, so any change is not welcomed.
Most of the shops I frequent have a young readers section. Diamond (the only North American comic book distributor) even has a young readers section of their release list. The author of the article clearly thinks comics are intended for children, when only a small portion are.
Your talking about the tail wagging the dog. Comics are how they are because the market imploded and they have to appeal to the niche of of niche that is their customer base.
When I was a kid in NYC, I remember going to the newsstand with my dad and they had a few racks of the mass market comics. I'd get spider man and superman, my younger sister would get Donald Duck and similar things. Today there's no newsstand and paper media is imploding, so it's a completely different market.
I don't get manga at all, but it's a different phenomenon that doesn't have mass appeal, and girls aren't in the niche.
You're seriously telling his kids what to do? Get real. Kids love to read comics: comics have great value for kids. Colours, heroes, secret hideouts and cool punchlines. Why wouldn't kids (male & female) want that? Why shouldn't they?
The next time you're about to tell someone('s kids) what to enjoy, remember that what you like is not necessarily what others like.
The writer of the article didn't 'complain about anything'. The complaint is very specific: lots of comics in the comic book store he visited featured more adult illustrations that he and his kid would've liked to see. Valid complaint that doesn't have anything to do with 'attitudes'.
I dont see this as an issue. Putting it very bluntly. Comics are (in general) of low quality (in terms of writing, ideas* ), aimed (in general) at a specific creepy contingent of society composed of teenage boys or men who still act like teenage boys.
So, who cares about them!? Contemporary media, games, tv shows, films, music, are filled with and largely composed of terrible dross. If you're discerning that involves ignoring 99% of media and almost completely ignoring comics.
*Obviously there are some good comics which I've read (Akira is a good example) but, in my experience, the soaring heights of the greatest writing in comics would be seen as mediocre in another domain.
The word comic comes with expectations about graphics style and content, same as manga has some expectations (through that has more variety of stuff). That is quite practical for people like me who don't like the comic style, but do enjoy differently painted pictures with bubbles.
Does not mean it must somehow inherently superior, it is more of attempt to sell to people who are aware of how it looks like usually and that they usually dont like it.
And when you decide to check the offer and not just what some people buy, you have content for a lot of people. Shojo targets young women, Yaoi is not really aimed at a young heterosexual male audience either.
You want diversity in picture books? Mangas have been doing it for more than 40 years. Some of their more successful authors are women.
While I can understand how part of his post is about the way women are portrayed physically in those comics. I'm not so sure on his examples he picked in reference to his children and their unsuitability. I already commented on how I wasn't sure if Batman was suitable for his 5 year old, given the nature of some lines, but some examples he picked in reference to his 7 year old daughter were a stretch.
Power Girl: Haven't fully checked but appears to be part of a line rated T for Teen.
Perhaps comic book stores should designate areas for different ratings of comics. Or comic companies should agree to make the rating larger. Or some parents need to become more aware that comics are just for kids, the same way that computer games aren't either.
It's kind of interesting - I can think of a number of comics that don't fall into the sexualized gender trap, but they're all comics that have no business being read by a 7 year old, which seems almost backwards.
In a lot of ways I guess comics aren't really for kids anymore, which seems kind of sad.
> Comics were never supposed to be educational or have any non-entertainment value and primary tarted at hormones soaked male teens.
In the USA, perhaps. There is literally nothing about the medium - panes of images, some with dialogue or narrative, which when put together portray a story - that makes it targeted towards males. If I tried to explain comics to people, there's nothing in the explanation that makes it male-only.
And in fact, there's plenty of people writing family-friendly and female-targeted comic books. They're just distributed through the Internet these days, and funded through advertising and merchandise. There's plenty of people reading them, along with manga and similar media.
But HN is a tiny minority. It is barely a drop in the ocean. Printed media is losing a lot of market (except books globally and comics in certain asian countries). Look at how manga works - most manga don't get that many sales. They rely entirely on their niche. There are just a lot of authors of them and a lot of buyers. However, in the western world comics seem to be dying like newspapers. The Internet just stomps them, so comics are trying to hold on to the niche they do have as hard as they can. You have to realize that this is afterall a business - the fact that there are very few comics that do portray what you're talking about disagrees with your "tremendous evidence".
Also note that I do not care for these types of comics you describe or even the "sexy" ones. I do not like western art in comics at all. I just think that people who say "oh, but I would read comics if only they had X" talk a lot about it, but not enough of them follow through for extended periods of time when offered the chance.
This article should feature a bunch of blank photos representing the comics that don't exist. Those are the problem. It's ok to have super sexed-up comics in the store, but it's really sad that's all they have.
Japanese manga is fully of sexy, weird, objectifying stuff that most people really wouldn't want their kids to see, but go to a bookstore in Japan and you'll also see bookcase after bookcase of manga totally appropriate for all ages with young girls pressing their nose into them. Stories about teenage girls getting picked on at school or trying to meet the right guy or saying stupid things in class. Stories about girls who are in bands and office workers and every possible thing.
I think the comic industry, video games, tech, and geek culture in general are all going through growing pains as they find adoption in a larger market. We need more articles like this helping people realize what a "normal" comic shop could look like. The comics we have today would still be in there, there would just be more variety and the market for comics would be healthier.
It's actually a better scenario for everyone.
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