Defending the Superhero pt 2

So yesterday a bunch of psychologists told us that superheroes were turning our kids evil. (Never mind that find a superhero comic that’s kid friendly is hard to come by, and a non-cartoon superhero story even more so.) So can comics do anything positive?

Why yes. According to the Canadian Council on Learning, they can get kids to read. Which we comic defenders have been saying for years!

But have comic books and graphic novels truly shaken their stigma as “low culture”? And if so, can they play a positive role in the development of prose literacy for young readers?

Research shows us that boys are generally less inclined to read than girls and that when they do read they prefer reading fantasy, non-fiction and comic books, which may hold specific promise for improving literacy rates.

How many of us comic fans first learned big words like “invulnerability” in the pages of Superman? Or learned about classic literature because Spider-Man used it as a quip? And today’s comics compose a wide variety of genres, even without looking at Japanese “manga” or the independent publishers that can’t get into Previews.

According to the study, girls have been doing better at reading skills than boys. Personally, I loved to read when I was a kid, including novels. My mom even enrolled me into a junior book club for a while because I loved reading books, magazines, and of course comic books. However, so much emphasis has been put on getting girls to receive the educational benefits that boys have gotten (and rightfully so) that they forgot to keep boys at that level or advance. To me this has been a mistake, and both genders should be pushed to be at the same level in all skills, including reading and creative writing.

Research has suggested that boys may report being less interested in reading than girls because their literary interests are not well-represented in school libraries and classrooms. Boys are much more likely to enjoy reading science and non-fiction books, informational texts and “how-to” manuals. They are also more likely to enjoy fantasy, adventure stories and stories that are scary or “gross” along with books about hobbies and things they do or want to do.

I remember a high-school English teacher that I had to fight to defend science fiction. It’s not that she wasn’t right to try to encourage other genres. How much Shakespearean influence has their been in dialog for Star Trek or the entire Gargoyles series? But it was more than that. She hated science-fiction. I had to struggle to get her to allow me to read Planet of the Apes for a book report. Folks, stick with the movies. The majority of the book is less action-packed than you think. Although the worst book I’ve ever read in school is The Old Man and the Sea. Dude spends most of the book being dragged out to sea by a huge fish or peeing over the side. Seriously, peeing is like a third of the book.

Best book I ever read for school? Not a sci-fi story. My favorite English teacher was a little more giving as far as reading choices, and still got us to read classics, like To Kill a Mockingbird, a book I highly recommend as well as the movie with Gregory Peck.

Yet despite their popularity with young male readers, comic books are still considered unsuitable reading material by many educators and are often associated with poor quality, cheapness and disposability. Some of these enduring myths about comic books may be at the root of the negative associations that continue to dog the genre.

There used to be a point where that was thought to be true. Comics were a new medium, and like plenty of new mediums it probably wasn’t expected to go very far. They said the same about television, the internet, video games, heck I bet storytellers who only used the spoken word thought writing would be a fad.

Comics, however, do encourage reading. You can’t always get the full story just by looking at the pretty pictures. In the old days, the captions often told too much of the story. Now it’s all decompressed so that every moment has to be captures like a TV show. It doesn’t work, but it still requires reading.

I have to print this part in it’s entirety. I want to make sure people understand this part.

Debunking some comic book myths

One common myth about comics is that reading them can replace the reading of other genres. Research shows that concern is misguided. Boys who read comic books regularly also tend to read more text-based material and report higher levels of overall reading enjoyment, compared to boys who do not read comic books. In fact, some evidence supports the idea that comic books provide a “gateway” to other literary genres. For example, some researchers have argued that the language of comic books can help young people make the transition from informal everyday language to formal written language.

Another popular myth is that the visual element of comic books makes them more suited to immature readers. In fact, comics can help readers develop a number of useful language and literacy skills. The extensive use of images in a comic book requires readers to develop two kinds of literacy: visual literacy and comics literacy. Visual literacy is the ability to interpret the meaning of various kinds of illustrations. It involves all the processes of knowing and responding to a visual image, as well as all the thought that might go into constructing or manipulating an image. Comics literacy refers to the ability to understand a sequence of events or images, to interpret characters’ non-verbal gestures, to discern a story’s plot and to make inferences.

Comic books allow children to develop many of the same skills as reading text-based books such as connecting narratives to children’s own experiences, predicting what will happen next and inferring what happens between individual panels. Even before children are ready to read text, comic books can give them practice in making meaning from material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, interpreting symbols, and following the sequence of events in a story.

Comic books have been shown to be useful for beginning readers, since the reduced text makes the language manageable for new readers. Comics expand children’s vocabulary by giving contexts to words that the child would not normally have been exposed to. New readers can also learn story elements through reading comics. Like novels, comics have a beginning, middle and end, main characters that develop through conflicts and story climax. Comics thus introduce the concepts of narrative structure and character development.

Comic books can also provide a tool for improving reading development among second- language learners, as the illustrations provide contextual clues to the meaning of the written narrative and because they present language as it is used in action.

Comic books can help children with learning or reading difficulties. Research highlights how a number of the features found in comics can be of benefit to those with dyslexia and similar challenges, particularly the left-to-right organization of comics’ panels, the use of upper case letters, and the use of symbols and context to help with comprehension. As well, the research indicates that learners who can read well and those with reading problems are equally attracted to comics.

I read reports about schools and teachers who use comics, and not just the “PSA” comics, to encourage young people to read and enjoy reading. If you get the right comics (I would recommend DC Super Friends but DC Comics, in their infinite lack of wisdom canceled it instead of working to promote it and get it to kids), it can work just as well as the “early reader” books I see nowadays that have reading stage numbers (and use DC Super Friends versions of DC heroes, just making them potential readers of DC Comics in the future–the far future, when they’re old enough for the blood, darkness, and raping supervillains 😛 ) in encouraging proper reading skills and inspire an interest in the classics.

The article list New York’s “Comic Book Project“, Britain’s “Rothamstead Research” putting out a series of science comics (I swear one guy is a dead ringer for Tintin, the book and HBO animated series star), and the Kids Love Comics project. I would throw in this article I wrote with some kid-friend webcomics and sites. Anything that gets kids to read (versus content) is a good thing, and comics are literature in the proper sense of the word. Find something your son or daughter likes, and encourage them to read it. Read it with them. Like the old ad used to go, reading is fundamental.