Peiratikos

I don’t often bother joining the comics-blogosphere (stupid awkward term, it needs an abbreviation—coblo? comicsphere?) conversations about the economics and politics of the comics industry, but since everybody ( Laura Gjovaag, Johnny B, David Fiore, Sean Collins, Christopher Butcher) is talking about this Jeff Parker interview which I so cruelly mocked, and since some of those people linked to my cruel mockery, I guess I’d better go ahead and say my own piece…

Laura thought I misread Parker’s point, but honestly, I didn’t even address the actual content of Parker’s statements (I was just making a little joke about a tangentially related irony), so I don’t think my reading of the point is relevant. His basic point, as I recall, once you strip away the somewhat moralistic tone of “Adults are stealing comics from kids!” seems to be that comics publishers who want to sell comics to kids should publish comics for kids. Which, well, yes. (As David points out, writing good books for kids can be very hard indeed.) I don’t think selling more comics to kids is necessarily the only or the best way to “save the industry,” but I don’t really care about the economic survival of DC or Marvel that much anyway. And as for the moralistic tone, well, whatever. Kids are no worse off for having their American superhero comics stolen away from them and made “adult”—they have plenty of manga and other things to entertain them. I’m sure it would be great if kids had more American comics to read, but Parker’s allegory of a poor child desperately grabbing for comics as the mean adult comics readers horde them away is really overstating the problem (calling it a “problem” is overstating the problem, really).