Day 84

Draft of a essay about why comic books are good

When I was seven my day bought me an amazing spiderman comic at a gas station in Wisconsin to get me to shut up and I read and re-read that book for nearly a year because I couldn’t get another one. I became quite fascinated with the characters, the pictures, how everything was so stylistic and colorful that it jumped right off the page, and stuck itself in the back of my head. I would be thinking about it all day, what Spiderman could and could not do, how he could beat the bad guys, what and how he would handle a situation, what I would do if I was Spiderman. Now, notably, I was the weird kid in the classroom who liked to play with scissors, but I won’t get into that. I will say that my mind was invested in world of comics from a very young age from the sheer beauty that they had to me.

Now, before I continue how many of you read one of the classics in eighth grade and in High School, perhaps something like: Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, A bit of Mark Twain? I hope many, because all of them are worth while and fill us with a world that otherwise we would not have known. They were perfect, or getting close to perfect for our minds to understand. And then we get to college and we are told to read a few more things that we may or may not like, but yeah they are still interesting, and some of us may give up reading by then, because we have been told what is good and bad our entire lives and are sick of reading something, just because its “good.” My point being, many students today do not read for the simplicity of loving a story or character or world, they read because “It will help them in the long run”, or “it is necessary”. And I am of the belief that this not need to be true.

I think that comic books are the answer. And a few others would agree with me. Interested in reading is at a strange state in our country today and many like, Deborah Ford, have been fighting back with comics. “Many are uninterested”, she lists in an interview from the School Library Journal, “I want them to be engaged and interested.” She has found that boys who had no interest in reading before hand would go to comics and become more than willing to read other materials after talking about comics. And that girls as well found the immediacy of the story telling intriguiging. “There was no forcing them to read as homework,” she said,” They wanted to read it all in class.” And so they did, devoting a bit of time each day to reading each day and then went back to the academics.

There is a documentary out called Comic Book Literacy that takes a new direction on getting the youth interested in story and writing. It follows a group of individuals who go into classrooms and promote an artistic work environment that allows kids to design and draw their own comics, to their hearts desires. Through this they are taught creative thinking, “What are your character’s powers, how do they use them, where are they from, who are they trying to save, what are they fighting for?” All of these and more that help the child not only extend their creativity, but be problem solvers for their own worlds. And Not only that, they get to be the artist too and show exactly what it is that they see in their heads, they are not limited to a standardized form or a multiple choice answer, they are given free range. The exercise was see how much a child could come up and to promote not just literary skills, but to also their artistic prowess and community. At the end of the exercise, which ran about a week long, the comics were gathered together and much like 836 Valencia, they were bound into a giant comic collection that the kids could have forever. Cementing their status as creators.

All of this in general seems to point in the direction of a much easier to manage and interested class room setting that many of the schools today lack. As a child, there is no doubt that many have the want to create, but in the standard setting or scholastic study and rudimentary system or learn-test,learn-test, there is little room for a child to want anything more. With comics there is an explosion of artistic want and creativity that bleeds into every other activity tied to the school, with the expanded thought processes children are better able to tackle complex problems, with the ability to look at it from all angles, they are more easily ready to express themselves in English because they have a better understanding of what it is they need to say. And with work like this it can keep children interested in the arts instead of something else more, well, villainous in their growing years.

In finality I want to say that there is something to a comic book that really nothing else has, its tangible, something physical you hold in your hands, with artwork that is dynamic and shows a moving, colorful world that has the immediacy to draw in adult and child alike. In 23 to 48 pages of work a slew of teams come together for one goal, to inspire and tell a story, and I hope that message can be spread to younger generations.