Lesson 02  A New Way of Looking at Comics

영어I-Lesson2-읽기본문.hwp

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In Japan, they call them manga; in Latin America, historietas; in Italy, fumetti; in Brazil, historia em quadrinhos; and in the U.S. comics. But no matter what you call them, comics are a favorite source of reading pleasure in many parts of the world.

In case you are wondering how popular comics are, the bestselling comic title in the U.S. sells about 4.5 million copies a year. All of Mexico's comic titles together sell over seven million copies a week. But Japan is by far the leading publisher of comics in the world. Manga account for nearly 40 percent of all the books and magazines published in Japan each year. And few magazines of any kind in the world can match this number: Shonen Jump, the leading comic title, has a circulation of 6.5 million copies per week!

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Ever since comics first appeared, there have been people who have criticized them. In the 1940s and 50s, many people believed that comics were immoral and that they caused bad behavior among young people. Even today, many question whether young people should read them at all. They argue that reading comics encourages bad reading habits.

However, some educators nowadays see comics as a way to get teenagers to choose reading instead of watching television or playing video games. And because of the art, a number of educators have argued that comics are a great way to get children to think creatively.

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More recent research has suggested that the combination of visuals and text in comics may be one reason young people handle computers and related software so easily.

In many places, comics have been a convenient way to communicate social or political information. For example, in the 1990s, comics were used by the Brazilian health ministry to communicate information about AIDS.

In Japan, the Education Ministry calls comics "a part of Japan's national culture, recognized and highly regarded abroad." Comics are increasingly being used for educational purposes, and many publishers there see them as a useful way of teaching history and other subjects.

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Comic books are good for children's learning

Parents should not look down on comics as they are just as good for children as reading books, a new study claims.

Researchers have found that children can benefit from stories about Superman and even Dennis the Menace in the same way they can from reading books. According to them, reading any work successfully, including comics, requires more than just absorbing text.

Professor Carol Tilley of Illinois University said that comics are just as complex as other forms of reading, and children benefit from reading them as much as they do from reading other kinds of books. She said there was evidence that comics increased students' vocabulary and instilled a love of reading. Here is what she said in School Library Monthly journal.

"A lot of the criticisms of comics come from people who think that kids are just looking at pictures and not putting them together with the words. But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.

Although they've long accepted picture books as appropriate children's literature, many adults ― even teachers who willingly add comics to their collections ― quickly dismiss the usefulness of comics as texts for young readers.

Any book can be good and any book can be bad, to some extent. It's up to the reader's personality and ability. As a whole, comics are just another medium. And if you really consider how the pictures and words work together to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature."