How Many Kids Read Comics in Teh Golden Age

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Ask the average person what a comic book is, and they may describe a bit of fluffy nonsense in which a leotard-wearing man punches another leotard-wearing man. Kid stuff, in other words. Cheap. Uncreative. Not worthy of an adult's time. Any adult who admits to liking comics must therefore be a virginal loser who still lives with his mother, which is obviously a bad thing. (Thanks for nothing, The Big Bang Theory.) While the success of various superhero movie franchises has dispelled a chip of the stigma, it'southward certainly still around.

These assumptions are based on a number of factual errors, the almost serious of which is that comic books are exclusively for children. This is not and never has been the instance. It is truthful, however, that the perception of comic books being exclusively for children has gotten the manufacture in a lot of problem and continues to determine how people view the medium. Hopefully, this article will provide a more consummate perspective on who comics are intended for, who actually reads them, and why the fun police tin can take a hike.

Note: Although I'm arguing that comics are not exclusively children's books, that doesn't hateful there'south anything wrong with children'southward books. Fifty-fifty if all comics ever fabricated were "but" for kids, they wouldn't deserve the ire and dismissiveness so often directed at them. Kids' books are just as valid and valuable as any other type of literature and should be respected every bit such.

The Golden Historic period (1938-1956)

(This section and the next owe a great debt to David Hajdu's book The Ten-Cent Plague. I strongly recommend information technology if you desire a more thorough test of the topics discussed here.)

Comics as we know them began every bit collections of newspaper strips. They didn't grow into their own until the invention of superheroes, starting with Superman's 1938 introduction in Action Comics #i. These comics were cheap and, like news strips before them, thought to appeal only to children and lower-grade (frequently immigrant) adults who couldn't understand "real" literature.

Fifty-fifty at this early date, however, it was clear that comics had a broader entreatment. During World War II, comics deemed for a quarter of all magazines shipped to American soldiers overseas, according to Bradford W. Wright's Comic Book Nation. Granted, this might be partly due to wartime propaganda: just most every comic book character from Batman to Sheena the Jungle Queen had taken upwards Nazi punching. But the indicate remains that both the soldiers and the people responsible for stocking their care packages acknowledged that comic books had value for adults. Comic book creators must have been aware of this, particularly given the number of creators who joined the military, so I tin can't imagine that they weren't working but as much for the soldiers equally they were for the kids.

Naturally, some killjoys took exception to American soldiers' love of such "childish" amusement. And when it comes to children's books, adults inevitably want to assert authority and brand sure there's nothing there that could upset or "harm" fragile immature minds. As early as 1942, Sensation Comics — published past All-American Comics and starring Wonder Woman — ended up on Cosmic banned books lists. Over the next decade, the anti-comics motion slowly picked up steam, fueled past hyperbolic claims that comic book violence led to real violence. Only about every child in America read comics at this point, and so they might likewise accept blamed juvenile malversation on ice foam and tried to exile the Good Humor human.

It's important to define the term "comic book" here. While comics are now largely equated with superheroes (in the U.South., anyway), comics encompassed (and still encompass) a wide multifariousness of genres. Some of them, like Disney comics and adaptations of literary classics, were above suspicion: these were deemed "wholesome" enough to escape religious and political wrath.

Most other genres were not so lucky. Superhero comics were at the eye of the moral hurricane, accused of everything from fascism to homosexuality to — gasp! — beingness unfeminine. Teen comics, too, took their share of licks. Even Archie, which until recently was regarded equally the almost inane comic in beingness, was criticized for being too horny. Criminal offense comics were also targets, for obvious reasons.

And and so there were the horror comics. Hoo male child, those horror comics.

EC Comics (the EC stands for "educational comics") didn't publish but horror comics, simply that's what they're all-time remembered for, mainly because that's what acquired their downfall in the mid-1950s. Lurid images from books like Tales of the Catacomb and The Vault of Horror were shown in Congress as definitive proof that comic books were inappropriate for children. These congressional hearings led to the creation of the Comics Code Dominance, a self-governing censorship bureau that spelled doom for EC Comics and innumerable other publishers.

The Silver Historic period (1956-1970)

Whether or non nosotros agree with Congress's accusations (while a lot of them are plain BS, I accept read some of EC's textile and that stuff needs a warning label at least) is not the point. Those hearings, and the comics backlash in full general, would not have happened if comics were non widely perceived as children's books.

But even at the height of anti-comics sentiment, not all comics were aimed at children. Romance comics, for instance, were explicitly marketed to older teenagers. One such comic, Young Romance, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two of the earliest industry giants and co-creators of Captain America. Equally the kids who grew upwardly reading superhero comics entered the comics industry themselves, they began to add a more sophisticated affect to the medium.

I've discussed elsewhere the ways in which comics awfully crawled toward more serious stories, so I won't get over information technology all again here. Instead, let's talk almost Roy Thomas. Thomas, who would succeed Stan Lee as Marvel Comics' editor-in-chief, brought unprecedented maturity and continuity to the material, indicating a new level of respect for the audition's intelligence. His small-scale footnotes (something along the lines of "Thor isn't in this issue of The Avengers because he'due south busy in his own mag! Check it out!") gradually mutated into the frequent crossovers and sprawling, shared universes that made things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe possible (and that children and adults alike may find intimidating).

Thomas also liked to infuse his work with literary references. To give just one case, he ends Avengers #57 with a page-long recitation of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias." You don't quote sonnets if your only audience is 6- and seven-year-olds.

Thomas wasn't the just one experimenting with the medium, either. Artists similar Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby were creating some wild panels in books like Strange Tales and (of all things) Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen, respectively. Check out this psychedelic panel from Strange Tales #167.

You tin also approximate the maturity of the audition at this time by the alphabetic character pages, where the creators print and respond to fan mail. I don't mean maturity in terms of historic period, necessarily (writers' ages are rarely included), but after looking through the letter pages of some problems I selected from my own collection — Batman #150 (1962), Teen Titans #4 (1966), and Batman #200 (1968) — I could tell they weren't kids only interested in bright colors and fisticuffs. Whatever their ages, they were itemizing parts they liked, lament most "ridiculous" stories, and pointing out potential plot holes. Even in the '60s, one of comics' goofiest decades, fans were one-time enough to appoint with and recall critically near what they were reading.

The Statuary Age (1970-1984) and the Modern Age (1984-Present)

Comics continued to become darker and more "adult" over the ensuing decades. I don't just mean superhero comics: the success of nonfiction books like Maus and Persepolis helped convince more than and more people that comic books were no longer just for kids — even though, as I've already shown, they never had been. The emergence of scholarship surrounding comics, equally evidenced by the books I've cited in this commodity, further demonstrates the medium's appeal non just to adults mostly, but to adults who take it seriously as both art and literature. And withal, the idea that comics are only for kids refuses to die, fifty-fifty among some who worked on them for decades.

Alan Moore helped popularize (however inadvertently) dark, ultra-violent, definitely-non-for-kids comics through his work on, among other things, Watchmen. He has since disowned his ain comics, which he talks about in this interview from October 2020. I disagree with a lot of what he says here: he dismisses superheroes as "children'south amusement," and claims that adults who similar superhero films — which he decries equally worthless "escapism" despite albeit he hasn't watched any since 1989 — just want to "get back to a nostalgic, remembered babyhood."

This is all very pretentious and patronizing, simply there is a fair signal to be made almost the function childhood nostalgia plays in driving modern superhero stories. A 2017 report showed that most people who buy superhero comics are male, and about one-half of them are betwixt 30 and 50 years old. These older, male readers are far more likely to practice their ownership in a comic book shop versus a bookstore or online. And unfortunately, when the comic book manufacture measures comic sales, they focus on sales of single issues — the kind people buy at comic book shops — and exclude digital problems or collected issues sold in bookstores.

Needless to say, prioritizing nostalgia over reality can become you in trouble, every bit several Marvel executives plant out. In 2018, the cyberspace disrepair Marvel for misinterpreting its ain sales figures in order to claim that diverse titles don't sell. (This despite the fact that Ms. Marvel, the groundbreaking volume starring Marvel'due south offset major Muslim superhero, was a New York Times bestseller!) "Diverse" titles, AKA those starring female heroes or heroes of color, tend to feature newer characters who were non around when the single-issue buyers were children. These titles sell quite well if you really take all the data into business relationship, which Marvel (and, one assumes, DC) does not.

In other words, the success of a superhero comic is judged but by its success with older male audiences — with men fueled by their nostalgic dear of Batman and Spider-Human being — rather than all buyers. In this sense, superhero comics aren't for children; they are for people who were one time children and prefer (understandably, in some ways) to stick with what they know.

Despite this relentless pandering to one very specific, developed audition, you lot tin still find enough of superhero comics for kids. In fact, they are often explicitly marketed as such. Franchises similar Curiosity Adventures and DC Super Hero Girls, for instance, state in marketing copy that they are perfect for "all ages" or "young readers" — a designation that would non be necessary if comics were inherently a children's medium.

Be a Hero: Let People Read What They Similar

While I've mostly talked near superhero comics here, other genres of comics certainly still be, for kids and adults alike. I haven't even touched on manga, which, according to the 2017 report, is very pop with teens and young adults. (It'southward hard to tell from sales numbers how many kids are reading a given comic, since their parents are probably doing the actual buying.)

In closing, comic books may expect different from other forms of literature, but they are just as diverse and cater to just equally many tastes and demographics. I believe the existent problem here is non that people think comics are for children. Rather, they call back comics are childish. All those large pictures and funny outfits, and so few words: how could a grown-upward take such a thing seriously? Clearly, the only appropriate response when someone likes "kittenish" things is to insult them and try to accept away what they love while acting superior for liking the "right" things.

In the finish, it shouldn't thing if comic books are — or are perceived to be — for children, or for adults nostalgic for babyhood. What actually counts is that you lot relish what you read. No one else can or should take your reading joy from you, whether you like Percy Shelley or comic books about men in leotards punching each other — or both.

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Source: https://bookriot.com/are-comics-for-kids/

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