Garfield, Dilbert, Foxtrot and Calvin and Hobbes is about the extent of my comic repertoire
Taking a 7 year old to a comic store is like tasking her to a pg 13 movie.. . Not too surprised it didn't work out. Comics tend to deal with adult themes and are aimed at older people.
Archie, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Asterix, Tintin... Old comics, from the 1980's or earlier are pretty safe. These days the audience is 15+ guys. Soft porn and hardcore violence. Why would he take his 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son to look at that?
For kids that young seeing is believing. My nephew at 6 watched Star Wars over Christmas. You explain that it isn't real, they are actors in a play, playing characters - he's been in several plays himself - and then later on he says 'but it must be real, because how could they make a whole planet?'.
Do kids not read comics because they wouldn't be interested in them? Or do they not read them because they're no longer kid-friendly? Which is cause and which is effect?
The shortened-to-the-point-that-it's-mostly-wrong version:
Prices went up for a variety of reasons, ordinary stores stopped stocking them, and the only way the companies found to move enough issues to avoid total disaster was to target men in roughly the 14-40 age range through dedicated comic book shops, embracing, in the process, a sub-genre of "grittier" comic story lines that had gained some traction.
Well, for the past 10 to 20 years kids have been reading comics less and less because they have TV and the Internet. Kids don't even go outside as much as they used to. Things change, and the comic book companies are adapting as best they can.
Taking her to that particular one might be, but my local one caters pretty well for the pre-teen girl market (as well as the more adult themed stuff). My daughter drags me in there every time we go into town.
This is the moral panic of the religious right all over again. Just like during the 80s and 90s, this one is aimed at sanitizing all adult aspects of society and making everywhere a "family friendly" place.
Taking a 7 year old to a comic store is like tasking her to a pg 13 movie.. . Not too surprised it didn't work out. Comics tend to deal with adult themes and are aimed at older people.