The Benefits of Comic Books to Children

The reason I started to do comics for kids, the real reason is because it worked for me. When my
children were young there is a point where they were in first grade and they were told by April
you have to know how to read and it worked for my daughter, but with my son, I mean same
environment, very bright kid. We had always read to him. Loved being read to, but the light bulb
that goes on that makes him a fluent reader. It just took much longer and since my husband was
reading American literature, I always spoke French to my kids, so I was reading in French.

We needed something that would sustain his interest and lo and behold it turns out that the
culture I come from, French comics, has marvelous offerings for young kids. Not just Tintin and
Asterix, but Boule et Bill, just hundreds of really great kid’s comics, so every night it was a
pleasure. And the reason why a kid who loves being read to will pay attention to the comics
better than he would to an illustrated text is that there is something for him or her to follow on
the page. There is a visual flow. There is a visual narrative that is implicitly understandable even
when you don’t understand the words and in a good comic, and they are hard to find, but good
comics have parallel intertwined narratives. It’s not just picture, repetition in the words. There is
a lot of information that is communicated visually and it’s a perfect point of entry. What we’ve
been saying is that comics are a gateway into literature.