Link Pondering.

Interesting article on CBC - "Hey Kids! No Comics!"

RESPONSE TANGENT: Considering that the vast amount of shelf space in this country is devoted to superhero comics, and that the audience for superhero comics is shrinking, and that the children's audience for superhero comics has disappeared right along with the superhero comics for children, maybe it's time to do something radical, like admit that superhero comics as a genre are inherently meant for children. By virtue of the very same conventions that define the genre, such as dressing up in costumes, secret identities, superpower origin stories, and the like. Perhaps if we made superhero comics for children, with youthful mentalities, and made adult comics for adults, in any genre we like, then there will be comics for everyone to read.

Of course this will never happen. Not while Marvel, DC, and others are struggling to have it both ways by producing superhero comics injected with adult themes, which are supposed to appeal to both groups but actually satisfy neither. They make their content mainly, or only, in one kid-appeal genre, and try to retain fans as they age by including increasing levels of sex/violence, plot convolutions, and psychological complexity that a kid's not necessarily going to be interested in. Rather than saying to Billy - "Hey! You like those Teen Titans? Here's a whole rack of superhero books just for you!" - and saying to slightly-older William - "You want some more, huh? Have some crime fiction, horror, or sci-fi comics like these!" - they're telling everybody to buy the same stuff stretched 16 ways: superhero crime fiction, and superhero horror, and superhero sci-fi, in other words, clumsy bastard offspring that are occassionally almost accidentally great and most often deformed and useless. And because of these companies' stranglehold on the distribution system, and retailers' strange reluctance to shelf alternatives when they are produced (like DC's vertigo books and the occassional stabs at children's comics), your ordinary kid and your ordinary adult look at the shelves and see nothing to read - and increasingly, the reading population becomes a crowd of immature adults and cynical kids.

I support real adult comics and real kids comics equally. I probably end up talking about adult comics more often because I have no children and there just aren't as many kids comics of similar quality. Which the article articulates nicely, even though I think they're pointing the finger at the wrong culprits. Creators are simply following, even as they're bending, the rules already enforced by publishers and retailers. A naturally all-ages book can only come to pass when genre fiction gets back its boundaries and individual books are freed up to just, y'know, tell a good story. When we have real adult books and real kids books, I think a great book can cross over on its own, and also someone who can enjoy both mature reading and kid-at-heart fun gets the best of both worlds. I do think we need to generate more of both sides, kids and adults comics, in a simultaneous process, to empty people out of that crossbreed middle ground.

Don't know if I'm making much sense there. Just something I'm pondering.