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Re: GNs for grown-ups— so many comic strips from the 70s and before effectively filled this category. Comics like Apartment 3-G, Rip Kirby, Brenda Starr, and others were stylish and exciting and told complex stories with interesting and relatable characters.
Seriously. Take a look at pre-1980s serial strips sometime. They’re intense.
In the late 70s/early 80s, things shifted dramatically. Readers started getting stodgy. These comics that had stayed fresh and current, often for decades, were threatened if anything changed. Artists and writers were essentially forced into a rut in many cases.
For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and later, these comics became these weird, amber-trapped artifacts of a bygone era. They were still hugely popular, but unlike their daytime TV cousins, they didn’t update in ways that kept them accessible to bring in new fans.
But for decades, story-driven comics for adults were a major part of readers’ lives. People use the fact that millennials don’t read newspapers in print as an excuse to claim millennials wouldn’t be interested in thoughtful, contemporary comics aimed at them. But...
Millennials and a good chunk of Gen Xers have rarely been given the opportunity to read commercial, story-driven comics that are mature and thoughtful and aimed at them that aren’t also framed as Capital I Important Works Of Art.
Graphic novels for adults exist and many of them are excellent but they don’t exist in a way that lets them be a thing an average reader might just pick up on a whim like any other book.
And while cape comics have certainly expanded and covered more mature content since the 1980s, those are still generally bogged down by accessibility issues for new readers and rarely expand outside of a certain cross-section of genres.
(I don’t think genre fiction is bad and I think it’s a problem to deride genre fiction in general, but different readers like different things and SFF is just simply not accessible to a lot of readers who prefer stories that feel like things that could happen)
I think looking back at those pre-1980 serial strips is a really good way to think of a model for what modern mass-market GNs for adults might look like. At least from a story and genre perspective— the delivery would clearly have to change.
A lot of the best ones feel like comic versions of the kinds of television shows we love. The genre works, the stories work, the characters desperately need to be updated because the representation is usually nil, but their humanity and complexity is there.
Generations of adult readers have LOVED comics made for adult readers. Generations of young readers have, too. There is zero reason to believe adult readers won’t buy or read mass market GNs *for adults* ...
...other than the confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of looking at the destruction of a genre that was held hostage by fear of change after decades of innovation.
