Originally Posted by
RachelGrey
But that's just it, there are books written for young readers in comics right now. Squirrel Girl, Ms Marvel, and in DC we have Far Sector about a young teenage green lantern. There are comics that are directed at younger readers.
This isn't just about readers, this about finding creative writers who want to challenge the story and move it forward. Heroes grow up, they become adults, they get married, they have children, they have to deal with real world issues of racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious persecution, and other forms of bigotry that is entrenched in modern society.
The readers who originally read Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Justice League, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman all grew up into adults, but part from nostalgia and part from just loving the characters they wanted the stories to grow up with them. Many gifted writers came on and were recruited to write for comics, some of them novel or screen writers who want to try the comic medium out for a while. (i.e. Ta-Nehisi Coates, JJ Abrams, Joss Whedon, Neil Gamon) No one can argue that Neil Gamon's Sandman, Death, and other series were directed at adults. No one can argue that Wolverine is more or less a comic character that isn't really for children, and that the X-Men became a lot more complex and adult focused when Claremont was writing. Chris Claremont infused the X-Men with a level of sex and violence, and pushed the limits of the comic code authority to the max. If he had been a little more blatant while he was writing they would have had to move the X-Men to Marvel Max because Claremont pushed the standards. Many writers did over the years and the stories became more complex and less archetypical. By the 1990's Emma Frost wasn't a villain anymore, she was an anti-hero who wanted to protect her students and was willing to use any means to do so. She had become a female version of Wolverine who used her cunning and wiles to protect her students from the rising racism in the Marvel Earth! Magneto went from being a 1 dimensional villain, to becoming a compelling anti-hero and guerrilla freedom fighter who resorted to terrorism to fight against the entrenched racism of the humans.
So many characters changed over the years. Tony Stark became an alcoholic, Carol Danvers was kidnapped and raped, Carol Danvers had her memories forcibly removed from her, and Rogue who did that was horrified by her own actions in that incident and reformed herself to become a hero because of it.
Under Claremont the Reavers tried to crucify the remaining X-Men in Australia, and they actually did crucify Logan, and this was written in the 1990's X-Men book.
I am sorry, a character being crucified in a comic is not a comic that is directed at children, and that was almost 30 years ago.
Superman who is the epitome of the pure and noble hero, his comic is not directed at children these days. They try to have a more hopeful theme in the comic, but Clark Kent is an adult, he's married, he has a child. His comic just went through a recent run dealing with a genocidal maniac who wanted to purge the universe of Kryptonians.
The X-Men were only archetypical superheroes in the 1960's. When Claremont took over and after Giant Size X-Men, the themes of the X-Men became much deeper and adult. Suddenly these weren't teenage characters, they were adults, doing adult things. Storm, Kurt, Logan, and Piotr were all over 20 and they had lived lives of hardship, they were experienced as individual super powered individuals, and they had to overcome personality differences to work as a team. They weren't children learning to fight, they were adults learning to fight as a unit.
Heck, they had a very limited student body until much later, and when Emma and Scott were running the school together that is when they emphasized that it was a full blown school with a large student body. Just compare Emma's original Massachusets Academy to the Xavier Institute. Emma had a mix of human and mutant students at her school, and the mutants were being trained in the underground facility beneath the school. The Xavier Institute maybe had 20 students only, and they were all mutants like the New Mutants Roberto, Sam, Dani, Xi'an, Illyana, Rahne, Doug, Kitty, etc.. When Emma reformed and merged her operations with Xavier, even she went to just having a limited student body at her school with no human students anymore. Because people now knew that Emma was openly allowing mutants at the Massachusets Academy, and they didn't want to send their human kids there, so it was just Sean and Emma teaching the younger kids to be a team together.
The X-Men isn't really a superhero story, it hasn't been since Giant Size X-Men, the X-Men is the story of the mutants in the 616 Marvel Earth and how they have struggled to be free to be themselves and to live in society peacefully. Some mutants became so disillusioned with humanity that they became terrorists, i.e. Amelia Voght, and Marrow. Some mutants preferred to be outright villains like Sabretooth because they get pleasure from hurting people. Some mutants worked as mercenaries, spies, and assassins, selling their services to the highest bidder, like Mystique and her Brotherhood.
I look at the X-Men as a science fiction story, what if we lived in a society where people could be born with super abilities and powers because of a quirk of genetics. What if more and more of these mutants were being born each year, how would the world react, what would the world do. All of the writers of X-Men since Claremont have been trying to answer that question.
If we are going to be purists and say that the X-men shouldn't have changed from how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby interpreted them to be, then that means the X-Men ended in the run in the 1960's and never came back. The pure story as it was originally written had some interesting concepts, but the execution was rather generic storytelling with simple archetype heroes and villains who didn't have any growth.
Even Archie Andrews and Riverdale have changed. Those kids are still in high school, but the owners of the Archie/Sabrina IP have been hiring writers to do mini-series that are much darker and more adult themed. They revamped the entire line a few years ago to make the characters reflect current high school dynamics a lot more than they have in the past. They also changed the art style to be more realistic with the current day comic artists. So even the unchanging Archie Andrews has been revamped to reflect the modern era.