You have to love people’s reluctance to change their tune when it comes to comic books. I’m not saying that every comic book that comes out is great literature, or even more than a small percentage of them. However, the sort of willful ignorance as exhibited in the interviews in this article really gets under my freaking skin. I’d place any number of the usual suspects (From Hell, Watchmen, Maus, etc) plus a few newer titles up against the majority of books that kids and teens tend to read.

“The minute they come, they go out,” says “teen” librarian Andrea Cecchetto, at the Angus Glen Library in Markham. “Graphic novels have high visual impact and they promote the visual literacy today’s youth have grown up with.”

Books, yes, but are they literature?

Kids read all the time at their in school and on their computers, “but what I’m missing in kids is time spent in reflective, intensive text,” Booth says.

“I’m not sure a computer or a graphic novel does that for them in the same way that poetry or a novel or a play in the narrative form does, when they can interact with each other about what they’re reading. I want to see more kids making sense of deep text.”

Comics