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Wednesday - December 29, 2004:

Friends of ours have two kids. The oldest, a boy, is four. We only see them once every few months so I thought I'd bring something small as a gift. I walked into my back-room ten minutes before it was time to make the hour trek and was faced with a mountain of long boxes I had no desire to dig through. See, I thought it would be nice to give little George a bunch of Spider-Man comics. He'd been running around in Spider-Man Pj's on our last visit so I thought, "Too young to read but not to old to look at the words and see them coming out of somebody's mouth while mom or dad narrated."

The problem in those ten minutes wasn't getting to the books, I could have thrown myself at the pile of boxes and come out with something. The problem became making sure they were appropriate for a four-year old. Most aren't and there's a problem with that. Of course, we walked in the door of their house only to be pummeled by suction-cupped darts that flew from George's brand new web-shooting wrists. Outside, there were spray webs, a bit shredded by the latest snow. George is obsessed with Spider-Man. I'll dig through the comics today, but I'm thinking I'll have to dig back into the 70's or early eighties to find anything that is light enough for a four year old and a his concerned mom. Any suggestions? it's got to be Spider-man.

Regardless of our thoughts about print-comics and expanding genres, shouldn't we be excited about kids being into a comic property before they even know what a comic-book is? Shouldn't that give us hope for the future of the medium? Is this a path to comics that we should be excited about or is it a path That's already worn too thin?

-Bob Stevenson 

1 comment:
Bob Stevenson (rstevenson) says:

 

1. Written by Guest, on 29-12-2004 14:10
see if you have any of the Spidey Super Stories books -- those are age-appropriate. if they didn't include a license to the Children's Television Workshop, I'm sure Marvel would be putting them back out again -- the Spidey and his Friends toddler line just seems to be expanding every time I'm in the store. if not those, go for some of the new Marvel Age books.

2. Written by Guest, on 29-12-2004 19:39
I grew up wanting to read comics, and I imagine it's similar for a lot of people that are into them now. I don't think it's something to make you hopeful, since the mere fact that some kids are interested in comics doesn't matter as much as the amount of kids that are. A tiny audience is influencing a tiny amount of kids that will be part of the tiny audience in the future. 
 
 
Anyways, I read comics to my five year old sister every night when I'm home from school. As far as content goes, if it's not worse than a grimm fairy tale, I'll read it, and those stories are pretty harsh... so I probably would consider most of my spiderman comics to be ok.Nothing terrible in "villain appears, spidey beats up villain... the end". Maybe they're doing different naughty things with Spiderman now =\  
 
Her favorite comic is GeGeGe no Kitaro. I've recently started reading Dungeon to her, but I'll probably stop since the dialogue is too advanced for her in spots, so I never know how much she really understands.Some of the more "mature" comics I have are probably worded simply enough for her to get completely, though. 
 
She's pretty knowledgeable for a child too. I took her to see the SpongeBob Squarepants movie and when there was a Krazy Kat drawing on the wall in one scene, she pointed it out to me.

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artist, history teacher, programmer, world traveler ... full profile
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