Why comics matter for young readers

Published on: 02 December 2024

Kitty Quest author Phil Corbett shares why comics are so valuable for children.

Writing and illustration are vastly different things, but they're kind of the same. They sit happily together in both factual and fictional books, nudging closer in children's books. But they cuddle up in an even tighter embrace when it comes to comic books.

The graphic novel is a nebulous thing. Where would you even start singing their praises and citing their importance? As a comic creator, I can only give you my take on how I see them.

The power of visual storytelling

As a child I loved the Rupert the Bear books. Rupert was a character created by husband and wife team Herbert and Mary Tourtel back in 1920 and is still going strong in the Daily Express to this day.

Every page of the Rupert annual had four sequential illustrations telling the tale with a two-line rhyming couplet under each one giving the gist of the story. You could read a more in-depth version of the story in the paragraphs beneath the panels – something I never did!

Obviously, I'm not extrapolating my personal language acquisition to be the same for all young readers. But for me, it was a short jump from following sequential images with a short verse beneath them, to embracing comics where all traces of narrative prose are dropped in favour of telling the story with just images and dialogue.

Could this be the point that that a comic becomes less of a picture book and more of an illustrated play script?

Bringing the story to life

If I had to come down on one side, I'd say the literary endeavour the graphic novel or comic resembles the most is the play or film script.

But it goes one step better; it actually performs the script as you read it. Not only that, but it shows the reader the characters and costumes, creates the sets, carries out the set direction, and art directs the whole experience.

All that's stopping a comic from being a 'cartoon' is a lack of animation. But animation is a costly business. It requires a lot of people and a lot of resources to make a cartoon.

Comic book creators have the advantage of being able to outsource all that expensive, manually intensive 'animation' work to the imagination of the reader. And that's where the magic truly works, in the visual mind of the reader.

Encouraging creativity

Comics are a great medium for young creators to use, too. Kids (I don't think you'd ever use 'children' to refer to the young in a comic context - comics are far too cool for that!) can get across the important points of their story, show the look of the characters, and define them through dialogue without the need for paragraphs of text explaining what's going on.

This immediacy of narrative creation is a definite bonus. The story needs only to be as complicated as they want it to be, and a fully-fledged scene or narrative can be made pretty quickly.

Short stories - and huge epics

As a reader, I love the fact that you can take in a whole story in as little as one sitting. It's a delight to see Snoopy wax lyrical over his love for root beer in three panels.

Or for something longer you can travel from the woods of ancient Gaul to the Colosseum in Rome in a 50-page Asterix saga.

And then you have the option of following hyper-imaginative Japanese manga institutions with adventures that continue over hundreds of books and that have been going for decades, such as One Piece by Eiichiro Oda.

One Piece fun fact: with more than 523 million copies in circulation worldwide, it's both the bestselling manga in history and the bestselling comic series ever printed in volume. Which makes Oda one of the bestselling fiction authors ever.

While kids' comic books in the UK may not have the cultural adoration, variety of style, and acceptance of tackling deeper, more emotional subjects as those in the Japanese and French markets, we are getting there. It's lovely seeing home-grown talent reach dizzying success, with some of them even going on to be picked up by and made into animated or even live action shows – the highest accolade!

Now wasn't that a point I made earlier? Something about the link between comics and cartoons. Or was it comics and plays? Who cares! Just get out there and enjoy comic books!

Comics I recommend:

• Peanuts by Charles Schultz
• Asterix by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Jeant-Yves Ferri, Fabcaro & Didier Conrad.
• One Piece by Eiichiro Oda

Kitty Quest: Phantom Frenzy, published by Simon & Schuster, is out now.