I grew up reading Marvel comics. The X books being my favorite. Sure I picked up some other titles from other companies, but I was a Marvel man. The other companies were inferior in their product (or so I believed). Then I got married and stopped reading comics. I still got my fix with the awesome Marvel movies though.
My kindergardener is learning to read now and comics are naturally something that I am using to encourage a love of reading. I read the Bone TPB to her and she even reviewed it. Naturally to familiarize her with the characters I have shown her comic book cartoons. This is where the divide starts.
What comic book cartoons are currently on the air? Teen Titans is running on CN. WB, or whatever it is called now, have Batman, Legion of Superheroes, and Krypto: The Superdog. Not suprisingly (WB and DC are in cahoots), all of these shows are DC properties. It is hard to find the older Marvel stuff from the 90's on TV. We have an X-Men tape and some of the old Fantastic Four stuff, but much less than what is available for DC.
The logical next step would be movies. The Marvel machine keeps churning out movies and DC is almost kind of stagnant there. The X-Men movies are a little too adult for a 6 y/o though, and this is double for most other properties as well. The Fantastic Four movie was horrible. The only one she can see is Spiderman and even that has its scary parts.
The result of all of this is that my daughters can name obscure DC characters and will miss iconic Marvel ones. I now pick up copies of the Teen Titans Go! comic for Ashli to practice reading. Marvel needs to get back in the cartooning game if it wants to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation of comic book fans.
