Comic Book Thursdays: Close Minded Adults, Open Minded Teens

 

Astonishing X-Men 51, variant cover

When I was a teenager, I bought tons of comics. Teen Titans and Young Justice immediately come to mind and even X-Men occasionally graced my shelves as well though I never got into it. Most of these stories were watered down versions of the regular, more adult titles and some were downright silly but occasionally they touched on serious issues. It was the 90’s after all and even though some subjects weren’t taboo, it still shocked people when things like drugs were in teen oriented stories.

  Considering how politically correct the world is nowadays, it’s strange that teen oriented storylines touch on issues adults avoid. Even more intriguing, is how open minded teenagers are to these sorts of issues.

  Let’s take an overused (and by overused, I mean everyone has posted some opinion on it) hot topic right now. Homosexuality in comics isn’t new, yet every time a character comes out; it’s cause for a moral panic. In 2006, Batwoman was announced to be a lesbian and people went ballistic. As a subtle joke, both her identities shared a name with a female Batman character designed to dispel gay rumors in the 50’s. Before the book was even out; people criticized it on every level. The same thing happened with Northstar and Kyle's wedding issue of the X-Men. People actually objected over the marriage and sexual preferences of fictional characters, citing them as immoral.

A Very Brief History of Young Adult Literature

Young Adult literature is becoming more and more prominent these days. You can't go to a bookstore, movie theater or even the internet without hearing about the latest young adult book in some way or another. Many people dismiss it as a new thing to market to impressionable teens or that it surged about with Harry Potter. Truth is, this genre has existed for quite some time.

And by quite some time, I mean more than a few centuries back.

Sci-Fi: I See You Hiding There, Little Genre

  

Sci Fi YA

When I was in college, my girl friends and I would meet everyday for lunch. Like the Sex and the City girls, we’d pick a place and discuss whatever we wanted that day. Unlike them however, our conversations mainly revolved around literature and television rather than sex. As single lady nerds studying literature (library sciences for me though) in college, conversations about literature and pop culture came normally to us. During one of these lunches, a close friend of mine said something that has stuck with me. She said that she loved Sci-Fi and Westerns because they were, in her opinion, the only two genres that went well with everything. I agreed completely.

   Sci-Fi may not be the most popular genre in the market right now. Often, it gets misclassified or lumped in with regular fiction because of secondary elements. But it is still very present in all media. If you can dream up a genre and a medium, odds are you can find something that has somehow melded with it.