Reportedly, the head of DC Comics told Pope that if he wanted to comics for kids, he can do Scooby Doo.

Source: Robot 6

Looks like the man upstairs is a big fan of HasDCDoneSomethingStupidToday.com, because just as the counter was approaching double digits and, with the 24 hour comics news cycle relatively quiet, no obvious looming PR disasters on DC's horizons, we were beginning to feel we might not be able to partake in the glorious bounty of DC stupidity this week. But lo, when the counter doth approach 9 days, he hath provided us with the succor we so desperately crave.

And of course, by the man upstairs, we mean Dan Didio (probably - see below), and by succor, we mean an extremely stupid statement.

This news comes, surprisingly, via CBR, from their coverage of the Gene Yang and Paul Pope in Conversation panel from San Diego Comic Con. Pope (Batman: Year 100, Wednesday Comics) was asked by Yang if he had tried to do an all ages book at DC with a franchise character. His reply?

"Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do 'Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]', this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said 'You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do 'Scooby-Doo.' And I thought, 'I guess we just broke up.'"

Wow. Of course, we understand that the majority of the comics audience nowadays tends to be older, sometimes much older, but where the fuck does DC think that those older readers came from? Most of them started reading comics when they were kids. If the comic book industry wants to reach new readers, it has to market at least SOME comics to kids. This is common fucking sense.

Of course, DC isn't the only company to neglect young readers. The comics industry as a whole tends to produce a product that is overwhelmingly aimed at adult males. Most sensible people view this as, to use a favorite phrase of Didio's, a myopic marketing strategy. Apparently Didio (or maybe Harras? Who knows who Pope is referring to when he says "head of DC?" We're just going to go with Didio and you can replace him with your favorite Dilbertesque DC executive if you prefer) likes things just the way they are, enough to pejoratively tell Pope, winner of the 2007 Eisner for Best Writer/Artist, to go do a Scooby Doo comic if he doesn't like it.

Didio must be dipping pretty heavily into the Scooby snacks if he thinks that only making comics for 45 year olds is a good strategy. You know what kids will be into if they get hooked on Scooby Doo comics? Scooby fucking Doo. Maybe that's Didio's strategy. Maybe he's got a sweet golden parachute deal for when he and his cronies finally drive DC into the ground that involves a shitload of Scooby Doo stock options.

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids at… CBR?! Wow, when a site that normally acts a cheerleader for everything you do is calling you out like that, you know you've got problems.

Side note: In our fervor, we neglected to mention that you can show DC how wrong they are by picking up Pope's Battling Boy, out October 8.