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When comics began, in the familiar half-tab format we know today, those producing them understood who their audience was, and understood most especially that THEY were not the audience!

Over the years, especially once the fans-turned-pro took more-or-less complete control, this did an about-face, and the people producing the books forgot almost completely that they were not the target audience.

Comics turned into expensive fanzines, and the circle-jerk began.*

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* Important Note to any "professional" reading this: if that statement offends you, you are part of the problem.

What really makes me mad is that they HAD the right formula. When i think back to the first comics that I encountered, Marvel and DC's output in the 80s, I see comics that truly were all-ages, stories I could enjoy then and can still read and get a thrill from now, comics that worked equally well for an 8-year-old kid and a 35-year-old man. That material followed the formula of so many other things that are truly all-ages and have appealed to generations of fans. Those comics and many that came before and after them are comparable in content to things like Star Wars, Star Trek, the Indiana Jones movies, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the works of Tolkein, etc. Marvel and DC tried to fix what certainly wasn't broken and, in the process, destroyed it.

I see very little maturity in the comics that are currently, supposedly, created for the so-called "mature" audience. If anything, they've become more childish and in the worst possible way.   

When I started writing -- and, indeed, when I was co-plotting with Chris Claremont -- my goal was to create comics that an eight year old could read, and get from that reading a full story. Then that eight year old would return, as a 15 year old, read the same story again, and find there were elements to it -- layers, if you will -- that he'd missed the first time. And he could return as a 25 year old, and find even more. That was the very living definition of "All-Ages" -- a term we felt no need to use, back then.

The audience, as we perceived it, was still mostly "kids". "Tweens" and teens, with some older readers around the edges. And around the fringes of those edges, some who were even old. Some who were in their forties, and who had been reading for more than thirty years. But the general perception of the average comicbook reader, both within the industry and by non-readers, was KIDS. And those out on the fringes, well, they were considered FREAKS. They were most definitely not in any way considered the (or even a) target audience.

Then, around the time I was getting into The Biz, there began a cascade of events (some of them deliberate, despite all logic and warnings to the contrary) which steadily shrank our audience. And as the audience shrank (and as I have noted before), the fringe moved closer to the center. At conventions I began seeing fewer and fewer kids, and more and more of what we used to call the "walking wounded". At the same time, and to a large extent driving the shrinking of the marketplace, the fans-turned-pro became a larger and large force within the industry. The Old Guard, who remembered what comics were supposed to be for (and remember things like deadlines and general professionalism) dropped out, and with them went their attitudes, their perceptions, their style. They were replaced by older fans -- fans who, themselves, had skirted the inner edges of the fringe. Fans whose thinking tended to mirror the fringe, in ways it should not.

As I have quoted before, Len Wein has said "The first story you'd do as a fan should be the last story you'd do as a pro." Tag that to Stan Lee's famous "Never give the fans what they THINK they want", and you have a set of bookends for how the Industry USED to work. And you have the two most often ignored "rules" of the modern industry.

This is all stuff I have said before -- but, like the proclamations of Cassandra of myth, all stuff nobody seems to want to listen to. And now this, from DC. And I wish I could say this was all new, but (again, I have told this story before), it goes back a long way. At least to the time when I was working on Superman, and pitched an "entry level" (ie, All-Ages) Batman title, only to be told that Batman was considered on of the ADULT characters.

Yes, by those who live in the fringes. But not by civilians. And most certainly not by potential new readers -- KIDS.

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As I recall, it was Craig Russell who once commented that the "adult" books Marvel started producing in the Eighties should more accurately have been labeled "sophomoric".

When I started writing -- and, indeed, when I was co-plotting with Chris Claremont -- my goal was to create comics that an eight year old could read, and get from that reading a full story. Then that eight year old would return, as a 15 year old, read the same story again, and find there were elements to it -- layers, if you will -- that he'd missed the first time. And he could return as a 25 year old, and find even more. That was the very living definition of "All-Ages" -- a term we felt no need to use, back then.

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In that goal, you succeeded, JB.  

I see very little maturity in the comics that are currently, supposedly, created for the so-called "mature" audience. If anything, they've become more childish and in the worst possible way.

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You hit the nail on the head.  The "modern" comics I have read remind me of how I imagined I would have written storylines...when I was in 6th-7th grade.  Luckily, when I was that age, there were creators in control that knew better.  The storylines were actually MUCH more complex, had subtleties, subtext, foreshadowing etc., much more "mature" in my eyes.  Anybody can throw in graphic violence, T&A, and a few #&%!@.  For me that's the irony-- the big 2 are trying to say the comics of today are more adult, but in my eyes, the comics of 30 years ago were created with much more maturity.