I’m not sure who it was- the British minister of education, perhaps, who announced that reluctant readers, most of whom are boys, should be encouraged to read Dickens rather than comic books. Now, I love Dickens and I even quite enjoyed him when I was in school. He was easier to understand than Faulkner, and I still like him. In fact, I’m thinking of re-reading David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist which I always sort of dismissed as being lightweight, maybe because of the movies.
His books are thick, meaty, perfect for curling up on a padded window-seat with a mug of cocoa or something stronger, and a couple of blankets and maybe a marmalade cat or two on a dreary winter’s day. But if a kid is not into reading, a book with that much prose (after all, Dickens’s books were serialized in magazines initially and he was paid by the word) is daunting, depressing and unexciting.
Plowing through an eight-hundred page book which is about people and their lives without the thrill of magic, prophecy and supernatural villains is a prospect to daunt most readers. And I think that even Rowling (she of the very long books) had to ease her readers into it. Dangle the enticing carrot of two or three moderately lengthy books in front of their noses before letting loose with a weighty tome. And by then of course we couldn’t have stopped reading even if we’d wanted to.
But unsurprisingly some kids won’t even pick up a book that weighs more than a math textbook despite guillotines and escaped convicts and crazy old ladies and all the other good stuff Dickens put into his tales.
I am a big fan of comics as I have stated here before. The hero of my books (Feltus Ovalton) is a big fan as well. He also loves Greek mythology. They are quite similar if you look closely. They tackle the big themes of the human experience just as Homer and Dickens and Faulkner and Rowling do, just in a different way.
And after all, don’t we start our kids off reading picture books. Don’t we all remember the vague sense of disappointment when we graduated to the teen section of the library and there were no more pictures? A good writer will always evoke clear images in our mind’s eye but sometimes it’s just nice to see it all in brazen color unfolding on the page in front of you. Comic books are visceral. They demand an instant response. The reader thrills to the action, the story, can’t wait to turn the page, their imagination is actively engaged. Are these bad things?
There is a new breed of comic books out there. Challenging, intelligent, artful, touching, beautiful, thought-provoking. And the genre is evolving continuously as more and more young readers gravitate towards them. Persepolis, Watchmen, Maus, Sandman, anything that Raw publishes.¦
If what we want is our kids to read, then maybe we shouldn’t be censoring what it is they pick up. Let’s let them find their own way. A book is a book is a book after all.
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