When did adults take over from children as tha main audience for mainstream comics?

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And was there a significant number of non-industry grown ups reading and taking seriously superhero comics in the 60s and 70s?

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Thursday, 25 May 2006 16:42 (nineteen years ago)

June 4th, 1983.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 25 May 2006 16:57 (nineteen years ago)

late 60s: post-ComicsCode generation enters college
70s-80s: rise of the direct market
early 90s: Darlene on 'Roseanne' has DC Comics products prominently displayed in her room

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 25 May 2006 17:04 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah it depends if you define college students as 'grown ups'. Marvel sometime in the 60s suddenly realised - based on the letters it was getting I suppose - that it had cracked the completely unforeseen college market and a lot of its imperial silver age phase involved trying to cater to said market.

Were servicemen always a significant adult market for comics?

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 25 May 2006 17:11 (nineteen years ago)

What year were mylar bags invented?

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 25 May 2006 17:35 (nineteen years ago)

Actually, 1986 (through a DC reader's eyes) seems like an important year in terms of moving beyond mere "comics not just for kids" toward eventual "we're just not that interested in kids", what with Watchmen, DKR, Crisis, etc. By '87, DC had launched it's "suggested for mature readers" label (which was soundly ignored by local retailers, which I applauded at the time, as a 10-yr-old, but maybe, shit, should I have really been reading that kind of thing?).

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 25 May 2006 17:43 (nineteen years ago)

i wld date it to the day Roy Thomas joined Marvel comics, the first significant superhero fan turned pro (i think E. Nelson Bridwell at DC slightly preceeded R the T) - after Roy, the deluge - of fanboys who knew tons more abt continuity than say Arnold Drake (one of the disenfranchised DC writers who in the late 60s didn't quite 'get' Marvel - see also Jerry Siegel's inept+hilarious Mighty Comics line) but who, inadvertently or otherwise, ended up communicating/pandering much more to OTHER fans rather than joe pub/casual reader/child - tied into phil seuling's deal, in the early 70s, to establish a DIRECT MARKET w/ Marvel+DC by wrangling bigger discounts for comic shops but w. no returns - limiting the circulation of c. bks away from the 'mom + pop' market and into the specialist realm of c. shops and the (justified!) public perception of them as somewhere you'd not be esp. happy for yr child to hang out in (when my pa took me to Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, London's Premier comic shop in 1976 when i was TEN, IN their shop in the heart of scummy Soho there was a huge glass cabinet on the shop floor of drug paraphernalia, bongs etc, pa was WELL impressed)

- ALSO the slow demise of Dell/Gold Key - their Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was prob the biggest selling American comic book OF ALL TIME up to the end of the 1950s easily - i was shocked when I went to Disney in Florida earlier this year not to see ANY comics in the merch shops - whereas in Europe I remember in my childhood seeing adults on the beach in france reading Donald Duck comics, and i think that still persists, to some degree

― Ward Fowler (Ward Fowler), Thursday, 25 May 2006 18:13 (nineteen years ago)

50s-era war comics (kurtzman's "two-fisted tales," etc) were generally aimed at adults, i think.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 25 May 2006 20:38 (nineteen years ago)

how i wish i could say somthin negative, i just can't in fact this page is by far the best. every one here know's what youre talking about. and belive me i think i just learned a thing or two about,
generation's superhero fan's in a wider prospective.
this page i promise i will respect...... your's truly .ZILLAMAN.

― zillaman, Saturday, 27 May 2006 05:32 (nineteen years ago)

I belive that trough out the year's Adult's and in the group, parent's, in the 50's, starting with movie's like classic flashgordon and so on giving birht to early ideas yet some that seemed to far ahead of the time's. In way's children, weather it was
donald duck or MAD,commic's for the most part it was what the children can't see,that the adult's keept away from them,. I mean
I still remember the day's when i got together with my friend's as a kid, looking at commic's that i snaged from my dad, forget about weather i was reading them, i know i diden't i was the insane picture's that we could not keep our eye's from watchin them.
Now I see kid's and what there looking at and by far it dosen't compare with what i remember as a kid. mainstream commic's and adult's have gone hand in hand in my opinion. The commic book industry,very smart,very very smart.......

― ZILLAMAN, Saturday, 27 May 2006 06:15 (nineteen years ago)

Great drawing's and reading material,with extreme eye candy for kid's and enough to raise the eyebrows in adult's to say 'wait a minute,most adult's don't se eye to eye,with what is and is not suitable,for children ,superman is o.k but not the Hulk, "example"
to much Hulk smashing! o.k well i guess many adult's are disconected with what's going on in the commic book industry. though some adult's think superman is the best and his name alone bring's commfert to the cildren ,i think that if for one second they were to page through a superman commic and a hulk commic the child would problably not get one or the other, ... me, my kid's well they get the hulk,superman,captain america ironman,greenlantern,exc.. why not?
to every one outhere i apologize for the almost duplicate answer,
mi son,is forcing me to play as i'm trying to put this out,resulting in slopyness....ooop's...zillaman out

― zillaman, Saturday, 27 May 2006 06:45 (nineteen years ago)

when i became an adult. really. sadly. maybe. alan moore. swampy.

although that 60's info is interesting.

― molly (bulbs), Saturday, 27 May 2006 07:27 (nineteen years ago)

Surely it's the lack of distribution, and the rising expense of single issues, that's the problem rather than the actual comics content (which is still largely accessible and teen/kid-oriented)?

Obviously there's a much better distribution of graphic novels at yer Borders and Indigos, but they're always so wretchedly looked after and indexed, I don't expect that to last for long.

I wonder about managa -- there are stocks of them at every bookstore, and supposedly they're really popular, but I never see anyone reading them.

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Saturday, 27 May 2006 10:01 (nineteen years ago)

Also, I'm sure adults have always been a big part of the audience at specialist shops, but I didn't really pa attntion to adults when I was a teen.

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Saturday, 27 May 2006 10:04 (nineteen years ago)

The problem with branding comics for adults or kids it works both ways. The "Suggested for Mature Readers"-era obviously had a lot of appeal to children ("It's too old for you" = red rag to a 12-year-old). Whereas and simplifying icon-ifying the characters for new, younger readers (as in One Year Later and GM's JLA) has the effect of drawing in lots of older, nostalgic saddoes like me.

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Saturday, 27 May 2006 12:24 (nineteen years ago)

I think that the level of public comfort and comics' adoption with non-traditional narrative structures in film and television (multiple simul. plot-lines, etc) had a large role in making comics more suited to an older audience.

― JW (ex machina), Tuesday, 30 May 2006 21:35 (nineteen years ago)

― genericspam, Monday, 12 June 2006 11:57 (nineteen years ago)

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― peter pinocchio, Tuesday, 20 June 2006 05:10 (nineteen years ago)

When did comic nerds take over from music nerds as the main audience for spam?

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 14:08 (nineteen years ago)

When the music nerds came out Pro-Registration. Dirty Iron Man sympos.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 14:10 (nineteen years ago)

[GOD FORSAKEN SPAM]

― SPAM, Monday, 26 June 2006 13:28 (nineteen years ago)

Although perhaps not entirely neccessary; I can't recall ever seeing one bit of spam on this board.

-- chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (joe.goode...), May 18th, 2006 10:41 PM. (chap)

Oh, how young and foolish I was.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap), Monday, 26 June 2006 13:33 (nineteen years ago)

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