How many parents, I wonder, sympathized with that episode of Malcolm in the Middle a few weeks ago where dad goes to The Middle Earthling comic store to get Malcolm a present. "The Middle Earthling is for a sophisticated clientele," intones the clerk, who tries to sell dad a bogus "classic" Spider-man for $50.
Things have changed since you boomers picked up Batman or Superman at the corner store for 15 cents, lo those many years ago. For one thing, you have to go to a comic store to buy a comic book these days. And the real problem is not snarky clerks with rings in their nose.
The problem is the mind-numbing sex and desperately repetitive violence of the comic books themselves. You can sense it as soon as you enter the store with a six-year-old girl and eight-year-old boy in tow, as I did, and feel the withering glare of the regular clientele, a clutch of anemic and under-socialized young men. There won't be any other children there.
In the past 10 years, young adults have become the target demographic for DC and Marvel, the big corporate purveyors. They have turned their venerable superheroes into cash-spinners, and the sensibilities of children are the last thing they're worried about. Next month, for example, Marvel's 1950s superhero The Rawhide Kid will come out of the closet and become the first avowedly homosexual character in comic-land. A few years ago, in a similar grab at market share, they didn't hesitate to turn The Green Lantern from a hero to a villain.
One thing that has made this easier is the downfall of the Comics Code Authority, whose code of good behaviour ("In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds") had regulated mass-market comics since 1954. Last year, Marvel officially renounced the Comics Code. Over at DC, where they pay lip service to the Code, Supergirl has nonetheless morphed into a bad-tempered Britney Spears.
The people who draw and write comics, and even a few misguided scholars, will tell you that this is because comics have evolved into a mature and "adult" art form. Academic Mark Dunn claims they are "the only art form that began as an expression of pop culture." Comic artist Peter Kostka declares that he "would go nuts if someone told me that [children's stories]are all I would ever be able to do in the art form that I love the most."
But smarter critics, including my eight-year-old son, who has taken an animation workshop and loves the comics, see through the "adult" flim-flam right away. We were nosing around Toronto's Comics and More last Saturday afternoon because he had rejected some current Spider-man comic books his mother had bought him for Christmas. "I call them Stupid Blood and Shouting comic books," he said. What he wanted, he explained, was something with, "good drawing and some kind of an actual story."
He was delighted with a book-size compendium of the first 10 Spider-man episodes from 1964, and it bothered him not at all that they were printed in black and white.
His sister, who was along for the ride, then insisted on a comic for herself. This unexpected request sent me shuffling over to the Wonder Woman and Supergirl racks. Wonder Woman has developed a lot more cleavage than I remembered (Comic Code Costume Rule No. 2: "Females shall be drawn realistically without undue emphasis on any physical quality"), not to mention a singularly unpleasant outlook on life. And Supergirl on the cover of the most recent edition had slitty, ferret-like eyes; on page three, she and her girlfriends, every one an apparent veteran of breast-enlargement surgery, get naked in a locker room.
The sympathetic store owner directed me to the Barbie comic section. This is the first time in my life I have been delighted to discover a Barbie product for sale, which gives cause for dark ruminations about settling for less when less is all there is.
Is this a case of old-fogeyism? Is our generation of parents merely the latest to misunderstand a perfectly normal childhood need to express aggression and find empowerment in superheroes and supervillains?
The Comics Code Authority itself was a reaction to Fredric Wertham's scaremongering 1953 book Seduction of the Innocent, which led to the U.S. Congress censuring the comic industry. The comics of my childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s were the cleaned-up outcome.
But even then, Supergirl wore a scanty costume that my mother disapproved of. Is my dismay at the current silicone-enhanced Supergirl merely the latest model of pointless parental indignation? Patricia Edgar, an Australian sociologist, sniffs that, "What you've got now is an overprotected middle class who can't act out their fantasies," and who pass on their timid, sanitized and risk-adverse outlook to their children.
However, distinctions can be made. Stacy Allston, a trenchant Internet comic critic who writes under the name Ouzomandias, attacks the pretension that current comics are either adult or sophisticated. "We confuse ourselves in this," she writes. "The presence, or absence, of adult content does not guarantee the quality of a work . . . 'Adult' has become a euphemism for words like 'lurid,' 'erotic,' and 'pornographic,' as well as an accurate descriptor of concepts like 'topical,' 'complex,' and 'difficult.' "
She mentions comics where the use of nudity can be justified as one means of symbolizing the conflict of good and evil forces. But thoughtful transgression of that sort is rare. More often, " 'Adult' serves as a euphemism to mask a puerile obsession with sex and nudity." When the potty-mouthed humour that accompanies it is understandable by 10-year-olds, as it invariably is, "We should not describe it as 'adult.' "
She believes, as I do, that the recent denigration of "kids' stories" within the comic business is connected to a rooted disrespect for children in our culture. In the North American view, a story for children must be vacuous, and the emptiness of a TV show like Barney (or, indeed, of the Barbie comic books) is the only possible manner of addressing children. This would come as a great surprise to Hans Christian Andersen, or to a first-rate contemporary children's writer such as Rosemary Wells. But it is the consensus.
You can't blame current comic-book writers for this. The overprotection of children began in the Fifties, and the moralizing Comics Code was an early manifestation. Comics of that era may have nostalgia value for people my age, but objectively considered, they were silly and limited.
I think the current degraded state of comics is little more than a different manifestation of this underlying discomfort with children. The comics were childish (as opposed to childlike) in the Fifties, and now they're childish in a different way.
But that difference, unfortunately, is a harmful one. It may have been inevitable that the superhero would sooner or later have to start killing the villain, but it was not inevitable that this be done, as it has been, in a subliterate way. Violence, once permitted, quickly became gratuitous, with a rocketing body count and a new breed of amoral "hero" represented by characters like The Punisher and Wolverine.
There's a 1960s Batman movie where the hero searches desperately for a place to throw a ticking bomb but encounters children and nuns (remember them?) everywhere. "Some days," he opines, "you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Today's Wolverine might very well toss the bomb. In a recent sequence, he was thrown into a jail where he was stripped naked, stalked by a group of evidently gay prisoners called "The Cruisers," and subjected to a simulated rape where his nipple was bitten off. One critic noted that in his local supermarket, these issues of Wolverine were on sale "un-shrinkwrapped" right next to Archie and Scooby-Doo.
Comic publishers argue that they are producing several streams of comics suitable for readers of different ages, including very young ones. They also claim that the covers are coded so parents will know the difference.
In an era of general corporate sleaze, it will come as no surprise that these "codes," if they exist, are obscure and unfindable. Parents who try to introduce their children to comics are ambushed by a jungle of genres that are unpredictably laced with soft porn and disembowelment.
It would be relatively easy for Marvel and DC to code their comics in a clear and readable fashion. Also doable, though more difficult, is simply to hire better writers.
Neither of these things is likely. Consult Marvel's Web site and you find a corporate balance sheet, complete with come-ons to potential investors and gloating over the profits of the Spider-man movie. "That's what's happened since the accountants took over," says the manager of Comics and More.
In answer to an e-mail plea, Allston recommended Bone, by Jeff Smith, as one of the few current comics "friendly to all-ages readers." But she added that all-ages comics are declining yearly and even now are almost impossible to find. "More and more, it seems necessary to look to reprints for a less salty approach to the medium."
And that, entirely out of desperation, is what I did. But the world of kids pooling their dimes to buy the latest issue of Batman is gone forever.
Perhaps that's not a bad thing . . . if there were anything out there in the world of popular culture to take its place. Is there?