Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he’s never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he’s made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)

It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.

Now, I know that a lot of people, probably even most people, don’t give an adamantium crap about comics. They’ve always been a ghettoized form of literature that traditionally has received only slightly more respect from the uninitiated than pornography. Moreover, I suspect a lot of the pasty-skinned folks you see at comic shops like it that way. (If comics were to achieve mainstream popularity, it wouldn’t be cool to like them anymore, kind of like when alternative music bands make it big and their fans from the old days start accusing them of selling out. I personally blame many of the problems the comic industry is experiencing on this short-sighted, insular attitude.)

I also know that older people have always lamented the declining intelligence, curiosity, imagination, modesty, morals, and hygiene of the generation coming up behind them. And that fans of aging media have always decried the tendency of the new to shoulder aside the old, which means that many of my sentiments are only an echo of things that have been said before. Paperback novels replaced pulp magazines and TV put an end to live radio dramas, and fans of those earlier media no doubt grumbled about how sad it was that kids of their day just didn’t get “it,” whatever “it” may have been.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think there’s something seriously wrong in America today if kids aren’t interested in comics. It’s not just because I liked them as a kid and don’t want to see them fade away. It’s because I think a lack of interest in such an accessible and pleasurable form of reading probably indicates a lack of interest in reading generally.

Consider: it used to be that a lot of kids (myself included) cut their literary teeth on comic books. Comics in the ’70s weren’t all that sophisticated as a rule — nothing like some of today’s very adult graphic novels — but they were a form of literature, despite what my teachers always told me. From comics (as well as TV, movies, and, yes, actual books, too, that I loved as a child), I learned the basic methods of storytelling, as well as the themes and motifs that have inspired readers for centuries. More importantly, they acted as a kind of gateway drug that led to bigger and better things. I don’t think I’m all that unusual for having read the “classic comics” version of Dracula and then seeking out the original novel when I got a little older. It seemed then and it seems to me now to be a perfectly natural progression.

Similarly, there was always a symbiotic relationship, at least for me, between movies, comics, and print literature. For instance, I saw the Star Wars movie, I read the Star Wars comics, and I read the Star Wars novel. Again, it semeed perfectly natural to me — each medium told the story according to its own strengths and created a stronger overall experience and understanding of the story. And in time my affection for the Star Wars novel drew me to other, similar stories told through the print medium, and then eventually to other types of stories altogether. And I honestly believe the comic book was a part of my progression toward more sophisticated literature.

But what is the progression today? From the movie to the video game to the branded merchandise and back again, without a print component at all? That would seem to be the lesson taught by little Steven, the Spider-Man fan who has never seen Spidey in his original element. I don’t know about you, but I find that lesson extremely worrisome…