Just a Few More Minutes

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon gave the keynote address at San Diego's Comic-Con International last month on the subversive, revolutionary notion that comic book publishers should try publishing some comics for children again! It's a great speech, encapsulating everything that the publishers could and should be doing to get the Harry Potter (and, several years ago, the Goosebumps) kids.

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. And for a long time we as lovers and partisans of comics were afraid, after so many long years of struggle and hard work and incremental gains, to pick up that old jar of greasy kid stuff again, and risk undoing it all. Comics have always been an arriviste art form, and all upstarts are to some degree ashamed of their beginnings. But frankly, I don’t think that’s what’s going on in comics anymore.

Now, I think, we have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

It's pretty telling that the non-comics programming at Comic-Con, the sci-fi movies and computer games, continues to grow compared to the medium which gives that convention its name.