Not long ago, while at a family gathering in which we celebrated my birthday, I received the trade version of the Batman
Knightfall series. My nephew, who is getting ready to turn 9 years old wanted to look through them as he is a fan of Batman (and numerous other comic book characters). His dad asked to go through them first to make sure they were appropriate for him to see. This action got me to thinking: How young is too young to read comics? My brother did allow him to look through the comics and I asked him if that is something he'd let his kids read and at what age. As expected, he replied with "it all depends on the book and the story," and that he'd have to approve it.
Along the same lines, I had some copies of Joss Whedon's
Astonishing X-Men at work. One of my associates, who is in his 50's, picked them up and said "these are a lot different than the comics I used to read!" Looking over his shoulder, I noticed he was staring at a large image of Emma Frost and her rather large assets. As with just about every other type of media, the look, feel and topics of comic book has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years since comic became main-stream. Not having kids myself, it is hard for me to make a judgement as to when kids should star reading comics, but from my own experiences, I'd have to agree with what my brother told me: It all depends on the topic and the story.
Throughout the years, there have been many attempts to place a ban on books and comic books, mainly due tot he fact that some feel they promote violence in the youth; much like video games and music, to some extent. Granted, if you were to flip through some of the pages of today's comic books, parents may be rather surprised at the detail of today's artists and their respective works. The characters, specifically the females, are portrayed as overly curvacious and/or muscular sex symbols and parents naturally have a dislike for things like this, in an attempt to shelter their kids from all things harmful. Also, if you take a look at some graphic novels and specific comic book characters like the Punisher and Deadpool, you find the pages filled with large amounts of violence and cursing. Naturally, these are the comics that most parents find to be the biggest offender and, to a certain extent, I can't blame them. Most would argue that young children aren't allowed into Rated-R films, so why should they be allowed to read these books?
Having grown up watching numerous cartoons, television series and multiples genres of films, I can attest that just becasue you watch and/or read violent material, does not mean that you will grow up to become the next Dahmer or Bundy. There are many "watchdog" type groups who insist that the violence and sex featured on the pages of our beloved comics introduce children to a lifestyle of anger and will breed feelings of the same ilk as the comics.
We currently have a system for rating films and for the most part, it does a decent job of regulating age-appropriate material. There have been attempts at setting things like this up for comic books; even going as far as requiring a seal of approval in order to be sold, which lasted for some time. But as time has gone on, the larger companies like DC and Marvel have simply gone around that system and published freely, while smaller companies just never even bothered with the idea. Honestly, a rating system similar to films and games would probably do no good. As I mentioned, the rating system for films has been somewhat successful, but as for video games, very few parents (at least in my experiences) actually follow those reccomendations. So it's quite likely that a similar system would not work weel for comics and books in general.
So, I wanted to get your opinions, especially those of you who have kids. I know that many of the CBM user have kids of their own and most of you are avid comic book readers. Where do you stand on this topic? At what age would you allow or did you allow your kids to read comic books and graphic novels?