The (largely) Lost Aesthetic of Kid-Id
My childhood was painted on boxes and magazine covers in vivid, pulp brushsrokes, one of the last decades where pulp-inspired art was used to give kid-oriented action/adventure a similar look to what teens and adults also got in their trashy sci-fi and fantasy.
I call it an aesthetic, but that's not really accurate. It's more of a vibe. Dell and Gold Key were pretty lame as comic companies went back in the day, with lackluster interior art and (quite often) typed lettering:
Turok, Son of Stone, for instance, had decent (for the 50s and 60s) representation of paleofauna, but otherwise wasn't much to look at compared to Marvel and DC's output at the time, but they sprang for beautiful painted covers
That really sold it.
So What is Kid-Id?
It's essentially pulp-for-kids, a visual aesthetic that taps into the unbridled child id, full of monsters, adventures, robots, dinosaurs, and violence (at least implied) and semi-elevates it by imitating the vibe of the pulp sci-fi and fantasy art of its age.
It's a dude in a tiny bodycon dress punching a goddamn robot in half:
And guys punching club-wielding ape-men in the solar plexus:
And while the art style changes, the vibe remains the same. On the left: MARS Patrol, 1966, on the right, G.I.Joe 1984ish.
Corporate needs you to find all the differences between these two pictures.
It is the terror of bears:
It's barely clothed men riding dinosaurs:
Undead menaces and strangely scaled/colored beasts
In other words, it's exactly what kids want to see.
It's the stuff of their imaginations treated at least as seriously as the sci-fi of their older siblings and parents, all while making the rule-of-cool the #1 overriding feature. If it's fearsome, slathering, perilous, rippling, slimy, frothing, filled with fangs or bristling with lasers or dancing with Dracula, it gets thrown in the pot.
And the resulting stew is unironic, straight-faced, awesome, and may or may not contain traces of tree nuts.
Like the painted movie poster, digital illustration and photo-compositing largely killed this aesthetic, as well as a lean toward more traditional comic book and anime aesthetics. It just isn't cost-effective anymore, and what does get made in it is nostalgia-driven, highly polished, and lacks the vital trashiness at the core.
The Point:
First, this aesthetic, and approach to kid-media, is good actually. To paraphrase Sid and Marty Krofft: kids are in school five days a week, they should have some media that's just plain fun.
Secondly, these are the wrapping of the kid media of most of this site's parents and grandparents. Nobody had to say 'unalive' or 'destroy' when they meant 'kill'. Half the heroes are dressed in a thong and a pair of shoes. Heroes could punch villains with fists. A martian can kill a dog. A child can murder a dinosaur with a bazooka.
The fretting busybodies that want you to live in an ad-safe bubble are so sensitive that the media from their own childhoods is seen as inappropriate for adult consumption.
And that's just dumb.
