My older kid turned six this past summer; that's also when their ability to read on their own really took off, as they began to read through simple chapter books. Pokémon novelizations were a key entry point; they'd gotten a bunch for Christmas, but we'd said we weren't going to read them, they would need to learn how to read them themself! (My wife and I enjoy reading aloud to our kids a lot, but I don't believe that anyone enjoys reading Pokémon novelizations aloud.)
Once they mastered all the Pokémon novels, we needed to find enough for them to read. We began picking up books at our local library, easy chapter books and kid graphic novels.
At a certain point—I forget exactly when this happened, but I want to say September, they declared they would only read graphic novels. No more prose fiction! They haven't totally stuck to this, but they have pretty much done so. As an English professor, I might kind of be disappointed, but as someone who grew up reading media tie-ins, I know there's actually nothing wrong with it!
The problem with this, though, is that many children's graphic novels are very easy reads. We'd get them a whole stack of books, and it seemed like they'd zip through it in less than an hour! We were getting all sorts of stuff: Dog Man, The Lunch Lady, Max and the Midknights, The First Cat in Space, and they were just blowing through it.
Mostly my wife picked out this stuff. I did request some kids and YA superhero graphic novels, which they seemed into: Dear Justice League, Diana: Princess of the Amazons, Green Lantern: Legacy. I also picked a lot of stuff based on the various tv series, figuring if it tied into the various kid-appropriate tv shows, it was probably kid-appropriate itself, stuff based on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans Go and the old Batman/Superman cartoons. The problem with venturing outside of either of these spheres, though, is that most contemporary superhero comics are very much not appropriate for a six-year-old, with too much sex and gruesome violence. Imagine your kid reading a Geoff Johns comic where Black Adam punches someone's head off!
It very much was! The nice thing about Silver Age comics is that they are totally appropriate for a six-year-old, because back then comics were actually aimed at kids! Not only that, but many of the things an adult reader now finds goofy turn out to be great, because those old Silver Age writers knew their audience. As an adult, I roll my eyes at Snapper Carr—my kid is psyched that the JLA hangs out with a kid like them! As an adult, you roll your eyes at those stories where suddenly Superman is being bad for some contrived reason—my kid is like, Dad, why is Superman going around breaking things!?
And, here's the real upside to reading 1960s comics: they used to have so many words back then! My kid has to positively labor to get through these. They're enjoying it, but boy does it take time.
They ended up requesting I get every "Silver Age" collection our library owned; in addition to reading JLA, they've also read or are reading World's Finest, Teen Titans, Green Lantern, and Suicide Squad. In some cases, our library doesn't own all of them, so we've had to ILL missing volumes. In some cases, they've exhausted what DC has reprinted in the "Silver Age" collections (which seem to have come to an end, alas), so we've switched to Showcase Presents for World's Finest and Teen Titans; at first they were opposed to the books being black and white, but eventually they came around.
Unfortunately, a lot of this Silver Age material is only reprinted in big hardcover omnibus volumes, which aren't really good for a six-year-old! I'm a bit surprised, to be honest; hopefully DC Finest plugs some of these gaps. I know DC keeps pumping out graphic novels for current kids, but clearly the stuff from the 1960s and '70s appeals to current kids, too, and I don't see why it's not more readily available.
And maybe like all children of the 2020s, they're a total sucker for all the multiverse stuff; now that they've read all the Justice League: The Silver Age volumes (as well as a one-off collection of stories from Denny O'Neil's "satellite era"), I'm trying to track down the Crisis on Multiple Earths collections for them.
Along the way, they've read a few comics from my collection: some of Walter Simonson's The Mighty Thor, an issue of Lee and Kirby's The Fantastic Four. Just today they asked me about The Legion of Super-Heroes (of which I own eleven of the thirteen archive editions). But mostly we keep these in reserve, for when they've run out of library books!
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