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Comics can provide quite a learning experience

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 04/15/2008 - 16:11

My column about the "Classics Illustrated" revival prompted the following heartwarming letter:Dear Cap: I am a retired teacher/media specialist who spent 27 years working in the Media Center of the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville (Ill.) ... mostly during the '70s and '80s. We bought multiple copies of "Classics Illustrated" for our deaf children and their teachers to use. We always had them in the library/media center, and often junior-high or high-school English teachers would keep them in their classrooms. We had to laminate and bind the issues so that they could survive the heavy use. When teachers used a "Classics Illustrated" story in class, we would create slide shows from some of the essential illustrations so that the teachers could lecture and the students could follow along. Of course the story would be told in sign language by the teacher, but the English words were in the books and under the slide illustrations.As you can imagine, I personally bought an entire set of every "Classics" comic available and had them at home for my own children to read. It was money well spent. Kids who read a "Classics" comic can enter the task of reading the original with the feeling that this is interesting, and not too difficult to get through. They like discovering that there is more to it than they imagined.More recently, I found myself reading one of the new graphic novels for adults, and my enthusiasm for this kind of literature took another bound. (The novel was on the topic of breast cancer.) If illustrated classics helped deaf kids understand, I thought, the new graphic novels must also be helpful for adults with English as a second language. If I were still in the education business, I would be begging for catalogs from Papercutz. -- Carole Hack, Jacksonville, Ill.Carole, I thought your testimony and ideas deserved sharing. Many educators and librarians are just now discovering what you figured out long ago -- comics can be an enormously powerful teaching tool that makes learning fun.And the venerable "Classics Illustrated" has indeed been revived in boffo fashion, prompting an effusive review in the March 31 "Newsweek." The next entry, "Tales from the Brothers Grimm," is due in May.But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that two other publishers have jumped into the classics pool.Marvel Comics is adapting great literary works into miniseries, then collecting them in hardbacks and trade paperbacks. Currently "The Jungle Book," "Last of the Mohicans," "Treasure Island" and "Man in the Iron Mask" have made it to the bookshelf, while "Picture of Dorian Gray," "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick" are in the miniseries stage, with more to come.Most of these "Marvel Illustrated" books are adapted by legendary writer/editor Roy Thomas, affectionately called "the Super-Adaptoid" in the 1970s and '80s for his skill in bringing Robert E. Howard's work (Conan, Kull, Red Sonja) to comic books. And as you'd expect from North America's largest comics publisher, the artwork -- by the likes of Miguel Sepulveda, Mario Gully and Hugo Petrus -- is top of the line. This is sure-footed work by some of the best in the business.Meanwhile, Eureka Productions has published 15 black-and-white anthologies in the "Graphic Classics" series of trade paperbacks, adapting the works of various authors (Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, etc.) and genres (horror, adventure, etc.). The latest, "Fantasy Classics," came out in March, and like the others, it's a high-quality, beautifully crafted love letter to literary favorites."Fantasy" includes adaptations of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," L. Frank Baum's "The Glass Dog" and poems by Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith. Each is illustrated in a different style by a different artist.Some might be given pause by the lack of color in "Graphics Classics," but I think there's a decent trade-off, in that B&W artwork is often more crisp and legible than fully rendered color. Plus, it allows "Graphics Classics" to be considerably cheaper than "Classics Illustrated Deluxe" or "Marvel Illustrated."But I can genuinely recommend all three. Somewhere, publisher Albert Kanter, who created the original "Classics Illustrated" in 1941, is smiling.(Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics(at)aol.com or visit www.captaincomics.us.)