"Not your Dad's comics." But wait, they are!

Continuing my commentary about how the term "all ages" has been reduced to "kiddie comics", I present exhibit B:



There had been many super-hero cartoons before, both theatrical and on broadcast television. The Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 1940's played it straight. They represented what was seen in the comics of the time. In the 1960's, both Marvel and DC licensed their characters to various animation studios with mixed results. The 1970's and '80's were likewise littered with various comic book characters on television although they were under heavy restrictions from the television's Practices and Standards as well as the networks that aired them. Violence was toned way down and many stories were crafted not as action-filled adventures, but as morality plays or ecology lessons. Then in 1989, movie theaters were hit with a huge bat-signal.

Tim Burton's Batman movie made a huge splash at the box office and everybody wanted to jump on the super-hero bandwagon. We were bombarded with movies, television shows and cartoons featuring all sorts of costumed adventures. And then just three years later, Batman: The Animated Series debuted, leaving everything else in the dust. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm had perfectly channeled the design and dynamic of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of fifty years earlier. The series featured characters familiar to the public and brought to the screen many others that had only been seen in the pages of comics. DC soon released a tie-in series written and drawn in the style established by the cartoon. This was a self-contained, single story per issue, out of main continuity series that was highly reminiscent of the main Batman and Detective Comics issues prior to the coming of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One stories.

Within a year of the new series debut, the main Bat books went into a multi-year, convoluted storyline where Batman has his back broken and is temporarily replaced by another hero named Azrael wearing the batsuit. The stories got very dark and following the pattern established by the Superman Comics the year before when that titular character was killed off, the reader had to purchase several comics each month to follow the story. Meanwhile, the Batman animated tie-in continued and became the only published version of the character that was even recognizable to the casual fan or the diehard comics reader. The series was cancelled and restarted several times adjusting to the changes in the television show, but still maintained the high level of quality and entertainment value. When Superman received his own new show in the same universe and style as Batman, a new comic for him was also introduced. They even produced a title in the animated style called "Adventures in the DC Universe" to tell stories of other characters not yet on television.



Watching the competition and reacting accordingly as they had done back and forth for decades, Marvel saw the success of the new cartoons and added their own. The X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four and others were brought to television and naturally, their own new comic series out of continuity. But while DC had maximized their cartoons potential by using Dini and Timm to design the show with extremely high production values, Marvel merely took the then current versions in the books and threw them on the screen. Being the 1990's, this meant that the excesses and over-design that we were seeing in the comics were magnified and looked even more ridiculous. The Marvel cartoons were trying too hard to play it straight, as well. The dialogue was borderline camp as the scripts seemed overly melodramatic in comparison to those of the distinguished competition. Another mis-step was that while DC hired talent to match the unique look in their comic versions of the cartoons, Marvel's cartoons had no distinctive look, so the comic versions looked like knock-offs of their mainline. (With an exception and due respect to Alex Saviuk who worked on the Spider-Man comic as well as the in-continuity Spider-Man.)

As time rolled on, each cartoon would end and be replaced by another on both sides of the fence. And the tie-in comics would follow suit with varying degrees of success matching that of the cartoon it would be adapting. Returning to the present, Marvel has created several series of comics that are out of continuity featuring the mainline characters that aren't tied to animated cartoons. DC has pretty much stuck to the pattern of following the cartoons, but both companies keep these lines separate from the mainline and does little to no promotion to show that these books,unlike the main titles, are accessible to everyone. Most modern comics readers are trained to follow the cross-overs and events that they are given. A one shot story? A done-in-one? Forget it. If it doesn't have repercussions to the characters in all the books, it's not important. It's almost as if the companies are trying to make the main books as difficult to get into as they are to quit when one "event" leads into another and no story ever truly ends. Are they afraid that if they end a story, everyone will quit buying the books? "Jumping on point" is a catchphrase overly used by publishers to convince potential readers that they can start reading a new title without having to have read a ton of back story. I find that this is more the opposite and every time that phrase is used, I see it as a "jumping OFF point".

Which brings us back to the animated tie-ins and out of continuity books. Marvel editors in interviews will state how Amazing Spider-Man is rated for "teens+", but Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man is rated "All Ages". I don't think I like the idea of ANY Spider-Man comic that isn't created to be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone of any age. Likewise with Batman, Superman, or any comic book super-hero. For years, Stan Lee sang it on high that Marvel comics were being read by college students and adults, but were still great for kids everywhere. So why is it that all those great characters that he, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and many others created and wrote/drew for decades now have to have separate titles for different demographics? Have the audiences really become more sophisticated as the publishers would like us to believe? A walk through any comic shop in America will permit you to answer that question for yourself. Maybe it's because the industry allowed itself to become too complacent and dependent on the direct market distribution system. When the only people that can find comics are the people that have already been buying them for years without any new readers coming in, it's easy to give up and pander to that audience. But that's another discussion for another day. Leaving the availability issue to the side for the moment, I believe that the content of the product is at least, if not more, important. If you aim narrowly, you will hit fewer targets. If comics publishers could get over themselves and realize that it's not necessary to divide your line to reach more and that creating a solid, entertaining, accessible product is the key to success, I think we would all be better off. But I'm a dreamer.