Michael Chabon thinks comics are "kids' stuff"

Michael Chabon's first collection of nonfiction pieces, Maps and Legends, includes an essay on comics titled "Kids' Stuff." Here is the first paragraph:

For at least the first forty years of their existence, from the Paleozoic pre-Superman era of Famous Funnies (1933) and More Fun Comics (1936), comic books were widely viewed, even by those who adored them, as juvenile: the ultimate greasy kids' stuff. Comics were the literary equivalent of bubble-gum cards, to be poked into the spokes of a young mind, where they would produce a satisfying - but entirely bogus - rumble of pleasure. But almost from the first, fitfully in the early days, intermittently through the fifties, and then starting in the mid-sixties with increasing vigor and determination, a battle has been waged by writers, artists, editors, and publishers to elevated the medium, to expand the scope of its subject matter and the range of its artistic styles, to sharpen and increase the sophistication of its language and visual grammar, to probe and explode the limits of the sequential panel, to give free reign to irony, tragedy, autobiography, and other grown-up-type modes of expression.

That paragraph sums up nicely why I named this blog, Where Stalks the Stiltman (a blurb from the cover of Daredevil #102). The Stiltman, like comics, lurks in the margins, hoping to be taken seriously. Will the heroes be intimidated by him? Will the other villains respect him? If he does everything right, he just might be taken seriously. But, even though he is never truly accepted, he endures. Junk or not (or somewhere in between), the comic book is an enduring cultural artifact, and it does what any cultural artifact does: it radiates meaning. The artifact is not without a context. It is produced in an environment. Therefore, it can tell us something about that environment. Richie Rich speaks to our economically stratified social structure. Batman speaks to our need for justice and/or vengeance. The X-Men comics function as a platform for discussing racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. The list is endless.