Hey Kids! No Comics!

Illustration from the critically-acclaimed JetCat clubhouse series. Courtesy Jay Stephens

JetCat clubhouse series. Courtesy Jay Stephens

Uncle Scrooge. Little Lulu. Mighty Mouse. Captain Marvel. For years characters like these ruled corner store comic racks across North America, earning a loyal fan base and selling hundreds of thousands of copies each month. As any comic connoisseur will tell you, these titles stood out thanks to charming art and clever writing that addressed both the joys and fears of childhood.

Take Little Lulu for example: a proto-feminist in curls and a red dress. Her misadventures throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s featured kids who were perpetually getting into trouble in an adult world, only to giddily stumble out again. Then there was Carl Barks's beloved Uncle Scrooge, which for 23 years weaved together colourful characters, slapstick humour and adventure in a way the Disney Empire has rarely duplicated.

Thing is, as you’ve probably read over the past few years: comics aren't just for kids anymore. The ongoing and well-reported shift towards a more mature audience is the result of a veritable landslide of challenging, complex graphic novels over the past 10 years. As clichéd as it sounds, these really do represent an evolutionary step for the medium - there’s no point in arguing that. But the new wave has had its costs, chief among them being the near vacuum that’s been left in what was once a thriving market for well-crafted kids’ comics. If you need proof, just take a stroll through your local 7-Eleven. You'd be hard pressed to find any evidence of kids’ comics or the iconic racks they used to call home. That’s because the continent’s largest convenience store chain did away with wire comic racks over the past decade, citing a lack of demand for kids’ comics. If comics of any kind are even carried you’ll have to root through copies of People and Electronic Gaming Monthly to find them.

This might not seem like much of a loss to grown-up readers of such comics as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth or Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, but it’s a matter of grave concern for those within the industry. Michael Chabon, author of the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, devoted his keynote address during last summer's Eisner Awards to the matter. In an eloquent and wistful speech, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer and occasional comic scribe took dead aim at the industry’s dirty little secret. “Children did not abandon comics," he said to a packed hall of comic professionals. "Comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. The adult reader of comic books has always been the Holy Grail, the promised land, the imagined lover who will greet us, at the end of the journey, with open arms, with acceptance, with approval. … Comics have always been an arriviste art form. And all upstarts are to some degree ashamed of their beginnings. But frankly, I don’t think that’s what’s going on in comics anymore. I think we have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?”

In addition to being sad, it’s also posing a serious threat to the future of the industry. What comic companies are worried about is this: typically, children who devour lots of comics tend to grow up to become happy, comic-buying adults. As the quantity and quality of kids’ comics drops so does the number of children reading them, which eventually will cut off the supply of adult readers who are willing to spend $40 on a hardcover comic. The free-falling circulation and readership numbers experienced by the North American industry over the past 15 or so years is evidence of the theory in action. There have been many attempts to remedy this, and all but a few have proved embarrassing.

To the comic world’s credit, there have been earnest attempts to recreate the Golden Age of Kids’ Stuff, including Measles, Scatterbrain, Yeah! and Little Lit. But despite such A-list talent as Los Bros. Hernandez, Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman and Ottawa’s Dave Cooper, they fell flat. In 2002 they even resorted to giving comic books away through an industry/retailer initiative called Free Comic Book Day. The annual event has participating publishers donate comics to be given away gratis at comic shops across North America. The scheme managed to grab some headlines, but failed to grab that many readers. The whole affair seems like an expensive exercise in desperation.

So aside from single-handedly eliminating video games, extreme sports and other modern distractions, what’s a cartoonist to do?

Well, if you’re Jay Stephens, you trade in your alt-comic credentials and start drawing kids’ comics. Stephens, who lives in Guelph, Ont., made a name for himself in the early ’90s with SIN Comics– a decidely adult comic that masqueraded as a kids’ comic. (Imagine cartoony black and white characters drinking, fighting and swearing.) Then in 1996 he adapted some of his characters to appear in the U.S. kids’ magazine Nickelodeon, and found near-instant success. He has gone on to draw a popular strip for Canada’s Chickadee and create an animated cartoon on NBC called Tutenstein based on one of his early characters. Like fellow cartoonists Joe Matt, Chester Brown and Seth, Stephens grew up reading comics such as Little Lulu, Casper, Archie, Mighty Mouse and of course superhero comics. Yet he’s also a parent of a 6½- and 4½-year-old, which makes the current dearth in new kids’ fare a bit more personal. “There are kids reading comics, they’re just reading less and less of them - and I’m not sure they ever will again,” he said. “It’s a product of our time. There's a generational impetus on making mature work and we’ve gone and cut off new readers. It’s like the whole ‘comics aren't just for kids anymore’ mantra turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

To Stephens, the recent failed attempts at nouveau kiddie comics missed the mark for a very specific reason. "A lot of these guys - whose work I love by the way - are permanent adolescents. Most of them aren’t married and hardly any of them have children. They've stayed adolescents and they're pulling up the art form with them. They've decided that comics are for them and them alone,” he said. “This is something that's always kind of irked me about somebody like, say, Seth, who is a huge Peanuts fan and Little Lulu fan, but in an intellectual way only. He embraces it as highbrow art. We're both fans of the same material, but we have a completely different approach. He would rather keep it just for himself. Isn’t it great because kids can read it and it's also miraculously enjoyable for grown-ups? Isn’t that the goal?”

Of course, it isn’t all doom and gloom according to Stephens. There is the occasional worthwhile licensed kids’ comic, along with a flood of Japanese manga and a reprinting of the classic Little Lulu oeuvre. But as long as cartoonists continue to eschew the lowly kids’ stuff, the industry will continue its freefall, which can’t be good for anyone. As Michael Chabon says at the conclusion of his comic-manifesto: “We have to sweep them up and carry them off on the vast flying carpets of story and pictures on which we ourselves, in entire generations, were borne aloft, on carpets woven by Swan and Hamilton, Kirby and Lee. They did it for us; we have to pass it on, pay it forward. It’s our duty, it’s our opportunity and I really do believe it will be our pleasure.”

Brad Mackay is a Toronto-based writer. He is currently collaborating on a book with Guelph-based cartoonist Seth about the history of Canadian cartooning.