I don't really know jack about your comics, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth checking out

"Or, you know, there's comics in the American tradition or at least made by Americans that have more depth and less stereotypes, be it Maus, Sandman, or other stuff."

I've looked into Sandman, and I don't really enjoy it. I find it utterly unpleasant. I also doubt I'd enjoy Maus, for obvious reasons

I don't know, I guess I just tend not to enjoy mature books. It's not that they aren't good works or that their authors don't have talent...I just tend to find them depressing or unpleasant. I like to have fun when I read comics. They're one of my "guilty pleasures."

And I mainly enjoy them for their over the top, badass supervillains Villains in mature books tend to make me so furious I want to burn the thing or make me so squicked out I feel like I need a shower. It's not much fun.

Things are better than they were in the 90s though, when books were both unpleasent AND immature. I was mainly relegated to back issues


"I just never got what is so interesting about all these endless series of superheroes. No doubt some of them have good stories, I'm not saying they don't, but I don't get why superheroes are so dominant in American comics, other than the humour genre and the occasional Maus, to the point where "comics" = Marvel and/or DC. I guess it's a matter of what you're used to - certainly some of the comics we read here have supernatural aspects, and on occasion even characters you could call superheroes, but in general they have much more focus on (relatively) normal characters. And of course I'm used to series that are the exclusive property of one or a handful of writers and artists, rather than franchises owned by the company on which the names of the artists and writers are of secondary importance. Which I would argue likely helps with things like the depiction of women as well - when an artist or writer shamelessly objectifies women, it's he who will be taking the criticism for that, not the company, and he can't point at tradition as an excuse."

I think the reason for all the Superheroes had to do with the Comics Code back in the 50s or 60s or whenever they introduced it. Suddenly, "mature" elements were no longer allowed to be in comics, and so a great many comic genres were decimated. Superheros, on the other hand, were easy enough to retool to fit with the new Code, and so they pretty much took over the medium.

Nowadays, since no one cares about the Comics Code anymore, other genres are making a comeback, but it's slow going. Especially since they have Manga to compete with now too.