Jon Kent aka "Superboy": DC's Franklin Richards??

[Darkspellmaster]

The book has been cancelled because Fox retains the rights to FF movies and Marvel doesn't want to give them free advertisement for their movies. This has literally nothing to do with liking Franklin as a kid or not. Franklin, Sue, Reed, Val, and the future foundation are off literally creating the Marvel Multiverse from scratch (Mostly Franklin and Reed). Again, nothing to do with him being a kid. Most people like that.

There's nothing to suggest that child characters are inherently bad to comics.

Don't forget Molcule man, he's helping them build it with Franklin's imagination. I should point out that Tom Defalco had him come into his own in the Spider-girl MC2 series as well being Psy lord, I think that was his name.

Bucky, Robin, the Power pack. Actually children have been helping with comics for years! It's an all ages type of media so it has to be viewable by all ages.

You don't need to dumb down comics to "G-rated" just because there are kids in the book. AGAIN, Damian aka Robin literally kills people in the Batman books. He's brought home human heads to show Batman. He has engaged in pretty graphic physical fights to the death with a child faced giant clone of himself. Damian is killed on page by being impaled by a sword.

Technically that's been toned down a lot since then. And a kids book can have a mature theme and still be aimed at children. There are books out there dealing with family issues and even the loss of a pet, that's pretty heavy stuff for kids. So many children's tv series, see gravity falls, have an all ages feel to it, so you can have serious stuff going on but not be too gross about it.

Oh and lets not even get started on the wildly popular Hit Girl who's a 10 year old girl who murders people in the most graphic ways possible.

.......yup basically a Dora The Explorer, right? No.

You're just making assumptions. You personally don't like child superheroes and that's fine, but that's basically where it stops. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. Great, imaginative, and thoughtful stories can be told with them, and about them. Put again, no, YOU, don't have to like them.

Hit girl's got nothing on the bad stuff that happens in Oliver Twist, and that's supposed to be read by the younger crowd as well. Although Hit girl was aimed at a older audience, if we're going to point to say all ages I would say look to the Tamora piece series of book, Diana Wynn Jones, and even some of the kids books written by George RR Martian (which are really good), that have darker young characters in there but still manage to tell a really compelling young persons story.

Bravo, agree with you on the last point!

[Darkspellmaster]

Superdad really let his other kid down. Poor Chris. Anyway I feel like DC is trying to shove Jon down our throat.

That was more the editors fault. I'm pretty sure that if they let him stick around and that if Donner who had created him had stuck around we would have had a better showing of him. Konner actually liked him, as I recall. I'm sure that at some point someone will pull him back and then Clark will have two sons and Jon will be a brother (maybe the older in this case?).

Again, the problem is that his introduction requires stepping on the toes of others. When that happens, you get resentment from your fanbase. Forcing him immediately as some unbelievable badass of power won't do any favors. Be gradual with it and let the character earn the goodwill of fans before pushing something like that. Or in the event that he doesn't catch on at all, understand that as well.

That depends on how you define stepping on toes. Damian was stepping on Tim's toes when he came in, then took the Robin title and all hell broke loose. It was only when he was with Dick and working with him that people were able to say "Hey this kid isn't as bad as he was," because there was a mellowing. Jon is different, he wasn't told who he was or his family, so he feels a bit of resentment towards that. He's probably going to try to learn more and want to know about the other Superman. He was actually writing a story about him for his school project and seemed very into him in the first place.

You're right, the resentment and anger exists because of the change, Kon fans are not happy at all to a point, but, as with Chris, the question should be, can both exist and the answer is, yeah. I don't think they will be bad-ass powers, more that they will be stronger because of the weird connection to the multiverse and the whole factor that he was on earth and thus he's got to be stronger due to the pull of the planet and human factor then his dad.

He's a more optimistic kid, I'm pretty sure he'll catch on given the excited look he has. I agree that the powers should be gradual, and I'm sure they will be, I'm pretty sure the first things he's going to get is resistance and flight and probably strength and that's about it for now. I can't see heat vision or breath, or other factors just yet, maybe speed. I don't think they're going to throw that all on him at once.

[Doctor Bifrost]

Hit girl's got nothing on the bad stuff that happens in Oliver Twist, and that's supposed to be read by the younger crowd as well.

Today, maybe. It originated as a serial in Bentley's Miscellany, a British literary magazine that was not written for kids.

[SuperCrab]

Bucky, Robin, the Power pack. Actually children have been helping with comics for years! It's an all ages type of media so it has to be viewable by all ages.

Not necessarily. A lot of the DC Comics books, including the main Superman titles, are rated T for Teen and Older, 12+, or something like that (It's usually there on the cover). Various companies have done MA (Mature Audiences), 17+, and R-Rated type fare as well. I don't think many people would want their 10 year old reading The Punisher.

At one point, The Joker kidnapped all of Batman's closest associates, cut off their faces, and then, without their initial knowledge, fed them their faces as a meal, in a comic book (This was on the Batman title somewhere within the first 20 issues of the new52, I can't cite an exact issue number of the top of my head). In the storyline, it was later revealed that he hadn't actually cut off their faces and fed them to them, and had just made Batman think he had, but they did show them with bandages on their heads eating what we were told as readers were their faces initially. I'm not complaining about that, I'm just saying that it's kind of an established thing that comics aren't just for children anymore, and not every comic has to be family friendly.

We've also seen similar mediums expand their reach and do more adult oriented shows. Even though they feature children, shows The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park are actually written primarily for adult audiences. Animated television, even moreso than comic books, was once considered exclusively a children's thing, and that's not really the case anymore. Sure, there are still Saturday Morning Cartoons and the like, with a child-centric demographic in mind, but there are also late night cartoons that really would not be appropriate for children, and don't have them in mind at all.

I think, to be honest, comic book readers in 2016 probably average somewhere around 30 or 40 years old. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be any comic books that cater to or are exclusively for children, of course. It just means we can and to a limited extent are seeing a wider array than there used to be. There's nothing wrong with doing an R-Rated comic and putting the rating on the cover and saying "This is intended for adults. Don't sell to children.", the same way a movie theater can show an R-rated film.

I see the comic book medium as fundamentally no different from movies, television, and prose novels in that it can be used to develop content for various different interests and age ranges. I don't think it needs to be ghettoized as having to either be for kids, or something that's "for all ages" exclusively.

It's not the same world as the 1940s where comic books were a nickel or a dime and exclusively read by children and had to cater to that audience.

These days, very few children buy comic books. It's teenagers and adults, for the most part. At least, that's the impression I get. I'll grant you, I don't hang out in real brick and mortar comic book stores often, and I don't go to conventions, I buy e-comics from my home, but certainly you can see on this forum alone that a lot of adults are extremely interested and passionate when it comes to comic books. I don't see many posts from people who are obviously children. I'm sure we have a few smart teenagers or even slightly younger children hanging around who don't automatically seem like children or teenagers to me, because they express themselves very articulately, like adults, but it's not the way a comic forum would have been if there had been an Internet in the 50s- mostly children and a few random adults. It's the other way around. And I'd imagine that most teenagers would probably rather read adult stories than children's stories anyway.

I'm in my middle 30s and when I was growing up, I don't think I knew anyone who read comic books. I might have bought one or two randomly. I started reading them as an adult. I think a lot of people are increasingly that way. It's a cultural shift.

[Superlad93]

Don't forget Molcule man, he's helping them build it with Franklin's imagination. I should point out that Tom Defalco had him come into his own in the Spider-girl MC2 series as well being Psy lord, I think that was his name.

Yes Owen is a very big part too, for sure. I was just pointing out the FF members that were doing it. And yeah I'm sure there's other great work on Franklin out there. I just think Hickman had a pretty definitive look at thing. But that's just my opinion.

Technically that's been toned down a lot since then.

Yeah and that's actually part of my point. The book had some of it's most graphic scenes WHILE a child character was in it. Then, ironically enough, it toned down in some parts after the kids death (I'm sure the book had spikes in graphic subject matter since his death). This just shows you that it doesn't matter if a kid is there or not. It's a strawman argument that has no actual straw to grab on to.

Bravo, agree with you on the last point!

Lol thanks

[Superlad93]

Again, the problem is that his introduction requires stepping on the toes of others. When that happens, you get resentment from your fanbase. Forcing him immediately as some unbelievable badass of power won't do any favors. Be gradual with it and let the character earn the goodwill of fans before pushing something like that. Or in the event that he doesn't catch on at all, understand that as well.

Damian was one of the most actively disliked characters in the Bat line during his intro phase. Now? He's one of the most popular DC characters in recent history.

Write a good and fun character, and you'll eventually do fine.