The Superhero Industry Hates Children
22nd April 2022
You can’t just turn a seven-year-old child loose in a comic-book store to look at the superhero comic books. Just like I couldn’t take him to the last big Avengers movie, to see which of his favorite heroes might have gotten un-murdered, after they got murdered in the big Avengers movie before that, which I also couldn’t take him to. 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 loved superheroes when I was his age. Now I’ve gone back to reading and watching superhero material to keep him company. The only problem is that the superhero industry hates children. It’s the most childish thing about the genre—not the musclebound people in tights, but the insistence that the musclebound people in tights should be grim and mature.