When was the last time you saw a kid in a comic book shop? More often than not, when you'd peer into a place like Druid's Keep or Comic Odyssey, you’d see yuppies, oldies and the occasional curious teen — mostly dudes around 22 or 23 all the way up to 50-year-old men. You’d be hard-pressed to find a child with wide-eyed wonder flipping through the pages of a comic book, all excited about what’s going to happen to his favorite hero next, inside a hobby shop like I used to do when I was younger.
No, you’d find them most probably at the video game store, the arcade or the Internet cafés, enjoying their Facebooks and Twitters.
How did a medium specifically designed for kids end up being ignored by them, by the original target market? I guess it started when the kids who first started picking up those comics started growing older.
Everyone knows the very first superhero was Superman. He came out in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Mind you, Action Comics wasn’t the first comic book. Supes was merely the first superhero, but he practically ignited the genre. He captured the imagination of kids all over. Everyone ran around in red and blue pajamas with sheets tied around their neck to look like capes.
However, as the readers grew up, the stories did, too. Maturity overtook innocence and campy fun. Sure, it took about 40 odd years before stories about drug abuse and hardcore murder showed up in a superhero title, but that was just the natural evolution of things.
As the audience grew older, so did the writers. The fanciful wordsmiths of old, guys like Stan “The Man” Lee, were replaced by guys who wanted more edge to the stories they loved reading as kids.
Stories grew more complex, characters more developed. The “fun” of it slowly dwindled away. Where you would have had a tale about a good guy suit up in his briefs-outside-the-pants costume to beat up a bad guy, you would now have a plot about the raped and murdered wife of a hero who goes on a ballistic rampage of moral justice and vengeance. After all, that’s what the aging audience wanted to read — high concept writing and all that jazz.
Personally, I blame technology. Back in the 80’s and even some parts of the 90’s, we kids got our fix of spandex-clad butt kickery from no other source but comic books. This is why the 90’s will be sarcastically remembered by comic book fans the world around as the decade of awesomeness. Everything was a mix of ridiculous grit and overcompensation. Writers were trying to be “hardcore” enough to cater to a teenage market, which they were slowly losing.
Incidentally, that was the decade when the Internet grew in popularity and became easily available. The digital age had begun. Sure, comic art quality improved vastly because of the rapid evolution of graphics technology, but so did other forms of entertainment like video games, easily produced cartoons and mind-blowing movies. Comic books were left for the geeks and the true blue fans.
No matter what your geekery is, though — whether it concerns movies or music — they all revolve around business. If the product you put out has no buyers, then what’s the point of it all? Comic book publishers were still, after all, businesses.
These big comic book publishers, they aren’t stupid. They know that eventually, if they don’t do anything about it, their market will grow old, wither and die. Where does that leave them?
They’d have to close up shop, yeah? No one wants that to happen. We geeks want them to live on longer than disco ever did
To that end, they’ve been diversifying and reaching out to kids, cultivating the market whose main media diet did not consist anything analog. It’s obvious in some of their shows like the Super Hero Squad or the Teen Titans that they are clearly targeting the kids whose market segment has thus far eluded them. Spandex-clad heroes are trying to no longer be for Dad and big bro exclusively.
Fans like me have to accept that sooner or later, the printed comic book will be a thing of the past much like the beeper, the quill or even the barbershop quartet. It’s a way of life — nothing is constant but change. However, dear geek parents, hear my call to arms (well, a call to wallets, actually). I urge you to buy your kids a comic book today so that they, too, may feel the glossy paper between their tiny little fingers and have their hearts jump in excitement with every turn of the page.
A vast majority of the stories are not full of death, drugs, murder, vengeance and violence like some people would like you to believe. Sure, there’s still a fair share of that, but comic books have started to become fun again. Titles like Marvel Adventures, Franklin Richards and the Legion of Superheroes were created to kick start the imagination of your children.
So, go ahead, and introduce the wonders of comic books to your kids. Try to keep one of the greatest sources of modern mythology alive at least for a few more decades. I’d say “do it for your kids,” but then I’d be lying. Do it for me!