It goes down the same road as creators who want their comics to take place in the "real world". They have to satisfy themselves and the adult fanbase. What kid could sit down and read one issue of Bendis' Daredevil (lauded by many adult readers) and come away feeling excited by it?

     I think John raised a good point about the trend in comics that finally drove me out of them.  I was that kid who got hooked on his work on the X-Men and continued to follow him over to the Fantastic Four.  Later, as I matured, I started looking for other comics and found myself getting into the imported and translated Japanese stuff when Marvel's superheroes started losing their appeal to me.  As a result, when I came back to Marvel on two occasions and saw what the new generation was doing there, it sank in that I wasn't going to be able to stay with them.

     Today, I think far too many of the current crop of editors and creative staff have taken the advice of Len Wein and Stan Lee, and just tossed them into the wastebasket...

Too many comic book writers, from the looks and sounds of things these days, seem to only want to write for 3 groups:  Media outlets, literary critics and Hollywood executives.

But writing for kids?  Well, that's for babies!

My daughters have a growing love for superheroes, but it's downright depressing when they ask me to buy a Batgirl or Supergirl comic that they see sometimes at Toys R Us, only to have me tell them, "No, too violent, too dark, not for little girls."

I'll order them some back issues online from time-to-time, but said issues tend to be (or have to be!) at least 25 or 30 years old! 

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Thought balloons.

I've got boxes and boxes of comics from my childhood (collected post dad-purge).

These are the comics my son will be bought up on - the B&W UK Marvel comics, the Essential volumes I've been buying and the America comics up to the mid '80's. The late '80s, '90s onward will be what he gets when he is a teenager.

The current stuff? I'm not sure when. If he reads a few comics a day he will have more than enough to keep him going through his entire childhood. I see no reason to give him the modern comics.

I recognise that this means that I may well contribute to the death of the industry and there may be no new comics by the time he reaches 20.

I also recognise that this may well have an impact on the type of relationship he will have with comics - read the old stuff, but never buying one for himself. I desperatly want to find a way to square that circle. It may be buying the UK children's comics of Spider-Man but I'm unsure at the moment.

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A key problem, right there, is that the current producers of the comics have forgotten (if they ever truly understood) that the female avatars of various characters were CREATED to appeal to (young) female readers. They were NOT created as "bad girls" for emotionally stunted males to whack off over.