comics.212.net – Cautiously Optimistic
This guy really hits the nail on the head in this post. He’s reacting to a recent incarnation of the oft-cried mantra “There are no comics for kids any more!” I’ve heard everyone from comic book store owners to author Michael Chabon claim this, and each time I hear it I’m no less flabbergasted than the previous time. Have these people never been to Borders? You know, Borders, where in order to get to the American comics section you have to trip and stumble over a pile of pre-teens heaped in the Manga section like a pile of dirty sweatsocks. I’m guessing they really haven’t–and this is only a small symptom of the bizarre comics myopia of the average grown-up comics reader. While the author of the original “There are no comics for kids” article was coming from a somewhat different direction, it is usually adult readers of either superhero comics, or art-coimics who make this claim and they are both dead wrong.
Superhero folks are generally so myopic in their thinking that nothing really exists for them outside of the world of superhero comics. They refer to this genre of comics as “mainstream,” although reading/collecting superhero comics is about as much a part of the mainstream as collecting Faberge eggs, or potato chips that look like celebrities. I once heard an editor at DC claim that they had tried a line of kids comics and “there is just no market for it.” What this person was really saying was, “We tried a line of superhero comics for kids, written and drawn exactly the same way that our adult titles are, and no one bought them.” Big Surprise.
Just as ill-informed are the art-comics types who make the same claims. I remember getting into an argument with a Fantagraphics-published cartoonist about this once. He challenged me to bring in some good kids comics for him as proof of my claim and I did; I brought copies of “Akiko,” “Castle Waiting,” “Nickelodeon Magazine,” “Shonen Jump,” “Usagi Yojimbo,” and others. He opened Akiko and began telling me how children couldn’t read this sort of thing because of how the panels were layed out and how the images in the panels were cropped. Then followed a rambling diatribe about the golden age of “Gasoline Alley.” “Gasoline Alley” was a great comic strip in its day (and so were many superhero books for that matter), but like many indie cartoonists this guy was so fixated on nostalgia for some bygone era, and the high-art filter through which he views this stuff, that he completely missed the point that tons of kids do read comics, and in fact, the comics medium is in the midst of a reniassance as far as childrens’ readership goes.
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