Hey, Kids! Comics! And Diabetes!

When I was a kid, my Mom would sometimes buy me a comic book out of the grocery store spinner rack to shut me up about not buying me the sugary cereals I was always screaming about (Although to be fair, one time she did buy me a box of Lucky Charms to get a hold of the Six Million Dollar Man sticker prize I spent days obsessing over after I saw the TV commercials. Then she picked out all the marshmallows while I cried. I was 32. But I digress).

But that was 1978. It’s 2011 now, and the spinner rack disappeared sometime around, well, 1978. So if you want your kid to shut the fuck up about buying them Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs with a comic book, well, you’ll have to buy them Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.

The New York Times is reporting that DC Comics and General Mills are gonna be announcing, sometime during this weekend’s New York Comic Con, a deal to distribute four specially-printed issues of Justice League to be dumped into nutritious fare such as Trix, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and my old nemesis: Lucky Charms.

The creative teams saddled with this horrible fucking chore – I mean, charged with the awesome opportunity to present DC comics to a new generation – will be Scott Beatty and Christian Duce for issue 1,  Paul Tobin and Derec Donovan for #2, Doug Wagner and Duce for #3, and Joshua Williamson and Bruno Redondo on the fourth, with Dan Jurgens doing the covers for each of them.  They’ll be twenty-four pages with no ads (Other than their delivery system), and DC’s apparently planning to print 12 MILLION of these bad boys – in contrast, last month’s biggest selling book, Batman, sold 188,420 copies.

While on one hand I applaud this effort – anything that gets comics into the hands of kids is probably a good thing, and like the man said: “Give me your children until they are seven, and… oh hi, Chris Hansen!” – I really wish DC did this before the New 52 launch. Because I can picture a wide-eyed young lad being led into a comic store by his mother for the first time after reading these books and being presented with a choice between Superman Taunts Your Friendly Policeman, and Batman and Catwoman’s Special Hug.

Or worse: Hawk & Dove.

(Cover images via Bleeding Cool)