It's a quiet week, so rather than try and force 1500 words out of the mere fact that Marvel is restarting the Epic imprint but hasn't said anything about it yet (and god knows I've tried), let's go back to one of the old standard debates which turned up on the Ninth Art forum this past week.

"Superheroes are for kids." Discuss.

Well, being a legalistic type, I'm going to start by asking what you mean by "for" and "kids." After all, one of the common complaints about the state of the industry is that kids don't buy comics. The actual audience for superhero comics skews rather older than that. The lower end of the age range seems to be teenagers, not children. So if your definition of "kids" is late teens and early twenties then you may have a demonstrable point in saying superheroes are for kids, but it's rather an artificial definition of "kids".

What about the target audiences? Well, obviously I could sit here all night and rattle off lists of superhero comics that are manifestly not aimed at children. There isn't much point in doing so, because it just draws the inevitable response that these are the exceptions that prove the rule. I will take it as read that we're all familiar with WATCHMEN and move on from there.

DC produces comics based on its superhero cartoons, along with the various Cartoon Network books. Those seem to be its effort at comics aimed at children. The rest of their superhero line, by implication, skews higher. Marvel continues, bafflingly, to insist that the Ultimate imprint is aimed at younger audiences than their mainstream books. Judging from Mark Millar's comments, and the thematic content of his stories, this seems to manifest largely in a list of banned words. But the policy, nonetheless, is there.

'The lower end of the age range seem to be teenagers, not children.' It would seem reasonable to infer that both the major superhero publishers are aiming their superhero books more or less at the core audience that has been buying the books anyway. Which isn't kids.

So if they're not aimed at kids, and they're not bought by kids, in what sense exactly are superheroes for kids?

The dumb version of the argument goes somewhat like this. Superheroes were a genre originally created to target children. That's what they were meant to do. It's their reason to exist. Anything else is basically just a distortion of a genre that was created for kids and will therefore always remain essentially for kids.

And of course, this is a hopeless argument. It's really just the same argument as "comics are for kids, and always will be because they always were". It's dumb when applied to a medium, dumb when applied to a genre. It's the straw man argument, but people actually still seem to advance it, so it's worth brushing aside.

The rather better version of the argument is: By definition, a superhero story is genre fiction. The rules and conventions of the genre are inherently limiting. They preclude the degree of complexity and sophistication to be found in more ambitious artistic works. They restrict the creator to such an extent that the rules are really only suitable for producing instances of children's entertainment. Thus superheroes are for kids - when they stop being for kids, they must have passed beyond the genre rules and therefore they are no longer superhero stories.

In a nutshell, it's an inherently unsophisticated genre best suited to unsophisticated minds.

'Superhero stories are genre fiction. The rules and conventions are limiting.' Well, okay, this has some more persuasive force to it. But there are two main counter-arguments.

Point one, are we talking about the superhero genre as it generally is, or the superhero genre as it could potentially be? Clearly I'm not going to make an argument for Silver Age comics being aimed at adults. Self-evidently they weren't, and I've never had much interest in them outside of historical curiosity. But equally clearly there has been intelligent, imaginative work with adult themes published within the genre. It may be in the minority, but it does show a potential within the genre for specifically adult stories with serious artistic aspirations.

However, there is a more fundamental objection to the argument than that.

The underlying assumption is that only material with a certain level of sophistication is for adults. Below that level, it's for kids. This is reflected in the way that "mature readers" has become used in comics as a euphemism for "a bit arthouse" - a label applied not merely to indicate a comic's unsuitability to younger readers, but to imply a certain level of artistic quality. Basically, if the work falls short of a certain degree of artistic or intellectual aspiration, it is deemed to be "for kids".

Complex work may be beyond the grasp of younger children and thus in that sense is may be "for adults". It does not follow that anything beneath that threshold is exclusively for kids, or even that it is primarily targeted at them. There is plenty of dumb material out there aimed at adults.

Who was watching JOE MILLIONAIRE? Rather a lot of adults, one imagines. Who are all those people drinking until they can't stand up but somehow staggering to the microphone for a karaoke rendition of "My Way"? Six-year-olds? Who goes to see Daniel O'Donnell concerts? Infants tragically afflicted with a rapid aging disorder?

'Adults are, much of the time, downright stupid.' Who went to see the BATMAN films? BLADE? DAREDEVIL? SPIDER-MAN? THE MATRIX, for that matter? Come on, you don't get to those levels of takings solely on the basis of children and the parents who were dragged along. Adults, plenty of them, happy to hand over money to watch superheroes.

The argument that something is only "for adults" if it achieves a certain level of artistic sophistication is simply wrong. If unsophisticated material cannot be "for adults" then this leads to the logical conclusion that hardcore pornography is for kids. Adults are, much of the time, downright stupid. This is not just the intellectually lazy ones who would like to delegate their thought processes altogether. Nobody wants a constant stream of Art. Everyone wants to switch their brain off sometimes. Look at the adults around you. Are you seriously telling me that all of these people are only interested in things that intellectually challenge them?

The "superheroes are for kids" mantra plays nicely to those segments of fandom that think the industry has taken a horrible wrong turn in being overrun with superheroes and that it needs to get rid of them to break through to a wider market. It tries to justify comics' failure to appeal to a wider audience by blaming it on the superheroes. I disagree; I think comics acquired their reputation as a kiddie medium not just through their choice of genre but through the way in which they executed that genre and others in the past (and the public perception of comics is still based on the past).

Yes, in the past the comics industry produced a ton of superhero comics for kids - but to the extent it produced anything in other genres, they tended to be for kids as well, so it should hardly come as a surprise that the superhero stories were likewise targeted. And this is the period of comics' history that still drives public perception.

The argument that superheroes are for kids flies in the face of adult audiences who are plainly interested in them - just in films, not comics. They watch superheroes just as they watch other action films. Whether the genre has untapped artistic potential or not is largely beside the point - mainstream adult audiences are not looking exclusively for that. That is not because they are ersatz kids. It's because that's what adults are like.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.