Comic Books More Educational Than You’d Think

By Akela Talamasca on August 27th, 2009

• Share
• Link to StumbleUpon
• 1 Comment

I began reading when I was three years old. As I got older, my comprehension grew more and more sophisticated, and I slowly graduated from books with pictures to straight novels, the way that most readers develop. However, I never lost my love of reading comic books, a love that has only deepened over time. I still read them these days, though not in the numbers that I used to.

Stepping back to look at the phenomenon, I discovered — almost despite myself — that comics have more to teach than one might previously have suspected.

First, though the vast majority of comic books concern themselves with the exploits of super-powered beings, that is by no means the only subject available to readers. Modern comics run the gamut of content from historical biography (Ho Che Anderson’s “King”) to social science fiction (Warren Ellis’s “Transmetropolitan) to horror (Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead”) to illustrated opera (P. Craig Russell’s “The Magic Flute”) and many others. Readers have a wide variety of subject matter to choose from, and therefore better chances to become well-read and diverse in their tastes.

Second, the use of language in comics — especially the bombastic prose found in superhero comics — tends toward a vocabulary slightly outside the norm found in “straight” fiction. There are simply greater incidences of words like “preternatural”, “phantasmagoric”, and “pangalactic” to be found in comics, for example, and thus more opportunities to expand one’s own lexicon, which is always beneficial to the reader.

Third, the evolution of the medium has produced a striking visual language on par with that of cinema — and at times even surpassing it. The juxtaposition of text and images as a conveyance for ideas is a phenomenon that can be exploited to induce nearly any association the authors desire. At times, there are some real mental gymnastics that must occur to derive full benefit of the layers at work — possibly the most famous example of this is Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” Improving the quality of thought — the way we approach new situations, and the tools of perception we use to make sense of the world — is something that ought to be stressed in education, and we can use comic books to help us achieve this goal.

Take a good look at what comics your kids are reading, and see if there isn’t something there you can actually use, instead of just demanding that they read something “good” — you may be surprised by what you find.