A colleague of mine just compared the scholarly interest in superhero stories to the scholarly interest in children's literature, and though I see the comparison, I think it's a little unfair to relegate all superhero comics to the 'kiddy lit' pile. Yes, the majority of it fairly thin fantasy/action, but there is a growing number of superhero books that cater to a much more politically attuned reader, JMS' Supreme Power or B.M. Bendis' Powers are probably the best two on the shelves right now.
Then there's the less pointed but still surprisingly political stuff going on in, for example, JLA, which had an issue on the Iraq War that paralleled Bush to Lex Luthor (#83, "American Nightmare"), or The Ultimates, which routinely calls superheroes "persons of mass destruction." Even the JL: Unlimited cartoon got damned political last year. Partly, this is due to how much politics have become the American national sport, but partly, the audience has just gotten smarter
Also, even the thin stuff really isn't aimed at kids anymore. The Batman animated series was aimed at guys in the late teens and twenties (I know, because I was one of them), as was something as innocuous as Animaniacs. Mainstream superhero books are marketed directly at guys in their twenties. The sexual content, the language, even the appeals to mass culture all point to that. We need to come up with a new age category for fantasy literature that isn't aimed at kids, but also isn't "L"iterature, either. It's not just YA; it has content and references that only adults get. It's also not 'adult' in the same sense as Sandman or Transmetropolitan.
Posted by orion at August 14, 2005 10:53 AM | TrackBack