RE: Comics! #3 [All Ages Comics]

Gregg takes a turn as MC this week. Still wondering what RE: Comics! is all about? See Living Wednesday to Wednesday #3. Want to talk about it after you're done reading? Matt moderates a thread to give you just such an opportunity on the message board. 

Gregg Schigiel: Okay, so it’s my turn to set things off; here we go.

We could probably make this topic a series of discussions on it’s own, but I want to touch on All-Ages comics, even if it’s only a tip of the iceberg kind of talk.

It always seems like there’s a lot of chatter and calls for books for kids or material to bring in new readers, but if you look over the comics landscape and what sells, at least in comic stores, the pudding lacks proof; looking at sales numbers they’re often on the lower end, circulation-wise.

So in honor of the release of Chris Giarrusso’s G-MAN: LEARNING TO FLY digest from Image Comics* a couple weeks ago, let me ask: What makes a comic an all-ages comic? What are good examples of all-ages comics, critically and commercially? And do all-ages comics sell, really, or is it a vocal minority that wants to see more all-ages material?

I have many more questions and many other ways to parse this topic, but let’s start there.

*(in the interest of full disclosure: Chris Giarrusso is a friend and yes, that was a very blatant plug on his behalf; buy his book (if you haven’t already)...I’m SURE Acme’s got copies...right, Stephen?!)

Stephen Mayer: This is one of the first topics that Gregg and I ever discussed post Baltimore Comic Con, but I feel that the landscape of All Ages comics has already changed enough in the last month to change the face of the whole argument. I say this because:

1) Boom! Kids has exploded onto the scene (as anyone could have predicted) with the Incredibles, Cars, the Muppet Show, and soon Toy Story.

2) DC has changed the Johnny DC demographic to an even younger audience than previous titles like Batman Strikes and Justice League Unlimited.

3) Marvel chose to end Mini Marvels in favor of Marvel Super Hero Squad (based on the "chibi" toy line).

4) Diary of a Wimpy Kid has young kids going nuts like I haven't seen since Harry Potter and may have even re-defined the graphic novel for a new generation.

What you would find in our All Ages section is anything that is free of excessive violence, adult language, or any kind of even implied sexual content. Sadly, nowadays that pretty much only amount to comics made expressly for the younger audience like Marvel Adventures, Johnny DC, Star Wars and Indiana Jones  adventures, Archie, and Sonic (which is made by Archie).

Even mainstream books that get newsstand distribution and should be suitable for younger readers, like Teen Titans, have garnered levels of concern from parents.

Critically and commercially, Mini Marvels volume 1 and 2 have been our biggest All Ages sellers of the year. We've moved 61 copies of Rock, Paper, Scissors and 46 copies of Secret Invasion. That's the book that parents come in and say, "All of my kid's friends have this book, and they must have it, too." It's the pre-pubescent equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.

We also can't keep individual issues of Sonic the Hedgehog on the shelf to save our lives.

If you want to know about adult readers that dip into the kids comics, just say the word.

GS: I don't know if our original discussion was so much an argument (though truth be told, I can't remember exactly what we did or didn't cover).

What's most striking about everything you've mentioned is the clear line drawn in the sand between comics for kids and comics for everyone else. Kids' comics tend to be drawn differently, titled differently ("Adventures" being a synonym for "this is for kids"), and racked separately.

This suggests that titles like SUPERMAN, BATMAN, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, THE HULK...superhero mainstays, are NOT kid friendly or appropriate.

That's pretty remarkable.

I got into comics, many years ago, via a combination of an older sibling and cartoons, namely Super Friends. I'd go to the comic shop with my brother and I, being a kid with limited means, would scour the 10-cent bins (this is the mid-'80s, 10-cent bins existed) for anything that had a superhero I recognized. This led to a lot of DC COMICS PRESENTS, BRAVE & THE BOLD, DC 80-PAGE GIANT, things like that. I think about a 10-year-old me now and...I don't know. Heck, I think about my niece and nephew and find it difficult to get them into comics. And this speaks to content and price point.

It seems there was a time when ALL comics were primarily for kids and the more mature, grown-up stuff looked different, were labeled as such, and were racked separately.

Is this a sea change and there's no going back? Is the only comics exposure a kid's gonna get to Superman and Batman going to be in the pages of Johnny DC's SUPER FRIENDS? And how would someone transition from that book to BATMAN or DETECTIVE, really?

What about the idea of ALL-AGES comics...comics that don't talk down but don't lock out? Batman: The Animated Series, the show from the early '90s, did a great job of appealing to both ends of the spectrum. The Iron Man movie seemed to play both sides of the fence quite nimbly (though have you seen the new cartoon, Iron Man: Armored Adventures...I saw a little bit of it and oof...it’s doing everything to make it kid-friendly, including making Tony Stark a teenager, which, in the context of the movie...you know, where he becomes Iron Man as an adult and has that whole heart thing...awesome. And of course, the word “Adventures” is in the title). The point being, why aren't the comics themselves able to play the same way, having stuff in there for the kids and the old-timers?

A lot of these are rhetorical questions and I don't expect you to come back point-by-point. It's more me making points by asking questions.

But here's a question I'm curious about: you say WIMPY KID may have redefined the graphic novel for a new generation. Admitting that I've not read any of those books, could you explain how? What's different about it, be it in content, use of the medium, etc?

And a second actual question: it's been said, most famously/recently I think by Robert Kirkman in his video statement last year, that a kid can tell the difference between a MARVEL ADVENTURES Spider-Man and the "real" Spider-Man. If I'm defining "kid" as between 7 and 12 years old (those numbers being based on nothing but my memories of getting into comics at about 7 and reading THE KILLING JOKE, which I'd not call a comic for kids, at about 13), in your experience at the store, can kids tell the difference? Does a parent pick out a kid-safe book and the kid wants the "real" one?

SM: I didn't mean argument as in disagreement, but just us presenting our points in a friendly, productive way. Like now =)

If I had to pull our All Ages comics that straddled the line between kids and adult readers I would say BKV's RUNAWAYS as the best new book, with titles by Sean McKeever such as GRAVITY and SENTINEL in a close second. AGE OF THE SENTRY by Jeff Parker and Dan Slott's run on MIGHTY AVENGERS are appropriate also.

Also, just to interject, an All Ages book that I had completely written off as a kiddie book and turned out to be a lot more was AMELIA RULES. The FCBD offering for it in 2008, which dealt with a girl's dad heading off to Iraq, not just with pride, but sadness and anger was really impressive and hit on feelings a lot more advanced than a book like Amazing Spider-man #574 that depicted Flash Thompson getting terribly wounded the war.

Books like OWLY and KORGI from Top Shelf do a good job of teaching kids about sequential storytelling, and they do a great job of exercising emotion from the panels, but I think they're a little too easy for kids over the age of 8 or so.

I must admit that I, too, got into comics from the .50 cent boxes in the earlier 90s. My mom would go to Jazzercize and my brother and I would go to the comic shop in the basement of the same mall and pick up a couple of books each. I got a bunch of Superman and X-Men stuff then. We have enough copies of Warren Ellis's Astonishing X-Men run to throw them in a dollar box or a quarter sale, but he puts his "Kitty Pryde character" Armor in a Suicide Girls shirt in the first issue. Nice example.

I think the Marvel Adventures line does a good job of presenting the characters and adventures in such a way that kids can transition into the adult titles with an understanding of the way things are supposed to work. Can they tell the difference? Yes, because they're relegated to this other section at the front of the store. Do they mind? No, because it's everything they want out of a book. Those titles are also written by
some of the up-and-coming talent at Marvel like the aforementioned Jeff Parker and Incredible Hercules writer Fred Van Lente.

So I suppose if you went Mini Marvels or Super Hero Squad for say 6 and under, Marvel Adventures Whoever for 7-12, and then did mainstream "T+" Marvel books, you could potentially have raised a new reader from birth.

I'd never heard of Diary of a Wimpy Kid before attending the Harvey Awards last year, and then not only was it up for all kinds of awards, they also gave us a free copy in our goody bags. Apparently we were late coming to the party because Carly's little sister and everyone in her class already LOVED Wimpy Kid. It's a New York Times #1 best seller that's had 3 volumes thus far and we can't keep it on the shelf. In format, it marries a novel and a comic. It's presented like a real "diary," with "lined papar" and a "handwritten font" and you'll typically have two or three paragraph of prose on the page and one or two comic strips or single panel gags. It's really pretty fascinating because it's so different that we had never heard of it, but similar and innovative enough to work alongside books like G-MAN and OWLY and garner critical comic acclaim.

GS: Funny you mention MIGHTY AVENGERS, which I read, and for the most part have liked. But I think it was in Dan’s second issue, there was a scene where Jarvis walks in on Hank Pym fixing something in Jocasta, and even in a small panel it was so suggestively drawn...and I know they're building the weird relationship between Pym and Jocasta, but I thought, man, there were other ways to do that. Then again, at 9 years old I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought.

Also interesting that you name books like GRAVITY or AGE OF THE SENTRY...wouldn't it make MORE sense, and stick with me here, if books like SPIDER-MAN or FLASH were written to straddle that line, and then, should a writer care to tell a more grown-up, mature, intense story, they could use a lesser known character...

To wit: as the story goes, WATCHMEN originally was to feature the Carlton heroes (Blue Beetle, The Question, Captain Atom, etc.), but it was decided that telling the Watchmen story with those characters essentially "destroys" those characters for future use. Hence, new characters. Done. Want to tell a story about the Justice League, but make Superman and Batman a couple, boom, THE AUTHORITY. You follow?

But it seems like, and this is not a new trend, that the mainstay characters are no longer a “protected species” as it were; they’re just as vulnerable to figurative destruction as anything else. Sometimes the stories are great, sometimes they turf out, but it seems in a lot of cases these are comics by and for long-time readers. Just interesting how things have changed. One could argue if these changes have been for better or worse.

Which is why your WIMPY KID statement struck me. I don't disagree, but I don't see it the same way. Much like Dav Pilkey's CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS (from about, what, 10 years ago?), it just proves that kids like comics as a medium. And with bigger, non-comics publishers like Scholastic (BONE & BABYSITTER'S CLUB), Penguin (LOUD BOY), Simon & Schuster (AMELIA RULES!) and others, it seems that quite possibly the future of comics, for younger readers, is in the realm of graphic novels, or at least collections.

Many years ago, when I had a serious POWER PACK jones, one of my ideas was to do it as a hybrid comic/YA novel series...with all the non-action/superhero stuff told in text (with spot illos) and the fights and power-usage done sequentially. That, and my over-eager 8-page POWER PACK ongoing-series proposal, as history shows, went nowhere. But 10 years later it’s nice to see some kind of evolution happening (I’m not such a “this is how it used to be” fuddy-duddy).

I suppose sometimes I just think about being a kid and really loving comics and superheroes and I look at the landscape now and wonder where a similar kid might find the same.

I mean, in your store, how well do books like OWLY or KORGI do? Or are comics still synonymous with super heroes/action and adventure and kids want Wolverine or Wonder Woman or Sonic or whoever?

And is THAT the real nuts and bolts of this...not are there comics for all-ages (obviously there are), but are there SUPERHERO comics and stories for all-ages? Or do we pin all our hopes and dreams on BATMAN: THE BRAVE & THE BOLD on Cartoon Network?

Also, unrelated to anything, I love that Jeff Parker’s an “up-and-coming” talent. That dude’s been around, doing his thing, for years. I remember I’d read his HeroesCon con reports on his site back in the day. His MYSTERIUS THE UNFATHOMABLE is really great, by the way.

SM: I know the panel that you're talking about in MIGHTY AVENGERS #22 and I agree with you about it. I also agree that as a kid you might not know what you were looking at. I've been re-watching PUSHING DAISIES in anticipation of the last three episodes airing over the next three Saturday nights, and as I watch them work with the conventions of a fairy tale, I wonder if it's suitable for an all ages audience, if the sexual themes are ambiguous enough in 99% of the show (except when Olive or Chuck are in their underwear) that any viewer could enjoy it for the mysteries and love story (maybe the dead bodies would be a bit much also).

But does one or two suggestive moments blow the whole thing? We ordered enough copies of FCBD Avengers this year to give it to every man, woman, and child that walked into the store. But they said "hell" and maybe "@$$hole" or "damn" without blurring anything out, and those smidgens of dialogue were enough to keep us from giving it to anyone under the age of 13 even though every other balloon was completely all ages friendly.

I agree with what you're saying about using alternate realities to express more adult content. I think the last time you had a situation like that was, again, involving Bendis. In practice the ULTIMATES were a more mature Avengers book when it began in 2002, at that time probably coinciding with Geoff Johns or Chuck Austen's run on Avengers vol. 3 that was still telling pretty classic stories. Then when Bendis did AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED it really blew things open and started the "darker" version of the Marvel Universe that we had today, at many times going farther than the "accessible" or "alternate" Ultimate Avengers.

Were you planning on writing and drawing the proposed Power Pack book yourself? Would it have been mainstream Marvel or was their an equivalent to Marvel Adventures (Marvel Age?) at the time (showing my ignorance in a big way).

Since you mentioned BONE (I was gonna save it for part 2 or some later date), I watched the trailer for Jeff Smith's new documentary THE CARTOONIST, and he expressly says that he never intended it to be for kids, but rather himself and other cartoonist enthusiasts. Bone's popularity with younger readers has really blown me away, especially since the colored volumes with better paper quality are even cheaper than the original black & white trades are. I know that they sell them at elementary book fairs and stuff, and I think that's a great example of taking something that was arguably pretty insular as a black & white independent comic and repackaging it for a new audience and a new market, kind of bringing together everything that we've talked about thus far.

OWLY does really well at our store, probably just behind MINI MARVELS and STAR WARS ADVENTURES, so much so that we've been in talks with a local media center specialist about getting Andy Runton to come for a signing sometime. SIMPSONS is a big seller and ARCHIE has seen a big jump in sales since the announcement that he'll be proposing in #600. BABYSITTERS CLUB hasn't done too well for us.

I know what you're saying about Jeff Parker, and this is probably grounds for another discussion, when has a creator "made it," but I think that despite the work that he did over 15 years as a writer AND artist (we threw in big behind Interman), right now with the Agents of Atlas on-going launch, Dark Reign the Hood, and Age of the Sentry, this is the first time people in the mainstream are learning his name in a big way and realizing that he's a writer to be trusted for good stuff.

Since I also mentioned Fred Van Lente, everyone should check out the award winning ACTION PHILOSOPHERS.

GS: In "Gregg Schigiel's Late '90s Fantasy Land" I envisioned an in-continuity, ongoing monthly POWER PACK book that I'd write and pencil. Key words: Fantasy Land. I'd drawn a comic book. But, when a monthly series fantasy seemed unlikely, the hybrid idea, text and comics, made a lot of sense to me. And I'd have loved to been involved creatively in this imaginary project. In that format, yeah, it'd essentially be of its own li'l universe. But as a kid I loved that series (it was one of the first Marvel books I really followed) and find the idea of a group of young siblings with powers pretty great.

Meanwhile, on Friday I listened to a podcast interview with AMELIA RULES' Jimmy Gownley that was excellent, particularly with regard to kids, comics, and how and where it's happening. It was particularly interesting because they discuss a lot of similar things to what we're bringing up; kids, comics, comic stores/book stores/libraries, superheroes vis-à-vis other content, and how it all connects (or doesn't) as the case may be. If anyone's interested it's on iTunes under "Comics Coast to Coast" and the episode is labeled as the Jimmy Gownley interview.

I'm not sure PUSHING DAISIES would be a show a kid under 13 would want to watch, suitable or not. I don't know if they'd sit through it (I could be wrong, but very few adults sat through it as it's cancelled and those of us that did now have to settle for a measly three more episodes...).

As far as the Avengers go...I'll simply say this: I was always an AVENGERS guy (more than an X-Men or Spider-Man guy). I was honored and thrilled as the assistant for the Busiek/Perez re-launch of that title. AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED and much of what’s come since hasn’t necessarily been to my tastes. That's diplomatic, right?

BONE, obviously, is a big-time deal and a great success story. But I'd say that's more an all-ages book than a kid's book. On the flip side, I'd say OWLY and KORGI appear to be marketed as for young readers, especially OWLY. I'd say the same for AMELIA RULES and BUZZBOY and the work of the Kids Love Comics gang as well as the books coming out of Toon Books and Graphix. And I'm all for it. I guess the thing that strikes me, and maybe we're just circling the point now, is how all of the books we mentioned, the ones that seem that young readers take to, or even books considered all-ages, are not traditional superheroes; not even traditional monthly comics (we didn’t even graze the subject of manga). That's really something.

Seems the lesson here (and of course this could stand for more study than a cartoonist in his apartment and a gentleman in a single comic shop, due respect to us both) might just be that the landscape is changed. And maybe all these cries for "more comics for kids" or "more all-ages books" needs to be reconsidered.  

Perhaps all of us who, and I know I did it, repeated the "comics aren't just kids' stuff anymore" mantra for so many years...who wanted so badly for comics to get “respect” from the world as mature, serious, artistic, "realistic", etc...maybe we’ve gotten, to some degree, our wish that not every mainstream article or report on comics would use the ‘60s Batman TV Show sound effects in their headlines and lead paragraphs.

Maybe a guy like me, who would love to give superhero comics to his 7-year-old nephew so he can maybe dig 'em as much as I did, has to come to grips with the fact that it's a different scene out there. Not better or worse, just different.

And seeing as I started this li’l mess and seem to have reached a semi-theoretical  conclusion on my end, how about you close us out with your final thoughts or points...

SM: This has been the most eye-opening discussion for me of the three we've done so far. When we say All Ages around the store, what we're really saying is "kids comics," without thinking of what either of those things mean. That corner is just the only 100% true haven in the store where you're not going to open up Spider-man and by chance see Aunt May and J. Jonah Jameson Sr. making time.

Right before I read your comment about "comics aren't just for kids anymore" I thought "comics aren't for kids anymore." and in a huge way I think that's true for the mainstream world at large. I think the responsibility has fallen away from writers and artists and editors onto the shoulders of retailers and other fans to raise new readers, to put the right, appropriate books in their hands and guide them into fully fledged readership.

It's a job we take very seriously around here because a) in the transitioning world of direct market retailing, we need to cultivate imaginations and a love of reading a book to death and rolling it up and stuffing it in your back pocket and b) because there's nothing like selling kids their first comic.

 

Gregg Schigiel is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. He's worked as a penciller and editor for Marvel Comics and an illustrator and cartoonist at Nickelodeon in addition to creating his own characters and books. He currently archives "swabby" Luke Skywalker drawings in the New York area. Check out his website at Hatter Entertainment.com.

Stephen Mayer makes his mama proud bagging back issues at home and getting emotional while watching Aaron Sorkin shows.