NJW&C 23: The Kids, They Won't Read
Hey, Kids! It’s Nice Jewish Words & Comics!, the latest installment from Neil Kleid's bi-monthly newsletter with updates and info about his latest projects!
Seriously, my kids used to love reading.
When they were younger, it was difficult to find at least one of them without a book or graphic novel nearby. And you all know me—I love to read, I love to write, love to recommend books to the people I love—so I have never had trouble getting out to the shops or libraries with those kids, encouraging them to load up with chapter books and anime and Bonevilles and magical coming of age stories. In the past, they would dig through my collection, my shelves, and ask which of my stockade of books and graphic novels might be right for them.
If a book tied into one of their interests—how to draw, a specific movie tie-in, big monsters, detectives, sports, whatever—I’d do whatever it took to get it into their eager little eyeballs. Hell, my oldest spent one year devouring all nine Harry Potter books (yes, he even read the script-book for the Broadway show) and then consumed every single installment of Percy Jackson, to boot, along with every Big Nate volume ever made. My daughter might as well be an honorary member of the damn Baby-Sitters Club, and my youngest would steal any Flash or Star Wars graphic novel or trade paperback the moment I brought one home, that is if he wasn’t too busy reading Wimpy Kid.
Now? Forget it. I can’t give ‘em away.
Okay, I’m exaggerating just a little, and they still consume the odd book from time to time, but somewhere along the lines, my kids have all become reluctant readers of anything that takes longer than five minutes to complete. They will still dig into the odd graphic novel, depending on which, but I have to actively lead them to books. My daughter will sometimes read on Shabbat when there are no devices or friends around. My oldest will pick up a comic or graphic novel if he’s incredibly bored on a Friday night, as well as skim a newspaper or magazine. But if it isn’t Shabbat, when their electronics are a no-go, all of them will bend over backwards to do anything but sit and read something that requires more than thirty minutes of their focus. Again, my oldest has had sporadic moments where he’ll request a specific book—the last one was the very mid Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline, published five years ago, at the top the pandemic. Since then? He’s got sports to play, television to watch, friends to meet, and most importantly, he’s got his phone. And I know what you’re going to say—well, if they’re glued to their devices, how about digital books or comics?
But here’s the kicker.
The other day, I mentioned a fun sports movie I thought that my oldest might like, that we could watch together, and his response was “Dad (roll your eyes here accordingly), I can’t focus on a movie.” Later that day, I asked him to watch a three-minute video with me, and he repeated, “it’s too long; I just can’t focus on that.”
Truthfully, that was a eureka moment for me.
I looked at each of my kids in turn, and looked around at them and their friends, their leisure habits, the way they consume their media. I thought about what smart phones and DVR and streaming and video content have done to us as humans. My wife and I are voracious readers. We love it, and always have a few books going at once. I can not understand not being able to focus on a book—sure, maybe not having the time to focus on one, but once we have that time, we can spend hours lost in a narrative until it’s done (in my case, I can knock out two in a day if left alone and have no deadlines.)
But…I have noticed that when we watch TV together or a movie at home during the week, half of the time one or both of us have an eye on the screen and the other scrolling our phones. We’re shopping or checking social media; bookmarking articles and answering e-mail and texts. We aren’t truly, one hundred percent focused on the show or film. Now, when I read I normally don’t have a phone in my hand—to be fair, I only have the time to devote to reading on a Friday or Saturday, on Shabbat, when I can’t use my phone because of religious reasons. But other rare moments—when I’m reading on vacation or commuting, say—I find that I can only focus on reading for x amount of time before I set aside the book to check my emails, feeds, or news.
My kids have stopped making reading their go-to thing. I understand why—I understand why many kids feel the same way, and adults too, if we’re all being honest. We’re training ourselves to consume shorter bits of content, media in chat sized pieces. Texts and posts, listicles, TikToks. Nothing that requires us to devote too much time throughout our busy days to really absorb a story or narrative for longer than a specific window of time.
Sure, I’d love my kids to start diving into Stephen King tomes or other popular novels—I’m not asking for non-fiction here, or the classics—but shit, that ain’t happening. My teenagers are too antsy, too “teenager-y”, too trained by their texts and WhatsApps and Snapchats to devote themselves to a full-bore novel. Last night, I asked one of my boys to provide a list of books he might like so I could get them from the library, and he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to finish even one. I basically told him that all he needed to do was dedicate himself to completing one chapter a night—a short bit of content at a time. No big deal, right? But if a three-minute Lonely Island video or a thirty-minute sitcom is too much to ask my kids these days, too much for a teen to focus on without enjoying it with their eyes also on texts or some mobile game, then I worry about what that means for the upcoming generation of readers.
And sure, yes…there are plenty of kids out there who do, of course, love to read. I am not making a broad generalization about all kids their age, or writing off an entire generation of readers from all walks off life based on what’s happening inside my walls, and because of the devices and device times I allow my children. I know that a lot of it is who younger readers are as individuals, and I know plenty who are as voracious about it as me and my wife. But I can also see this move toward being unable to focus on a novel, a book, or a movie, is more widespread than just inside the Kleid compound. Humans are training themselves to hop from media rock to media rock in an increasingly smaller window of time. And when we don’t—when we have the time to dig into a novel, or go see a three hour film, or spend hours bingeing a TV series, it often feels like a luxury these days.
So, comics.
I mean, that’s the easy answer for my reluctant readers, right? Twenty-two pages per dose. That isn’t a lot to ask of my kids. I’m not preaching or pushing Bone, Love and Rockets, or Castle Waiting (two of which my kids have read in the past) nor am I urging them to consume multi-volume series or become regular Wednesday warriors. Hey, kids: comic, singular. Try one, it’s quick.
But is it? Yes, as comic creators we all have this dream that one issue will ‘hook’ a younger reader, and get them returning to the store for issue two, or more comics like the one they just read. But when my kids ask to read any comics I own that aren’t self-contained or collected, it becomes increasingly difficult to do recommend one that they might enjoy. The comic they end up reading is either issue one of five (“do I have to read all five?!!”) or in the middle of a storyline rooted in dense continuity (“wait—I need to read something else to understand this? Something you don’t even have?”), or even worse, somewhere at the end. Or maybe it’s part of a crossover?
“You need to write this as if it were someone’s first comic.” That’s one of those industry credos you hear bandied about; most say it was a Stan Leeism, others attribute it to someone else. Our man Alex Segura wrote an entire essay about this topic one month ago, leading into an impassioned ode to Legion of Super Heroes (which I love, too) in which Alex compares an Archie comic—self-contained, simple, easy to pick up and easy to put down—to an X-Men comic—the second issue in a five issue storyline, bogged down in one of the most involved and confusing long-running operatic comics continuities ever put to page. He arrived at this:
“The intentions are good, but it’s not taking into account a key element of The Reader: curiosity. We want to figure stuff out for ourselves. In this era before Wikipedia of even Marvel trading cards, all I had was the comic in front of me, and I pored over it for weeks, reading and re-reading it to absorb every drop of information I could. Who were these mutants? What the hell was a Genegineer? Why did Wolverine and Rogue lose their powers?
It would take a long time for me to find out, but because the story itself was so well-crafted, so masterfully executed, I didn’t care. I wanted more. The characters were cool. The world was fascinating - and the story had tapped into something primal. Needless to say, I’m still an X-Men reader. So what’s the lesson here? Yes, you should make a comic aim to educate a new reader. But first and foremost, you should strive to make it good. And sometimes good - or the striving for greatness - means deviating a little bit from the established path.”
But is that going to be enough to engage my kids and their limited windows of focus? These are not kids who are going to go off, research, and figure stuff out themselves. They will walk away unless the entire story is handed to them right now—beginning, middle, and end—and be able to get in and out before they lose focus to something else.
Back before the aughts, between the late Sixties and late Eighties, a lot of Marvel and DC superhero comic book issues were fairly self-contained. I wouldn’t compare these series, say, to a television procedural in which you have an hour or so of story with simmering subplots that tie each episode—and the world—together. Some of them were literally “done-in-one” stories about Sgt Rock and Easy out in the field. Or Batman and a single, contained mystery. Or, I dunno, Spider-Man teaming up with some hero to fight some villain. One of my favorite Spidey comics, in fact, is a done-in-one issue from the Nineties, written by Paul Jenkins, in which Peter and a bunch of Marvel heroes get together to play poker against the Kingpin. Another Paul wrote is about Peter and his Uncle Ben, and memories around a single baseball game.
Early issues of G.I. Joe—a comic book designed to teach distracted kids how to play with toys their parents could buy in stores, based on a cartoon they were glued to for a half-hour each day—focused on a self-contained storyline…until that series reached the point where it could start adding subplots, start turning the comics into something compelling for a subscribed reader. Sure; you had Uncanny X-Men and Teen Titans out there, you had Avengers and other team books–heck, even issues of Amazing Spider-Man—that carried long-running narrative from month to month…but you also had a lot of comic books on racks in convenience stores, or in just coming into their own comic book shops, that really allowed a casual reader to see what The Flash or Moon Knight were up to for a single issue and then jump ship to another after the back cover was turned.
As Segura points out about Archie, those comics are “a perfect introduction to the medium - clear art, characters promptly identified/named, humor, no expectation of continuity or history. Not to mention the fact the stories were funny, well-crafted, and delivered in short, 6-10 bursts of content. The perfect primer for a new reader.”
So, should we be out there making more done-in comics for all ages, short stories and self-contained anthologies to target the easily distractible TikTok generation that can’t spend time sitting through an entire episode of sitcom TV?
Is the way for me to get my kids to read more by helping to produce single-issue, twenty-two page stand-alone comics about all sorts of topics…or better yet, two ten-page short stories like Archie Comics does…so younger, distracted or reluctant readers can get in, engage for a short period of time, and then get out? Do I have to get on BookTok and create videos of myself extolling the virtues of good books and comics? Do I beg my kids to be a part of BookTok on their own, and find the literature that they like?
Is that a good plan to fill the readership plunge between easy-to-consume volumes of Dog Man and densely packed issues of New Gods? Am I wasting my time trying to churn out five-issue creator-owned mini-series targeted at a variety of existing or older readers and should I instead just develop one-shots and two-story digests, or procedural superhero stories that wrap up their plots by the back cover, with the thinnest of character subplots to loosely tie the issues together?
I can’t say. But I can definitely see there being a market for TikTok Comics. I mean, they still sell Archie in supermarkets, right? They can’t be doing all that bad with that sort of distribution and name recognition? Perhaps a return to that style of storytelling will end up being profitable?
I think there’s something there, kids.
In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to stick issues of Marvel Team-Up between my kids’ peepers and the glowing screen.
Wish a reader luck.
THE WORK, SHE CONTINUES
First and foremost, it is once again time to nominate comic books for the Ringo Awards! The 2025 Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards—an annual celebration of the creativity, skill and fun of comics—are on the horizon, and YOU can nominate the books and creators you love right here, including Nice Jewish Boys by me, John Broglia and Ellie Wright, the collected volume which is eligible for nomination this year. Please vote for us in the above categories, and ask your friends, family, colleague, enemies, and neighbors to do the same. Thanks for considering us for this year’s Ringos!
I was invited to chat a while back with Mark and Dan at Amazing Spider-Talk, to chat about all things Spider-Man and "Kraven's Last Hunt”, the seminal Spidey storyline by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck I was privileged enough to adapt into prose. Have a listen, Spider-Fans.
Riding for a while in the project valley as I finish up writing duties on ‘Project Mantle’, hopefully coming out later this year. I’ve got four issues written out of five (despite the above grumpy manifesto about creator-owned five-issue minis), and I’m lettering the second issue as the colors roll in. Definitely looking forward to everyone’s reaction to this one—it’s one hundred percent out of my comfort zone, and it’s a whole lot of fun. Someone let me write this comic book forever. If I only get five issues, I'ma be so sad.
Hell, here’s a look.
Next! LA Strong, the charity comic from Mad Cave to benefit victims of the Los Angeles wildfires, came out a few weeks back. I picked up a copy at the store and the art is not only gorgeous, but the essays are profoundly moving. Get your copy, friends, and do a bit of good.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to finish both ‘Project Taylor’, my spec screenplay, and ‘Project Vigilant’, my spec novel. I’m on page 77 of the former and clocking in at a word count of 47,000 our of 85k on the latter…so here’s hoping I’ll wrap both before the summer. I’m also a hair’s breadth from finalizing contracts for two prose projects: ’Project Sukkah’, a time-travel murder mystery, and ‘Project Sugar’, a short horror story for an upcoming anthology. Definitely more of a focus on prose for now as the comics world grapples with a new distributor, crazy pants global tariffs, and the usual closing of doors.
I like what my man Tony Lee is doing over there. He’s kind of figured it out. I may try a few things in this direction over the next year or two, if the publishing industry continues to apply a shrinking effect to my usually steady output of comics and graphic novels.
That said, I love comics. I doubt I’ll ever stop making them. In fact, I have a few ideas I’ll probably be turning into pitches soon. But for now…I think I need to do this prose thing for a bit and see where it leads.
THE FOCUS, IT STILL WANES
Some bits and bobs that have caught my eye this month:
So, yeah. I fucked up the broth from last time. Roasted the bones just fine…but I added too much anise; it overpowered the house and I had to dump it all. Next time, I’ll just get broth from the store.
I mean, bless Cory Booker, right? Finally? Twenty-five hours, never wavered, nary a Boba Fett in the mix. That moment where he put on the yellow ribbon meant a lot.
Our man John Broglia—of Savor and Nice Jewish Boys fame—has teamed up with pal of the newsletter Taki Soma to give us Alienated from our other pals at Comixology Originals. Check it out and give it a whirl!
Visited the Anne Frank exhibit at the Center for Jewish History here in NYC (yes, the place they hold JewCe) and it’s an incredibly powerful installation. I did notice many parallels between the systematic rise to Nazi power throughout the space to what’s happening with our democracy right now. Horrifying to walk through, listening to the audio guide, and not shout out “holy shit that just happened a week ago.”
Also, the power of my Detroit Lions ball cap is that I can be standing by a wall in NYC waiting to go into an Anne Frank exhibit and some random dude will still walk by, point at me, and chant “Ja-red Goff. Ja-red Goff.” I miss you, football.
I cannot wait until I unlock “Others” as a playable character:
It’s April, so we’re about two weeks away from new episode of Star Wars: Andor, but also damn it if I can’t wait until this May when Lucasfilm brings us new Star Wars: Tales Of the Underworld, an under-rated series featuring amazing animated shorts. And it’s featuring both Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane! Yes, short content again for the folks who lack focus. Who cares when it’s this good?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgVJxZifi0Sometimes you strike gold in the discount comic book boxes. I’m burning through issues and volumes of DC Comics’ Warlord by the legendary Mike Grell because the fantastic sword-and-sorcery series may end up being a plot point in this new comic book pitch I’m trying to engineer. If you haven’t read this series yet, give it a whirl and visit Skartaris. Oh, and Groo the Wanderer, by legends Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones (and oft-lettered by Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai)? Read as many of those back issues as you can get your hands on while also enjoying a fine bowl of cheese dip, Groo’s my favorite. You’ll thank me for it. And so will Groo.
Let’s end this month’s installment with a new, hopeful look at the upcoming Superman movie from James Gunn:
Holy wow. I mean, I wish we were getting the giant keyhole in the Fortress of Solitude, but that's a very minor nitpick. This looks so good. Also, dogs can be irritating.
All right, that does it for me this month. Next month is the birthday month, friends, and a Jew turns fifty. How should we celebrate?
See you in thirty, when we bring the May flowers.
—Neil
MIGDAL: Neil Kleid's Nice Jewish Words & Comics is free! Tell your friends, enemies and interested dragons. If you enjoyed this email, you can show Neil that his writing is valuable to you by checking out his books here and supporting independent comix: https://bookshop.org/shop/neilkleid