168 EDUCATIONAL COMICS
comics, World Comics teaches activists how to write and draw their own locally-based,
comics-format wall-posters, even if they did not have previous drawing experience. Packa-
lén and Ghanaian cartoonist Frank Odoi created a manual on educational cartooning, now
out of print, that republishes samples of activist-drawn comics about health, agriculture,
the environment, human rights, and other topics from around the world. More recently,
Packalén has collaborated with Sharad Sharma to create Grassroots Comics: A Develop-
ment Communication Tool (2007), a manual for teaching people to communicate their
own community’s issues using comics format. Grassroots Comics can be downloaded from
the web at http://www.worldcomics.fi /grassroots_comics.pdf.
Rox35 Comix, founded by Len Cowan and Nate Butler, encourages the use
of comics as a tool for evangelism by off ering training courses and consulting.
Rox35 Comix maintains a Web site which posts evidence supporting their argument
that comics are “the world’s most widely-read form of popular literature.” COMIX35
off ers three-day seminars for professional and amateur Christian communicators to
share specifi cs on how to produce a comics-format tract. (http://www.comix35.org/
aboutus.html.)
Fewer organizations advertise services to create custom-designed professional-
quality comic books today than in the 1950s. Custom Comics Services advertises itself
as the “largest producer of educational and promotional comic books” for clients in the
United States. Th ey claim to have helped their customers reach 200 million readers
since 1985. Th eir Web site lists 20 ideas for how groups can use educational comics,
and 22 types of groups that might use comics. http://www.customcomicservices.com/
index.html.
The Internet
Th e Internet has become a relatively inexpensive medium for making educational
comics available. Web designers have experimented with a variety of fi le formats. People
often web-post comics that also exist in print versions as .pdf fi les. For example, see Nick
Th orkelson’s Economic Meltdown Funnies (http://economicmeltdownfunnies.org/) or
Greg Palast and Bobby Kennedy’s Steal Back Your Vote (http://www.gregpalast.com/
sbyv/download-the-comic-book.html) or Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Nuclear Melt-
down (http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/en/news/new-comic-book-gets-youth-invo).
Th e web has also made it possible to share old and out-of-print educational comics
using this format. Ethan Persoff ’s Web site posts many examples as “COMICS WITH
PROBLEMS” at http://www.ep.tc/.
Other sites use .gif or .jpg fi les to share educational comics. Comics theorist/car-
toonist Neil Cohn has web-posted .jpg excerpts of two contrasting ways of telling how
photosynthesis works using comics: expository style or narrative style. http://www.
emaki.net/blog/2007/03/photosynthesis.html. Jorge Cham’s web-comic “Piled Higher
and Deeper” not only conveys information, but also takes graduate school as its setting,
making it doubly-related to “education.” Cham uses .gif fi les. http://www.phdcomics.
com/comics/aboutcomics.html.
