Comics: The Universal Language
I founded Reading With Pictures because I learned to read from comics. More importantly, I learned to love reading from comics. Comics made reading easy, and comics made reading fun. That made learning anything both easy and fun. I was the child of a single mother who lived below the poverty line, but with the help of comics, I was reading at the college level in the 5th grade and was taking college courses by the 7th.
Hooked on comics worked for me, and I believe they can do the same for students everywhere. Now I travel the world as a “Comics Ambassador” for the US State Department, promoting the idea that comics belong in the classroom and that they’re a kind of universal visual language ideal for communicating complex ideas to a diverse audience.
But we should begin by defining our terms:
Definitions
Comics (noun)
1. A visual medium featuring pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.
Synonyms: sequential art, graphic novel, comic book, manga, manhwa, bande dessinées, graphic album, cartoons, diagrams, flowcharts, etc.
Cartooning (noun)
1. Abstract images that focus on essential meaning
Synonyms: iconography, caricature, rendering archetypes, etc.
The Evolution of Visual Communication
Of course, humans have been using pictures in sequence to communicate and educate for thousands of years. Before the advent of the printing press, intricate stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals used images in sequence to impart religious education. Hieroglyphics are images in sequence forming an entire written language.
And as far back as 40,000 years ago our ancestors painted images in sequence on the walls of caves to tell their stories. The comics medium is, in effect, the proto-language of the entire human race.
But any language — even a pictographic and ideographic language such as comics — requires a certain shared cultural context, or literacy, for mutual understanding to exist. Conveniently, the art of cartooning provides a storytelling methodology based entirely around iconography. Cartooning reduces the complexity — as well as the cultural specificity — of an image in order to transform it into something approaching an archetype. There will still inevitably be gaps in understanding, but cartooning can greatly minimize those gaps.
Which is why cartooned images are used to communicate complex concepts and intricate processes to a culturally and linguistically diverse audience in high-stakes, real world situations everyday.
Airports and airlines use cartoons to communicate simultaneously with thousands of travelers speaking hundreds of languages with varying levels of textual literacy. IKEA uses cartoons to sell ready-to-assemble furniture in 27 countries, while only printing one set of instructions. Cartooning has proven to be the single most effective method available for communicating complex ideas to the widest possible audience.
Engagement, Efficiency and Effectiveness
And this isn’t just my opinion. Research has shown that comics can convey information on a wide variety of topics in a manner that’s engaging, efficient and effective.
- Engagement: Comics require readers to actively create meaning from text and images. This leads to greater engagement between the reader and the content. Studies have shown that comics can be more effective than traditional textbooks at teaching content, while increasing engagement with the topic.
- Efficiency: The comic format conveys large amounts of information in a short time. Humans process images faster than text, and images can make complex ideas understandable very quickly.
- Effectiveness: Processing text and images together leads to better recall and transfer of learning. Known as the dual-coding theory of cognition, the experiments also indicate that pairing an image with text leads to increased memory retention for both
So What Does This All Mean?
Comics are a powerful tool for education, one we’ve left in the toolbox for far too long. For in the end, comics are just words and pictures. And when combined properly, they can form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Kids love to read comics. Let’s embrace that! We just need to make sure we give them comics worth reading.
That’s exactly what we at Reading With Pictures (alongside with our partners at PCI Media Impact, PVBLIC Foundation and The World’s Largest Lesson) are trying to do on a global scale with the Comics Uniting Nations project. We’re currently raising funds on Kickstarter to create a free, educational comics resource in 11 different languages. With your help, we will teach valuable, even life-saving lessons to millions of students around the world and inspire them to become heroes for change in their own communities.
Help us use comics to change the world, one reader at a time.
This piece was composed with the help of Tracy Edmunds.
