Literacy and the Graphic Novel

Definition

Since comics hit the newsstands at the beginning of the twentieth century, they have been immensely popular, especially with juveniles, preteens, and young adults. This popularity sparked a debate over how reading comics affects literacy in general. Throughout history, comics have been seen as distractions from “real” reading and learning. However, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many teachers and librarians saw educational promise in comics as a new way to enrich student literacy.

Introduction

Comic book and comic strip mediums were immediately popular with children and adults. The full-color strips of the early twentieth centurysuch as Richard F. Outcault's Yellow Kid or Hogan's Alleywere born of fierce competition among newspapers seeking to attract wider audiences. The early strips acted as lures for those with limited English literacy, which was a significant population at the time. However, the strips soon found broad appeal across social classes, diverse cultures, and gender lines and became permanent and popular fixtures in newspapers.

Despite the widespread success of comics, the new art form's contentious history was vividly illustrated from the start. In a time when one-tenth of the population was illiterate, comics could connect and communicate without prejudice. However, by providing accessibility, comics also provoked great dreadeople wondered how the art form would affect literacy and how the captivating, full-color stories would affect a person's ability to read pictureless text. For most of their popular history, comics were seen as distractions that dulled the wits of readers, and their popularity pointed toward widespread illiteracy.

With the rise of graphic novels since the 1980s, however, an expanding group of parents, tutors, teachers, professors, and librarians have questioned the widely accepted view of comics and have seen comics as a boon to reading. While graphic novels have received literary praise and considerable positive attention from literacy and education experts, they are still plagued by the same doubts and fears that met The Yellow Kid. As graphic novels move from the fringe into libraries and classrooms, the debate about whether comics present peril or promise for reading still rages.

Who Reads Graphic Novels?

In the United States, comic books and graphic novels are still widely perceived as most appropriate for preteen and young adult boys. This is not because the graphic novel form is inherently more appealing to this gender and age group. Instead, the American public's narrow perception of the intended audience of graphic novels owes itself mainly to the work of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and his 1954 anti-comics manifesto, Seduction of the Innocent.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wertham led a charge against comics with mature themes and images, a public assault that ended in a hearing before the Senate and, subsequently, the 1954 creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which censored comic books. Only mainstream comic books could be published with the approval of the CCA. As a result of the CCA, American comic books became juvenile. For decades, the primary comic readers were juvenile, preteen, and young-adult boys and men, audience publishers and distributors focused on vigorously.

Since the late 1980s, the graphic novel readership has broadened from an audience of young men to a diverse and mainstream audience. While young men are still the dominant readers of comic books, young women have become an essential segment of the readership. Mangaan enormous segment of the American comics marketdraws far more female than male readers.

American publishers such as DC Comics have responded to this trend by distributing more content for young women. More broadly, mainstream book publishers such as Random House and Norton publish and promote graphic novels, and bookstores have sections devoted to them. Graphic novels can be found and read by anyone.

Can Graphic Novels Cause Illiteracy?

Since their introduction in Sunday newspapers, comics have been accused of making readersespecially childrenilliterate. This criticism was especially harsh as comic books became a primary form of entertainment for children in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Beyond causing "juvenile delinquency," Wertham asserted that comic books were a primary cause of the increasing number of children who had reading troubles.

Comic strips and comic books are considered inferior reading material because of their form and content. First, the form allows readers to use visual cues to make sense of the text. Thus, readers can "read" a comic without understanding words. It has been argued that this form, by its nature, diminishes readers' abilities to read print text. Second, the content is perceived as juvenile and thus, even when understood, is considered to provide the reading equivalent of junk food calories.

Like comic strips and comic books, graphic novels are considered inferior reading materials and are believed to contribute to reading disabilities. In 2010, Ben Bova, a prolific science-fiction writer, argued that graphic novels are inherently shallow and cannot explore the depth of thought that a print novel can. In essence, he argued that the form limits the quality of the content. To Bova, graphic novels represent part of a march toward an increasingly illiterate society—the same claim made by newspaper readers one hundred years before and by Wertham sixty years earlier.

The Gateway Drugto Reading

While Wertham claimed comics were a gateway to illiteracy, since the 1990s, an expanding group of librarians, reading scholars, and English instructors have described comics as leading students toward reading rather than from it. Many librarians and teachers believe graphic novels are a means of engaging reluctant or resistant readers.

In the early 1990s, graphic novels did not have their own category in libraries or collection areas. As graphic novels and manga have gained legitimacy and popularity, librarians have taken notice and started making a home for them on the shelves. Librarians have noted that when available, graphic novels circulate in high numbers. Just as publishers used comic strips to attract a broader audience to their newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century, librarians have used graphic novels to attract juveniles, preteens, and young adults to the library.

Some have argued that graphic novels lure a broader audience to the library, especially those who otherwise would avoid it. Once in the library, these readers become more comfortable there and ultimately come to use the library for noncomic purposes such as research and finding print books to read. In this way, graphic novels act as a gateway to the library, a means to engage the patron, and a way to encourage them to develop further literacy practices.

Educators, especially English teachers, see graphic novels as a means to lure reluctant readers into print books. They argue that young adult readers can more easily relate to the themes in young adult graphic novels, and in a visual-oriented culture, the images in graphic novels can act as a bridge to the world of books. They hope that by reaching out to their student's interests and their visual way of learning and making reading "fun," they can encourage students to connect with books and become more motivated to read in general.

Classrooms Illustrated

In Wertham's day, comic books were something to be smuggled into classrooms inside "real" books. In later decades, they have increasingly become textbooks; graphic novels, manga, and comics in general have entered classrooms at all levels, from kindergarten through college. Educational publishers have responded to this trend, publishing textbooks in "graphic novel" formats and including excerpts of graphic novels in print literature anthologies.

Beyond motivating students, many educators use graphic novels because they find them incredibly accessible for students learning to read in English or struggling with learning or reading disabilities. For example, teachers provide graphic novel adaptations of famous texts—such as the Classics Illustrated series, which provides illustrated versions of William Shakespeare's plays and Charles Dickens's novels, among others. The students may read the graphic novel version instead of the print text or read it in accompaniment with the text as support. In either case, graphic novels provide a bridge to more challenging print-based reading, and students will ultimately leave the pictures behind as they advance in skill.

Other educators argue that reading comics is not a bridge to superior print literacy but an end in itself. The theory of New Literacy claims that in a multimedia world, literacy involves the ability to read print and words and images together. Thus, graphic novels provide an ideal medium for teaching students to read and think critically in the digital era, in which most of the texts they encounter daily will be closer to comics than print text.

The Graphic Novel as Literature

As graphic novels have gained more significant literary acclaim, they have increasingly become part of the curriculum in general high school and middle school education. Educators treat graphic texts such as Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative Maus (1986, 1991) as works of literature to be studied, with literary devices to be explored and significance to be explained in academic essays and similar assignments.

Graphic novels are also finding a place in higher education. Anthologies of literature and first-year composition readers include graphic literature, and professors assign graphic novels such as Maus in English and other humanities courses. An increasing number of literature courses at the community college and university levels are focused solely on graphic novels. Further, scholars present and publish articles on graphic novels, and there is a small body of book-length scholarly criticism.

Comics are not part of the mainstream educational experience for most students or a significant part of teacher education. Some educators will not use graphic novels in the classroom because they believe they are not "real literature" and, as such, represent a dilution of the curriculum. Further, research into comics and literacy is still in its infancy, with little knowledge to definitively settle the debate and demonstrate conclusively the value comics have for education.

Impact

The early twenty-first century was a pivotal moment in the history of comics, a popular, though often maligned, literary form. Graphic novels have increased comics' visibility, bringing more robust sales and a broader, more diverse audience to the art form. Ironically, it is the success of graphic novels that have, in part, undermined their legitimacy: The explosion of big-budget Hollywood films based on comics—such as Iron Man (2008) and Thor (2011)—appears to reinforce the prejudice that comics are purely popular culture, more entertaining, action-packed distractions than human expressions worth study, analysis, and serious consideration. Thus, public opinion generally believes that graphic novels and comics are juvenile entertainment, as they were considered to be at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, graphic novels have found their way into more and more libraries and classrooms, an idea all but unthinkable in the days of Yellow Kid.

As Wertham's long shadow fades, graphic novels may play a significant role in twenty-first-century American education and raise a generation of students who see comics not as a debased form of reading but as a legitimate art form worthy of appreciation. Ultimately, given comics' tumultuous history with literacy and how prone education is to fads, it is still being determined what impact schools will have on graphic novels, what impact graphic novels will have on schools, and how both will affect the face of literacy.

By the 2020s, the pendulum had swung. Research further deepend the hypothesis that graphic novels were effective at imparting learning and student engagement. An environment developed where literary classics from all eras and genres were adapted into graphic novels. Even religious texts, such as the Bible, became sought after in illustrated forms. Highly regarded universities initiated academic programs where courses that studied graphic novel development counted toward earning a degree. This was similar to other disciplines, such as motion pictures and photography. Such developments helped overcome obsolete viewpoints that held graphic novels in low regard and as unserious literary formats.

Bibliography

Cary, Stephen. Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom. Portsmouth, Heinemann, 2004.

"Comic and Graphic Novels." UCLA Library, 2024, guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=1037230&p=8081558. Accessed 18 July 2024.

Hadju, David. The Ten Cent Plague: Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

"Introduction: Teaching with Comics: Empirical, Analytical, and Professional Experiences." SpringerLink, 4 Sept. 2022, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-05194-4‗1 Accessed 18 July 2024.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Da Capo Press, 2007.