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Underground > Comic Books >

Comics are/aren't just for kids

  
 
Benny the Ball
06:57 / 08.12.06
Have companies stopped producing comics with younger audiences in mind? Is there a certain degree of pampering to fan boys that are an easy sell and not enough of a draw for new readers? Is there too much credence lent to the old 'comics aren't just for kids' motto?

Looking at the spiderman for young readers (the UK produced marvel book) and thinking back to those books I got in the UK as a kid, there seems to be less of a concern for younger readers out in the field at the moment. Even something like the Ultimate line, which I was under the impression was reinventing the marvel universe for younger and new readers seems to be more about fan boy appeasment now days. There seems to be a call for silver age style, more innocent and fun books, but a need for these to be aimed at adults?

Does the over reliance on continuity and the fear of industry business remove the fun from the funny books?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:59 / 08.12.06
The Ultimate line is _deeply_ odd: it was supposedly a new and continuity-free approach, but in fact seems to be mired in in-jokes and races to create the first in-continuity "Ultimate" appearance of old characters; the Ultimate Defenders relied for much of its humour, I think, on knowledge of the "original" Defenders.

Mind you, I don't know who is reading the Ultimate line. Given the content - in particular in the Mark Millar-written titles, it doesn't seem to be aimed much at children.

However, we get, then, onto the question of genres and media, and indeed in this case publishers. DC, certainly, produces some comics aimed specifically at children - Teen Titans Go! and, if it is still going, the Powerpuff Girls comic. Arguably, titles like Runaways seem to be relatively child/teen friendly, if acceptable also to a notionally adult audience.

And, outside the big two, you have Oni putting out titles like Sidekicks, which seems to me to be aimed much more at a younger audience.

Manga is another thing - Runaways, Marvel's Mary-Jane and Sidekicks are all collected into manga-sized digests (which remainds me of something I want to put into the medium/genre discussion), and managa, as I understand it, sells big to younger readers. We don't have that kind of sales pattern in the UK, but we do have comics specifically targetted at children - A4 format, free gift on cover, tying in to current popular TV series/phenomenon... The "digest" versions of American comics - Batman, X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man seem to occupy an odd place - maybe for adult comic readers who can't make it to comic shops? The density of the plotting, long space between issues and high cost seem to suggest they aren't aimed at children...


Hoom. It's a bit like toys, isn't it? Kids' and collectors' markets - comic shops tend to be full of toys, but primarily aimed at collectors rather than kids - and there's an argument that comics _as they are sold in comic shops_ are a form of collectable, really.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
09:37 / 08.12.06
I don't know. As a comics fan from the age of about eight onwards, the more violent, weird and convoluted the material the better, I always thought. The fact that it wasn't really clear what was going on in say, the Marvel universe a lot of the time was a source of fascination rather than anything else. I suspect I'm not alone there. I'd have had nightmares about something like Garth Ennis' Punisher (which all right, I technically wouldn't be able to buy as a ten year old these days) but I wouldn't have been able to look away either.

If there is a problem with comics and the younger audience (and I'd agree that there probably is) isn't it more to do with the fact that you can't just walk into your local newsagent and pick up the latest US imports with your pocket money any more? (And then clatter home over the cobblestones on your penny farthing with a loaf from the baker's and a churn of milk fresh from the cow.)
 
 
Benny the Ball
09:49 / 08.12.06
definitely has an effect. I remember picking up most of my books from the newsagents simply because there weren't many specialist shops near by - I used to have the newsagent hold stuff back for me, go in once every fortnight or so and go through the oder and get what I wanted from it (they were great about it - but at the same time I was about the only person who bought them soooo). I remember when direct sales came into full effect, and going to a shop that was very good for me as a late teen, early twenty adult, but was incredibly unfriendly and suspicious of kids (granted it came at a boom time when shop lifting was at a high, but still, i saw some questions get brushed aside in a manner that suggested that they didn't consider some children as serious customers).
 
 
Alex's Grandma
10:18 / 08.12.06
I'd imagine specialist shops are a nightmare for children. There'd be so much stuff you'd want, almost all of it would be out of your price range, and you'd pretty much exclusively surrounded by the kind of men your mother warned you not to accept sweets or a lift home from, both behind the till and in front of it. A salient comparison might be buying pornography from one of the basement superstores in Soho, rather than the local corner shop - in both cases, lose your teenage male audience and you're in trouble.
 
 
Spaniel
11:09 / 08.12.06
I don't think kids lines would have appealed to me much as a child. Like Alex, I liked things strange and convoluted and involved, and frankly the more adult themes the better, even if I didn't understand them. 2000AD in particular was a very odd comic to grow up around and hardly seemed to make any compromises for the notional age of it's audience, it was unashamedly punky and regularly disturbing and nothing like an all ages book. It seems to me that many other comics fans came to the medium in a similar way, so I've always found the the prescriptive edicts of some do-gooding fans determined to get the kids involved again slightly annoying - the kids are almost always more intelligent, more willing to explore, and more savvy than said edicts often allow.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
11:50 / 08.12.06
Perceived notions of 'The Kids' are always a problem. A forty year old man's idea of what a ten year old wants to read is going to miss the mark by a mile.
 
 
Mario
12:14 / 08.12.06
The Power Pack books and the Adventures line seem pretty kid-friendly. I think it's less a question of "Do the books exist", and more "Does anyone know?"
 
 
Spaniel
12:24 / 08.12.06
And, "are they a good idea?"
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:26 / 08.12.06
A forty year old man's idea of what a ten year old wants to read is going to miss the mark by a mile.

Indeed. Philip Pullman must be weeping into his beard that the kids hate him so.

The thing about kids' lines, or at least kid-friendly comics, is that they don't have to be any less in quality, or actually any less interesting or clever, than comics notionally produced for the teen/adult market. Classic Power Pack is at least as sophisticated as the stuff that more regular Marvel titles were putting out, but with less breastylady. Sarah Dwyer's Action Girl, an avowedly all-ages publication, contained consistently excellent work. It's difficult to work out what exactly is aimed at children, or indeed what children would like to read - I'd say that Gail Simone's Killer Princesses would be top-quality children's entertainment, but others may disagree. If it werent for the ADULT COMICS breastyrape and the endless bloody Tori Amos lyrics, the Sandman would be a good read for ten-year olds or so. And meanwhile, what has been consistently better and more imaginative - Justice League of America the comic book, or Justice League Unlimited, the comic book based on the popular series, and I hope at least child-friendly, with lots of one-shot episodes and a cartoony, Darwyn-Cookish style? One hint. Chris Claremont's vampires are lovingly rendered by John Byrne.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
12:35 / 08.12.06
Okay, a forty year old man with a Hawaiian shirt and a beard then.

What I meant was that one should perhaps aim to write a good accessible comic rather than one which aims specifically for children.
 
 
The Natural Way
12:51 / 08.12.06
Are kids into Pullman, though? I thought it was teenagers. That leads me onto another thing - are we talkijng about kids or teens here? Are we talking about both? I read Sandman when I was 11 and I loved it, inspite, or perhaps slightly because of, the rudey/nasty bits. I'm personally all for comics aimed at children/young teenagers, but, like Mac and Boboss, I think it's hard to predict what they will and won't enjoy.
 
 
Mario
15:26 / 08.12.06
For that matter, do we want to write books kids will enjoy, or books their parents will approve of? I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I read a lot of scary stuff (Poe, for example)
 
 
John Octave
14:54 / 09.12.06
"Accessibility" comes up a lot when speaking of how to reach the children, and while it's a good mindset to be in, I think a lot of people go about it wrong.

When people say Marvel Adventures comics are "accessible," they mean they're done-in-one stories with no continuing threads before or after. Everything exists within a bubble completely closed off from everything else. This is also generally true of the Dini animated shows, Silver Age Superman comics, Scooby Doo and, I don't know, Home Improvement. They are modular and can be read/watched in almost any order.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. The JLU comic according to the model above is enjoyable for both kids and adults...

(ASIDE: Although perhaps kids don't read it in the numbers they might because the show was not followed every week by a brief ten-second commercial that said "You can find more adventures of Justice League Unlimited every month at your nearest comic book store, call 1-800-COMICBOOK" or whatever. (It wasn't, was it? I never saw one.) I mean, an eight-year-old who doesn't go to comic book shops needs to be TOLD that there's comics. I don't think a kid who's grown up after the newstand market collapsed neccessarily assumes that those colorful superfellows appear in printed color magazines as well. DC and Marvel: "Why don't kids read comics?" Have you told them they exist? ASIDE ENDS.)

...but anyway, the stuff kids seem to be into nowadays doesn't often follow that done-in-one format. Manga and anime don't always end in a tidy way. Shows like Dragonball Z or Buffy have complex backstories that can pull kids in. Even the JLU show had ongoing threads. As Alex's Grandma says, sometimes dropping into the middle of a strange world with a strange history and strange rules is half the fun. You can watch one episode of Scooby Doo and be done with it forever when it ends. But you watch an episode of Buffy, even one that doesn't end on a cliffhanger but has unresolved story threads, and the aim is to make you wonder what's going to happen next, thus bringing you back.

Also, perhaps more goal-oriented stories (like Pokemon and even the recent Transformers show where they had to hunt down those mini-bot things) are in order. More proactive heroes?

To that end, here's the JLU series I'd propose. A specific number X of the world's most dangerous supervillains have escaped from the world's most dangerous prison. The JLU assembles to round them up. Each issue ends with a satisfactory conclusion with no cliffhanger (villain goes to jail, or possibly gets away for another day). There are also interpersonal story arcs. Maybe Flash has a crush on Zatanna (let the YouTube music videos begin); will he tell her, or is Aquaman going to steal her away? Also is the overarcing mystery of who broke the criminals out in the first place, and you've got quite a few stories NOW GO!

Yes, that was very fanboy "you play the editor!" but I think it's a viable model for an engaging kids comic. The secret, I think, is not to get them to read a comic, but to get them to believe that they can't! miss! the next one.
 
 
The Falcon
23:13 / 09.12.06
Weeell, I think it'd help getting 'em to read a superhero one, anyway, if the covers weren't so terribly, almost uniformly, generic and had some semblance to the excitement that (possibly) lays inside - I think the old Broome Flashes are, while somewhat campy now, pretty much a gold standard for this - the Kitchener directive to purchase/read, 'Green, green; why is everything green?' God, I don't even know - but I want to find out, still.
 
  
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