Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon gave the keynote address at the Eisner Awards at the San Diego Comic-Con this year, and to hear the pros tell it, it was like throwing a bomb into a crowded theater, as most people see Chabon’s speech as saying that comics should be for kids:

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. And for a long time we as lovers and partisans of comics were afraid, after so many long years of struggle and hard work and incremental gains, to pick up that old jar of greasy kid stuff again, and risk undoing it all. Comics have always been an arriviste art form, and all upstarts are to some degree ashamed of their beginnings. But frankly, I don’t think that’s what’s going on in comics anymore.

Now, I think, we have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

Which of course isn’t really the case, as just moments before Chabon was talking about the fact that given new media attention, the medium was now considered at least on par with other accepted forms of mass culture (such as film or television). But naysayers would never let actual words get in their way!