“ANXIETY”

Like most people my age, I read hundreds, if not thousands, of comic books as a kid. And like most people, I also read them in phases: Charlie Brown, then Uncle Scrooge, then Archie, then horror comics and on and on. I never bonded with superhero comics, but my horror phase was long—odd, as nowadays the genre never enters my thinking, and I don’t enjoy horror movies.

Comic books are like lemonade stands and paper routes—seemingly innocent training wheels for a future life geared to psychologically targeted consumption. The thing about comic books is that you’re really selling anxiety to kids —a heightened emotional state—and this is a point you have to get across on the cover, or the comic won’t sell. In horror comics and superhero comics, anxiety is easy to create.

With comics aimed at younger readers, the anxiety is more treacly, but it’s there nonetheless. Animals or demi-human creatures embody situations which, when magnified or reduced, are revealed in often bleak clarity, and these images feed directly into the child’s simpler waking and dreaming cosmology. D.C.