Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy 127
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. 'A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words,' says Tilley. 'But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.' Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format."
Also foreign language learning. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I lived in Spain for a year, spoke/read very little spanish when I moved there and read alot of x-men comic books. They did help me pick up vocabulary and common expressions and such. Anyone who things that any form of reading cannot help just due to it's content is just being prejudicial against the material.
Re:No doubt. (Score:3, Insightful)
Had you started reading comics when you could buy them for five cents, you'd have had an easier time making sense of the story and not needed to worry about the graphics stealing your concentration. The artwork then, compared to that found in comics today could only be called primitive. This is not to say that the artists were unskilled, but rather that the medium was still, for all its color, only in its late infancy.
The graphic novels of today revel in the pure colors and glossy paper. 50-60 years ago, when they went to press with the "dick tracy" palette and stipple shading, plotlines were somewhat less complicated (stories were pretty cut and dried, good vs. evil with no shades of gray) and relied more on the text than they did on the art. The writers were passing their mores to the next generation, building a society viewed patriotism without today's fashionable disdain, without the snarky remarks about nationalism and right-wing beliefs. It was better then.
I learned to read paying a nickle a comic. I learned the 5x, 10x, and 12x multiplication tables figuring out how many comics I could get according to how many lawns or loads of trash I carted out of neighbor's basements to the alley. Yeah, times were good when I could pay a nickle for a good comic.
Re:No doubt. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No doubt. (Score:2, Insightful)
The graphic novels of today revel in the pure colors and glossy paper. 50-60 years ago, when they went to press with the "dick tracy" palette and stipple shading, plotlines were somewhat less complicated (stories were pretty cut and dried, good vs. evil with no shades of gray) and relied more on the text than they did on the art. The writers were passing their mores to the next generation, building a society viewed patriotism without today's fashionable disdain, without the snarky remarks about nationalism and right-wing beliefs. It was better then.
Of course, you are forgetting that thanks to 'moral panics' about the content of comics, the Comic Code Authority [wikipedia.org] censored all comics to remove storylines which were deemed 'perverted', where authority figures did anything wrong, or where good did not triumph over evil. It's less about the writers' mores and more to do with an industry responding to intense government pressure.
50-60 years ago most people alive remembered the Second World War and the urgent question was whether Communism was going to conquer the world. It's easy to look back at the comics and films of the time and think that this was an era with social harmony and happy families, and forget that mass-market media that questioned that view was not allowed.
Medium, not genre (Score:5, Insightful)
Comics are not a genre.
Westerns, science fiction, romance, mystery, autobiography, war, superheroes, etc. are genres.
Comics are a medium - like films, prose, poetry, songs, or plays - one capable of telling stories in any genre. The problem is that the mediums of comix is so closely associated in our current culture with funny-animal stories for children and superhero stories for adolescents, that people don't realise what the medium is really capable of, especially its ability to be sophisticated enough to engage intelligent adults. But name any popular genre, and I can name a comic book series or graphic novel that tells a story in that genre.