When you walk into your local comic shop with your kids, they might run over to the most popular titles like The Amazing Spider-Man or X-Men, but these books may not necessarily be the best choice for youngsters. The stories are complicated, mature, and deal with subjects that may be over the heads of kids under the age of 12. So what should you look for when your 5 year old son wants some cool comics? Read on for a quick look at some recommended titles.
The Super Hero Squad by Marvel Comics is based on the Cartoon Network animated series and features characters made famous through comics over the years like Captain America, The Silver Surfer, and Iron Man. The drawings are done in a very cartoonish style and the stories are short capers where the violence is purely slapstick. This comic is a great choice for the youngest of readers because it’s fun and colorful to look at even before a child can fully read, and if your kid is anything like mine, they already know the names of all the characters. There’s usually two or three stories in each issue.
The Tiny Titans is an Eisner Award winning series from DC comics that features the characters from DC’s Teen Titans series, again drawn in a very cartoony style. The characters are set in an Elementary school type of environment and the focus is on running gags and jokes rather than any kind of serious story. This book has been popular ever since it was introduced as part of the industry’s “Free Comic Book Day”.
Sonic the Hedgehog comics, published by Archie Comics is a popular kids series based on the Sega video game character that was introduced about twenty years ago. For some reason, the comic book has always been much more popular than any kind of animated TV series based on the same characters. The comic is colorful with a lot of cute characters, and never reaches any kind of extreme levels of violence. It’s definitely intended purely for kids.
If you start with comics like these, you should be able to build a nice library of comic books for the kids in your homes. These comics are currently being published on a monthly basis, and are available at your local comic shop or at all quality book shops.
