I haven't read comic books since I was 11 years old and I wouldn't even know where to buy one now. When I was a child I looked forward to the arrival of DC Comics --Superman, Batman, et al. -- on Tuesdays at the local convenience store, mainly because I had little else to read; there was no local library and there were almost no books in my home. So I followed closely the characters in the DC world. In 1961 along came Marvel Comics and by then I had started to find books to read, mostly paperbacks on the store racks that I purchased with the five dollars a week or so that I earned on my paper route.
Now we have an abundance of movies and TV shows based on comic books, including Jessica Jones on Netflix. The show seems to be liked by some adults and Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker even praised it for its contribution to the continuing debate over sexual consent, as Jones fights the attempts of Kilgrave to control her mind, which he apparently was able to do for a while. I think the show would be much better if Jessica Jones were the same gritty private eye but without the superpowers (which aren't too clear anyway; she can lift things and fly a little bit) and who is a somewhat bitter dipso because of her time with Kilgrave. As it is, when she pursues Kilgrave (whose mind control powers are also a little vague) almost everyone who tries to help her ends up dead. At one point Jessica tried to get Kilgrave to use his powers for good, but that plotline was unfortunately quickly dropped.
It seems that too many parents these days are content to let their children read comic books; at least they are reading something! Whether today's Marvel Comics are any good or not I am not qualified to say, but they certainly play a leading role in today's movies and TV. Perhaps comics are more artistic and intelligent than they were when I was a kid, but they still discourage kids from using their imaginations, just as TV has done since it basically replaced radio.
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