Scarlet Speedster wrote:
There's no need to think that comics that can be read by children have to be dull. I grew up with the comics of the late seventies and of the eighties. I would gladly give a kid Simonson's Thor to read, or Byrne's FF as those were all-ages books. And where they dull or childish? Absolutely not, quite the opposite. They were simply awesome, and had a lot more depth than many of today's gore-infested books. 


I'm in complete agreement.

As a kid I read comics of the late-'50s and the '60s. They were perfect books to grow up with, but as any reader of DC Archives will attest, they really were for kids. If comics had stayed as they were while I was growing older, I would have abandoned them by the time I was 20 - but they evolved and took on greater depth that appealed to a somewhat older readership.

I firmly believe that the early '80s saw the best comics overall of any period of their history. I'm not seeing them through the film of "nostalgia-for-my-youth" - at that time I was in my 30s, and I was enjoying them as an adult. And those comics were still fit for children to read.

It was the further movement into the realm of "grim & gritty" in the mid-'80s that took almost every comic on the stands into grownups-only status they maintain today.