More Comics for Kids

The Eisner Committee has posted the entirety of Michael Chabon's keynote speech from last week's Eisner Awards ceremony held at the San Diego Comic Convention.

I case you didn't know, Michael Chabon is the critically acclaimed and award winning author of such books as The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2001), Wonderboys, and Summerland. He's also a huge comic book fan who oversees the quarterly The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist for Dark Horse Comics.

I found a number of things interesting in his speech:

1) He believes that comic books have finally arrived artistically.

Because I believe that the battle has now, in fact, been won. Not only are comics appealing to a wider and older audience than ever before, but the idea of comics as a valid art form on a par at least with, say, film or rock and roll music, is widely if not quite universally accepted. Comics and graphic novels are regularly reviewed and debated in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, even in the august pages of The New York Review of Books. Ben Katchor won a MacArthur Fellowship, and Art Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize.

Despite his inclusion of the horribly over-used example of the Spiegleman Pulitzer, I have to agree with him. There are more comics with high literary and artistic merit in the marketplace than ever before. This is a very good thing. It helps that there is plenty of product out there to direct new readers to for people like myself who try to preach the good word on comics. Even if I'm not reading all of it, to know it's there gives me the confidence to promote what I think is a fantastic (and relatively inexpensive) entertainment and art format.

2) However, Chabon thinks that in comic's rush to reach artistic credibility it has left its original audience - children - behind.

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. And for a long time we as lovers and partisans of comics were afraid, after so many long years of struggle and hard work and incremental gains, to pick up that old jar of greasy kid stuff again, and risk undoing it all. 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.

He brings up the usual complaints from comic publishers: that there is too much competition for a kid's dollar and will eventually lose out to video games, the Internet, DVDs, etc. He also trots out the old adage that kids today are more sophisticated today. He dismisses both.

I think, we have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

He then presents 4 general principles for creating great comic books for kids. I won't list them here, but you can quickly find them by scanning through the transcript of the speech. They are good ideas that could generate fascinating stories for youngsters if implemented with skill and creativity.

Good comics for kids would translate into more comic books readers. More comic book reading kids means more comic book reading adults down the road. Unless more readers are brought in, the industry won't be able to sustain itself.

3) Chabon, like myself, has pretty much forced comics on his kids up to this point.

My son Zeke is here tonight. He's seven, and he likes comic books. In 1944, if you were a seven year old, you probably knew a dozen other kids your age who were into Captain Marvel and the Submariner and the Blue Beetle. When I was seven, in 1970, I knew three or four. But in his class, in his world, Zeke is unique. Comic books are so important to me-I have thought, talked and written about them so much-that if he didn't like them, I think he would be obliged to loathe them. I have pretty much forced comics on my kids.

We can't afford to take this handcrafted, one-kid-at-a-time approach anymore. 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.

Ian loves comic books now - but I can't be certain that he'll continue to enjoy them in the future. I guess it will be my job to show him how the comic book form is already to grow with him. It doesn't have to be superheroes all the time. And I'm ready to take on the more daunting task of turning two girls (Emma and Zoe) into comic readers. Daunting because despite many of the accomplishments in the comics field, a vast majority of the books appeal mainly to boys. There are books that appeal to girls - and the list grows longer every day - but they are harder to find.

Hopefully the creators in the comic book industry listen to Chabon's call to action and create the books that will make my sale of comics to Ian, Emma, and Zoe - and their friends/classmates/cousins - easier.