The Superhero Industry Hates Children (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Superhero Industry Hates Children (2019)

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170 pointsPaulHoule273 comments

This reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote “ When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

This also reminds me of finding boxes full of superhero comic books from the 1950s and 1960s in my grandparent’s basement. They had belonged to my father and his siblings when they were teenagers. I loved reading those old comic books where every story had a complete story between two covers. Where it was always clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were (and if the good guy was acting bad, you knew that by the end of the story it would be revealed that they were pretending or being controlled by a bad guy). The stories were plain fun and uplifting. Such a joy to read. Decades later I tried getting into the modern comic books. I was disappointed by them. They were all serial stories that required reading multiple volumes to get the whole story. The themes were ones of depression, cynicism, bleakness, sadness, hurt, pain. I simply couldn’t relate and yearned for the comics of my youth in my grandparent’s basement. But, I still really enjoy the marvel movies ;-)

>>Where it was always clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were

As I get older, and the world gets more chaotic, I find I like this more and more.. When you have to vet the weatherman saying it's raining, its nice to have something simple/straightforward.

As a kid, I always had a softspot for 80s spiderman - nothing ever went right for the poor guy :-P

I can relate to that quote (as I'm sure most people can).

When I was in middle-school, Pokemon TCG was still really new and popular ... "with children". Me and my friends played together, but I was horrified of the idea of anyone else at school finding out. I remember walking to a friends house with my cards and ran into some of our school friends walking the other way, and I did everything I could to hide my box so they didn't ask what I was carrying.

What a childish thing to do ;P

Now that I'm older, I hang my most prized Pokemon cards behind me like a poster. I don't care if my webcam picks them up during work. And I love to tell people about it.

I make sure to never show shame around my kids about "little kid things". Or even "girly" things or "boy-ee" things. When my son started to show shame for liking "pink" things, I slowly started including pink and purple as my favorite colors when my kids asked. I gently yet swiftly squash any "barbies are for girls" type of comments when they're spoken around me.

Sometimes I'll walk in on my young teen son shamelessly playing Barbies or other dolls with his little sister. I say nothing except things like, "Looks like you're having fun!" It makes me sad to think of the day when the wrong friend finds out and teases him for it. Hopefully by then he's gained enough self-esteem to not listen.

As someone who was shamed for anything too feminine growing up, thank you for doing that for your son.

I remember the days when a superhero would fight an army of bad guys, against overwhelming odds, and win. Now it's an army of superheros (Avengers as an example) against one bad guy and their win is often ambiguous. It just doesn't have the same payoff for the time spent consuming the entertainment.

It's the infantilization of the newer generations of adults. We are now kids until we are in our forties, still playing with Lego and Star Wars and hankering for the next Marvel episode. In the process, as the article points out, we have co-opted these categories and imbued them with a discordant set of adult sensibilities which makes them wholly unappealing and inappropriate for actual kids. Not even My Little Pony is safe.

Some will probably argue that it's wonderful, finally we allow ourselves to let the inner child blossom and bloom into adulthood. It just seems to me that it is the worst parts of the inner child that we indulge: Escapist, shirking responsibility, partial to instant gratification rather than deeper pursuits. I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.

The easy explanation for this is that adults, with the disposable income that they never had as children, are good consumers of products they couldn’t previously afford. Nostalgia sells.

You bemoan the consumption of video games and superhero fiction as low value content. And you don’t blame their formats, but their content. But is that right? Past generations were dominated by all sorts of cheap, disposable entertainment- soap operas, radio shows, pulp fiction. What do yearly superhero films resemble? The serial films that arrived at the beginning of cinema. Is this base content really so much baser than the entertainment of the past?

It surely is. After all, how could any modern cinema hope to be even half as profound and meaningful as the three stooges?

My dad's favourite hobby was tinkering on cars. I don't honestly see much difference between me playing video games and tinkering on my PC than him driving and getting his hands greasy. My grandfather's was walking around in the woods hunting or sitting in a boat fishing. Why are those mature and virtuous, while my love of games infantilizing? Are video games innately childish due to their medium? Is a comic book movie actually that much more childish than Die Hard or James Bond?

I don’t know about virtuous but the clear difference is fishing and fixing cars produces useful byproducts: food & working transportation. Playing with the PC may do that but usually video games do not unless you are making them yourself.

The hunting and fishing byproduct was only the pretense, it was to spend an afternoon in the woods or on the lake. And the cars weren't exactly practical, they were impractical muscle cars that broke down often and were a mess of upkeep. If we're looking at useful byproducts that tells me factory working is the best past time one can have.

I don't think this is a compelling argument. It's an extremely inefficient way of producing those "useful byproducts". A person fixing and tuning the same old car for years?

Fishing is mostly an excuse to sit on a boat and drink beer all day (a high quality activity I fully support in moderation)

Car enthusiasts are mostly about making something look cool and have certain stats, it’s about fun not utility.

Cars are about fun but you can learn a vast amount of practical engineering from the process that is applicable in Broad aspects of life.

I won't tell others how to live their lives, but I think this has more value than how to optimally crush candies for example

Saying that fixing cars or fishing as a hobby "produce useful byproducts" is like saying playing video games and PC tinkering produces useful byproducts of programmers and content creators.

the useful byproduct of my interest in computers is that i understand what my kids are doing with the technology and what the technology is doing to them.

Most people whom I know - do fishing as a hobby in local lake or something similar - actually return the fish to the Pond/Lake after catching it. There is no food to be had from these activities.I am not saying that is what parent's grandad did but just a data point.

I can't tell you how many times historical knowledge from age of empires has come in handy. And I know my way around parts of DC due to fallout.

All 4 examples main benefit is knowledge to be used later.

If the car isn't your daily driver, then working on it is superfluous.

People who fish with a pole rarely catch more than the investment made into their gear and bait.

My assumption is virtuosity is explained by the associated crowds of said activities.

Playing video games is occasionally associated with the NEET crowd, likely because of the low barrier to entry in terms of experience.

Exploring nature and working on mechanical things requires some prior knowledge, experience and/or space to get started.

It would seem in this case the bad stereotypes are doing the infantilizing. The activities of the past had the same low barrier to entry as the current ones - my dad started working on cars in high school, and my grandfather started hunting and fishing as a child and never graduated high school.

Regulatory requirements around insurance for cars, for example, are likely to be higher and more expensive now than they were decades ago. Therefore, someone young is unlikely to go a used car lot and pick one up and tinker.

Likewise, access to uncontaminated nature in large population centres is harder than it was when rural populations outnumbered the people living in urban environments.

Bikes, on the other hand, are great for tinkering and also small enough to be compatible with modern living. These, however, might not be accessible for someone with a low level of fitness and willpower to attain that fitness.

Technology in late model cars makes tinkering more difficult as well. Back when our parents were tinkering, you didn't have to reprogram a computer when changing heads or a cam. All you needed was hand tools, for the most part. My toys are an '88 and a '90. Both would require creating a new program for major changes- requiring EEPROM chips and a programmer. Newer cars are simpler, but not as simple as needing just a screwdriver to tune a carb. Quite honestly it does take some of the fun out of it.

This is a great question.

I'm sure others will disagree but I believe playing video games for hours is more infantilizing than hunting, fishing, or tinkering on cars.

The former is content designed by humans (generally working under the aegis of giant corporations) whose goal is to completely capture and dominate your attention to the exclusion of other things. While videogames certainly can be and often are art that tells interesting stories about the human condition, they also often function psychologically much more like junk food and drugs. They give you just enough serotonin hit to get you to keep playing but rarely enough to leave you truly sated. Many games don't want to satisfy because then you'll stop consuming the content.

Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally. They are both boring in a deeply useful way that gives you time to reflect and process your own thoughts. Instead of doom scrolling social media which constantly fills your brain with new information, stressors, and problems that you never have time to sift through, hunting and fishing give your brain the idle time it needs to finally start defragging its memory.

Tinkering on cars forces you to solve difficult challenges. Unlike playing videogames where the stakes are by design relatively low—all you can lose is time—working on a car forces you to confront difficulty and failure where that matters. You can break parts that are expensive to replace. You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.

All three of these engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands in an integrated, much deeper way than a controller and rectangle of pixels does. The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.

This is something we all know intuitively and it's the constant onslaught of capitalism and the ease of consuming media at home that makes us forget. Videogames can certainly have moments of meaningful joy. But ask yourself this: How often after sinking an hour into a game do you find yourself thinking, "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?

For me, 80% of the time I spend playing videogames or watching dumb social media leaves me with the same lingering regret I feel when I eat a bag of chips instead of preparing an actually nutritious meal.

This is not something we all know intuitively. This is a conclusion you have come to and decided is THE truth instead of just YOUR truth. History is full of people like you and all we can do is hope that they never gain any power over the rest of our lives.

History is also full of people like you who claim a moral authority to say X is your truth, not my truth, and that there are not objective truths. An example is slavery. Good luck objectively saying "it's your truth that slavery is wrong, but in the south where I come from, it is my truth that it is OK, so stuff it!"

> History is full of people like you and all we can do is hope that they never gain any power over the rest of our lives.

Wow, that escalated quickly. TIL I'm Hitler.

> You can break parts that are expensive to replace.

Both in the process of tinkering, and out of frustration when stuff goes wrong. So, also developing a bit of anger management skill. :)

> The former is content designed by humans (generally working under the aegis of giant corporations) whose goal is to completely capture and dominate your attention to the exclusion of other things.

So all of modern TV is the same? Is watching cable news infantilizing? I feel like we're watering down to "infantilizing" to mean "things I don't feel good things towards".

> Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally.

Again, this whole paragraph is unrelated to the question, right? Physical activity is related to those things a well, but people would argue that playing a game of hopscotch is childish. As well, my grandfather isn't what I would describe as the picture of mental health.

> You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.

I mean, you just described computer tinkering and problem solving as well.

> The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.

Again, the topic is infantilizing. You're romanticizing.

> "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?

Never? I sincerely hated fishing growing up and have found I'm not much of a hiker.

You're right that I didn't make the connection explicit.

I believe that spending significant time on things that aren't meaningfully enriching and tend to leave you feeling regretful is immature. Obviously, everyone needs some time to veg. I'm not saying everyone's gotta be trying to level up and hustle 24/7.

But if you're spending hours every day watching superhero shows you don't really care about or grinding videogames alone with little sense of accomplishment, I think that demonstrates a lack of maturity that I would consider infantile. And I deeply believe that the aforementioned media is designed to make you do that. These shows and games are deliberately structured for binging and grinding. They want you to turn off your executive reasoning and get you to make short-term selfish choices around comfort and complacency. They want consumers.

So, in that sense, yes, I believe that media is infantilizing.

> I believe playing video games for hours is more infantilizing than hunting, fishing, or tinkering on cars.

I prefer video games over most outdoors activities but still largely agree with you.

One minor critique is that I would substitute "infantilizing" for "psychologically beneficial." I also think the gap in inherent value between the two groups of activities could be summarized into the tendency of screen-based activities to produce instant gratification with minimal discernible gain. The latter group activities involve aspects of mindfulness and require a degree of active physical/mental labor over time, therefore you could argue less "outdoor-sy" creative efforts like painting, long-form writing, or sewing could all provide the same benefits.

> the tendency of screen-based activities to produce instant gratification with minimal discernible gain.

I believe they're designed to do that, which is why I think they're infantilizing. They encourage us to do adopt an unhealthy short-term gratification selfish comfort mindset.

> All three of these engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands in an integrated, much deeper way than a controller and rectangle of pixels does.

I think this very well might be the major difference between those pursuits and screen media. The latter can not yet both simulate those experiences and stimulate the body at the same time.

This distinction between physical experiences from those that solely stimulate the mind, I feel, is the only way you can prioritize the worthiness of one over the other. Certainly it feels exhausting to have consumed a bunch of content that stimulated the mind while the body was immobile the entire time, yes. But I think any further value judgments between the two are subject and based on one's own moral philosophy. In many cases, examples of the "real" can be as morally judged against. For instance, the idea of billionaires and politicians buying lavish ranches and then mugging for the camera while they're playacting as farmers and cowboys when they are just living out a caricature of real labor.

If the key difference between the physical and the purely intellectual is the lack of effects on the former, one wonders if the end goal will be to be able to stimulate the body while the mind is being stimulated (even if only by simulation), or deeper and invasive forms of mind stimulation that make it appear as if the body has been stimulated as well. Rest assured, our top giant corporations are working on this problem even as we speak.

> This is something we all know intuitively and it's the constant onslaught of capitalism and the ease of consuming media at home that makes us forget.

I don't think this is at all "something we all know intuitively". It also applies to basically any kind of content consumption, including reading books, listening to opera, or watching any kind of cinema. These don't "engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands", and yet they can be valuable activities that enrich us greatly. At the same time I don't get a lot out of sitting around in a boat for hours; if I want to be left alone to my thoughts I'd rather be on a walk (which I'd argue doesn't necessarily engage my entire body either -- I'm generally lost in thought and have no idea what my body's doing while on a walk).

There's really nothing special about an activity being tactile. I can solve a problem in my own head without touching a damned thing. And watching good movies, or playing good video games, can engage my imagination and help me be more empathic or a better problem solver.

Also, I can play video games without brutally murdering a living creature that feels pain, so that's nice.

> I don't think this is at all "something we all know intuitively".

I really do, in the same way that a satisfying nutritious meal feels different after you're done eating it than a meal of junk food does.

> It also applies to basically any kind of content consumption, including reading books, listening to opera, or watching any kind of cinema.

I was pretty careful to say that not all "content" is like this (though anything that we'd naturally refer to as "content" instead of a "work of art" is probably telling us something). It's certainly the case that there are books, films, shows, and videogames that are meaningful and enriching. There's also 50 Shades of Gray, whatever Michael Bay's latest thing is, Jersey Shore, and Candy Crush.

The form of the media isn't the point, it's the merit of the actual content.

> These don't "engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands", and yet they can be valuable activities that enrich us greatly.

Sure, not every meaningful activity has to tick every box. But it's good to spend your time on things that tick at least some of them. Binge watching completely forgettable superhero series or grinding pointless quests on an MMO are doing little more than fast-forwarding someone towards their death. I of course respect their choice to do that, but my opinion is that choosing to spend signicant time doing that is infantile, just as eating chicken tendies and soda for every meal is.

> At the same time I don't get a lot out of sitting around in a boat for hours; if I want to be left alone to my thoughts I'd rather be on a walk (which I'd argue doesn't necessarily engage my entire body either -- I'm generally lost in thought and have no idea what my body's doing while on a walk).

I only used those specific examples because those are the ones the parent comment used. Find whatever activities are meaningful and rewarding to you. I just hope you're able to find some instead of burning your free time in a mindless fugue of media consumption which is all too easy to do these days.

> I can play video games without brutally murdering a living creature that feels pain, so that's nice.

If you've ever seen me fish, you'd know that harm to fish is rarely involved. In fact, most days there is no fish participation at all.

Really well said. I think a big difference too is how far one takes a hobby. I can enjoy a comic book every now and then, or watch the Simpsons, or play a video game. But I’ve known people who plastered their cubicles with comic books, or displayed their massive collection of cartoon figurines. It’s when something becomes an obsession that I think it becomes infantilizing. This could go for “grown up” pursuits too. Wasting hours upon hours watching SportsCenter on ESPN doesn’t strike me as being more mature than reading comic books all day, and even someone whose whole life revolves around fishing or some other hobby might fall into that category. I think the key is to keep hobbies as hobbies and not make them your whole identity.

A lot of research shows time spent outdoors protects against depression and other mental illness.

Playing videos games directly improves my depression.

considering the alternatives are likely sports, celebrity gossip, and reality TV—I think superheroes are fine.

Mozart also produced a lot of rubbish low brow humor, Shakespeare is full of cheap dirty jokes.

What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality. The truth is that superhero movies are the latest incarnation of a type of entertainment which is as old as the oldest human culture we know about. The Iliad is the same kind of entertainment in a different format. Commentators said the same about gladiators chariot races in the Colosseum. There are dick jokes scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.

The childish attitude is making a dichotomy between childish and adult things and criticizing the childish things pretending the latest incarnation is somehow a new kind of thing.

But unlike any superhero movie in the past 10 years, the illiad is a wonderful LGBT love story...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_Patroclus

Have you actually read the Iliad? Much of the plot revolves around Achilles being sullen because a woman given to him as a slave and spoil of war was taken away by Agamemnon. Projecting modern ideas of gender on to an ancient Greek epic and then calling it a wonderful love story is quite misguided.

You seemed to have missed the author's point.

Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.

The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."

You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.

Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.

Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.

Your points are true, but you're responding to a response to a comment condemning superhero comics as infantile, rather than a response to the OP, which condemns modern superhero comics as not childish enough.

And I think the latter point is fair but it's just the cyclical nature of the medium. In the late '80s comic books grew up and got all serious with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and other works that deconstructed the genre. And the early '90s had an unrelated trend where heroes had to be all gritty and edgy, overly-muscular and toting tons of ammunition pouches and automatic weapons. But the genre swung back from the excesses to more optimistic and child-friendly versions.

So maybe we're at a moment in history where superhero comics are a certain way. But it's just a trend that will change.

Hmm. I think the person I responded to had a pretty critical take on the author's essay, misrepresenting it as "golden values conservatism", when the author made very clear illustrations of what was better about the older CBs. It's not conservatism when the old stuff really was better.

To your point about the comic book medium, I think it's worth separating the superhero concept from the format it was presented in. I don't think it would have been impossible to bring superheroes into the 80s and 90s, same as we had incorruptible heroes like Robocop. What makes them kid-friendly isn't the artistry or the goriness of the setting, as author pointed out, both Spider-Man and Batman were borne out of death, it's the undying nature of their commitment to fight evil. When you start messing with that you get outside of the capacity of a seven year-old to follow, relate with, and fall in love with it. Has nothing to do with cutesy graphics.

No my response was squarely towards the parent comment not the linked article.

I listen to a lot of high brow and low brow humor. I probably hear 20 fart and dick jokes in a given week. I'm not against or above it.

That has nothing to do with infantilization in our culture. The fact that they also had fart and dick jokes in the past has no bearing on this.

The fact that adults in our culture form their identity around low quality super hero movies in a desperate attempt to recapture their youth and seem fun and then run off to buy the little toys from the ads is the infantilization.

I've only seen a couple of MCU movies and a few (mainly Batman) DC ones, never much cared for the comic book medium but for a few exceptions; however, I don't really see what you're describing as a problem among my friends who do really get into that stuff. You can find obsessive fans for anything, I don't think most people who get into the MCU are particularly obsessive though.

Also, while the franchises have moved away from being for young kids anymore I can tell you that my friends who have kids in the teenage bracket certainly bond with them over their shared interest in such movies.

Disclaimer, I don't really sort humor into high brow and low brow per se, and probably listen to a whole lot more than 20 bawdy or indecent jokes in a single day. There are plenty of comedians who are too mean-spirited for my taste though.

>"What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality."

I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.

It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).

"we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP."

You must not have been around for what the 80's/early 90's had churned out. Any number of songs from 2 Live Crew and Too Short make WAP seem tame by comparison.

Despite the moral panic at the time surrounding those groups/artists, we still managed to survive and grow as a country, and especially with regards to free speech.

Yes, WAP is only controversial because it involves women rapping about sex the way men always have, but it isn't unique.

Allow me to "old man" intervene here...

1. 2 Live Crew and Too Short weren't Billboard #1 artists, they were (perfectly fine) marginal hip hop artists who helped knock down the door on profanity in lyrics.

2. Almost every pop song in the 80s and 90s had no profanity, the ratio was probably 99/1 or higher.

3. As a dad of 4 I can attest that profanity in the top 40 pop charts is waaaaaaaaay up, WAP style songs are mainstream, and I've had to teach my 5 year old to say "radio edit" to Alexa.

I did an informal study, at the end of last year Amazon Music had a "top 100 songs of 2021" playlist, I listened to them all and 44 of them had lyrics I would consider inappropriate for a 5 year old.

I'm not a prude and I'm not making value judgments, but the floodgates have opened on profanity and explicit lyrics, at least in part because of the decline of radio's monopoly, the rise of streaming, the overall fracturing of the monoculture, and the Internet's rewarding of clickbait / extreme behavior.

People thought the Simpsons was vulgar, they thought Elvis dancing was vulgar, they thought girls dancing to jazz in the flapper era was vulgar, thought that women exposing any skin beyond their hands and face was vulgar.... you get the picture.

Y'all are a bunch of prudes and artists and the leading edge of culture are using that shock people experience in their art and have been for a long damn time. There's this burned in mythos that sex is bad which was brought in by Christianity and despite the goalposts of what is vulgar and what is acceptable there continues to be the undercurrent of "this is awful because it's too explicitly sexual" even though what was too much has shifted from exposed ankles to whatever people are offended by today. Hopefully we're close to running out of things to be offended by and people will just be comfortable with people expressing their sexuality as normal... but I doubt it.

> People thought the Simpsons was vulgar, they thought Elvis dancing was vulgar, they thought girls dancing to jazz in the flapper era was vulgar, thought that women exposing any skin beyond their hands and face was vulgar

I think the difference here is that it's easy to imagine what is more vulgar than The Simpsons, or more vulgar than Elvis dancing.

I'm struggling to come up with what is more vulgar than some of the stuff that is produced for the mainstream today, without being just pornography.

Eh, if you were a pepper pot circa 1992, you very well might not be able to imagine anything worse than the Simpsons.

And the Simpsons stopped getting heat once Bevis and Butthead went on the air and became the new target.

I refer you to Jimmy Swaggart in 1986

>he views rock as “pornography and degenerative filth which denigrates all the values we hold sacred and is destructive to youth.”

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-03-ca-1235-s...

This is where The New Pornographers got their name

It's not a leading edge. It's just an edge. Porn existed as long as humans existed, and it still exists. It's not leading anywhere, it's just is, for people that need it. It's not new, and it doesn't by itself spell doom to anything - it has always existed on the edges. But let's not pretend it is some fundamental cultural achievement. It's just a lowbrow entertainment it always has been. Sometimes it is socially acceptable to consume it publicly, sometimes it isn't - but it's not leading anybody anywhere.

The article and the thread leading comment are both nonsense in many ways, because you only have to look at the Comics Code[0] to determine what made comic books and superhero stories "for kids". They were sanitized to the point where they weren't telling "adult" stories and were stripped of many interesting possibilities.

Over time, the code lost its value and as of ten years ago, no comic company is following it anymore. Good riddance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

What separates The Iliad from superhero movies cannot be reduced to a difference of format.

No, it’s only the fragmentary preservation over thousands of years.

The fundamental story structures are quite similar. The scope of the tales told is quite similar. The behaviour of the protagonists and antagonists is quite similar.

We know about the Iliad and the Odyssey because they were relatively well preserved. We don’t know about Homer’s less popular poems, or of any particularly trashy verse that he wrote…because it didn’t survive.

The Iliad survived not because it is transcendent, but because it was popular (which meant that there were more copies made to survive over time). The "transcendence" was added later as a (probably wrong) reason for its popularity.

Some 3,000 years from now there will probably be someone calling the Saga of the Boy Wizard transcendent just the way that people call the Iliad transcendent. They, like many others, will confuse its widespread popularity and many copies with a judgement on quality. There are other similar stories better written that don’t have the popularity of HP. But they won’t survive over time because there weren’t as many copies.

The reason the stories are similar is attributable to Homer. You might assert that there is a pre-existing human need for gestalt, but I come from Harold Bloom's school of thinking on the subject, thinking myself that it is literature that articulates, in its most salient respects, the nature of this need. Our understanding of it is based on literature, and the Marvel movies are based on that cultural heritage, however the results may vary.

I actually have no information as to the popularity of Homer's work relative to other works at that time. I suppose I have fairly strong intuitions as to its popularity after antiquity, but its popularity at that point seems to cut against your argument somewhat. There were certainly stories that dominated Homer's societal saturation after the fall of the Greek empire, and some of those survived, some not.

> Mozart also produced a lot of rubbish low brow humor, Shakespeare is full of cheap dirty jokes.

I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.

Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.

They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.

They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.

Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.

They are qualitatively different.

> the content is usually rubbish

There is a fair amount of good content, in both video games and comic books. Both are fairly reasonably considered art. I don't see a lot of people saying we should destroy art museums because they're escapism.

Yes, there's a lot of bad video games and comic books, too. But I dare say exactly that is true of arts, books, and a variety of other things people widely consider worthwhile forms of entertainment.

Fantasy sports is perfectly acceptable as an adult hobby. So is reality TV. Or gambling/playing the lottery. Or just getting drunk every weekend till all sense of reality is warped. All of these (and lots more) are perfect examples of escapism. But as soon as we start talking about superheroes or sci-fi suddenly it becomes "infantilization" because those are associated with nerds. There's no deeper logic here than decades worth of social stigma.

> There's no deeper logic here than decades worth of social stigma.

Oh, there is. There's a whole school of thought that is basically non-stop hand-wringing about how superheroes are displacing religion, and We Must Take Back Our Media from those Hollywood heathens and so on.

Stupid, yes. But dangerous too - book-burning season looks like it is just getting started, they already are going after Disney, and those people seem geared up for a serious push.

As a radio ham you're not supposed to talk about religion but I got away with running an APRS beacon that said "It's Thorsday!" every Thorsday

As an Amateur Extra myself, I 100% approve :D

> they already are going after Disney

They aren't going after Disney because of adult infantilization, but the opposite - introducing kids to adult concepts in a particularly politically motivated way that makes them not a good source of kids entertainment in the opinion of many adults.

The comic books that Disney Marvel has produced are 98% low quality poorly written poorly drawn trash, and their movies mostly ok until now (except we seem to be getting into the girl-boss post success phase of the MCU and I expect a downturn).

The issue with Disney is their attempt to become a source of propaganda for social policies aimed towards people's kids, and their choice to be vocal about wanting to influence laws being passed the government in Florida. Their choice, but they also reap the consequences.

Thanks.

That's the culture-warrior's way of saying, "we're cancelling Disney because they protested that we were cancelling gay people."

The Florida bill never even mentions the word "gay". As for what the bill actually says:

> Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

That's not cancelling gay people at large. That's preventing the schools from talking to third-graders or younger (8 years old or younger) about these things and letting their parents do it if they choose.

You might disagree with the bill, but Disney is taking a political stance, and does not deserve to have special political privileges if they take any form of political stance, regardless on what the political stance is.

> but Disney is taking a political stance, and does not deserve to have special political privileges if they take any form of political stance

Wait, who said this? Corporations lobby the government all the time. They absolutely have political stances. Sometimes these stances are transparently about making them money, and sometimes they're (ostensibly) not, but it would deny reality to claim that they shouldn't have political stances. Maybe you feel that they shouldn't, but it's tilting at windmills.

This is beside the point of whether they should have "special political privileges". Maybe no corporation should have "special political privileges". But in a world where they do, it's strange to confer them conditional on what has never been the case (companies not taking political positions).

edit:

"The Florida bill never even mentions the word 'gay'."

That statement does not make you sound very serious. The bill obviously involves -- at a deep level -- the concept of "gay" whether or not it uses that particular word.

Preventing schools from talking about "gay" to people who are generally 5-9 years old is a political choice that is very different than excluding gay people from society as claimed.

I disagree. What is really trying to be banned here is things like talking about families that have two dads (or two moms). No-one is talking to kindergartners about sex in schools, homosexual or heterosexual. But they are talking about why one kids'd parents do not line up with another, and how that is ok.

As a side note: I have an 8-year-old son. I tried to explain a bit about this sort of thing, but just explaining about how adults are attracted to each other is something he is simply not ready to understand. Trying to explain sex to him at this point would just be confusing.

The problem is that some parents do not think that it is ok that someone has two dads, and really want to go back to the days when "those people" would be socially shamed and that shaming was supported by what is taught in school. And the governor of Florida, and his compatriots in that states legislative body agree with them (or are at least willing to play this for political points).

I happen to think that we should accept people's choices about who they think are family (there are extremes on this, and I am less certain about my stance the farther you go). And to some degree our laws and the court's interpretation of that have solidified that as the law of the land. Once we are there, pretty much the only thing that schools can reasonably do is to teach these "new" forms of family as normal. Yes that is against what some parents want, but if they want their kids not to be exposed to this then they better be taking care of their kids education themselves (homeschool or paying for private schools).

You are wrong, full stop.

If one cannot talk about why Joe has two mommies and no daddies, or why Jane's mom should now be called dad (necessary consequences of the "don't say gay" bill - and very much intended by the bigots behind the bill and behind those bigots who support the bill), then one is _erasing_ gay people from society.

My 62-year-old brother-in-law tells me that knew he was gay (but didn’t have a word for it) from about 6 years old. He still had to go through a bunch of figuring out what that meant, but if society hadn’t been stuck where it was when he was 6, he may have saved himself a lot of pain growing up.

"The law doesn't have this exact word in it and therefore none of the observed effects of the law actually exist." is not the airtight defense you may think it is.

>the girl-boss

Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself? Or something else (or mixture of those trends?)

Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that. A large part of their audience really wants to see them (and corporations in general) take a stand on certain issues, and Disney doesn't want to lose them by keeping silent. Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.

>Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself?

Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.

Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc

I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.

>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that

I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202

>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.

Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.

They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.

Most of those female characters you mentioned are just as "real" to me as the male superheroes. I don't like the Marvel movies or give a crap about any of those characters, male or female. Terminator 3, 4 and 5 were creative disasters on every level yet apparently Terminator 6 was a problem because of *something something girl boss*.

The Star Wars sequel movies were all written and directed by white men but something something girlboss ruined it for you.

It just seems to me you have some ideological grudge that has little to do with the movies.

>It just seems to me you have some ideological grudge that has little to do with the movies.

This is a very strange statement. Movies are media. Ideology has a lot to do with media.

The ideology can be "whatever content makes us the most money". Whether that content happens to coincide with a particular political or social issue may simply be a function of determining what will make the most money.

I'm not saying that's how all movies are made, it's not. But for a massive global mega corp like Disney I don't think that a particular political or social ideology is the driving force behind the content. If leadership thought that different content would make them more money, they'd find people willing to make that content.

Taking Disney as an example, if they actually wanted to push an ideology-- let's say one that's in line with their statements against HB 1557, then they wouldn't be running tours in Egypt or other countries that have anti-LGBT laws, or at least would be making similar condemnations of them. [1]

They say & do-- or don't say & do-- whatever they think will keep the money flowing. If they can't avoid being drawn into a social or political issue, they'll say whatever they think will best mitigate the damage of being involved. It's little different than the significant rise of greenwashing over the last couple of decades. That's as much of a social & political statement as well, but I don't actually believe the company means it.

[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/disney-expanding-operat...

">They don't need to satisfy everyone"

I'm not so sure about that. They faced backlash over their attempt to mostly stay out of the issue with Florida's HB 1557 bill. That initial reaction tells me they (leadership) probably didn't want any part of it. That had its own backlash & so they tried to appease their critics, but I still think their initial reaction was as "honest" a response as we would get from a massive global corporation.

> unlikeable women that don't register as real people

I'm curious what you consider likeable or registering as real. As compared to, say, Batman.

Disney takes a very small stand on "certain issues" often limited on screen as an aside or wink to the audience, and not to the extent to which their creative professionals would like. In fact they got so fed up with being strung along in being limited in LGBTQ representation that they went on strike with the "Don't Say Gay" bills to force the new CEO to act publicly and belatedly. You can please some of the people some of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Discussion of human rights and dignity aside; one of the richest corporations in the country and one of the most, shall we say, active political polities in the country feuding makes for an interesting show. I do fear the consequences of continuing escalation more broadly, however.

> The issue with Disney is their attempt to become a source of propaganda for social policies aimed towards people's kids, and their choice to be vocal about wanting to influence laws being passed the government in Florida. Their choice, but they also reap the consequences.

What is wrong with this? Plenty of private corporations lobby the government.

> in the opinion of many adults.

How many?

It's frightening how so many of the same people that have spent the last few years hollering about cancel culture and free speech absolutism and insisting the government regulate social media platforms also support the government punishing a corporation for legal political speech with which they disagree.

Frightening, but not at all surprising.

The corporation that decided it would intervene in laws passed by the government loses special privileges and now must act like every other corporation isn't cancel culture.

Once they became intentionally political they entered the political arena.

And they're free to talk and also free to catch the consequences of their speech - isn't that what I keep hearing?

As opposed to the people who in the last 15 seconds have suddenly realized that it's great when megacorporations use their power to influence the political process.

> suddenly it becomes "infantilization" because those are associated with nerds

I think you may be on to something. Perhaps it's because it feels worse when it is highly intelligent and otherwise reasonable people wasting their time.

The mere categorization of entertainment as "wasting their time" is a judgement call in and of itself.

The nerds won. Nerdy forms of entertainment dominate our culture.

What dominates our culture is by definition not nerdy. It was taken from the nerds. The nerds lost.

Now they have to go find some still obscure interest to invest their time in if they hope to retain their nerd status, otherwise they're just into mass culture like the rest of the lowest common denominator.

You seem to be confusing hipsters and nerds. Nothing about the definition of being a nerd requires a constant search for ever more obscure pursuits to maintain a sense of elitism.

Nothing was "taken" from the nerds, except social stigma. They're still reading comics and watching anime and superhero movies, and playing D&D and video games, etc. They're still nerds even if what they love is more popular than it ever was.

You have to be into nerdy things to be regarded as a nerd. Mass culture doesn't count. Their nerdy interest isn't a nerdy interest anymore, it's been taken from them and changed into a popular interest. A hipster is just a type of nerd.

You have to be deep into things to be regarded as a nerd, but they can be all kinds of things. Baseball is mass culture, but there are baseball nerds delving deep into their stats; Oscars is about mass culture but there are movie nerds who don't do the niche art movies but care to know which minor actor was in which Fast and Furious movie; etc - every aspect of mass culture has their share of nerds as well.

What does a prototypical hipster do? Dresses up in anachronistic clothing. Listens to music on vinyl and plays video games made 20 years before they were born.

Hipsters are nerds.

Your original comment condemned superhero entertainment specifically for their content, but not "the formats themselves". Independent of this discussion, I've been thinking lately about how, especially in the most closed-off months of the pandemic quarantine, so many of our pastimes consist of indulging in simulations. Everything from the loftiest performance of a Shakespearean play to the most throwaway TikTok, from the most true-to-life non-fiction narrative account of a real event to the most escapist of comic books, they're all about bringing out minds to a different place.

And I wonder what it all means. As a species we've been at this since the first cave paintings, the earliest oral traditions. And what we're doing now with modern hyperstimulating computer-generated mediums is in that same tradition. But from a biological standpoint, what do these intellectual forms of recreation really mean for us? Is the final goal of our society to automate away all of the hard physical stuff, and then place our bodies in comfortable pods where our only stimulation is the simulated and safe? To play out stories and to experience emotions where we have minimized our vulnerability and maximized our enjoyment? "All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

This isn't meant to be a condemnatory dystopian vision or anything. I just wonder if the ideal end state of luxury existence is to live in stories, so the mind and passions can work, but the body is satiated and at peace. So when people indulge in leisure now, is that truly "wasting their time"? Perhaps they are only capturing a fleeting glimpse of the final future of our species.

Almost all of the things you listed as acceptable hobbies are looked down upon at least in my social circle and I'd argue in general. Reality TV is a guilty pleasure even among fans, gambling and drinking are clearly vices, fantasy sports can involve gambling and even if it doesn't it's seen as a pretty nerdy thing to be into.

The only hobbies that aren't looked down upon are things that involve creation instead of consumption or are major class signifiers really (Opera, skiing, etc).

So your social circle looks down on all forms of entertainment unless you are creating something of value? That is definitely not the case for society at large (and sounds pretty miserable to me personally).

That's a bit reductive and I don't agree with the characterization so maybe I overstated my point. Point is in general I find even purely consumption based entertainment hobbies are usually framed in a way that it's constructive (e.g. prestige TV and how it shapes your world view, consuming fine arts that heal the soul and inform, etc) in conversation when trying to impress.

No, but looking down on gambling is definitely common. And that was mentioned in the parent comment

> The only hobbies that aren't looked down upon are things that involve creation instead of consumption or are major class signifiers really (Opera, skiing, etc).

This does not sound like what people think in general in the US. This sounds like you live in a social circle and assume their opinions as general opinion.

Welcome to the effects of class socialization. You appear to have about the mix of Fussellian Middle and Upper-Middle preferences and attitudes (plus a bit from his Class X[1]) that's essentially standard on HN.

[1] Which, unfortunately for his hopes, turned out to just be a fashion wave in the Upper-Middle and was eventually, partially, incorporated into it—I dunno if he just let optimism get the better of him, or truly didn't recognize totally normal Bohemianism when he saw it.

All of those are bad when indulged to excess.

what isn't ? to steal an example from fullshark... 'skibum' definitely wasn't compliment where I grew up.

Everything is bad when indulged to excess. That's the definition of excess.

I remember comics in the 1980's and they weren't pure escapist fantasy written for children. They tackled very adult subjects like reparations and slavery through the Genotia series in the X-Men and how the mutants were the stand-ins for the African Americans, where Genotia (a fictitious nation) enslaved them and America stripped their rights away, using the force of the Sentinels to do so. I was maybe 12 during this story line and it was foundational on how I treat and view people.

Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).

Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(

I will agree there were some comics that talked about social issues, but even those tended to not hit you on the head with the message so hard, and they weren't the majority of comics books - they were a small minority of books. Now everyone wants to be Alan Moore, or they don't understand why Alan Moore is important and they want to dress their heroes up for party instead of make interesting stories with cool action.

Comics are alive and well in non-western comic traditions. It's the big two (Marvel,DC) as well some some smaller companies like IDW that can't produce stories people want to read on a regular basis.

I was never a DC fan, so I can't speak to them, but Marvel used to give their writers much more freedom in the 80's and early 90's (coincidentally, when comic sales were doing great) as well as owning smaller "independent" publishers, to let their talent publish small, offbeat, "risky" comics with subversive themes. It was GREAT. That's what Image Comics was (owned by Marvel). It was like how Large movie studios would own small art house film studios in order to entice good directors (like Spielberg and Lucas) to make blockbusters for them.

Besides, good literature isn't supposed to hit you with their message so hard. Good literature isn't a blunt instrument to be wielded like some dullard wielding a sledge hammer in a slaughter house. It's a gentle and subtle poison that changes your mind from the inside. V for Vendetta is a great example. On the outside it just shows how government is corrupt, but it also shows the risks of human experimentation, the problems of corporate and government cooperation, how easily people are swayed by a compliant media, how easily small things in the beginning can have huge consequences far down the line that were never suspected, even in a time of conflict and rage the need for human connection is important... and all of these things are laid out in the sub plot of a comic book. Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken =)

>That's what Image Comics was (owned by Marvel)

Image comics was never owned by Marvel - it was founded when 7 of the big marvel/DC artists realized they didn't need marvel to publish them and left to do their own thing. Each artist had his own company (like Silvestri's Top Cow, Liefeld's Extreme Studios, Todd Mcfarlane's Todd Mcfarlane Productions, Jim Lee's Wildstorm, etc). Image's job was to act as a publisher that took minimal financial value from the project away from the creators, and didn't own any of the IP.

DC comics did have some smaller publishing houses - Vertigo comics, Wildstorm Comics after they bought it from Jim Lee, etc. Vertigo owned IP so it wasn't creator owned stuff, and I think Wildstorm was a mix. Vertigo imploded after a woke reboot that lasted from 2018-2019, and DC consolidated its adult oriented lines to DC Black Label.

Marvel had Icon Comics with creator owned stuff like Kick Ass (that later got a movie) but it was really about stopping Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar (netflix acquired Millarworld Limited in 2017) from shopping those IPs out to other places.

>good literature isn't supposed

99.99% of comic book writers today don't know how to write good comics, let alone good literature. DC has imploded and gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and there are very few of the people who were involved with the comics you remember left there anymore. Marvel is happy to make garbage if it hires people with the right diversity checkboxes (see Vita Ayala, who somehow keeps getting more work while being completely unable to write stories people want to read).

>V for Vendetta

Originally published in the UK, later put out by Vertigo Comics (DC) in its hayday. But Alan Moore is better writer than almost everyone left at either of the big comics houses these days, and he was writing in a time where it was less culturally acceptable to write blunt propaganda into comic books.

>Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken

This is because our society has switched. In the 80s the left was fighting right wing christian censorship and largely winning. Today we have inverted.

>>Image comics was never owned by Marvel - it was founded when 7 of the big marvel writers realized they didn't need marvel to publish them and left to do their own thing<<

No kidding! Today I learned. Thanks... I really thought they opened this up to hold on some of these artists (specifically McFarland, who was notoriously hard to work with). =)

Are you sure? The entirety of the comic book genre is almost 100% based in social issues. Even going back to the first superhero, Superman, in the first issue of Action Comics #1, the protagonist rescues a woman about to be executed for a wrongful murder conviction (wrongful convictions and death penalty), rescues another woman being beaten by her husband (domestic abuse), rescues Lois Lane who was kidnapped by a gangster for rebuffing his advances (sexual harassment), and investigates a senator suspected of corruption (political corruption). It also acknowledges topics like media propaganda with the Daily Planet editor wanting to stir up the news. That's not even to speak of later super heroes like the X-Men whose entire existence was an exploration in marginalization of groups based on genetic differences. If those aren't main plot points based on social issues, I'm not sure what is.

Maybe it's just that as kids, we didn't recognize these things as being so politically charged as we do in our adulthood. Perhaps it's because as kids, it just seemed like common sense that these things shouldn't even be controversial so much as just being obviously bad things against which a hero would fight. It's hard to maintain a kid's perspective on things when we leave our kid years.

Edit: wording.

Yes, everything the author describes started in earnest with 80s comics.

The trouble is that after Moore completely deconstructed super hero comics with Watchmen (and Miracle Man, and Miller with Dark Knight, etc.), a new generation thought that's how comics were supposed to be.

But Moore demonstrated that if you extrapolate how super humans would operate in "the real world", it would quickly devolve into a nightmare no one would want to live in.

So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless. Watchmen did it better than any of the current authors, and reading them just leads to getting depressed about the depravity of our fantasy worlds, on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.

I have been ruined for most "cape" films for the last decade or so by reading a brilliant reconstruction of, well, the vast majority of cape concepts, tropes, settings, powers and such in a web serial called Worm, which is an enormous work set in an Earth where "powers" began to appear in certain people, called parahumans, around 1982. The sequel, Ward tackles even the more abstract concepts, like identity against the Revolving Door of Death in comics.

Probably the best cape thing I have come across since Watchmen.

How's it compare to Planetary?

Worm starts as the story of a bullied girl in high school. Some people in the world of worm have the latent 'capability' to 'trigger' and get powers when placed in extremely stressful situations. The main character suffers a prolonged bullying campaign and is stuffed into a locker with used feminine hygiene products by her bullies.

She triggers, not with super-strength or flying or lasers, but with the ability to control all bugs in a large radius around herself.

The world is darker than in planetary in that society is trying to cope with supervillains (people who trigger are often in bad situations that don't lead them to becoming superheros) as well as the Endbringers, three seemingly unstoppable monsters who alternate attacking a city every ~3 months and thus society needs supervillains to help combat them.

It's a long read, and I haven't read it in recent years so I can't remember how good the writing was. I enjoyed it. Never read the sequel since its about a different character that I didn't really care about.

Planetary is not really in the same vein of story.

Link? it's not an easy google.

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

The deconstruction era didn't last forever. There was also reconstruction, with the likes of Astro City, Marvels, Kingdom Come, etc. That was certainly more upbeat and had a sense of wonder.

>on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.

That's one take. When I got into comics as a young adult, it wasnt depressing, indulgent, or defeating. It was a window look at some of the darker aspects of reality and explore and form opinions on them. I could have conversations with friends about the totalitarian state depicted in V for Vendetta or zero-sum politics and fascism in transmetropolitan.

It let me experience exaggerated possible worlds that I would not want to live in and that I was sheltered from in real life. It helped me form ideals and ideas about what I don't want in life.

Probably the only comic that I had a negative impact on me that I wasn't over able to overcome reframe as a cautionary tale was cerebus the aardvark. It certainly colored the world view of several of my friends, sending some into levels of mild depression. It contained some seriously unsettling takes on life, relationships, and women that were hard to shake, and I'm still not sure I have 15 years later.

"So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless."

Reminds me of the sheer number of times I've seen "clever" people give a dark, gritty take on Alice in Wonderland. The weird thing to do with that material is give it an unironically bright, sunny, upbeat interpretation. If the surface of the original material isn't "dark", it sure isn't hiding very deeply under the surface.

I'm curious to know what you would consider better or at least not-rubbish pursuits, just as a comparison.

This should be the top comment for the GP. To a very good approximation all pursuits of all adults are fundamentally rubbish in a childish level. Just as an example, I think it is widely accepted that following sports is a decent way for a proper adult to spend their time. Like...what? Seriously, you call e.g. watching other people driving in circles competing who is fastest as a serious, non-rubbish adult-like way to spend time? (Okay, I agree, it may be fun. But so are all the other pursuits to whoever pursue them, so no difference there.)

Of course not. Devoting yourself to watching sports is equally a waste of time.

But playing sport leads to all kinds of benefits like getting exercise, socializing and developing bonds with others, overcoming adversity, fresh air, a feeling of increasing mastery over time.

I imagine writing and drawing comics would have similar mental health benefits (if not the exercise and fresh air).

The problem for many of us (myself included) is consuming vs. producing.

I produce enough shit when working. I don't need to constantly produce. The idea that I should always be doing something "of value" is toxic and soul crushing. If I want to produce something in my non-work time that's my choice. It's also my choice if I just want to read a comic book. I work to live, not live to work.

Frankly, I personally and subjectively agree with you more than you might guess. But objectively... I do not quite see why our "feeling of increasing mastery" of kicking around a rubber ball is somehow more "adult" or "beneficial" or otherwise superior to the thrill of reading a comic book.

Creating instead of consuming.

it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books

high quality comics targeted at adults have existed in europe for decades. there was no infantilization there. and the fact that i enjoy playing videogames occasionally allows me to spend quality time with my children in ways that my parents never could.

bravo sir! It is only the opera and the delicate art of croquet that hold any moral character. The rest of these ragamuffins are filling their heads with nonsense like philistines instead of reading through the classics 24/7 like anyone sensible would.

What-ho!

The real problem with rampant neoteny isn't adults playing video games, it's the very revulsion at the idea (and I hate this phrase) of "adulting".

The entire point of the transition from childhood to adulthood is that you become responsible for yourself and others which is a transition from you being the responsibility of others.

The idea that responsibilities are somehow an injustice has dominated thinking of my generation and latter. I really enjoy playing a round of Elden Ring after I've gotten all my house work done and taken care of the things that people rely on me for. Just on the basic standards of household maintenance I'm shocked how often my friends apartments look like they are lived in by a teenager.

The whole idea of "ghosting" is another example of this bizarre inability to just do the things you need to do. Being an "adult" in just about any culture, means you do somethings that are uncomfortable because those things need to be done. Sure it can be hard to tell some people "no" but ignoring them completely because you can't stand a bit of discomfort is the very essence of "childish" behavior.

I grew up in a dysfunctional household, where I was not taken care of as a child, so I was very eager to become an adult. Taking responsibility and taking care of myself where things I looked forward to because I'd be taken care of, even if I was the one doing it.

Now that climate change is starting to show undeniable consequences it's a bit hard for me to take demands for climate action seriously from people who just a few months ago complained about "adulting" when doing their own taxes in their late 20s.

Did you just say "a round" of Elden Ring?....now I have a suspicion that I'm replying to a bot haha.

What if I told you I ghost people because I don't care and it has nothing to do with maturity.

I experience 0 discomfort cutting ties and relationships with people that I've moved on from or didn't see myself interacting with in the first place. I find no grace in extending interactions to make some people feel better that feel like they're owed conversation or an explanation. What's so wrong with just moving on? If someone doesn't gel with you or reply, you should really just take the hint. Or would it be better for me to be honest and say something like, "Sorry, I just find you intolerable once I got to know you, so I think it's better if you don't talk to me anymore, thank you!"

I think it's childish to expect everyone to give you the time of day in a world where we are busier than ever before. I'd prefer to be ghosted by people who decide to ghost me.

Most people complain about "adulting" do it in jest or use it as a device to insult the job their parents did of teaching them important skills. I raised myself and I never complain about "adulting" but find it fun to groan about becoming older.

I agree that adults engage in all manner of pointless, infantilizing ways to waste their time.

The only enormous time and energy sink I’ve seen that’s completely universal and worse than marvel movies or funko pops is Posting — random grown adults online that have been told that their opinions should hold sway over other random adults online because of the sheer value of their opinions. For every sad weirdo with a room full of expensive anime figurines, there are hundreds of sad, weird Facebook Aunts espousing “the importance of traditional values and maybe urine therapy”

It’s like we’ve all got a new commonality. It used to be eating, shitting, pissing, fucking and sleeping. Now it’s that plus “screaming into an uncaring void”

I know a few people who spend hours doing intensive work a day (PhD program for one, medical school for another), and don't want to become involved in more intensive hobbies (e.g. literature study, art films). The deeper pursuits are left for the career, and hobbies are an easy way to get your mind off it during rest periods.

As Bill Hicks said, "I think a lot of people could do with discovering their inner adult."

Not really sure how it's infantilization. Do super powers make a movie more infantile than not having them? Does it change the moral challenges and difficulties encountered? Is an action movie or heist movie better or more mature without such things? Are sitcoms and reality TV somehow less rubbish? Perhaps people should only spend their time reading and discussing serious philosophers and political policy.

I have a liking for the current crop of superhero stuff because its light-hearted. The tone is hopeful. (It's ironic, honestly, that the article goes on about the mature/miserable nature of current superhero stuff when the flagship Marvel stuff is all pretty positive, with the exception of the ten-year culmination of the Avengers storyline they cite). It's a nice break from worrying about the real world, which these days seems to have this constant, vague, oppressive feeling of inevitable doom. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but the universal problems around corruption, collective action issues, personal wealth above general good, etc. is tiring and depressing.)

> the infantilization of the newer generations of adults

I think when you reach the age of like 25, you realize that you don't have a clue, and the "adults" around you mostly don't have a clue either.

But it's always been like that. It is in fact a childish view to conceive of adulthood as some fundamentally different stage of life where everything changes and you've got it all figured out.

The real difference with past generations is that you were expected and able to slot into a rigid social order, to fill a certain role. That rigidity has partly been rejected, and is partly simply out of reach due to economic factors.

> I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.

So you think they should move on to an "adult" hobby like stamp collecting or model trains?

I don't think maturity is a function of one's hobbies, and I believe that to do so is to use a poison-the-well fallacy, where the poison is the emphasis on the association of the hobby with children as a means to argue that there exists a common component (=immaturity) shared between the two classes of people that has a causal relationship with the hobby in question.

Maturity is, in my opinion, a function of one's perception of the consequences of their actions and how they weigh said consequences. An immature person, regardless of their hobbies behaves like a child when they don't consider e.g. the feelings of other people or the harm they impose onto others. As we get older and accumulate more experiences through interactions with other people, we tend to take into consideration a far longer and wider horizon. This usually happens by increasing one's responsibilities as they become older.

This comment is funny. The article complains that comics are not for kids anymore because they treat adult themes.

This comment complains that adults are somehow children because they engage with entertainment formats that were traditionally geared towards children.

You angered the neckbeards, look at the other comments...

Look, I consume all of this cultural junk food you mentioned. But at least I recognise it as such.

The fact that others are in a so vehement denial about it just shows EXACTLY how right you are. Minds of childs.

> it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books

Why do you care what other men do with their spare time?

Maybe spend less time thinking about what other people ought to enjoy and find something that makes you happy.

Star Wars is hardly the first time adults have enjoyed a pastime that isn't a "deeper pursuit" or sufficiently thought provoking. Heck, "America's pastime" is a game of people hitting a ball with a stick, and has drawn millions of viewers.

If you had a time machine and went back a couple thousand years, I think you'd find that people already did unproductive things for entertainment.

And people have probably been disapproving of younger generations enjoying the wrong entertainment for about as long as we've done things for entertainment.

Ugh, please, attitudes like yours is the infantile one. Enjoying Lego and Star Wars isn't in opposition to being a good adult. Especially being a good parent. Creativity and imagination are hugely important in the modern world, and those endeavors require a playful mindset to excel at. It's sad to me to see that you find other's enjoyment as "sad". But I'm sure you have "proper" grown man pursuits, why don't you share with us what I, as a 50+ year old man should spend my time on? It might be shocking, but I spend my time on whatever it is you think I should be doing as well.

Here's an idea: being an adult shouldn't be one dimensional. I can play with legos, play video games, read scifi and fantasy, and also raise my son, renovate my house, and, I dunno, wrestle bears? Conquer nations? Drink beer and yell at the TV about sports? Or maybe it is denigration of others that you think is the hobby real men do. If so, you're correct, I'm just a child then with my silly belief that people getting joy from activities is a good thing.

Also, there's plenty for kids to get into these days, including comics, books, video games, and whatever. More than I had when I was a kid.

Go read the Superman stories from Action Comics #1 - #10. Tell me how kid-friendly they are.

Something I heard once that has always stuck with me: "They can take everything from you except your contempt."

The idea is when so much of our agency is stripped from us, often the last thing we can hold onto—which we hold onto tightly because it is the last thing—is comtempt. You can crush me under your boot. You can make me sing the party's songs. But you can't make me believe them. You may own my body but not my mind.

We in the US are living in a time of deep cynicism and distrust of all of the institutions Americans used to hold dear. The degree to which that distrust is misplaced is an open question but the distrust itself is unequivocal.

I look at the current culture of anti-heroes and dark superheroes as a reaction to that. We are so distrustful of anyone or thing claiming to be good that a brightly-colored positive superhero today would earn only contempt from us. We'd assume it must be a deceitful facade.

All that leaves us is morally corrupted dark anti-heroes that are least openly flawed and whose contempt for the other institutions of justice mirrors our own.

>All that leaves us is morally corrupted dark anti-heroes that are least openly flawed and whose contempt for the other institutions of justice mirrors our own.

Except most modern superhero movies aren't like that at all, if anything much of the genre seems to be a tonal rejection of the cynicism and nihilism you're describing.

With properties like The Boys, Bright Burn, and Batman movies and spinoffs like Joker, it's starting to sneak back in.

There was a similar cycle in the late 80s and 90s, when there was a rush of "mature" super hero comics.

I don't think it's much of a cycle, there has been a constant undercurrent of "mature" cynical superhero comics and movies for decades now. In the '00s we had the Christian Bale Batman movies, and adaptations of V for Vendetta and Watchmen. In the '10s we had Deadpool and the Zack Snyder DC movies with their unprecedented cynical take on Superman. It all continues today with Venom and Batman spinoffs.

Great summation of the zeit geist. I would say "The Boys" is a direct child of this sentiment.

I took my son to see the first Iron Man movie when he was around that same age (maybe a little younger). He's 18 now, and has yet to become a burned-out, drug-addicted misanthropic serial killer. Maybe, just maybe, you're being a little unreasonably overprotective.

People are exposed to all kinds of things when they are kids and they grow up just fine. I've scarcely met anyone who felt that _they themselves_ were negatively affected by or unable to deal with something in a popular TV show they wanted to see as a child--but then they have kids and go into this weird neurotic state of hyper-vigilance.

I was thinking about something similar recently: I was raised in a very christian household, and while I've lost faith in divinity, I still look back fondly at being raised that way and believe it did instill valuable life lessons that just don't require the existence of a god to be valuable. Having said all that, I've been finding myself a bit uncomfortable with religious books and stories and such which our families share with our own young children. The kids seem so impressionable and religious stuff seems like such overt brainwashing from my non-believing adult perspective. But these two instincts are in conflict! My children will inevitably be less influenced by this than I was (we aren't going to church and Sunday school every week...), and those years of constant exposure didn't keep me from developing my own views and opinions when I grew up. So my conclusion is that maybe I don't need to worry so much about my kids being impressionable now because they aren't going to get stuck, they're going to keep taking in and incorporating different influences for decades, maybe what I need to do instead is work hard at answering their questions in a way that keeps them curious and gives them room to grow.

It’s profound the amount of effort that goes into influencing and seems as though if the influencers believed what they were saying to be true, that they wouldn’t feel the need to perform so many mental gymnastics. What bothers me about these organizations is the overt levels of monetary greed and psychological abuse they inflict.

I mostly agree with the first part. But the second part is not universally true: my (mainline protestant) church growing up was not at all a vehicle for monetary greed, and like I was pointing out in my comment, I certainly was not psychologically "abused". But some churches are vehicles for the greedy and some people are abused; it's just not universal.

I was pretty scarred by the first Saw movie, even though I only made it about halfway through the first torture scene. I don't understand why people want to subject themselves to that kind of psychological violence.

Probably because different people could process the same thing differently, and derive enjoyment from different feelings.

For example, i like movies with really convoluted/branching multi-timeline stories where you dont really have much of an idea of what's going on, and you have to uncover it as you go (e.g., Inception). It makes my head "hurt" in a good way, and i like it because of that. I know plenty of people who dislike those movies for the exact same reason I like it for. And i hear the same "why would anyone want to subject themselves to this" critique about those movies from them.

I couldn't make it through Saw either, and I am not into those types of movies at all. But i can totally see plenty of valid reasons for why a person would enjoy it. It is essentially a really twisted escape room story with death games. And all that violence and gore just ups the stakes of the death games, thus making it feel more grotesque and intense. They might like how uncomfortable that movie makes them feel, similarly to how I like intensely convoluted multitimeline mystery stories that make my head "hurt" in a good way.

Off topic, but you might enjoy aovie called primer. Super short, low budget film about time travel. It's got a convoluted, but consistent timeline and the fun of the movie is going back and watching it over and over to fully understand what's happening. It's really good

I am not sure that this comparison justifies people being capable of enjoying something like Saw. It's like comparing yoga with, well, actual torture. They both make your body hurt.

It's like saying you don't understand how someone could enjoy playing Call of Duty or any other FPS videogames, because it involves killing people in the game, which is a terrifying and horrible experience that pretty much no one would want to go through irl. So it must be that they enjoy murder irl, right?

They don't enjoy the torture parts of Saw, they enjoy how that movie overall makes them feel (terrified, contemplating certain moral dilemmas, etc.). Like, the point of Saw, from what I gathered, was that it put people who did terrible things to others into those death game circumstances. Which adds a whole other sub-theme of "but does it make it less terrible, if they were a horrible person?" type of a dilemma. And overall, the grotesque nature of the visuals in the movie just serves the purpose of highlighting how horrifying it all is, not to make people enjoy the torture and think "wow, this is kinda fun and lighthearted".

Mind you, I am saying that as someone who cannot really stomach horror movies in general. That doesn't mean that I cannot see plenty of valid reasons for why people might like those movies.

Heh, despite being in the prime market for games like Call of Duty, I am not able to stomach those either, but I take your point. That level of gore just feels like such an indelible blot on the whole rest of the enterprise that I don't see how anyone would be able to taste anything else on the palate, but suppose people do have pretty different palates.

I enjoyed the first Saw, but to me it played out as more of a murder mystery than “torture porn” ala Hostel. It was dark in the same vein as Seven, but what made it interesting was the “whodunnit” aspect, not the horror.

A lot of horror is experienced in a way that's most similar to comedy. That's not to say that it's explicitly supposed to be funny to the viewers (but sometimes it is! A significant portion of horror films include scenes of over-the-top violence that is absolutely intended, at least in part, to get a laugh through sheer shock and "OMG I can't believe they did that" value) but also that the tension-release cycle is pretty similar to comedy (and, sure, also porn, but it's much more similar to comedy for a bunch of reasons that should be pretty obvious, I think).

Horror may also have a larger-than-most-genres share of fans who are watching at a much lesser level of suspension-of-disbelief, remaining very aware most or all of the time that "it's just a movie" and appreciating the craft, daring, and skill of the filmmakers, as much as the experience of the film per se.

There's horror outside the comedy-esque thrill-zone, of course, and it tends to be really damn bleak and scarring, even without much gore (It Comes at Night, for instance). The gorey flicks are usually not among the "worst" the genre has to offer, IMO.

All these referenced movies are rated PG-13. No rating system is perfect, but I think there's at least a very reasonable case to be made that they're not age appropriate for 7 year olds

> I think there's at least a very reasonable case to be made that they're not age appropriate for 7 year olds

What is the case? What is the bad outcome that happens to a 7 year old who watches a PG-13 movie? (Or more generally, a population of 7 year olds who watch PG-13 movies)

Like, what’s the bad “thing” that we should be able to see?

Nightmares, crying through the night, anxiety about fantasy monsters and apocalyptic destruction.

Yes, these can happen without the movie. Yes, some children will be fine with them. No, you won't always realize what the child is having a hard time processing.

The counsel for "parental guidance" is literal.

When I was 7, my mom thought it was a good idea to buy me a Batman comic book (not realizing it was meant for adults). There was a particular scene where the Joker knocks on the door of the police commissioner's house. His daughter opens the door, and the Joker shoots her in her stomach, while smiling. [1]

The next 2 years, I was terrified of any doors that would open to dark rooms.

[1] https://marvballrutodc.quora.com/When-the-Joker-shoots-Barba...

The bad thing is that the 7 year old will get bored and fall asleep halfway through the movie.

The PG-13 movies are optimized for an older audience, and that leaves children with fewer, lower quality options for entertainment.

> The bad thing is that the 7 year old will get bored...

This. There’s enough adult content in these films that even my 12-year-old nephew gets bored.

> The PG-13 movies are optimized for an older audience, and that leaves children with fewer, lower quality options for entertainment.

I think there’s still plenty decent kid-focused content, you might just need to go back some years for the more wholesome non-big budget stuff.

They might think it’s OK to say “fuck”, as long as they only say it once every 120 minutes!

I'd guess that 80% of 12 year old boys are watching hardcore porn/whatever else they want on the internet, so it becomes a farce I think in any case.

Huge difference between ages 7 and 12. If your 7 year old is watching hardcore porn on the internet I'd say that is a problem.

Yes, but the point is that PG-13 isn't hardcore porn. If 12 year olds are watching porn, maybe, just maybe, most 7 year olds can handle a PG-13 film.

Like I said above, it depends. PG-13 is the default film rating these days. PG films that have a few extra mentions of "fuck" or R-rated films which cleaned up some of the blood and gore both qualify. A large chunk of them are absolutely not appropriate for 7 year olds.

Well that's not good for them either.

PG-13 has a wide enough range these days to be entirely meaningless. There is no harm in taking a 7-10 year old to see an Avengers film, IMO, but of course I wouldn't say the same for the Dark Knight trilogy.

Doesn't Endgame literally have Thanos being decapitated? I don't think it'll scar most kids but I don't remember any decapitations happening in the Dark Knight movies.

I still remember Simba's dad falling and being trampled to death by gnus, when I was 5. I don't think that traumatised me or my friends. It can be good for kids to see sad things happening in movies, so they know it's not weird if something sad happens to them.

A quick, clean decapitation of a bad guy is hardly going to set a permanent mark. Nobody cared when Scar also died at the end of said movie.

Not to mention Scar being _eaten by a mob of hyenas_ at the end...

I wonder how it works psychologically. Even in Avengers, the "good people" turning into dust clearly affected the audience much more than "the bad people" being killed in various ways during the movie.

Media that highlights this dynamic is interesting, though it implies some fourth-wall breaking. Funny Games did it (and I hated it, but it was interesting.) Sometimes video games do it too; Metal Gear Solid criticizes the player for enjoying all the killing.

> Metal Gear Solid criticizes the player for enjoying all the killing.

Then there's Spec Ops: The Line. Yikes.

You know, as a kid I didn't really realize what the hyenas did to Scar. I just knew they were mad at him and he wasn't in the movie anymore.

It wasn't until I watched it again when I was 17 or so and I realized how completely dark that actually was.

My seven and four year old girls definitely understood what the hungry hyenas were doing; but then, I've never really sheltered them from the horrors of nature.

When I was a young kid, I hated Disney movies. The villains were always too mean and scary for me (I still hate Ursula), and besides that, those movies had too much drama that made me feel extremely anxious. My aversion to violence and sadism in media wore off eventually, but is that good? Maybe I was just excessively sensitive as a kid and needed to be exposed to even more stuff like that even earlier on. I'm not sure about that, but I don't have much fondness for those movies even in retrospect.

American PG-13 movies regularly include hyper-violence, human torture, and gore.

But yes, the rating shelters children from women's nipples, everyone's genitals, and naughty words.

Parents can just watch the movies themselves and figure out whether their individual kids can handle watching it.

That's what we do. It works great. I know our kids and what they can handle. Some PG-13 movies are fine for our 5-6 yr olds, some are not.

Maybe read the article again. The author isn't saying they're some kind of "bad influence" that are gonna turn kids into serial killers.

You should read the article. You're arguing against a position the author does not take.

I know this is the internet and everyone just reads the headline, but comments like this are frustrating.

But isn’t the first iron man movie more like the old school comics than what he describes?

I was never into comics as a kid, but started reading some after a podcaster I like sold me on how good they can be. I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, and started reading the older comics (from the 40s, 50s, and 60s)

They are a lot of fun once you understand the art form, but there are a lot of problematic things with them, just like any work from 80 years ago.

I got into reading some of them with my 5 year old daughter, and she loves the old ones. I sometimes have to explain some things to her, and why some things we read aren’t ok, but she likes them.

We also found quite a few more modern comics that are perfect for kids her age. We love reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur together, and we also love reading Squirrel Girl comics. We stay away from some of the more dark comics that feature the most popular super heroes.

I guess my point is that there are a lot more super hero comics than just the MCU ones, and some are much more kid appropriate than others. I appreciate a world that has adult and kid comics. Why can’t we have both?

One other thing I noticed with my two kids (6 and 3 now) is that what scares and traumatizes them the most aren’t the things that scare adult me the most. For example, I am way more disturbed by death than my kids. Characters dying don’t bother my kids like it does me. I think it is likely due to not really understanding what death is, exactly. They have not lost people and don’t understand the permanence.

On the other hand, random things that don’t seem scary at all can scare the crap out of them. My 3 year old will want to watch the fight to the death between sharptooth and little foot’s mom in Land Before Time over and over, but freaks out over the opening montage in Moana.

I think this might be the best moment on HN, to talk about my my love of 'One Piece'. The highest selling comic-book by a single author of all time.

The joy of exploration, 'cool' moments, downright insane attacks, friendship and slapstick humor appealed to 10 yr old me. 20 years from then, it is still the best work of fantasy fiction I have ever read. Oda has managed to preserve all of those moments of childlike joy and unbridled creativity, while injecting societally relevant themes of authoritarianism, discrimination, the complex nature of morality and art that moves the genre forward, in a manner that is superior to a lot of grim-dark works meant to do exactly that. The current arc exemplifies that quality, 25 years since it started.

Calling a manga with 500 million sales underrated is ridiculous, but I find that it is still not appreciated enough in American & 'critic' spaces.

Here in the US, it is common to ignore manga because of the stereotypes that come with certain genres within it. However, I find that Japan's best artists & story-tellers find manga as their medium for expression more often than western counterparts.

I find that American culture tends to invade American media in a way that demands attention until the next 'big' issue is identified. Every community is forced to comment on the one issue, in a manner that kills all diversity and 'magic' from creative works. It feels lazy and repetitive. To some degree, it might do some good for American culture and American media to reorient towards more localized concerns, and not care so much about what is ruling the 1st-page of the new cycle.

If the author thinks Avengers is too dark for their son, they definitely won't like One Piece. The manga has a man eating his own leg from starvation, a man getting half his head blown off, genocide, human experimentation, people being sold for slavery, a man being boiled alive. I love One Piece, but if the author wants their son to be free of "stunted impersonation of grownup sensibilities" I'm not sure it's the right thing.

I'm more than old enough to have a 13-year old offspring without any age-of-consent laws being broken¹, and I distinctly remember there been dark tones in comic books and² related cartoons back in my youth. It isn't a new thing.

I suspect that either there is some selective memory going on here, or the writer's parents were very careful about what parts of the comics world they were exposed to.

[1] old enough to have a 26-year-old one even

[2] though much less so as the grimier ones didn't get the TV treatment, or the grime was mostly washed off

As a kid, Daredevil was my favourite. It was pretty bleak, didn’t seem to bother me.

Gargoyles, Batman, Spiderman cartoons from the late 90s... they were dark, compared of Power Rangers, which was on at the same time.

Those comics were visually dark and had some darkish themes but they weren't much darker than Power Rangers or anything else on at the time. If anything they were more sophisticated shows than Power Rangers.

That's not to say Power Rangers was bad, but Spider-Man and Gargoyles were interesting in that they used multi-episode storylines with multiple acts. Outside of their visual motifs they weren't dark series. They were just offering narratives for older kids that were reading books and comics and playing video games.

Yes, the transition is really an 80's-90's thing. A lot of films are basically using comics from that era as storyboards. The few superhero films of that era were generally lightweight fare based on much older comics.

This was a great article. This is probably one of the reasons why my son only reads comics that are about Minecraft characters. Why would he want to read superheroes? That is grownup stuff. The Minecraft comics are often odd, have to weirdly combine school age kid concerns with crafting things and wearing pumpkins on your head to hide from endermen, but nobody is nihilistically killing everyone.

Everyone thinks of "comics" as "superhero" but we used to have comics other than superheroes.

The Disney Duck comics used to be moderately popular in the USA, though they remain popular outside the country they're basically moribund here.

Archie comics continues to publish but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.

THe 1950s are calling, and they want their talking points back...

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/scare-tactics-...

> "On April 21, 1954, Dr. Frederic Wertham strode into the U.S. Senate hearing room in a white lab coat, a symbol of the same authority he wielded while writing Seduction of the Innocent, his condemnation of the comics industry, especially the horror genre, as corrupting America’s youth. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, led by Senator Estes Kefauver fresh from his victory over organized crime, put comics on trial, which Trombetta explains became more of a show trial. It was a foregone conclusion that comics would never be the same again. An entire industry of horror comics disappeared literally overnight. Words such as “horror” and “terror” were banned by the new code, and even “crime” faced heavy restrictions. “It was, in true Orwellian fashion,” Trombetta writes, “as if the government thought bad things would vanish if they couldn’t be read or thought about.”"

1950? It goes back further than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

It’s not clear to me how these two are the same?

Yeah, they're old, but are the talking points wrong?

Patrick H Willems has a great video where he discusses how superhero media has moved away from it's core audience of children and teens. He does a good job of discussing what's lost and presenting a pretty good and fair 'hot take': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dfI_2dscGE

Best part: In anticipation of rabid comic book/superhero fans attempting to gatekeep his opinions, Patrick opens the video by sharing his large - very large - comic book collection and 'nerd credentials.'

This is a good point, people used to say, "I wanna make a dark and gritty comic book film" like it was something original. Now EVERYONE says that.

Like so many things today, what was once cliche 20 or 30 years ago would now feel wildly original.

The problem IMO is deeper than this superficial take. My view is that the hopelessness that has invaded much of modern life is soaking into all aspects of media. Star Trek which was a Utopia is now a dystopia. The most recent Batman was grim dark and even the Marvel stuff with it's coating of Disney sprinkles isn't super positive.

The Superhero Industry diversified and comics are expensive. They went from being pulp to full gloss at the same time that companies started spending less and less on print advertisement. You can totally find books suited for children, with all the characters you grew up with, but the main line books today are for the people who grew up with them, because they can afford it.

The economic argument continues: comic books get turned into comic movies and comic tv shows and comic action figures and that gets creators paid, even if they work for the big two. Nobody is making BIFF, BAM, POW movies. Why should they work against their own financial self interests?

You're not going to walk out of a comic shop with 4 new comics for less than $20 when accounting for tax. Kids don't HAVE to be focused on superheroes, anyway. There are all sorts of comics out there, and most of the youth trade paperbacks are vastly better reading material for kids, because they try to present the material at their level of understanding instead of just dumbing down the mainstream to whatever was popular 50 years ago.

I consider the MCU to be biff bam pow. Except these days it tends to be "Quip! Snarky riposte! Aptly descriptive nickname!"

The kids grew up and the corps figured it was easier to sell to the already hooked than compete in the even more vapid trinkets world of the newly young?

Young adults used to migrate from teen pulp to more in-depth fiction. Nowadays they just seem directed to cuddle in infantilized cultural substitute.

Is there any evidence of this, at all?

The reason I can't stand the superhero films is a combination of them being shallow and taking themselves so seriously. Even the humour is shallow and manages to take itself seriously.

Well, yes -it does.

Children have not been the primary demographic target of comics since the mid to late eighties.

Agreed. There's even a trope[1] named after the phenomenon, though I'm sure the trope itself was around before it was widely applied to comic books in said 80s.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier

Ah yes, the weekly article from a new parent wanting the world to be changed to better cater to their children and what they've decided is "appropriate" for them.

The superhero obsession of US culture is quite strange to me.

> A seven-year-old has a clean, first-order appreciation of superheroes. They like hero comics because the comics have heroes: bold, strong, vividly colored good guys to fight off the bad guys and make the world safe.

This too is somewhat artificially created. It's not false, but... what analogy shall I use here? I guess it's like how kids, and not just kids, love sugar, and sugary-sweet food. Refined sugar is problematic as its prevalence in your diet increases; it's also somewhat of an addiction; and also, it's out of its original context in sugarcane (or honey, fruit, etc.). US superheroes are a bit like that: A particular refinement of an aspect of stories of heroism and adventure.

Like refined sugar, superhero films (and to a much lesser extent comics) are actively pushed by large corporations. And while neither is a conspiracy to poison people, they both need to be well enough aligned with what corporations want to habituate people to, diet-wise and culture-wise; and that should also be kept in mind.

It's really eye-opening to go shopping for clothing for a 3 year old and see that half of the clothes are covered in characters from media that won't be age appropriate for the wearer for another 10 years.

It doesn't hate children. It created content geared towards the most lucrative audience, which skews older, that's all.

Batman in 1989 showed that superhero movies could still be extremely popular & attract an older audience. It also sold so much merchandise-- consumed primarily by younger members of the audience-- that by the time the 4th movie "Batman & Robin" came around merchandise & its design was driving movie creation rather than quality content and the genre went into hiatus for a few years.

When the genre reemerged with the 2002 Spiderman movie and subsequent hits & creation of the MCU, movie makers seemed to realize that they had to appeal to the older audience as well as those on the younger tween+ spectrum, even if it meant giving up ticket sales on for the youngest. And the extreme popularity of the movies made them enough of a cultural phenomenon that they still sell tons of merch to younger kids anyway.

> a movie designed to scare and sadden him—a movie actively hostile to people like him

Superhero hater jumps a shark? I'm pretty sure there's nothing in marketing-driven Marvel or DC about intentionally being hostile to an audience.

This theme pervades the piece, a sort of self-created victimhood combined with a sense of entitlement.

Fully agree. When I watched The Boys, which was highly rated and marked as a comedy on IMDB, I was honestly disturbed by all the blood and gore. And there wasn't anything funny in it.

Comedy and Satire should be different categories. And we should split 18+ into "18+ because of violence" and "16+sex".

> My seven-year-old really wanted to see that last Avengers movie, and he really wanted not to see it; that is, he wished it were a movie he could see, but he understood that it was, instead, a movie designed to scare and sadden him—a movie actively hostile to people like him.

I'm sure he understands.

I recently rewatched the Adam West Batman movie, it was very fun and a good watch with kids, crazy what that character has now become.

Check out the new Harley Quinn. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7658402/

I think I disagree with the fundamental premise that children shouldn't be exposed to, or don't enjoy, grim characters and dark stories.

I remember being not much older than the author's seven year old and gleefully flipping through Spawn #1. At the time, I was already a fan of Judge Dredd and TMNT comics. (If you're unaware, the TMNT comics were _violent_). My favourite films were Roadwarrior and Evil Dead 2!

It seems odd to me to suggest that death and misery aren't experiences kids encounter or should encounter. Perhaps its uniquely modern, but it seems to me that even the sheltered children of the west must encounter a passing of a pet or a family member from time to time. It would certainly help to allow them to explore those concepts through art and entertainment, in order to process the feelings they're trying to understand.

The author says they loved superheroes as a child, but assumes that was because the content back then was kid-friendly. In reality if you look at comic books from decades ago they were a lot more "adult". There was an order of magnitude more death, blood, gore and general adult themes. Heck the PG-13 rating didn't even exist before the 80s.

The difference was that there was a lot less supervision those days, and no one would blink at a 7 year old browsing through the aisles alone at a bookstore. Groups of kids sneaking into an R rated movie was perfectly routine.

So it isn't the superhero industry that changed but our own treatment of children.

Shallow, dumb hot take. I was given stern looks as a kid going into hobby stores as a kid, too. The only comics I got to readily touch was at a supermarket, and even there I'd get chastised by adults from time to time if I got too kid-like. Turns out stores don't like kids destroying merchandise.

Find a store that is more friendly to your kid, or just ignore the silly store person and teach your kid to respect items and the value of some things and let them look around. There is plenty of comics - a massive amount, really - aimed at kids. My son has read a bunch of them, far more than when I was his age.

The great thing about comics is there is one for everybody.

Instead of heading to your local comic book store, which is geared toward people with disposable income, you head to your local library or children's section of a large bookstore, you will find way more age appropriate content for your seven year old. I'm willing to bet your seven year old will understand and relate better to these comics than anything on the wall at the comic book store.

Depending on the maturity level of your child, you are just a few short years away from them being able to handle the nitty gritty comics of today.

I wonder if this has to do with superhero comics being popular in a particular era, let's say the 80s-90s, and most of it's fans getting into comics around that time, and sticking around.

I admit, I did try to get into comics a few years ago, during the peak MCU craze, but I found both Marvel's and DC's offerings, with hundreds of characters who stories run in parallel and intertwine in a confusing fashion over hundreds of issues over decades to be impenetrable.

I suspect newcomers struggle with the same issue, while for die-hard veterans, it's part of the core appeal.

I generally don't get the outcry about the brooding and dark themes in works meant for moody teenagers - which is a constant trait of them across space and time.

If we didn't single out superhero comics, we could mention a great number of young adult works with dark themes - Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Huckleberry Finn, Arthur Gordon Pym, Jack London's works just to give some examples of the top of my head.

I'm not a developmental psychologist, and I don't want to speculate why teens are this way, but they certainly always have been.

American culture is so impoverished, and doesn't even. realise it.

If that is true, why does the rest of the world want it so badly?

How are those even in conflict? Humans are humans. American culture skews heavily towards wish fulfillment and impulse gratification. Why wouldn't people want that?

Sugar is quite popular too. It is quite possible for people to want sugar, yet notice that people who have excessive access to (not to mention advertising and peer pressure towards) sugar often lose the ability to appreciate or even distinguish other flavors.

If the rest of the world loves american super hero movies, why would american "culture" (whatever that means) be at fault?

I am not sure if you are short-sighted, but this kind of comment doesn't contribute to HN

I am from Asia, while we love super hero movies because they are cool (including the dark side), but that doesn't mean we appreciate the culture described in the article, to be honest, it's kind of lame

You can say it's lame, but it is everywhere in asia. Every movie theater, toys, bootleg merch - asia is saturated in it and people are paying for it because they love it. You can call it lame, but that's really more of a judgement on the people around you. Seems pretty short sighted.

I think you have a comprehension problem

If you can't explain why, maybe the problem isn't me. All I said was that people criticizing american super hero movies need to deal with the fact that they are sought out everywhere in the world. Then you tried to insult me and say my comment "doesn't contribute to HN". Does this mean that you think this is what comments should be? Hollow insults with no explanation?

true story: my coworker gave away her sons comic book collection because she found out one of the batman books portrays the caped crusader in a homosexual relationship, So id say the superhero industry doesnt hate kids per-say, it just has an unfortunately callous ability to expose which of your formerly well-intentioned parents is secretly an insufferable child.

Bizarre: persumably she thought the comics were bad for her child, however they are okay for another child?

I find it disturbing someone takes 3-4yo to comic book store to be exposed for sure to inappropriate content.

As non American what US movies taught me each US school class has bully(ies) and all unpopular kids have asthma and must use inhaler, which I don't a bit strange because I had asthma and never used it it in my life, but it seems life saving in US.

When kids read, they read Harry Potter et al. When they see movies in theaters, it's Pixar stuff, or again, Harry Potter. When they watch movies online, I think they have decent access to kid friendly superhero stuff, much of it old. So I think the kids just became much less accessible to the industry.

This is exactly right. At the risk of going super specific; Joaquin Phoenix's Joker's popularity just strikes me as the weirdest thing, if not harmful. You're tackling serious grown up things in a child's format. Give me that Leto Joker because he seems fun and cartoony.

"phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny"... what is this dude going on about?

I will agree with him later in the article: the "superhero industry" is basically soap-opera for nerds, stringing them along, all the way to the bank. I don't play that game.

I flicked through a book on inside Marvel comics in the 90's. It really made them sound a bit predatory saleswise, I felt a bit of a sucker having bought them then. Holographic covers, pah.

For me, this brings to mind two examples I can remember of superhero comics failing even their now-core audiences of adults, or adolescents developing towards adults.

I quit reading Marvel comics towards the end of the first Civil War storyline (wow, exactly 15 years ago!). Peter Parker, as Spider-Man, becomes Tony Stark's poster boy for superheroes revealing their secret identities and registering with the government. But after a crisis of conscience, he defects from Stark's program and goes on the run with Aunt May and Mary Jane. A bounty goes out, and Aunt May takes a sniper bullet meant for Peter. In order to save Aunt May, Peter and Mary Jane make a deal with the conveniently Marvel-branded, IP-protected version of the Devil. The cost is that history is altered so that Peter and Mary Jane were never married, and neither they nor anyone else would remember them ever being married. I believe some of the writers at the time came right out and said that it was easier to go back to writing angst-ridden, "will they or won't they" romance storylines than to try to write two adult characters maintaining a successful marriage. For me as a young adult, Peter the successful husband was a much more desirable hero figure than a less mature Peter who struggled with women. That caused me to drop Marvel comics, and I have seldom gone back since, even though I understand they've done a number of better-written and more impactful storylines since.

DC Comics, on the other hand, has seemed absolutely desperate to catch up with the Disney-Marvel juggernaut during the past decade, and one of the ways that's manifested is trying to market the Joker's girlfriend Harley Quinn as some kind of perverse equivalent to a Disney princess. Since that means Harley can no longer be a straight villain, they recently introduced the Joker's new girlfriend, Punchline. Punchline's super-villain origin story is that she was on a high-school field trip to a TV station when the Joker broke in, took everybody hostage, and forced her to read whatever insane screed he had prepared live on-air. As a result of this, over the years, she became more and more obsessed with the Joker, and by the time she was a young adult, was putting out a podcast tracing the Joker's most famous crimes. The Joker caught wind of it, recruited her as a new love interest and protege, and off the storyline goes. If my kids were reading this, I would need to sit them down and explain that it is reinforcing strongly negative stereotypes about how women respond to trauma and abuse. The writers and editors fail to do so within the context of the story, as they're mainly looking for a new anti-hero to market, since that's what's sold so well for years now.

Comics just are too expensive to target a young child audience, and as such their story lines reflect that… basically only comic hero with big money behind them aimed at kids is spider man…

On the other hand I don’t know anyone under 20 into American comics, but almost all the kids I know read tons of manga and watch a bazillion anime joints. And most of them got into it off shonen dragon ball and Naruto style cartoons that most have childish themes of friendship and hard work

Comics are mythology minus wisdom.

Comics are often created with a greater idea in mind, and then continued by someone else without that idea.

Comic books were only infantilized for a brief period. Have you ever read the original Dick Tracy, which was perfectly fine entertainment children in the '30s? It's hardcore. There are scenes with Tracy torturing gang members with fire. Pulp, western, romance, and horror genres dominated. All would be deemed in appropriate by this author. Children read them anyway.

Then came the Comics Code Authority, which it seems this author would like to see return. It started in the '50s and didn't officially end until much more recently. But even under the CCA in the '70s and '80s you were seeing plenty of material "inappropriate" for children. In the US kids could be found reading Claremont's X-Men, a run of comics absolutely boiling over with everything that makes conservatives angry. In Japan, where the CCA did not exist, you could find children reading things like Fist of the North Star.

Those children Are now in their 40s and 50s. Purely anecdotal, but I've never heard of even one person who was traumatized or devastated because they read such a comic book at a young age. I have heard many stories of people who's lives were dramatically positively influenced by those books such that they still remember and revere them to this day.

Let your kid read (almost) whatever comic book they want. It's not hard to avoid what truly XXX-rated material that's out there.

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