EDUCATIONAL COMICS 161
Th ese include local and global history comics, “true fact” comics, illustrated adaptations
of novels and plays, instructional comics, propaganda and psychological warfare comics,
religious education and proselytizing comics, advertising and industrial public relations
comics, political campaign comics, health education comics, biography and autobiog-
raphy comics, development education comics, educational fotonovelas, benefi t/cause
comics, comics-illustrated brochures, cartoon-illustrated nonfi ction picture books,
infotainment, and classroom-based edutainment. “Educational comics” include some
of the most-widely circulated and most-respected comics ever made, and educational
cartooning has attracted the talents of some of the most artistically ambitious and
celebrated comic book creators. Such comics are read all over the world.
A defi nition of educational comics as simply those comics that deal in “facts” instead
of “fi ction” only goes so far, as comics have combined factual and fi ctional elements in
many ways. People recognize even a comic that retells a well-known work of fi ction as
educational if the comic attempts to reliably convey the essence of that earlier work.
In the clearest case, the distinguishing features of an educational comic include certain
didactic purposes of the individuals and institutions that created and distributed it; the
presence of specifi c textual cues that enable readers to recognize these publications as
both educational and as comics; and the particular uses which those who buy and those
who read these comics make of them. Since the motives for creating and consuming
comics are inescapably mixed and complicated, a categorization of comics that partly
depends on identifying these motives will necessarily remain fuzzy. Th e quality of being
educational can be found to some degree in any comic book.
Like educational projects in other media, people usually commission educational
comic books to promote a particular, predefi ned message (for example, “don’t smoke,” or
“be grateful for the steel industry”). Increasingly, cartoonists have been using the comics
as a medium to freely explore topics as artists. Ideally, educational comics contribute to
deeper, fuller and richer shared understandings of the world.
History
Th e distinction between educational and other uses of cartooning arose relatively
recently in the long history of “narrative illustration,” which traces back to Paleolithic
drawings. Consequently, a review of the early ancestry of the comic book (such as Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics, Mayan codices, adaptations of Bible stories using illustrated and
captioned panels, and so forth) could be inserted here with little further discussion.
In 1933, Harry Wildenberg and M. C. Gaines convinced several companies to publish
reformatted Sunday comic strips as smaller, saddle-stitched booklets with covers on
heavier stock as advertising premiums, thus establishing the basic American comic book
format. By the 1940s, the American comic book industry was booming, and many innova-
tions for exploiting the new medium’s educational possibilities date from those years.
Gaines, a former school principal, formed his own comic book publishing company
in 1942, “Educational Comics,” through which he published Picture Stories from the Bible,
Picture Stories from American History, Picture Stories from Science, and Picture Stories from
