Paul Pope: “Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do ‘Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]‘, this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said ‘You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do ‘Scooby-Doo.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we just broke up.’”
For the record, Paul Pope is this guy:
and how awesome would a Kamandi series be if Pope was to create it? We'll never know now. Apparently it would need gratuitous sex and violence to appeal to DC's forty-five year old demographic which is obviously not what Pope had in mind when he pitched it.
It actually makes me sick to think that this is an industry that I wanted to work in for so long. An industry that has become so short-sighted and profit-driven that it can't get out of its own way. To think that the comic industry (and DC Comics in particular, though I wouldn't be surprised if internally this was Marvel's mantra as well) is going to alienate the kids that will make up its future audience, causing them to turn their attention to television or video games or something else. There should be a push to get children interested in comic books so that their love of these characters can start at an early age.
Both Marvel and DC do a good job of bringing in children with their various animated cartoons, however you would think that that would be a vehicle to get children to want to pick up the comic. If you create a fan and a collector at an early age, you have a cash cow for a long time. Instead, a kid going to the comic shop looking for the newest Batman comic because they just saw the latest cartoon featuring the Dark Knight, will come across what? Batman banging Catwoman on a rooftop (Catwoman #1) or Joker's removed face and subsequent torture of the Bat-Family (last year's "Death of the Family" storyline). If I came across that on a spinner rack as a kid, my parents wouldn't have let me anywhere near comic books.
Are we, therefore supposed to just pander to kids with comics involving Scooby Doo or Looney Tunes and hope that they like the medium enough to come back to it when they reach an age that is appropriate for the stories being told with the characters they really want to read? That seems like wishful thinking, and with the average attention span of kids nowadays as short as it is, comics will run out of readers in the next twenty to thirty years as they die off from old age. Or, they'll alienate the readers that they do have and have no one to replace them with as the children that should be reading comic books are off doing something else.
I don't think I've ever felt so ashamed to be a comic book fan as I do now (and I survived the 90s and early 2000s).
Thanks DiDio.
Thanks DC.
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