They’re brash, bold, and immediately compelling. Their high picture-to-text ratio and action-packed pages make comic books appealing to kids and emerging readers — and worrisome to parents.

When my kids were little, I always said I wouldn’t buy them comic books, admits Miriam, a mother with several middle-grade children. But then my kids started reading and they just loved comic books. They’re big readers and good students, baruch Hashem, and while I wish they’d read more traditional books than comics, this just wasn’t a hill I wanted to die on. And they’re spending hours reading and rereading these books, which has to count for something, I think.

Miriam’s concerns are fairly typical. Given their druthers, most parents would prefer to see their children choosing to curl up with traditional children’s books, with vocabulary and page counts sure to boost their reading skill and imaginations. After all, does it even count as reading when there are just so many pictures?

Yet like Miriam’s kids, many children seem to enjoy the ease and entertainment inherent in graphic novels. Are parents and educators justified in their typical reluctance to encourage this form of reading? Or have comic books been unfairly maligned?

A Bad Beginning OR The C-Word

Graphic novels may be enjoying a recent surge in popularity, but comics’ bad rap is nothing new. In a 2016 TED talk, cartoonist and former educator Gene Luen Yang notes that American educators have historically been so reluctant to use comic books in their classrooms. Yang posits that the reasons for this fear can be traced to a 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, written by child psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who noted that most of the juvenile delinquents he worked with read comic books. (Yang wryly notes that in 1954, most kids read comic books.) Despite a two-month long series of Senate hearings that failed to establish a link between juvenile delinquency and comic books, the negative stereotype took root and flourished. Comic books were accused of everything from encouraging violence to dumbing down America.

Since the 1980s, comic books have been inching their way back into favor with some arguing that the books are not only benign, but a boon. Educators have kept their eyes on the genre ever since research has shown that kids who start reading comics may soon turn their attention span to longer books, Yang notes, citing a study that found that the mere presence of graphic novels in the library increased usage by about 80 percent and increased the circulation of noncomics material by about 30 percent.

Yang argues that comic books really do belong in every educator’s toolkit. He views graphic novels as the perfect addition to a 21st-century classroom.

“Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they’re used to taking in information that way,” he explains. “But unlike other visual narratives, like film or television or animation or video, comics are what I call permanent. In a comic, past, present and future all sit side by side on the same page. This means that the rate of information flow is firmly in the hands of the reader. [Comics] teach visually, they give our students that remote control. The educational potential is there, just waiting to be tapped by creative people like you.”

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 616)