The Battle Continues Over "Childish Things"

The recent kerfuffle between Bill Maher and comic fans mourning Stan Lee's passing has illustrated an ugly truth that geeks everywhere continue to face: geekdom is still viewed by some as a sign that society has failed to "grow up."
The recent kerfuffle between Bill Maher and comic fans mourning Stan Lee's passing has illustrated an ugly truth that geeks everywhere continue to face: geekdom is still viewed by some as a sign that society has failed to "grow up."

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[h=3]It Started with Stan[/h]The death of comics legend Stan Lee prompted an outpouring of grief and comedian Bill Maher took his passing as an opportunity to take a shot at fandom with an essay titled "Adulting":

"...the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures. But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature."

The response was swift. Maher admitted the lost 40,000 Twitter followers after his post and that he's still followed by paparazzi asking him about "the Stan Lee thing." In response, Maher doubled down in a scathing attack on geekdom everywhere with a video titled, "New Rule: Grow Up":

"...the point of my blog is that I'm not glad Stan Lee is dead I'm sad you're alive...my shot wasn't at Stan Lee it was at, you know, grown men who still dress like kids...I'm sorry but if you are an adult playing with superhero dolls--I'm sorry, I mean collectible action figures!--why not go all the way and drive to work on a big wheel? Grown-ups these days, they cling so desperately to their childhood that when they do attempt to act their age they have a special word for it now, 'adulting'."

If those statements make your blood boil, you're not alone. The comic book industry's condemnation of Maher's comments were swift and wide-reaching. Stan Lee's estate responded directly to Maher:

Mr. Maher: Comic books, like all literature, are storytelling devices. When written well by great creators such as Stan Lee, they make us feel, make us think and teach us lessons that hopefully make us better human beings. One lesson Stan taught so many of us was tolerance and respect, and thanks to that message, we are grateful that we can say you have a right to your opinion that comics are childish and unsophisticated. Many said the same about Dickens, Steinbeck, Melville and even Shakespeare. But to say that Stan merely inspired people to “watch a movie” is in our opinion frankly disgusting. Countless people can attest to how Stan inspired them to read, taught them that the world is not made up of absolutes, that heroes can have flaws and even villains can show humanity within their souls.

The same criticism has been leveled at all things geeky, including role-playing games.
[h=3]Are Role-Playing Games Childish?[/h]Maher's attack on comics is essentially an attack on geekdom itself; the defense from Stan Lee's estate is an argument for the kind of imaginative storytelling that is at the heart of role-playing games.

In a lengthy response to a Quora question if D&D is "too immature and childish," Jake Harris explained:

D&D is a great game that brings people of all kinds together, for those willing to actually try and enjoy it. It's far from childish. Same with other forms of science fiction and fantasy. I strongly believe that these are lowkey pillars of society, which endure when pop culture constantly waxes and wanes with new trends and interpretations of “pop”. Dungeons & Dragons might have 6 Editions (I'm counting 3rd and 3.5 Editions) and Pathfinder, but its playerbase and rules remain largely the same: sit around a table, and travel to far-off lands, doing what no one else in the world is able to. Maybe you think that's childish. Maybe you could even argue that it is. Fine. I submit that maybe our world needs a little childishness. Maybe if we learn to fight less and play more we might actually get somewhere. If we choose to let the children inside of us inspire ourselves and those around us, we might not be stuck with all the problems we have.

Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt doesn't see a difference between pop culture and geek culture:

...I've got news for you—pop culture is nerd culture. The fans of Real Housewives of Hoboken watch, discuss, and absorb their show the same way a geek watched Dark Shadows or obsessed over his eighth-level half-elf ranger character in Dungeons & Dragons. It's the method of consumption, not what's on the plate.

That times have changed is perhaps best exemplified by the Collins online dictionary, which signified a shift away from Maher's perspective:

Once a slur reserved for eggheads and an insult aimed at lovers of computer programming, geek has been deemed the word of the year by the Collins online dictionary. Less brazen than selfie – which topped the Oxford Dictionaries poll last month – geek was chosen as a reminder of how an insult can be transformed into a badge of honour, according to Collins. In September the dictionary changed the main definition of geek from someone preoccupied with computing to "a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject'', adding geekery, geek chic and geekdom to the fold.

Part of geekdom is maintaining the passion for things we enjoyed as children into adulthood, but it does not necessarily mean that we aren't effectively "adulting." Although geekdom seems to have taken over popular culture, comedians like Maher are there to remind us that not everyone is okay with the takeover.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca

Eh, that criticism is broadly applicable enough that it's functionally worthless, IMO, unless applied to a specific work, creator, studio, etc.

Fantasy novels, sci-fi, television, movies, table top games, video games, music of pretty much any genre, whatever. It can all be said, with equal accuracy and thus equal uselessness, to be childish and unsophisticated.

To some extent, sure.

But the serial nature of superhero stories....especially the most successful and well known....essentially places them in a loop that always circles back around to the default starting story point. No matter what happens, things will eventually revert to the status quo. As such, continually enjoying such stories without eventually seeing the loop can be a bit odd.

They can take Spider-Man and tweak his origin, reveal his identity, kill Aunt May, and all kinds of other changes....and then boom, it's all back to the default status quo.

At any point in the loop, sure there are stretches that can be incredibly entertaining and creative and thoughtful. But taken as a whole, I can see how it can be viewed as a bit childish. It doesn't mean I'm perpetually a child if I still enjoy superhero stories, or that I can't enjoy other things. But I recognize it myself. I'll put down a comic and think "wow, I got nothing at all out of that....it's no different, and actually probably inferior to the stuff I read when I was 10". When I get that feeling, I stop buying the book in question.

Generally, I think a lot of it comes down to the creators involved, and what they choose to do, or sometimes more importantly what they are allowed to do, with the characters.

Again, I am not saying that Maher is right. Ultimately, he's wrong because he's conflating the genre and the medium. And then even taking his comments as they relate to the superhero genre, I think he mostly misses the mark, but I can at least understand the criticism.
 

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It’s a paradox of sorts that the most popular superheroes- and comic strip characters- are most at risk of getting stuck in loops. Victims of their own popularity.

OTOH, some of the second tier (or indie) characters- even those on the cusp of breaking through to the top- are free enough to evolve and even die. And sometimes, that freedom lets the creative staff do some of their better work with those characters. Tell stories they don’t think they could with the marquee properties.
 

The long and short of all of this is that "That's childish!" is just a phrase some people use to lord themselves over others. Plenty of people get called childish for being sports fans, for loving the military, for voting republican/democrat/neither, for buying a sports car, for not having children, for spending their hard-earned money on a cheesecake.

It's just absurd. The only purpose it serves is to make Person A feel superior to Person B for not participating in "childish things".
 

Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was [MENTION=40171]Shashara[/MENTION]k talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference?
 

To some extent, sure.

But the serial nature of superhero stories....especially the most successful and well known....essentially places them in a loop that always circles back around to the default starting story point. No matter what happens, things will eventually revert to the status quo. As such, continually enjoying such stories without eventually seeing the loop can be a bit odd.

They can take Spider-Man and tweak his origin, reveal his identity, kill Aunt May, and all kinds of other changes....and then boom, it's all back to the default status quo.

At any point in the loop, sure there are stretches that can be incredibly entertaining and creative and thoughtful. But taken as a whole, I can see how it can be viewed as a bit childish. It doesn't mean I'm perpetually a child if I still enjoy superhero stories, or that I can't enjoy other things. But I recognize it myself. I'll put down a comic and think "wow, I got nothing at all out of that....it's no different, and actually probably inferior to the stuff I read when I was 10". When I get that feeling, I stop buying the book in question.

Generally, I think a lot of it comes down to the creators involved, and what they choose to do, or sometimes more importantly what they are allowed to do, with the characters.

Again, I am not saying that Maher is right. Ultimately, he's wrong because he's conflating the genre and the medium. And then even taking his comments as they relate to the superhero genre, I think he mostly misses the mark, but I can at least understand the criticism.

And I'm saying that he is wrong about the genre. Not just "mostly misses the mark" but "is completely ignorant regarding the thing of which he speaks, and is speaking entirely out of his butthole".

Spider-man and MJ aren't, to my knowledge, back together. Pete isn't a teenager again. Gwen Stacy is never coming back (outside of alternate universes).

Damien Wayne might come back to life again, if he hasn't already, or he might not. Even if he does, it won't be a retcon or a "return to the status quo", because even his arrival was a change to the status quo, and barring a new reboot, they aren't that prone to ignoring events like a character dying. They tend to continue to inform that character's ongoing story. The older Robins will never be Robin again. Jason Todd will never be a character who hasn't been brutally murdered and then resurrected by a sociopath who believes he is necessary to the development of humanity, a piece of Jason's humanity lost in the resurrection.

Regardless of any "status quo", the very fact that you can point to stories within these universes that are award worthy literature makes Maher's "criticism" complete nonsense, as close to objectively false as one can get about art.
 


  1. Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was @Shasharak talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

    So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

    Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

    So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

    It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference?
    This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different.

    I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.

    Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words. (Two tests: think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented. You can't. Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

    The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s. He was more like pro football--a whole bunch of people went to the plays. Many were felons. Few knew much about "dramatic art," and fewer cared. Many spent most of the "game" not watching the "game," even (especially) the rich, smart ones.

    All the authors you mention were most certainly writing for adults. Children were typically considered not human until the 19th century, and "childhood" as a concept was only really established in the 1950s when child mortality began to be unusual. The idea of writing "for children" as we consider it dates from around 1870, although the moral aspect of children's writing was fiercely advocated until the Baby Boom, when Seuss and others began to attempt children's writing from a child's purported perspective. Dickens wrote for "families," a concept that was also beginning to be invented in the 19th century, and essentially his "market positioning" (read it to everyone in front of the fire) defined the market. His most direct descendant is Disney. George Eliot, a far better novelist and far more influential *as a writer* to later novelists, did well but not as well owing to not following Dickens' positioning.

    Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.





 


  1. [q]Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was @Shasharak talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of something that is "childish" that it's something that children and young adults do?

    So, how many adults do you think actually read or watch a Shakespeare play compared to the number of high school aged people? How many people, outside of high school, actually attend a Shakespeare play or read one? The overwhelming majority of consumers of Shakespeare for the last century or so have been teens. If you head down to your local library, and found a Shakespeare play or a collection of sonnets, and then tracked down all the people in the last, say, twenty years who had checked out that book, I'd think you'd find that the overwhelming majority would be high school students. Virtually no one over the age of 25 anyway.

    Same goes for Dickens or Melville.

    So, how is Shakespeare an "adult" author when the overwhelming majority of readers are under the age of 20? How is he any more adult than JK Rowlings or those terrible Twilight books? The average age of a reader of A Christmas Carol is likely no different than the average age of a reader of someone reading Batman.

    It's not like Dickens or Shakespeare were writing for adults anyway at the time. They were the Marvel Universe writers of their day. Pop culture works meant to be consumed by the masses. What's the difference? [/q]

    This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different.

    I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.

    Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words. (Two tests: think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented. You can't. Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

    The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s. He was more like pro football--a whole bunch of people went to the plays. Many were felons. Few knew much about "dramatic art," and fewer cared. Many spent most of the "game" not watching the "game," even (especially) the rich, smart ones.

    All the authors you mention were most certainly writing for adults. Children were typically considered not human until the 19th century, and "childhood" as a concept was only really established in the 1950s when child mortality began to be unusual. The idea of writing "for children" as we consider it dates from around 1870, although the moral aspect of children's writing was fiercely advocated until the Baby Boom, when Seuss and others began to attempt children's writing from a child's purported perspective. Dickens wrote for "families," a concept that was also beginning to be invented in the 19th century, and essentially his "market positioning" (read it to everyone in front of the fire) defined the market. His most direct descendant is Disney. George Eliot, a far better novelist and far more influential *as a writer* to later novelists, did well but not as well owing to not following Dickens' positioning.

    Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.

    Edit: fix quote tags





 

Vanveen, please fix the formatting of your last couple of posts.

See this thread:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?348563-Dark-Text-on-a-Dark-Background-Tutorial

As for this:
Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city.

Would I compare Justice League of America #175 to Finnegan’s Wake? No.

Would I denigrate comic fans as immature/hicks while conveniently ignoring exemplars within that genre that have been recognized by the same organizations that consider a wide variety of the other literary genres out there? Also no.

Pulitzer, Hugo, Newbery, Caldecott, Michael L. Printz, Coretta Scott King and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights boards have all granted literary awards to comics and graphic novels. Which begs the question: are THEY the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city?

(If your answer is “Yes.”, then your ivory tower is showing, and you should really tuck that away.)
 
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Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting.

Someone needs to dust off his Scott McCloud.
 

I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong.


Oh dear, save us from the pseudo-intellectuals.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words.

Do you mean for the English language, or just generally? Because if you mean generally, I'm finding that statement a bit ridiculous.

think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented.

Are you seriously advancing an argument from the counter-factual as evidence?

Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?)

In the United States? 'Great Gatsby' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. If I meet a stranger in a bar, I will assume that the works he's most certainly read are not the ones people read as a matter of taste or choice, but ones assigned to him in high school. And 'Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn' and a few others are probably right up there with Shakespeare because well, that's what they make you read in high school. In fact, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' might be a safer bet than Shakespeare, because which play or plays that they read probably depended on whether or not they were in an honors course, but everyone was made to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' at some point.

The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s.

Popular culture as a phrase dates to at least 1825, and as I understand the concept the phrase meant pretty much what it means now. I don't know what concept you are talking about, but popular culture has been around pretty much since the time society got sufficiently wealthy to stratify.

Seriously, stop wagging your credentials around like you can talk down to this crowd and get away with it. We're not rubes, and you're not as sophisticated as you think you are. You're talking like someone who has only a casual acquaintance with the subject matter involved, and as such are presenting it in the most unnuanced simplistic manner possible, like someone who read a magazine article on the subject and only partly remembers what was said.
 
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