READING COMIX MAKES YOU DUMM!!

i am actually - as i say on FT - somewhat of the mind that being excellent at one mode of aesthetic appreciation can certainly severely blunt you to other modes BUT do not accept that um "non-mainstream" intellectual capability = dummness automatically* (haha this is another dimension to the evil issue of rockism!! but by all means let us not go down THAT road)

*eg many musicians are not v.articulate wordwise = WHY THEY BECAME MUSICIANS MAYBE YOU THINK? etc

One of the best on-topic points in that discussion is that if you want to impress your kids with books that will blow open their minds with the power of pure, no string attached story, what the hell are you doing giving them American Gods? It's like introducing someone to music via the medium of Weird Al records.

Kids don't read comics anymore! Blame computer games!

jel i wish you wrote for crooked timber!

If you're going to introduce kids to a fantasy series, give them something like Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books or that series about The Dark; something easy to read where the genre conventions are either clearly mapped out from the get-go OR that starts out in a world that is the same as ours and becomes progressively weirder/out-of-step as the novel(s) progress. So much fantasy and science fiction are pitched at people predisposed/used to those types of stories.