Reading the Comics—A Comparative Study

Kid friendly? Constructions of comics literacy in the classroom

“…There has been some interesting research done on comics and education since the early 1940s (Hammond, 2009; Pantaleo, 2011; Witty, 1941a, 1941b; for a review, see, for example, Tilley and Weiner, 2017). For example, Hammond (2009) explores 12th-grade pupils’ reading responses to the graphic novel American Born Chinese , in which she demonstrates the affordances of picture-text combinations, and concludes, among other things, that ‘schools need to reflect the wide range of multimodal literacy practices in which students engage’ (p. 144).…”

Chapter II: Literature in School Instruction

“…Witty and Foster (88) compiled opposing points of view toward the comics and reported investigations showing the relationship of comic reading to various aspects of growth. Studies of children's interest in comics were made by Hill and Trent (27), Steere (81), Witty (86,87,89), and Young (92), who provided convincing evidence of the intensity of children's interests in the comics at different grade levels, identified favorite comic strips and comic books, and compared reading comics with other forms of amusement. Thorndike's analysis (85) of the content and difficulty of four comic books showed that a child "reading one comic book a month gets as much wordage as from a new fourth or fifth reader," and meets a vocabulary difficulty estimated at fifth or sixth grade.…”

The Normal Child and Adolescent

“…Brumbaugh and Wilson (3) compared the responses of 800 children in Grades III-VI with those of 100 graduate students on a questionnaire designed to secure opinions about the humor of movie and radio comedians, comic strips, stories, jokes, and pictures. Witty (33,34) studied the interests of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children in reading comics and found this to be the most popular of all reading activities. He did not discover evidence in justification for the apprehension which some people have felt concerning the harmful effects on children of reading comics.…”