Kids and Comics

[TimR]

Thanks JMelloul, I fixed the link as well

[kamikaze]

I work with children and adolescents in a psych hospital. I cant count how many times that the kids there are interested in comics and drawing (especially the younger kids). I talk with them during their free time about what their favorite comics and cartoons are as well as bring some comics to our unit for them to read and draw from. ALL of them actually enjoy reading them. I also found this article a couple of weeks ago that was interesting about how children can benefit from reading comic books..

http://momshomeroom.msn.com/parentin...mc_id=facebook

[RoboTwin]

Originally Posted by Aaron Walther

... comics need to be cheap, disposable, and available to kids. I'm not saying that everybody should be making all ages material, just that we need to be conscious of kid's interest in comics. It's the only way to grow the medium. I'm glad to say I grew the audience by one more reader.

Nice story! There was another thread about this awhile back; this must be a cyclical theme. Comics at the standard size are too expensive for kids, so we'd have to scale down to ashcan/manga size or smaller. I suggest to make comics cheap and disposable by publishing pulp mini-comics and putting them in candy racks at checkout isles. Make the cost the same or less than a candy bar. They deliberately put all that sugary goodness at child's-eye level to capitalize on their impulses. Someone needs to do a pilot program, maybe co-branding and sharing distribution channels with with M&M or Hershey.

TimR - Great concept but it looks almost too sophisticated, maybe for the discerning child prodigy!

[SuperMonkey]

Newsprint, please.

[TimR]

Originally Posted by RoboTwin

TimR - Great concept but it looks almost too sophisticated, maybe for the discerning child prodigy!

LOL... yeah, I put a few copies in my neighborhood corner store and when I asked the clerk who had bought some or expressed interest, they told me the most interested people were some graduate students who lived nearby! But I'm not sure many kids wander through there anyway.

I can report this though: I brought a copy to a caricature class I taught last week and some of the kids there were interested in it. Funny thing, the real little kids (6-7) liked it and spent a bit of time flipping through it, but the word balloons were too dense for them to read. On the other hand, older kids (10-13) who could have made sense of the text if they tried, glanced at it more quickly and then put it aside for other art books and things I had.