I get pissed off when my adult comics are put in the children’s section

Or perceived as only suitable for children and not the parents or guardians/cool adults who I actually crafted the comic for in the first place.

(kinda a clickbait dramatic flattening-of-the-thesis title but the feelings are not un-truth)

To clarify what I mean by “adult” before I start my hot take / vent, I mean “content made primarily for an adult-aged audience” - so anyone over 18, maybe 16 if you’re cool. I don’t mean erotica, though sexuality and sensuality can be covered as topics or themes. Anyway,

A dear friend recently visited the Brussels Comic Art Museum (a bucket list travel destination!) and excitedly showed me that Book 1 of my historical fiction webcomic/graphic novel, casually nicknamed Alexander Comic, is stocked in the museum bookshop. Which is so cool!! In global comics, Brussels is one of THE comics hubs, besides Angouleme and Tokyo. I am hype whenever Alexander Comic gets to be stocked in any museum bookstore, even more a museum that celebrates the wide variety of bande dessinee. Yippee!!

But then my eyes notice the category Alexander was placed at - Jeunesse, or "kids/youth", amongst great beautiful works - and my brain clenches its fist Arthur-style. First, I was bamboozled - the first thing I thought was "kids??? What are they (kids and booksellers/librarians) going to do when Books 2 to 4 are a blood gore putrescence fest?". Then I became irritated. Agitated. Annoyed. Exasperated, even. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and every time the feelings never get any less present. After a vent with friends, I soon get over the bad vibes and move on to making my comics, but the feelings always lay dormant, never resolved, until it happens again. This time though, I'm now able to articulate precisely why this phenomena of my adult comics being miscategorised as children's literature bothers me so much. So here we are. Here we go.

1.

I don't mind if the kids/parents are cool with whatever dark historical hopeful blood-drenched pragmatic radical optimism Alexander Comic is shaping into, because I know I would be -- as the kid OR adult. I grew up as one of those voracious kids who was so desperate to read anything that I raided my parents' bookshelves and read their thick paperbacks of crime novels and magic realism. Like, I think the first "classy" sex scene described in prose I ever encountered was when I was 10. I also loved animation that wasn't afraid to lean into darkness and treated its young audience with intelligence, and to this day I am grateful for art like that for teaching me to appreciate life. PLUS I was a "latch key raised by the internet" preteen/teen, so you can only imagine the nonsense I saw in the Wild West of pre-2010s World Wide Web. My bias tends towards letting kids explore when they feel ready to do so, because that was my upbringing. I turned out fine... mostly.

Something to keep in mind as we progress through this post: as a kid, it was ME who made the decision that I was ready enough to read those books.

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2.

I don't mind that my comics (whether for adults or kids) are seen as art to be enjoyed by adults AND kids. In my ideal world, adult (again, not erotica) literature can be given to kids with the necessary scaffolding - whether that's through parents' guidance or teaching material provided by educational professionals. In my mind adult and kids literature shouldn’t always be so strictly segregated - in fact, when a piece of prose, comic, poetry etc becomes universal across multiple generations, that's a good thing.

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3.

So after reading all this, the question then becomes "so what is the problem?". Well, my problem, which I can now articulate, is that I live and work in a publishing/arts industry reality that still has trouble fully accepting comics into its domain. This means I have to be aware of and navigate the conventions and misconceptions that are ever-present obstacles to my practice, such as "comics are only for kids" and "comics are not an art form".

In the publishing industry, age categories like "Adult" and "Children" actually mean concrete consequences. They not only describe the age group the author primarily writes for (or who the publisher thinks the author primarily writes for), those categories also influence who visits that particular area of the library/bookstore/publisher website, buying decisions, marketing, speaking/event opportunities for the author, etc - just a complex web of choices that flow down from that age category placement, affecting all parties involved in the exchange. An adult visiting the crime novel bookshelf in the grown-up section of the bookstore is not making the same decisions as an adult visiting the children's section, unless they are age-agnostic as I am. More often than not, they will treat the books in those sections with a different set of expectations.

When a comic of mine is shelved into such rigid categories of ADULT or CHILDREN*, external expectations understandably apply to my adult comic when it is placed into the children's section, when I never made the comic for those expectations in the first place lmao

*I don't talk about young adult here because my adult comics have never been miscategorised as such. Even then, I don't think I'd be as pissed off, since the difference between art for young adult and adult is not as huge compared to kids and adult.

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4.

Whenever I start making a book, one of the first things I think about is audience: who am I writing this to? I can be glib and say "I write for everyone!!" but the truth is I already have a specific person in mind. Usually, it begins as "me as a kid", "me as a preteen", "me as a teenager in high school", "me as a high school graduate starting college", "me as a university student" and "me as adult in [life stage]", since I know myself best. Then I expand that mind-net to include the people of around that age group who I was with: how my friends/classmates/work colleagues were experiencing life during that time. And I finally think about the literature that I read that was designed for that age group: how were other authors approaching similar content, if any; how I felt reading their work at the age I first and last read their work.

Despite my age agnosticism when it comes to buying and reading books, I am very serious and committed to how the primary age of my target audience will craft my story, especially when I decide to make a kids comic. That is, a comic that I designed specifically for children to read (which adults can read too, btw).

As an author there are child education standards and considerations I apply to my kids comics designed for children that I don't apply to my adult comics. I try my best to match thematic and topical explorations to age-appropriate developmental milestones in understanding and learning. For example, I don't think kids need to hear MY adult brain-poisoned furious jaded view on the state of the world; they CAN hear it but why is it needed, in those words, in that way? As an adult writer writing and drawing a book for children, my responsibility to children is to encourage them to be better adults - better than I have become. I want them to maintain their joy and hope in themselves and others. I want them to love art. I want to treat them as intelligent without subjecting them to cursed knowledge. Anyway, I don't think kids will be interested in my burdens, neither should they be carrying my burdens, until they grow up and learn to understand through life experience and acquisition of the cursed knowledge themselves.

I think of the fantastic children's shows that raised me and countless others, designed by people (artists and psychologists) who cared about children as members of society and their mental/psychological/moral/linguistic development - Sesame Street, The Wriggles, Mr Rogers, Blues Clues, Bluey, etc. And I think of the Youtube kids slop that is being generated by content farms (which may or may not be AI) without that same care. The difference is massive, inescapably shown in the quality of the work. Good children's media IS hard rigorous careful thoughtful work. Children's media IS craft.

Many parents subconsciously come to expect that level of quality from creators of children's media. They may not be able to articulate what those standards that produce good children's media are, but they are thinking of and hoping for those standards when they get on their knees to pick up a children's graphic novel in the bookstore.

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5.

So it is frustrating, annoying, irritating, aggravating to me when by an accident of fate or unintentional ignorance a middleman (bookseller, librarian, publisher, whoever!) misplaces my adult comic in the children's section of anything.

Because when that happens, external expectations and standards attached to children media are assumed to be true across all books placed in the children's bookshelf. After all, who's to say those standards don't apply to Alexander Comic when it is grouped together with Raina Telgemeier's Smile?

Parents are busy, exhausted and looking for anything to reduce mental load so they can focus on their child's wellbeing. They trust the middleman to have vetted the selection of books in the children's bookshelf.

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6.

My adult comics don't have and will never have those standards of children's media applied to them. Sure, yes, I want to make well-crafted, universal work, but at this point I am using very different standards. I am not thinking about the developmental milestones of adults. I don't have a syllabus. I am writing to express myself as a full-blooded fully-emotioned fully-sensual adult. All my freak wacky academic existential burdens laid bare. I care about how my comic's thesis is presented and its rigour, but I am not afraid of the implications and creative choices leading on from that thesis, because I assume an adult audience's understanding, good faith reading and exposure to a broader media diet. Thus, I don't put in a lot of spoonfeeding, nor do I find it necessary to spell out or even have a moral.

I am not afraid of nudity. Or sex. Or gore. Or body horror. Or the realities of war. Or my anger. How they are applied depends on the project, but I don't keep them under lock and key.

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7.

So when parents pick up Alexander Comic from the bookshelf, trusting that the middleman has verified the standards of children's media are applied, they may give Alexander to their children without verifying.

So when the children and parents (eventually, in future books) see the corpse of a king tortured and stabbed in three places by javelins (this is how Alexander's rival Darius died in real life btw) resurrect to talk to Alexander (doesn't happen in real life but happens in the Alexander Romance) with his anatomically accurate putrescence, then what??? I am not being glib edgy - this realism is an intentional stylistic artistic choice because 1) it is consistent with my depictions of war-related trauma 2) I wanted to contrast the realism with the dreamy fantasy of Darius coming to life to gift Alexander his kingdom 3) I wanted to stun people into understanding that this isn't your typical Alexander romanticising... and that contrasting imagery is what the format of the graphic novel can provide that the prose retelling could not do.

Look, those ideas can be cool if appropriately introduced to kids!! Kid Me would think that's cool (hell yeah so metal seeing a corpse king bleeding his guts out)!! Parent Me would think that's cool (hell yeah so metal seeing a corpse king bleeding his guts out)!! EXCEPT not all kids and parents are as cool as me!! And admittedly if I had given/read my kid this Alexander book without checking beforehand that the book was meant to be without parental guidance or not designed to support a child's reading, I would be bamboozled. I would be left stunned not knowing what to say to explain to my child what's going on, since the author has provided no scaffolding or explanation except through inference. And there's no satisfying happy candy resolution for that scene to mitigate the brutality of the scene itself or the embarrassing situation I am put in if my kid happens to not be ready for such content and tearfully asks me to stop reading the book cos of the scary, upsetting imagery.

Understandably, Parent Me... or any parent, will be annoyed and irritated. So who is responsible and becomes the target of their anger? The publisher who mislabelled the book??? The librarian/bookseller who misshelved the book??? The author who wrote the book according to adult literature standards and never intended for that book to be just simply given to children????

Unless they are artists themselves, people don't really care to investigate or consider what the intent of the author is when a situation like that arises. Does it matter if I warn repeatedly on my websites over the years that Alexander is for +16 or "adults or older teens"? What they know is that they saw this book in the children's category and understood it as a children's comic. Simple. Occam's razor.

This is the real reason why I am pissed off when my adult comics are put in the children’s section of anything. I don't want to create that kind of scenario with parents and their children. I don't want kids who are not ready to be traumatised or burdened. I don't want kids to have their experience of reading graphic novels be an injured experience. I don't want parents coming in without full informed consent, understanding and preparation of what my intended-for-adults-comic is, so that they can make that decision to give or pass on the book to their kids.

AND I especially don't want to be seen as responsible for this scenario, when the miscategorisation is NOT my fault at all, yet the miscategorisation puts me (without my consent) at increased risk of being entered into the aftermath of this scenario. I'm not saying I shoulder all the blame; a parent if enough of an ambitious advocate/terror can walk up directly to a bookseller librarian publisher, but I am saying that the book represents me more than the other parties, because my name is on the cover, duh! My name, my art, my voice - my representation. My public image and possibly my safety are directly at increased risk should the scenario go bad, especially since I am committed to NOT pandering my adult comics for children regardless of whoever slots my adult comics to the children's category. Like... bro, I already have THREE existing intended-for-kids graphic novels. Please put those books of mine instead in the children's category, please I am begging you. Not Alexander! Not The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya!

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8.

So yes. Hello. For a long time I thought my irritation was just petty silliness ("am I taking myself too seriously??") and something I keep dismissing. Now that I understand the core raw source of my irritation... actually, I don't know if anything will come out of this understanding. Emotional carthasis maybe. I certainly feel better having identified the very real fear that underlies my irritation. But the reality is that I can't stop people from doing this. I don't even know how to stop people from doing this faux pas except write a blog post explaining my rationale hoping that it would maybe alert other professionals about being more careful to not miscategorise ANY intended-for-adults comic - not just mine - as kids comics without vetting it first. Not just for the author's image and safety, but for the child reader's sake!

The other emotion that I haven't mentioned here, but also informs my irritation, is that the miscategorisation puts me in a spot where I doubt my artistic ability. Is my art style that childish? Am I not considered capable of making adult comics? Does that dismissal have to do with my personhood? I cancel these doubts easier, but that doesn't resolve the fact that the spot of doubt is provoked anyway.

I love you so much Brussel Comic Art Museum - this post is not your fault and not a direct attack on you or the staff who put Alexandre, le Verdoyant & l'Elixir de Vie in the kids section, though you finally enabled me to articulate my irritation that I had for your peers who keep doing this in past incidents over the years. I want to visit you one day. I want to attend your events. I cherish your dedication to comics as an art form. I appreciate your staff. But please kindly move Alexandre to the normal BD section of the bookstore, in the historical or fantasy genre. If for whatever reason you must keep Alexandre in the youth category, put him in the teen/young adult category. Cheers,