Comic books are great literacy tools for young people
- Oliver Lui
- Jun 17, 2018
- 2 min read
Comic books have been a popular form of literary entertainment for decades. For many it has been seen as just that – entertainment. Superheroes battling the bad guys, promoting good versus evil, and giving children and adults alike an escape from reality.
But comic books, or graphic novels as they are now referred to, go much deeper than colourful graphics and witty dialogue. They promote literacy.
In fact, comics have been a literary tool in some schools dating back to the 1830’s. “There is a history of comics and literacy that dates back at least 180 years,” said Ryerson University English Department Chair Andrew O’Malley, who uses comics as part of the curriculum in his English classes.
“There is a Swiss educator by the name of Rodolphe Topffer who in the 1830’s produced a series of books in the form of comic strips with the now familiar sequential panels with text underneath them. They were kind of satirical and comical but he did use them in school where he was headmaster to help with literacy,” he said.
“It was really in the 90’s with the boom of the graphic novel that there was a kind of widespread popular recognition that there was a literary and artistic quality to these materials … Really the watershed moment was Art Spiegelman’s Maus that went on to win the Pulitzer, and since then, they have gained greater and greater legitimacy … They are increasingly being used in schools now.”
Comic books are said to be a very sophisticated form of literature. As O’Malley explains, the pictures and the text do not match perfectly. In other words, the text does not explain the image and the images do not supplement the text.
Reading comics actually requires your brain to multi-task – interpreting both the image and the text. “There is actually a very sophisticated kind of interaction going on. So comic reading requires pretty advanced decoding,” O’Malley says.
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