I do as sci-fi humor all ages comic called Marooned – A Space Opera in the Wrong Key. Steve Ogden does another one called Moon Town.

We recently just began a publishing studio called Wishtales, and our stories will cater to the all ages market. In fact, we just published a kids book by my daughter called Gertie, a Guinea Pig’s Tail.

Good stuff is out there, it just may not be on the big stores/comic shop shelves right now.

Disclaimer: I’m 17 years old, and I just got back into comics over this past year when my friend loaned me a copy of the Daredevil “Guardian Devil” TPB. I loved every minute of it, as it was accessible to new readers, yet adhered to established fans.

Conversely, when I tried reading “Final Crisis”, I hated it. It was full of nothing but allusions to decades-old stories and obscure characters that no one I knew had ever heard of. More often than not, I found myself looking up some people, like Libra and whatnot, because I had no idea who they were or why they were important!

My point is this: if comic companies want to hook new readers in, they’ll have to make it accessible. And the only way they can do THAT is to make engaging stories that don’t shy readers away.

My idea for them to do this? STOP. THE. CROSSOVERS. There are far too dang many of them now and it’s infuriating. The biggest offender: the house of ideas themselves, Marvel. It seems like every 2 months they issue ANOTHER line-wide crossover. If it’s not Avengers Disassembled, it’s House of M. If it’s not House of M, it’s Civil War, which is running concurrently with Planet Hulk, which turns into World War Hulk, and let’s not forget the Ultimate line of stories, which is set in modern-day, BUT it has crossovers of its own. It’s ridiculous!

I’ve chosen to wade through the kerfluffle of the Superhero comics, concentrating on “Batman” (and JUST “Batman”, mind you)for the most part. But I’m also exploring IDW’s backlog of “Transformers” TPBs, and they’re equally good.

My best bet for young readers? The Disney stuff put out by BOOM, Marvel Adventures, or even the Simpsons title Bongo does. Why? Well, I’ve read some of the stuff, and while it’s much less complex and doesn’t tie as many threads together as a good modern-day comic, it’s still fun and enjoyable to read.

That’s all I really have to say.

My five year old loves Tiny Titans, Owly, Batman Adventures, the little Chirp strip in Chirp magazine and when we’re not careful, whatever is left in the can. He doesn’t differentiate between genres, it’s comics. He even makes his own. Or he ‘helps’ me work on mine.

If you present them with varied material, they won’t grow up with the Marvel DC single mindset. And something like Frankie Pickle is really great, it bridges between novel and comics.

Thanks for the wonderful riff on the state of retailing comics for kids. The only somewhat fresh perspective I can contribute to the discussion is my role as a father and grandfather of blended families who couldn’t wait to take his kids and grandkids to the funny book store. Let me report that their reactions to comicdom were decidedly mixed.

My daughter and youngest son — future brainiac doctorates in medicine who were introduced to comics when they were 12 and 8, respectively — love to read but couldn’t be bothered with comics. (Still bought my youngest — now a 30-year-old Tori Amos fan — a copy of Comic Book Tattoo for his last birthday, a Xmas present that he claims to have enjoyed.)

Caught my oldest son — now a 32-year-old soldier heading for either Iraq or Afghanistan — and my granddaughter — a 6-year-old living in Dubuque, Iowa — just in time, however. Both fell in love with comics — separately and 25 years apart — before they started learning how to read.

John grew up on “quarter-box” comics at Roy’s Memory Shop in Houston, consisting largely of old mid 70s DC horror, war and largely continuity-free comics (House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Our Army at War, Star Spangled War Stories). After asking me one too many times what happened to HOM and HOS, I bought him some DC Showcase B/W reprints for Xmas presents. Shock and awe indeed…

In the case of granddaughter Zoe, I took her to the only comics shop in Dubuque this past summer for the very first time, pointed out what I thought to be age-appropriate comics that I thought she’d be interested in (unfortunately two very small but wide racks crammed with Marvel Adventures, Simpsons and Tiny Titans) and left her alone to make up her mind. She sat for the longest time — maybe a half-hour — looking and reading…

Two books caught her attention:

1. Finding Nemo, the only Boom Disney title the store stocked.
2. Issue #2 of Power Pack and the Fantastic Four miniseries.

Those, along with the Spongebob Squarepants comic I bought at a local Borders, got her hooked. So much so, that Zoe’s not allowed to read comics in the bathroom anymore. So much so, that Zoe explains to her two-year-old brother explaining the intricacies of Power Pack and these kids who are her age. So much so, that I found and mailed a trade of the first FF/PP collection to her in October. So much so, that Zoe keeps her copy of Spongebob Squarepants in my daughter’s car so she won’t get bored.

So, I agree with you wholeheartedly that adults who want to pass along the comic book habits shouldn’t push their superhero fix onto their kids. Let them discover what they like, if anything, get them hooked early…

About 5 years into my time at Nick Magazine, I used to get similarly rankled about “All-ages” comics. There I was at a magazine that spent money and time figuring out what kids of a specific age range ACTUALLY like by getting surveys out there, doing school visits, reading thousands of letters (well, the interns did) and yes, doing focus groups. (Those things get scoffed at, but as long as you don’t take everything you hear as gospel, they can help create real view of your readership.)

But Marvel, DC and whoever else would just stick a label on a comic and say “it’s for kids!” Grr… I too would rage that “all ages” is sloppy wishful thinking in an industry that doesn’t actually make much money off of kids.

But nowadays I’m more towing the Dorkin line–I shrug when folks object to the term. For a couple of reasons: as is universally acknowledged, kids are not the core business of most companies making comics for the direct market. When Marvel and DC produce stuff for kids it’s them throwing pasta against the wall. If it sticks, it sticks. They don’t know why. I doubt they could replicate their own successes in these areas. (Batman Adventures was great! The latest tie ins? Not as good.) Top talent isn’t looking to work on those books, and talent isn’t brought in with the idea that they will create a best-selling kids comic. Until these companies get serious, what they do isn’t all that bad. Or mostly not. It’s a “shrug” response, but until Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, et al spend time and money creating great stuff for kids, it’s the best they’ll do. In the long run, they should really do this–but I don’t begrudge them the term “all ages” anymore.

The bigger reason I’m not upset about “all ages” is that everyone else other than Marvel, DC, and “big” direct market companies, are filling in the gaps in kids comics quite well. Tons of manga, Dungeon, huge swaths of books from Scholastic, First Second, Hyperion–we haven’t seen the end of “graphic novels for kids” (a phrase that makes my head spin) by a long shot. And they are often being produced by companies that are more sensitive to the subtleties of the kid audiences in a market (bookstores) that traditionally sells to kids.

And, yes Yotsuba is a pretty amazing comic!!!

(It’s also really enjoyable, which doesn’t hurt.)

For what it’s worth my 5-yr old is reading Bongo Comics, the John Stanley library books, Little Lulu, the Toon Comics Treasury, various Disney comics, the DHC Harvey Comics reprints, the first Cul De Sac collection, Nickelodeon Magazine’s comics section (for another month), the Supergirl section of Wednesday Comics, Polo, some of the Toon Comics releases, 50’s Felix the Cat comics, a few Tiny Titans issues and a bunch of other all-ages family-friendly comical books. And that scratches the surface, I have no complaints with anything other than the usual pipeline/delivery mechanism/stigma/stupidity issues everyone’s had since the newsstand died and the DM started.

Isn’t Yotsuba an awesome comic?

Wanted to end positive and geeky.

The industry has long decried a ratings system as being a form of censorship, but could it be useful as a sales tool?

For “All Ages” the best off the cuff example would be Star Wars. The violence is there but isn’t graphically portrayed and thus acceptable to most parents. There is no sex, the most dangerous thing you see is a kiss between an unknowing brother and sister. The over all tone is a mix of serious and fun storytelling. Kids and adults alike can enjoy it. That’s probably what publishers are going for with the term, and failing badly with the content.

If all children’s books were marketed as “all-ages”, you’d see everything from Curious George to Gossip Girls all shelved next to each other. And that would be dumb. Marvel and DC have never cared much about marketing to bookstores and libraries. As you said, they’ve got a core audience. They don’t really need the rest of us. But it wouldn’t hurt for other comic/graphic novel publishers to take a look at how prose books are marketed to that “all-ages” demographic. They’re marketed according to reading level and content to make them easy to sell to the intended customer. And that intended customer is, of course, the moms, aunts, and grandmas who buy books for their kids, and who probably don’t know a whole lot about superheroes. (Sure, dads buy books for their kids, too. But not nearly as often and not nearly as much.)

Making books easy to sell. Wow. Crazy talk?

Probably. :)

To address your point about the nature of ‘All Ages’ rather than the terminology, I think it works great in a punk show context, it very deliberately means that you don’t have to be drinking age to show up. I think even the idea of it is stupid for comics, it means arrested development because too many grown-ups in comics are ’sensitive’ about buying shit labeled as ‘for kids’, even if they enjoy it. I think that as a creator you can write a book for anyone you want, but it’s the job of publishers and retailers to sell that work and saying shit like “It’s for all ages!” doesn’t do a very good job of that. Think of the media you love the most, then think about whether or not it appeals, clearly and deliberately, to a particular audience. Whether that’s little kids, teenagers, monster fans, whomever. That it found an audience outside that particular target group is great, but if it had tried to appeal to all people, all ‘ages’ at once, do you really think it’d be your favourite?

As for “Family” dickishness, Murphy Brown already explained and defended different usages for the word family back when Dan Quayle got on her case. Anyone who’s still got a problem with the word can take it up with the 1990s.

That being said: For me, all-ages is a phrase I became familiar with through all-ages punk shows, everyone knew what it meant, the kids were allowed into CBGB’s for that show, they didn’t quibble about whether 3 or 90-yr olds were gonna show up. I see all-ages and it just tells me it isn’t filled with scenes from Clockwork Orange. I never got the idea it was a sales tool, really. Not in comics. I thought it was a warning that there’s no “mature” (haha, let’s discuss that phrase) material there, kids can look. As an evil marketing tool it’s too damned subtle for lunkeaded, chunkheaded comics, it might be abused more often than “sense-shattering”, perhaps, but I think it does have some meaning and communicates, even if sloppily. The “entertaining to all”, that’s fantasy-land, sure.

I’ve used the phrase to describe kid-friendly books I’ve done and I don’t care what dummy or huckster bin that puts me in. It’s a term that makes sense to enough people at this point in comics, so, I dunno, I can’t get worked up over it either way, despite these numerous sentences. Sue me, I’m bored waiting for ink to dry on an “all-ages”comic (really), or “family friendly” if you like. Although, in Hulk vs Superman mode — “family-friendly” makes me barf a little because it makes me immediately think of the Ice Capades and I don’t want to, I believe it translates into “namby-pamby” in the minds of most folks wearing Graphitti Design t-shirts, and if you wanted to be annoying and dickish about it, you could argue — whose family is it suitably friendly for? All English-speaking families world-wide? What if some english-speaking families disagree? There’s beer and violence in Bongo comics, but it’s got the code, and it’s considered “family-friendly” — help! What if you don’t have a family? What if you can’t have a family, please don’t remind me I’m sterile, I hate you, stupid comic phrase!” Okay, dickishness over — but it’s easy to sound silly knocking phrases, because if you’re looking for a perfect one, you might as well go looking for a unicorn or something.

Anyway, see, I wrote about phrases and sidelined the debate, let it go, man, let it go. The behavior’s more important than the comic book terms. Besides, when you’re in a multi-genre medium called “comic books”, you’ve pretty much already lost the war as far as professional terminology goes.

They’re not the same as the ones I’ve read as a kid (you guessed it – superheroes of the 70s/80s), but who cares. I wouldn’t buy the latest Superspider-Manamerica for myself, much less my kid. But then, I didn’t have anything like ‘Bone’, the Dungeon series, ‘Name that Manga’ or the BOOM series of licensed stuff when I was a kid either. Nope, just three to choose from, Marvel, DC or Archie.

But the thing is? I could find that stuff almost ANYWHERE other than an LCS. I guess that’s where the rub is when one goes to many LCS out there – it must be kinda like going to rent the DVD of The Gritty, Murderous, Misogynist, Mostly Nude Adventures of Mickey Mouse at the store while trying to cover your kids’ eyes.

One other problem with the “mature” titles is that they mistake boobies and decapitations for dealing with issues and stories that adults can actually relate to. Luckily there’s some great manga for that (Solanin, Oishinbo, Real) but still, comparatively slim pickings.

Is the idea of a market for anything other than superhero books a myth too?