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In my experience, it always seems that "kids comics" of the past two decades have mostly been
a) throwaway product tie-ins
b) quaint and out-dated - the type of things that aging creators and fans remember as being "kid's stuff" when they were children, so they are very out of step with the rest of culture and mostly just excercises in nostalgia
c) either a or b, but also painfully condescending and insulting to anyone reading them
I have no idea what kind of comics would be best for kids now. All I know is that whatever they are, they have to be based on what kids RIGHT NOW want, and not what people 20-40 years older than them might think that they want, or want to give to them. It think it really would have to be promoted heavily, and if that can't be done, the project should be scrapped. Whoever is going to do it really ought to do a LOT of demographic surveying. They need to be really, really careful who draws it.
I do think it's really important to have kids reading comics, cos you've got to hook people on the medium early if you want to keep them for the long haul. I started reading comics when I was 5 years old, but I never really read comics meant for kids. I was reading Uncanny X-Men, and various other Marvel Comics from the early 80s. Jim Shooter's Marvel was great, cos every issue was usually jam-packed full of story in a way that most comics today aren't, and they were generally pretty smart things for kids to read. I was re-reading a few of my first X-Men comics this past week, and pretty amazed by how dense and intelligent it was, and I was really into it when I was just a little kid. Maybe I'm weird, though. At 11, I was heavy into Morrison's Doom Patrol and Milligan's Shade The Changing Man. Still, I don't think it's a bad idea to consider something like New X-Men a pretty marvelous comic for little kids to read. I'd rather have kids read something that was just a bit over their heads and inspired them to catch up rather than pitch directly to them, or worse, beneath them. |
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