We do a lot of reading in the course of the day. We read books, newspapers, magazines, billboards, signs, notices, bills, websites, blogs, social media posts et cetera.

When we read all those things, consciously or unconsciously, we’re developing and using multiple literacy skills. Thanks to the internet and social media, we’re also increasingly relying on visual literacy and multimodal texts.

I’d say that developing multiliteracies is absolutely essential these days. Strong linguistic literacy is important, for sure, but developing multiliteracies is absolutely essential because most of the texts we read are multimodal.

In developing multiliteracies, I believe that comics are an excellent resource but they have long suffered a stigma that is, unfortunately, frequently reiterated by teachers, parents and librarians.

It usually goes like this…

A child is reading a comic and a well-meaning grown up says, ‘pick a real book. Do some reading.’ Or a child wants to borrow a graphic novel and a well meaning adult says, ‘leave that’, or ‘only one comic, I want you to read real books’.

Every time this happens enormous damage is done, with children being turned away from reading the books that pique their interest.

To me, it seems obvious, the child wanted to read, took initiative and picked up something that they were interested in — and you have a problem with that?!

I’ve never understood the logic in that.

A comic, a graphic novel, call it what you will, is a text and reading is reading. There is no harm in that, in fact, on the contrary, the harm is done when we turn children away from what they want to read.

Life long readers

As librarians, we want people who love reading, who enjoy it, who see it as part of their everyday routine and their identity. We want them to confidently say and think, ‘I’m a reader’. When they form that habit they develop into a life long reader.

I have observed something in a lifetime of comics reading and talking to comic book readers. This observation has been reinforced in six years talking to comic book creators and librarians deeply invested in comics.

To be clear, this is not a ground breaking observation but it’s worth saying. Comic book readers do it because they love it. They take great pleasure in reading comics and it’s something they seek despite adults around them telling them not to, despite often being seen as uncool or nerdy.

Similarly, as adults comics readers often hear a ‘but you still read comics?’ comment. Or librarians or educators working with comics often see a baffled expression with a variation of ‘you work with comics in the classroom?’ or ‘comics for adults?’

Yes, we go against the grain. And, what I’ve observed and has become clear to me is that comics readers are a lifelong readers. We crave them, we need them and we make sure we keep up with them and make time for reading. In fact, Stephen Krashen long ago showed evidence that comic book readers read as many books as regular readers (often more) and that there is a strong correlation between reading comics and life-long reading.

A comic for everyone

Comics come in all shapes, forms and genres. From slice of life stories, to dramas, comedies, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, crime, horror, memoir, graphic essays, graphic medicine, educational and so much more. Same as with fiction or films, there really is no limit to what kind of stories can be told in comics.

It is all too common for people to think of superheroes on hearing the word comics. However, the most popular and best-selling comics for young readers today are Raina Telgemeier’s humorous and heart-warming slice-of-life graphic novels, where she often shares some of her life struggles venturing into graphic medicine territory, and Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man, a humorous romp of a series created by a man with ADHD and dyslexia who struggled through schooling and was told by a teacher that he couldn’t spend his life making comics, as he ripped up little Dav’s notebook.

Looking at comics for adults, among the top most borrowed comics in my library last year, we had a the graphic novel adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir graphic novel. Lore Olympus, a modern adaptation of Persephone’s story has also been widely popular.

It’s undeniable that there’s a comic for everyone. Whatever genre you want. Whatever mood you feel.

Multiliteracy superpowers

We know that comics are attractive to children. They appeal to them because of their visuals. We also understand that comics are multimodal texts where the reader needs to use multiple literacies to make meaning. And there’s a wide appeal in this.

Comics are the perfect blend of the written word and visual narrative which makes them incredibly rich and complex texts.

In comics, words and images can juxtapose each other and they can support each other. Depending on the complexity of their interactions and decoding required, comics can be excellent for:

• developing readers: as the relationship between images and words support each other, helping the reader to infer the meaning and

• advanced readers: when the images and words juxtapose each other and can be narrating the story from different narrators, time and spaces.

But what do I really mean when I talk about multiliteracies?

Borrowing and adapting the New London Group’s multiliteracy model from 1996, I usually describe five broad literacies that readers have to use when reading comics. They are:

• linguistic (written language)

• visual (colours, shading, composition et cetera)

• gestural (body and facial language)

• spatial (panels, layout)

• symbolic (icons, balloons, visual representations and emanata).

In order to make meaning, the reader has to look at all of these elements, decode and interpret them, and then combine them all to make meaning.

By combining them all, the reader is working much harder than when reading a book or watching a movie. It seems to me that there’s no other art that gives so much and, yet, also demands so much of the reader.

Books give detailed descriptions in words that the readers has to visualise in their mind. There are no visuals provided. Movies, offer visuals and sound. The images and sounds are commonly hyperrealistic and little is left to the imagination.

In contrast, comics provide a mix of words and visuals. The visuals are representations drawn by an artist but they’re not realistic, fully-formed images, which means that the reader will have to finish that image in their head, turning those lines and ink into coherent sequential images. This is a complex task because often the visuals act as metaphors or juxtapose the written word, forcing the reader to decode and establish their relationships.

They also offer a rich visual narrative with a multitude of tools for the artist to create meaning, for instance the shape of the panels, the colouring, the lines, the number of panels on the page, the shape of the speech balloons and emanata. They’re all elements the reader decodes to infer meaning.

In addition to this, the page layout, the pace of panels and the actions and movement that happen in between panels will have to all be put together and filled in by the reader.

Best of all, as there so many elements to decode and put together, the reader is in total control of the reading pace, including:

• the ability to look at more than one panel at once

• to go back and forth between panels and pages

• to focus on one panel or detail, or even zoom out and focus on the whole page and all the panels at the same time.

I believe it’s this combination of all the elements (the multiple literacies) and the total control of the reading (including pacing, zooming in and out and the ability to go back and forth) that sets the reader’s brain on fire. All those neurons putting all that information together, all those connections happening.

This may explain why studies have shown that comics readers benefit from greater information retention and why graphic novels are increasingly being used in classrooms, including in tertiary education.

In addition to all this, comics model some excellent literacy practices for readers such as precise, concise and rich language. Comics don’t typically have long prose paragraphs (it wouldn’t be a comic) and the constraints of the page demand that narration and dialogue are kept to a minimum. No word can be wasted, which forces the writer to be incredibly precise with the written word. This models excellent writing and offers rich vocabulary because every word matters.

The future of comics

There are some great reasons for reading comics and graphic novels and they’re incredibly popular right now. Young readers are devouring Dav Pilkey, Raina Telgemeier and most of the Scholastic graphic novels. Manga (manwha and manhua too) is incredibly popular with young adult and adult readers. Webtoons style comics, created to be read on mobile devices also have incredibly followings around the world and are increasingly being printed and published as graphic novels. Hollywood and TV studios are adapting an enormous number of comics for the screen (and I’m not just talking about superhero comics).

But best of all, in my opinion, some of the most amazing, personal, independent and diverse titles being published right now are coming out as graphic novels. Non fiction titles like Sarah Firth’s Eventually Everything Connects, Eight Essays on Uncertainty for adult readers, or the recently published Oh Brother by Georgina Chadderton, a middle grade book recounting the sometimes hilarious and sometimes difficult parts of growing up alongside her non-verbal, autistic brother. These are just two examples by Australian creators, who have published non-fiction books that also fall in the graphic medicine category. But there are so many more!

At schools, comics are an excellent resource. They engage struggling readers with a visual allure. They encourage reading because they don’t seem as daunting as a whole book filled with words. Comics help early readers to decode text with visual elements providing clues to support the reader. More importantly, because this is often forgotten, comics extend the reading for advanced readers with the interaction of the written and visual narratives adding complex layers of meaning.

It’s, also, great to see that school curriculums are placing increasing emphasis on visual literacy, and rightly so, as most of the texts we consume these days are multimodal with high visual elements.

There is no doubt in my mind that the old prejudices against comics must be cast into the dustbin of history by librarians, teachers and parents.

With the great wealth of graphic novels currently being published and the excellent quality of Australian graphic novels being produced these days, with incredibly interesting emerging creators surfacing across all of Australia, it is my hope that libraries invest in their graphic novel collections for everyone, children, young adults and adults.

In 1967, while visiting a bookstore in Paris, Salvador Dali said that comics would be the culture of 3794. He was wrong in only one aspect. We don't have to wait that long. the time for comics is now.

_{A version of this article originally appeared on SCIS’ Connections Magazine, Issue 115, Term 4 2020. This is an updated, extended, and probably ramblier, version of it.}

Some recommended further reading:

A Guide to Using Graphic Novels With Children and Teens, 2025, Scholastic.

Darbyshire, Shauna (2019), The time for comics is NOW: Why comics are a powerful format in our age of distraction, Perspectives on Reading.

Ferlazzo, Larry (2026), How Graphic Novels Can Bring Joy to Reading Instruction, Education Week.

Jaffe, Meryl PhD. (2014), Raising a Reader: How Comics and Graphic Novels Can Help Your Kids Love to Read! Comic Book Legal Defence Fund.

Kullberg, Adam (2018), How using comics can improve your child’s reading skills. Pop Culture Classroom.

KICKING AROUND THE NET

• The value of libraries in our community is unmeasurable. It’s in the lives it changes, in the relationships and connections it builds, in the conversations we have, the support we lend. This article on The Conversation by Roanna Gonsalves is a great example of that. But, of course, in the society we live in nowawadays everything has to be measured in dollars. So for the bean counters out there, ABC News has published an article discussing the State Library of NSW’s report on the value of libraries which found that “the State Library was worth $467 million and public libraries were worth $735 million in community value per year, adding up to $1.13 billion in community benefits per year.” If you want more hard data, you can find the whole article here.

• ALIA, ACSL and AMLA recently released a joint statement on school libraries and media literacy. This is a really important statement. Media literacy in schools is an absolute essential and it should be a core part of the curriculum. This must include, qualified librarians at school libraries.

• The ABC organised a Media Literacy Summit and published recordings of the speeches and panels here. Additionally, the ABC has released a three episode media literacy documentary series, The Matter of Facts, which is well worth a watch.

• The Australian government was pretty quick to claim the social media ban as a victory but before they completed the victory lap the picture that has emerged is a lot more complicated, nuanced and troublesome. Two articles on The Conversation give two perspectives. One, by Susan Sawyer and Sylvia Lin, focuses on the early wins and the more complicated picture emerging, while the second article by Lisa Given, explores a new report that exposes how the social media giants are not complying with the social media ban.

• The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association has been publishing a series of articles focusing on different lies that book banners peddle about libraries and librarians. The first one focused on the lie of libraries indoctrinating by providing books with viewpoints some people disagree with. The second post focused on the lie that libraries have pornographic materials available for children. The third and most recent post focuses on the lie that libraries hold illegal books in their collections. Needless to say, these posts explore the issue in the United States. The Australian context and law are different. But it’s still worth reading the series as those who seek book bans often use the same arguments and libraries holds similar values and principles.

• In AI news, it’s interesting to see that Wikipedia has now banned AI generated content on its website. This makes Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that teachers and lecturers always said was not reliable, arguably, more reliable than Chat GPT and all other LLM AI sources that Universities seem to be embracing so rapidly or signing incredibly lucrative contracts with. Let’s remember, that Open AI admitted that even with all correct data, Chat GPT would often give incorrect answers and made up answers.

• And it’s great to see that there’s a movement against AI use, particularly in arts and culture, with a movement towards creating AI-free certification systems. Of course, there are already problems and we will see more issues come to the surface because it’s not easy to assess with absolute certainty if something has been created by AI, with some modest use of AI, or no AI at all. Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl was pulled out by Hachette because of the growing wave of comments around the book and how it was written using AI. We’ve also seen an article recently pulled out from Crikey because it was written with AI, but there will be writers who will be accused of using AI, who have not used it. It will happen. And there will be no way to demonstrate that they did not use AI. This is going be a big problem.

• And two documentaries about AI have come out recently. Decca Muldowney and Emily Bender of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 and last year’s excellent The AI Con book, have some thoughts on these two documentaries and which one they feel explores the issues around AI more in depth and with a sharper, more critical eye.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Eduardo Chillida was an extraordinary and gifted sculptor (though, I have to admit that I’ve always favoured the boundless genius of Jorge Oteiza, another extraordinary sculptor working in a similar style). Haizearen Orrazia (The Comb of the Wind) is a large sculpture built into the rocks at sea in one of the corners of the beautiful bay of Donostia (known internationally by it’s Spanish name San Sebastian).

The sculpture is completed by another comb situated to the left, which is ashore and coming out of hte mountain. The sculpture is further enhanced by the blowholes in the viewing area. When waves enter and hit the wall underneath the viewing area wind (and sometimes water) blows out of the holes.

This is one of my favourite places to sit down and lose myself in the wind, the waves and the sea.