Do Comics and Graphic Novels Really Count as Reading?
Yes: comic books use rarer words than most children’s books and demand real inference skills. Treating them as lesser reading tends to backfire.
Someone in the house is stretched out with a graphic novel, laughing at a panel, flipping back a page to check a detail. Someone else, watching from the doorway, wonders whether this counts as the reading that was supposed to happen this evening instead of the assigned chapter book. It counts. The pictures are not the story doing the reader’s work for them. If anything, the words on those pages are working harder than most people assume.
The words are not simpler, they are often rarer
Researchers Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich, writing in the American Federation of Teachers’ journal American Educator, laid out data originally gathered by Dolores Hayes and Margaret Ahrens comparing the vocabulary used across different kinds of texts. By their count, comic books contain about 53.5 rare words per thousand, words outside the everyday vocabulary of a typical nine to twelve year old, compared with about 30.9 rare words per thousand in children’s books, and this puts comics closer to adult books, at 52.7, than to the material usually handed to a young reader as a ’proper’ book. The panels and speech bubbles are not lowering the bar. In terms of the words a reader actually meets on the page, comics regularly clear it by more than most people expect.
Reading a comic asks the brain to do something a plain page does not
A page of prose asks a reader to build a picture from words alone. A comic panel gives you the picture, then asks something else of you: work out what happened in the white space between one panel and the next, where nothing is drawn and nothing is written, and the reader has to supply the missing action. Multiply that across a chapter and a reader has done a great deal of inferring, matching pictures to captions, and following a plot that is only ever half spelled out. That is not a shortcut around comprehension. It is a specific kind of comprehension, exercised on every page.
A comic does not do the thinking for you. It simply asks you to think in two channels instead of one.
Where the evidence on engagement gets interesting
A study published by the Young Adult Library Services Association followed four struggling eighth grade boys through a twelve week graphic novel book club, where they chose freely from more than ninety titles. Over two months, the group read 63 graphic novels between them, a volume that would be remarkable for readers who had previously described themselves as not really readers at all. Their scores on how much they valued reading rose measurably over the course of the study. Asked directly whether they felt like good readers when reading graphic novels, every one of the four said yes, without qualification. One of them put his finger on exactly why the pictures helped: when the text got difficult, the image gave him something to hold onto while he worked out what it meant. By the end of the study, one participant had asked to join a different book club entirely, this time built around prose fiction, a detail the researchers noted as evidence that the graphic novels had done their work as a bridge rather than a dead end.
The quickest way to lose a reader is to sneer at what they are reading
Tell a child that comics are a lesser kind of reading, something to grow out of on the way to the real books, and the more likely outcome is not that they reach for the real books sooner. It is that they conclude reading itself is an activity where their own taste keeps getting marked wrong, and many simply stop raising their hand. Genre snobbery, aimed at manga, graphic novels, or any format an adult privately considers beneath a serious reader, tends to produce fewer readers of everything, not more readers of the classics.
What tends to work instead is treating the graphic novel as a full and legitimate front door, one that plenty of readers walk straight through and out the other side. A reader who finishes a stack of graphic memoirs or manga volumes with real pleasure is a reader who has practiced finishing books, following plots, caring what happens next, and forming opinions about characters. Those are exactly the muscles a heavier novel later asks a reader to use. Nobody arrives at a five hundred page book without having first finished a shorter one.
So the next time a comic gets set down with a satisfied sigh, the honest response is not to ask when the ’real’ reading will start. It already did.