Aren’t comic books supposed to be for kids?
Not necessarily. In America, most comic-book readers are adults, almost 70%. Many more comic-book readers are older teenagers. The same is true in Europe and Japan, where comics are not stigmatized as a children’s medium. Thus, many of today’s comic books are intended for mature audiences, in the same way that many television programs, movies and novels are intended for mature audiences. Of course, publishers still print certain comics almost exclusively for children, and print other comics, such as Archie or Batman Adventures, for mixed audiences. But adult comics have an old and fairly distinguished heritage. America’s first comics to contain original material may have been the sexually explicit “Tijuana Bibles” of the 1920s or earlier. Adult-oriented “underground comix” played a prominent role in promoting counterculture politics during the 1960s and ’70s. The adult comic Maus, an allegory about the Holocaust, won a Pulitzer Prize during the 1980s. Modern comics from authors Daniel
