The Washington Post ran an article yesterday called Schools Turn to Comics as Trial Balloons about a planned program in Maryland that will use comics to help encourage reading among students from kindergarten through high school.
It’s pretty lightweight although still informative. The article does gets points for mentioning Fredric Wertham at the very moment I was thinking “What would he say about all of this?” (Yes, I’ve read Seduction of the Innocent.)
It’s an encouraging step, I think, in the mainstream acceptance of comic books. I know things like this have been done other places. Maybe one day we can all see comic books as a respectable literary form.
I still think that day is a long way off, though.
