Historically, comics were considered unhelpful recreational reading unfit for use in the classroom. That has changed. Graphic novels and comics are now understood to motivate young and reluctant readers. With detailed illustrations, the graphic novel format engages children and can be an effective medium for even the driest subject matter such as history and social studies.

Graphic Novels Stimulate the Mind

Graphic novels stimulate the mind in a way that plain text novels do not. Readers must interact with both the text and image.

Beginning readers can enjoy all the character emotions, setting, and action in the story through a single page of artwork. By comparison, it would take many pages of text to describe the same detail. Importantly, graphic novels also stimulate the minds of advanced readers. Students use higher-level critical thinking, inference and analytic skills to interpret and connect the illustrations to the limited text.