Journalist Jerry McGovern has an excellent article online about how to get more kids reading comics, not by trying to create more “kid-friendly” books, but by telling kids not to read them in the first place. Essentially, McGovern argues that if you telll kids that comics are bad for them, the allure will increase and BAM - more kids reading comics. This dovetails somewhat with my theory that we don’t need to make comics any more kiddie than they already are, that if companies just focus like a laser on making them appeal to young adults - keyword: “adults” - then eventually, the younger audience would come around.

For reasons that were never very clear to me, adults — especially my mother — were worried that reading comics would do some damage. Maybe they thought the pictures would diminish our reading skill, or that we would be exposed to dangerous ideas. I do remember that the jet pilot Blackhawk group was made up of various nationalities — Swedish, French, Dutch, etc. It was more like a United Nations peacekeeping force than the U.S. Marines, and Mom did not like the U.N.

Whatever the objection, it made the comics more attractive.

It’s refreshing to find something written for non-comic geeks by someone who actuallly understands the cource material and wasn’t just a journalist on a press junket. Read the rest of the piece here.

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