Remember when comic books were just for kids? Yeah, we don't either, really. But looking at our dog-eared copies of Watchmen and Ghost World — not to mention those DVDs of the Spiderman and X-Men movies — we suspect that we may be the first generation of parents to have bigger comic collections than our children. Comics publishers, of course, want to have it both ways: DC just released the kiddie superhero series Tiny Titans, which you'll feel much better handing to a six-year-old than the latest issue of Batman. What other tiny superheros are lurking on the shelves of your local comic shop? To find out, we consulted comics expert and father-to-be Gabriel Mckee. Here's his round-up:
The Mini-Marvels
"Chris Giarusso's Calvin-and-Hobbes take on the Marvel Universe cleverly transfers the grandeur of epic superhero conflict into the microcosm of a third-grade classroom."
The Tiny Titans
"In the mid-'60s, DC cashed in on the success of the Justice League by introducting the Teen Titans, a superteam that gathered together kid sidekicks and adolescent doubles of their biggest heroes. Now they're doing one better with the Tiny Titans, an entire classroom full of superpowered students at Sidekick Elementary."
The X-Babies
"Everybody likes the X-Men, right? The certainly do in the television-centric alternate dimension ruled by arch-studio mogul Mojo. But anytime he kidnaps the X-Men to appear in his programs, they fight back and escape. The solution: create infantile clones of the whole team!"
The Little Endless
"The eight symbolic deities of Neil Gaiman's Sandman have existed since the beginning of time. When they tell stories about their earliest days, "when things were still taking shape," they conceptualize themselves as superdeformed goth kids-- the Little Endless."
The Mighty Skullboy Army
"Jacob Chabot's Skullboy is the head of an evil corporation with a plan to take over the world — if his teacher will let him leave the first-grade classroom, that is. It doesn't help that his army — a mischievous monkey and a wisecracking robot — would rather play videogames than conquer his foes."
