My Little Superheroine (Alert Nerd Family Show)

My Little Superheroine (Alert Nerd Family Show)

Nov 30

I’ve missed a lot of the Christopher Butcher-launched kids comics discussion (though the original post is fantastic as always), but what hooked me into it this morning was Noah Bertlasky’s post on his own experiences with his son & superhero comics:

I’m always willing to sneer at superhero fans, as most folks know. But I think this maybe misses or downplays a fairly major point – kids really, really, really like superheroes. A lot. It’s not me who was foisting my old Spidey Super Stories and Super-friends comics on my kid because I desperately wanted him to read them for the sake of my overwhelming nostalgia. On the contrary, I pulled those out of the long boxes because my son was obsessed, and I figured it would be cheaper than buying new reading material. And let me tell you, by the time I’d read them fifty or sixty times out loud, any lingering nostalgia I felt for the material was killed well nigh dead.

This got me to thinking about my own experiences. As it happens, my three-year-old also loves superheroes. And she’s a girl.

I point this out not to indicate that Noah’s post was lacking for not addressing this issue from a female perspective; reading it just made me interested in sharing my own experiences with my daughter, who also really, really, really likes superheroes.

But what ARE superheroes to her? She knows Batman, because Batman is my co-pilot, and she had a brief fixation on Krypto the Superdog inspired by stealing my stuffed toy version when I was looking the other way.

To her, at age 3, “superhero” is an idea, based on the classic tenets you can probably guess: Doing good stuff, flying, stopping the bad guys, wearing a cape. She will have us pin a blanket to her shirt and run around the house just being a superhero. Not Superman, or even Batman, but just a superhero.

Of course, as a fan of superheroes myself, I’ve done plenty to support her imaginative play. I haven’t spent much time teaching her about mainstream corporate trademark superheroes, because I’m very conscious as a geek of my tendency to want to make people like the things I like, and I don’t want to force my own kid down any path whatsoever when she is perfectly capable of doing the good work of exploring her own interests and using them to enhance her own imagination and creativity. (NO judgment there; it’s just the path I chose. Believe me, she gets plenty of corporate trademark stimulation from the good people at the Walt Disney Company, Princess Division.) I do talk a lot about what superheroes do, the good stuff, and how brave and smart they are, because I want her to feel she herself is brave and smart, which she is.

She actually watches two superhero shows that you may never have heard of, unless you are also the parent of a toddler. Super Why! is a PBS animated series about a team of kids with alphabet and reading-related “superpowers” who help fairy tale characters solve problems. Wonder Pets is about three classroom pets who dress up in capes and save animals in trouble. She’ll even conflate Hercules from the Disney film of the same name with superheroics, which fits. These are firmly in the superhero genre; they just don’t star Batman or Spider-Man.

Just this weekend, I found a couple Justice League Unlimited figures a friend had given me. She saw them and was immediately interested. We curled up on the bed and I told her all about Elongated Man, Rocket Red, and Mister Miracle. A few hours later, she was playing with them in the tub, and suddenly they were Super Water, Water Friend, and Super Water (I guess two of them had the same name; it is catchy).

Obviously, she’s three, so it’s not like she’s ready to quote chapter and verse of an encyclopedic superhero knowledge. But she does know plenty of details about those damn princesses.

So this seems to tell me that while she may not be interested (or hey, maybe just not old enough) for superheroes as us nostalgia fiends understand them, she’s still plenty into the idea of superheroes, and that’s what she loves more than anything. Part of me wants to see that as “don’t worry, fellow nerds; superheroes will be fine and someday our children’s children will pore over Legend of Super-Why issue 843, with art by JH Williams VI, and all will be right with the world.” But that’s idiotic. (Except the JH Williams VI part; I seriously want to see what that guy cooks up.)

Maybe it just circles back to the point I think Chris Butcher was trying to make in the first place:

Let’s let those few parents so drowned in their own nostalgia that they can’t see past the end of their comic collection, let’s let them go, and hope that their kids get into comics through the net, at school, at public libraries, through their friends, and then come back to comic book stores and buy the stuff that they might ACTUALLY want to read. I see it happen every day and I’m happy to do it. Just like I’m happy to work with and sell to the parents who truly love comics, and want to share the joys of reading and the medium with their own kids-even if it isn’t exactly the same thing that they want to read themselves.

And of course, even if those kids aren’t boys.

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