10 Harsh Truths You Don't Want To Admit About Comic Books‏

10. They Are Kinda Childish

One of the major struggles comic book fans have faced for years - and still face, to a degree - is the sneering condescension from non-readers who dismiss them as "for kids". Some of those snobs turn out to be total hypocrites who will totally pick up and praise a comic if it's rebranded as a graphic novel but still, as much as it pains us to say so, they do have a point. Sort of, anyway. Indie comics have been catering for a more mature audience since they broke out of the underground, and superhero comics have certainly been trying to keep up with their aging fan base who started reading in the sixties and seventies. That doesn't override the fact that, first of all, comic books were originally designed to be read by children. The original comics, even before the darker pulp-inspired superheroes, were either collections of newspaper funnies or spin/knock-offs of cartoons, all aimed at kids. Comic books as a whole continued that form for decades, and it was only really with revisionist classics like Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns in the eighties that publishers started to expand their scope a little. It'd be nice to say that since then comics have become as mature and thoughtful as those two books, but...well, they really haven't. Like a child misunderstanding what being a grown-up means, cape comics took the grittiness, violence and sexual content of those stories without anything else. Robbed of their context, they appear exactly as they actually are: a cynical attempt to appeal not to the pre-teen audience of the Golden Age, but the hormone-crazed adolescent boys who would otherwise be playing Call of Duty or watching action films. Which is why you get female characters who wear nothing more than bikinis, Superman snapping necks, and the Dark Knight describing himself as the goddamn Batman. In acting all "grown up", most superhero comics just highlight how childish they really are.