Sunday, September 8, 2013

DC only publishes comics for 45-year olds?

Doing my morning Cass-search for things Cass Cain-related to discuss here and I found an amusing story on The Outhouse (practically the only site that name-drops Cass on a weekly basis these days) about Dan DiDio confusing Kate Kane, the current Batwoman, with Kathy Kane, the Golden Age Batwoman.  Kate-Kathy, Kathy-Kate.  That's kind of goofy, but what jumped out at me was this one sentence in particular.

The only characters DC seems to think about are Silver Age ones, which obviously fits with the forty-five year old fanbase DC claims to publish comics for.  --The Outhouse

"Claims" seems to suggest a healthy skepticism on the part of writer Zechs, but as a person who is 45 myself, I immediately thought, "Can this be true?  DC is aiming their comics at people my age?"  I also wondered if this was one of those The Outhouse jokes I sometimes find funny and sometimes don't.  I clicked the link embedded in the sentence and found another The Outhouse story, this time by Jude Terror with a massive pull-quote from a Paul Pope interview at Comic Book Resources.  I followed that quote to what I'm guessing is the original story and there it was.

I'm guessing, because by then my 45-year-old body was giving out on me.  Knee pain, shortness of breath, a tingling down my left arm.  The usual stuff.  I had to stop chasing this story in ever-tightening circles and deal with the images from my own life that came flooding back for some reason...

So Gene Yang and Paul Pope did a two-person panel at the San Diego Comic Convention over the summer and here's the quote in case you don't care to link-chase:

Asked by Yang if he had tried to do an all-ages book with a franchise character, Pope said he did test the waters, only to be knocked back. "Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do 'Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]', this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said 'You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do 'Scooby-Doo.' And I thought, 'I guess we just broke up.'"  --Comic Book Resources

As a 45-year old, I'd much rather read an all-ages Paul Pope Kamandi book than any of DC's New 52 continuity.  But as a Cass fan, I'd rather read a Pope Cass Batgirl book.  Pope would have done some eye-popping covers for her series, too.  Hey, just for fun imagine a Cass-Stephanie Brown book written and drawn by Paul Pope.  Wouldn't that be seven layers of heaven?

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