BW’s Saturday Article Link> Graphic Novels ARE Books

The show Boy Meets World and its spinoff, Girl Meets World (following the daughter of the first show’s protagonist back when that could still lead to good storytelling–I actually like it more than her dad’s story), both have episodes in which a literature teacher has to fight to make a graphic novel part of their curriculum. I’m not a fan of the choices (for Cory it was God Loves, Man Kills, the X-Men story, if I remember correctly, and for his daughter Riley it was The Dark Knight Returns, both before Disney bought Marvel if memory serves) but they aren’t terrible ones to go with. It’s just not what I would have chosen. It does highlight the problems comics still have when it comes to being accepted as literature and art.

In an article by Ashley Skorld for Fansided’s “I Prefer Reading” site, she runs into someone at a bookstore suffering the same issue with her son, trying to get him to read something other than a comic. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. I love reading both, but she then claims that graphic novels aren’t “real books”, and the writer takes issue with that point of view.