Plus how do you know that Xenos isn’t my real name or at least part of it? Or even a pen name I’m trying to build? Or perhaps I’m trying to avoid having my true written down in a shinegami’s Death Note? (Heh. Just watched a certain episode.)

I even said that I acknowledge that the show is for kids, but it’s a terrible thing to give to children. The design appears to be the typical sugar coated cartoon style that some people think are good for kids. Again, to use the cereal comparisons, that sugary stuff the marketing department is shoving at our kids today isn’t healthy for them.

I also bring up the argument that DC can’t keep its properties straight. In the past few years they had three competing and separate Batman related cartoons. Now they’re doing this unrelated one.

No. I must be a whiny baby. You should likely stick your fingers in your ears, ignore me, and call me a babyman. It seems some think that’s the mature thing to do.

It’s really too bad too. Seeing newcomer Jamie as the Blue Beetle meeting current versions of the characters would have been a brilliant show. Instead he’s somehow running into folks from the Silver Age and beyond.

Well I’m in my 20s and I think this cartoon design is trash. There is nothing wrong with giving kids mature and sometimes dark character. Certainly with Batman, that’s how he is. let’s not revert back to the 60s Sprang designs. Batman Begins and the Batman comics use the modern version, what makes this cartoon feel the need to be different?

Plus those cereal and rollups are loaded with high fructose corn syrup. Our kids are getting fat and getting diabetes from the crap we’re feeding them. This cartoon is no different. A unhealthy sugary mess.

No, pal. You’re the baby man. I think kids deserve a mature cartoon that they can watch along with their parents. You want to talk down to them and feed them sugar coated cereal.

Meanwhile, kids are reading comics and watching cartoons. Japanese ones. They maintain a constant look throughout their runs. They don’t have five cartoon versions of Batman in five years. They have one consistent version of Naruto or Bleach. They don’t have three competing versions of the same characters. We had a fight between JLU, The Batman, and Teen Titans. Now this. This is yet another failure from DC / AOL Time Warner at maintaining their characters.

Sounds like neologism claim-jumping to me.

This has been my biggest complaint about DC for the past several years. They seem to be marching boldly backwards, to a time and a set of characters that were at their peak before I was born. Say what you will about the grim ‘n’ gritty style, at least things were changing in the books. It seems to me like the DC universe is striving to make it back to status quo with all the reverence and fervor of a bad sitcom in its last 7 minutes, except the creators feel that “status quo” means “pre-crisis.” As soon as multiple earths were rediscovered and all of Elseworlds (which were the comics I had grown up on) had to be shown to be Real True Places so that they could have their own inane inter-dimensional crossovers, I knew my days of reading DC were waning. When Hal Jordan came back, I threw up my arms and gave up. Between dodging the nostalgia for a time I don’t care about — and wasn’t even there for the first time around — and avoiding the masturbatory megacrossovers obsessed with esoteric continuity details, I’ve pretty much abandoned DC these days. Which makes me sad, because I actually like superheroes.

Even worse, “One More Day” suggests that Marvel may be following suit.

Dear editors,

If your audience is in their twenties, they probably are not as interested in the characters you read about 30 years ago. If they like old comics, as I do, then they’ve already read them, as I have. If they don’t like old comics, they’ll be even less interested.

As a worker in the saltmines of TV animation, it amuses me when people expect kids’ cartoons to have adult appeal, or that there’s some kind of obligation to entertain anyone but the audience for which it’s intended.

The funniest part of this quote is that my taste for ‘grim and gritty’ comics developed when I was a young kid, and thought that those titles were edgy, mature and transgressive. Back when all my friends started reading comics (around the 2nd to 4th grade), we didn’t want ‘fun’ or silly books. I only started appreciating those kinds of titles (and stopped reading the ‘grim and gritty’ nonsense) when I actually matured.

Something that always gets lost in these discussions is that kids (8 and up) like violence and faux-darkness. They love Wolverine. They love violent video games. The idea that the primary audience for some of that stuff was always ‘babymen’ is faintly ridiculous. Hell, I remember that the older employees at the comic store I went to as a kid always rolled their eyes when I picked up stuff like X-force.

I think what you mean to say is “The problem is that if somebody tries to get into many Marvel and DC superhero comics, they are met with ‘Babyman’ materials… etc etc”

Because if you are talking about Comics in general…. well that’s just silly.

I don’t think anyone is asking for the shelves to be full of only Babyman comics — or even have more than a handful. But I do think that they should be out there. Are you going to dismiss every novel because it’s not Ulysses?

If someone really wants to get into comics, they’ll likely do it as one of three ways: 1) suggestion from a friend, 2) organically [ie, they stop in at a Borders, see Watchmen on the front table, pick it up, enjoy it], or 3) suggestion from someone in the know, either a critic or a clerk in the store. If this person wants something like when he read comics as a 12-year-old, I think Brave and the Bold would be a great suggestion. I read it, and it certainly takes me back 20 years, and not in a bad way.