Comments on: It’s Things Like This Why I Love The Eff Out Of Maryland, My Home State

By: MyPOV

MyPOV — Wed, 09 May 2007 02:41:31 +0000

The concept of inference is found throughout every comic book. They make the concept accessible to a younger reader in an enjoyable form.

By: Duros62

Duros62 — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:20:43 +0000

I strongly recommend The Cartoon History of the Universe.

By: jerry

jerry — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:07:57 +0000

Kim Possible on TV and then Kim Possible “Animanga” hooked my first grader on reading. Within one year she moved from beginning reader to reading Harry Potter. No shit. And then I read Harry Potter because of her.

So Kim, Ron, Rufus, Wade, and even Drew Lipsky and She-Go “animanga” are ok with me.

By: RedBastardGod

RedBastardGod — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:48:29 +0000

I never liked comic books until I started reading Jack Chick tracts. They’re a hoot!

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:44:33 +0000

I agree with Rheinhard. My son started out with basketball magazines. Lately he has been enamored with copies of Illustrated Classics books I kept from when I was 10 years old. He read ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles’ already and he’s working his way through ‘Moby Dick’ now.

By: Rheinhard

Rheinhard — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:25:27 +0000

Frank, methinks you haven’t been paying attention to the state of modern graphic storytelling. Now Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to comics as everything else, but the good stuff is really really good.

Get the kids reading the *right* comics, and you can hook them on reading *real* books for life. Neil Gaiman’s famed “Sandman” is one of the most literate things I’ve ever read – references to everything from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, Norse Mythology to Dante’s Inferno (with John Constantine and the Martian Manhunter thrown in for good measure). Or take “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (forget the execrable movie) – it’ll get the kids checking out: HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jules Verne. Not too bad for a funny book!

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:35:43 +0000

I was always taught by my parents to read what I enjoyed. My daughter takes after me and will read lots of different things. If somebody hands me a book and says, “This is good”, I’ll read it no matter what it is.

But certain people, like my son, didn’t take to reading so fast. To encourage him to read, I started buying him basketball magazines the moment he fell in love with playing hoops. He started reading them from cover to cover.

I’ve never understood the mentality of people who believe that kids must read certain types of books or else it will all be for nothing. Nonsense. Sooner or later people get interested in something else and they want to read about that.

By: fd10801

fd10801 — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:22:29 +0000

When I was a kid, we had something called a Bookmobile, a “trailer” tricked out to be a small children’s library. The Librarian used to remark that she looked forward to seeing the three of us every week.

Of course, nowadays kids are treated like simpletons who can’t read “real words” so some schools are teaching kids fonetik inglish, and now here comes comic books!

Yay! Biff! Pow!

By: DN

DN — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:59:04 +0000

Sounds like a nice mom.
And a reminder to everyone, the 13th is her day.

By: WhiteWhale

WhiteWhale — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:54:47 +0000

Comic books opened my eyes to the joys of reading. I suggest to my class that they read comic books because I believe it fosters good reading habits and gives them something they can lose themselves in.