Comics Books and Education

Comic books, as a medium, still have a lot of potential that goes relatively untapped. They’re a fusion of word and image, allowing juxtapositions that you can’t readily achieve with simply text or moving pictures.

As you might have guessed from the title, one of those areas is education. There’s a comic book I really, really enjoy called Action Philosophers, written by Fred Van Lente and illustrated by Ryan Dunlavey. Each issue takes a handful of philosophers and lays out the history and basic principles

I like philosophy, although it wasn’t something I studied in college, since there was drinking to be done. But speaking as someone who reads this kind of stuff for fun, philosophy can be sufficiently dry as to make the Sahara look like an ocean.

Van Lente and Dunlavey take the tack of illustrating the points that philosophers were making in insightful and, usually, funny ways. Take Plato, for example. Plato means broad shouldered, and Plato himself was a professional wrestler.

No, really.

So for the bit about Plato, he’s drawn as a hulking masked wrestler who shouts “Plato smash!”

This is the sort of thing that really creates a memorable mental picture, which gives you an anchor to attach what would otherwise be abstract knowledge. The most recent issue had a story called “You’re a good man, John Stuart Mill” which cats Mill as Charlie Brown to explain his life and views.

This all goes a long way to making philosophy a lot more palatable. The other main benefit of this is that a lot of ideas are more easily illustrated as a visual than defined in words. Philosophers have a tendency to go on and on and on and on and, well you get the idea, in order to eliminate any ambiguity about what it is they’re trying to say. Things that can be summed up, at least, in a single picture.

A section on Kabblah, for example, uses an illustration of a factory to er, illustrate the nature of the universe. In cases like this, a picture is worth a thousand words and then some.

Now, for reasons of space, Action Philosophers simply offers a basic introduction to the concepts, but it offers them in a way that will give the reader a lot more retention than an introductory textbook, as well as providing something to visualize when and if they choose to read more about the topic.

And this is something that can’t be readily simulated by film, because film sets the pace. You get the information as the filmmakers dole it out, with focus where they aim it. With comics your pace is self directed, and you have the ability to go back and forth as you see fit.

There are quite a lot of areas that would benefit from increasing the interplay between text and image. History is an obvious one, since history as most people learn is simply stories. But there’s also a lot of untapped potential for using it to explain math and even psychology and sociology.

Of course, there’s a lot of prejudices that need to be overcome regarding comics before it can be a viable learning tool in formal education, but there’s nothing stopping those of us who love comics from getting a little book learning with our pretty pitchers.