The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

While not really germane to Robert Kirkman’s point, there was one other small little jab he made at Marvel in that video of his.  He quickly accused some (emphasis on “some”) Marvel Adventure books of speaking down to kids.  I watched that part of the video as I have one of my 4 year old son’s Marvel Adventures Hulk digests sitting next to my computer.

I’ve gotten Jakob a number of the Marvel and DC digests.  They’re nice, small, cheap and mostly harmless.  I even like a number of them; Jeff Parker’s Avengers feature some fun adventures with solid art.  It’s nothing ground shaking but it’s good comics for a 4 year old.  For some reason though, Kirkman’s comments are getting me to think about what I was reading as a young kid.  I started reading (or most likely flipping through) comics somewhere between 4 and 6 years old.  But I wasn’t reading Marvel Adventures or DC’s Johnny DC books because things like that didn’t exist.  I was reading “The Serpent Crown Affair” in Avengers and some Negative Zone story featuring a Reed Richards doppelganer running around.  I was already grabbing books that were in a continuity that I could latch on to and keep collecting for close to the next 20 years of my life.  And those stories I was reading at 24 were the same stories I was reading at 4.

Continuity is a bad word but it’s what kept me reading a lot of comics for a long time.  Even now, I get some kind of brief thrill reading Matt Fraction writing the same characters in X-Men that I was reading when I was 13 years old.  He’s not writing an “older” or “mature” version of those characters.  He’s dealing with the same characters, the same plots and same situations as Chris Claremont and John Byrne.  It’s stupid that that means something to me but, in some small back corner of my mind, it does.

But there’s no way in hell I’m giving him X-Men #500 for a while.  Call it censorship or call it parenting, there are themes and situations in those “continuity books” that he honestly doesn’t need exposure to yet.  As Kirkman said, “the fanboy becomes the fanman becomes the oldman becomes the deadman.”  He left out that somewhere in there they also become comic writers but it’s no secret to anyone that most Marvel 616 and DCU books are outside of the understanding of most kids. 

Kirkman isn’t calling for the dumbing down of comics and I’m not either.  But honestly, when do those of us in our thirties and older give up the characters we love and let the younger generations have them?  When do we give up our stranglehold on kid’s books and just let them have X-Men and Justice League of America? 

More importantly, do kids want them?  I honestly think they do but we’re ghettoizing the books for them with Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC.  I’m still going to get them for my son because he actually enjoys them but I can already tell that he loves the Scholastic Bone books even more. 

At least, he’s enjoying his comics.