Comic Books and Literacy

It would appear as if this is the 200th entry in this here blog. I was wondering what I would write about, and in doing so remembered that I have always wanted to dispel a misconception that has been told to me by many people since I was a child. Since I assume people come on here to read, I thought I'd talk a little bit about litaracy, and in particular, extol the positive aspects of literacy by comic book reading.

Now, I have heard this all my life - comic books are for kids, comic books are a waste of time, comic books have juvenile language, comic books are for the immature reader, and so forth. Though I do not read comic books anymore, what I can say is that these perceptions are far from the truth. In fact, in my own experience, comic books have enhanced my literacy to the degree that I was able to subsequently win spelling contests, become enough of a decent writer to be accepted into all the journalism schools to which I applied, which allowed me to get a gig as an editor of my college magazine and which enabled me to become a writer/reviewer for a prominent Christian magazine more than 15 years ago. I will be happy to debate with anyone anytime who does not believe comic books have any value when it comes to literacy.

I was a late bloomer when it came to reading. Unlike my son, who at six-years-old, can read at an elementary level, I don't believe that I was able to read with any degree of fluency until I was about eight or nine. Even then, reading was really a forced activity and to me, it was more for academic exercises, rather than personal enjoyment. I do not come from a family of readers; in fact, I don't think my parents ever read a book in their lives from cover-to-cover, aside from the one book I know my Dad read, Lee Iacocca's self-titled autobiography. I believe my Dad once told me that is the only book that he read on his own accord in his entire life (and even then, "on his own accord" is debatable, since the book was either required for business purposes or he was strongly encouraged to read it for the same). My Mom has told me that has never read any books. My brother and sister are not really strong readers either, though they have read the occasional book (we're talking maybe one book every few years). So really, I am an anomaly of sorts, in not only the fact that I have an extensive personal library of books at home (around 1200+ at least count), but I've read hundreds upon hundreds of novels, expository works, non-fiction, biographies, and so forth). I've told my son this, that if it was between watching a movie, and reading a book, I would highly favour the latter.

My late start with reading came in a non-conventional means. Some kids start reading novels early and subsequently gravitate towards more big-kid novels, teen novels, and adult novels. For me, I was never into novels. I remember being in grade six (12-years-old or so) and part of our reading units required that I pick out a different book from the homeroom teacher's library (which, if I recall, was quite thin) and read it for the purposes of providing a book report on it. All I remember is how much of a challenge this was for me, given that I had no interest in any of the books that were in the teacher's collection. I remember picking up the Hobbit and thinking, "that is a thick book, I will never get through that". It was a chore, and I don't recall successfully getting through any of those books, but I must have, since I didn't fail grade six.

It was around that time that I started to excel at creative writing. It was kind of weird, for me as an emerging writer, to thoroughly enjoy writing, yet be wary of reading. You would think that reading and writing were mutually inclusive, but they were not for me. That marriage took place soon after, when I discovered the world of comic books, particularly Marvel and D.C. superhero comic books.

In retrospect, I think that part of the reason why I was able to write well at that point, was because I enjoyed using my imagination, and writing gross and seemingly crude stories about burping, farting, boogers, and what not. I remember being able to aptly describe something that was a normal body function in such great detail, that it had the class in stitches. Of course, this had its downside as well, oftentimes with me sitting in the front of the class facing the wall with a dunce cap place upon my head (yes, they did that kind of stuff back then). But the classmate response far outweighed any disciplinary action, so it was one of those cases of "it was worth it".

Comic books helped to really bring the marriage of imagination, writing, and vocabulary expansion to its full extent for me. My parents, my teachers and other parents were highly critical of comic books, claiming that there is no long-term beneift in reading these, as the vocabulary is infantile and does not enhance learning. Maybe that is true if you are reading the good ol' Whitman type of comics, but the Marvel and D.C. types were highly proficient in their use of language, so much so that I often had to check a dictionary in order to find out the meaning of a word. I had the impetus to do so, since without knowing the respective word's meaning, I could not progress further in the plot. Meanwhile, my Dad, who was a harsh critic of comics, read the Toronto Sun newspaper, which subsequent studies have shown to have about a grade 4-6 reading vocabulary, whereas the comic books that I was reading were about grade 9-11.

Some feel the illustrations in comic books are too much of an aid in telling the story, but there are different perspectives on this. Mine is that I viewed the illustrations as having artistic value rather than simply visual translation. It's no different than graphics on video games - I enjoy seeing advanced graphics, not because I am expecting some sort of realistic fantasy escape, but I simply admire the artist's ability to render at such a high degree of proficiency. Similarly, my admiration of comic art was more for artistic value and attention to detail than anything else. It was the story that was the draw, and bear in mind that the comics that I read were more than simply a bubble with a sentence or two in it. Most conversations or thoughts had complex sentences with varying sentence structure to give it that variety of reading flow. If you read anything that is just a collection of single sentences with a period at the end, it will get boring really fast. But comic books were not like that for me.

Further, comics oftentimes had complex plots, with multi-faceted characters, and delved in a variety of issues, sometimes touching on ethnical or moral dilemmas. It's not what people think of - the old Popeye beating the crap out of Brutus and saving Olive Oyl - type of plots). After a while, you really do get a sense of the psychology of characters and their personas. This has really helped me to transition to novels, something that I was not able to read and fully appreciate until I was in my mid-to-late 20s. Part of my difficulty was bridging my own imaginary thought processes with someone else's. To this day, one of the hardest things for me to get through in a novel is reading someone else's descriptions of a setting or an environment. We all come by with our own perception of how things should look, based on the framework of our experiences and environment, all of which are influenced by cultural and social factors. But comic books were able to help me to better appreciate how someone else may have painted that scene and challenged my own perceptions of how something should look. This is a big reason why I would rather read books than watch movies, since the books will allow me to open my mind up to an endless possibilty of how as scene is set, how a character looks and behaves, and so forth.

Based on our family's socio-economic status, comic books were an affordable way to learn how to read. My parents could not afford to buy even a steady stream of Scholastic titles and I suspect that even if they had, I would not have read it. Since comic books were varied in subject, title, and genre, there was a lot of selection to choose from, and every month, either the variety store or comic book shop's stock was replenished. This added much excitement to my monthly foray into these places, making me wonder what story I will pick up next. Comics back then were 50 cents to a dollar, so based on my measly allowance, I could pick up several titles. With gaining interest in a series, I was then introduced to the whole world of back-issues. Remember, reading a novel generally encompasses elements that are self-contained; that is, the plot, characters and so forth are not re-occuring and do not cross-over to other books (there are, of course, exceptions to this, with children's series and what not, but even then, their release and publication is limited by the ability of the author to churn out material). Multiple titles of comic books were released on a monthly basis (back in the day, I seem to recall that Marvel had something like 30-40 titles going on per month. That's a lot of selection from which to choose). That's a lot of reading opportunities that became available.

These days, unfortuantely, literacy is not as highly regarded as it once was. You see this the ghetto-ization of the English language, with inner city urban-speak now enjoying everyday usage. I cringe when I see words deliberately mis-spelled and are commonly passed off as younger generation communicative expression. Instant messaging has turned the English language into a series of abbreviated, mis-spelled "words". And basic words are constantly fouled up, even by those who you think would know better (like older executives, who you assume have been through a better educational system from yesteryear). How many people spell the plural for compact discs as "CD's" when it fact it should be spelled "CDs". People have no clue that the apostrophe is for either contraction or possession only. The words "their" and "there" are inter-mingled frequently. "Dependent" is often spelled "dependant", and so forth.

I also find it disconcerting to see that society and the educational system has now become a haven for English-as-a-second-langage toleration. You have to remember that I am speaking this as an Asian guy whose original language was Chinese (Cantonese). My parents spoke very broken English when we first came to Canada, and so anything I know in my writing or speaking of English was credited to both the schools to which I attended, and also, to my willingness to suck it up and learn English. Nowadays, there is so much accomodation for the speaking of other languages, that English is relegated to the backdrop of "as-needed" status. I completely reject this type of approach and in fact, when I am stopped on the street (which happens often) by a Chinese person who assumes I speak Chinese, I will not respond to them in Chinese, because I do not want to perpetuate that language crutch. I will speak to them in English and if they do not understand, well, that's too bad - they better learn English. The only exception to this are elderly people, for whom it may be too late to start learning a new language.

My son is starting to develop an interest in reading. While I can give him some kid novels to read, I am not certain that that is the right approach. Kids can and do get discouraged in reading a tome, where many words are beyond their comprehension. It would be, in my estimation, far better to simply transition them in the wonderful world of reading with the use of vocabulary-level-appropriate comic books. This will allow them to use their imagination, help them to visualize words and settings and prepare them for a future world of reading where they can enjoy the vast breadth of the English language.