EDUCATIONAL COMICS 165
in partnership with Ohmsha in Japan, has been publishing a series of manga titles about
statistics, physics, calculus, electricity, and similar topics.
Controversies
Th e earliest controversies over educational comic books in the 1940s and 1950s
included questions about how faithfully they communicated the heart and soul of
the books they adapted, about how commercial considerations were causing them to
accentuate violence or suppress mature themes, and about whether children were using
them as a gateway to reading, or as a substitute for reading. Th e reputation of educa-
tional comics also became entangled in questions about whether comic books in general
promote or retard literacy. In Seduction of the Innocent, Fredric Wertham singled out
comic book adaptations of classics for special scorn, writing “Comic books adapted from
classical literature are reportedly used in 25,000 schools in the United States. If this
is true, then I have never heard a more serious indictment of American education, for
they emasculate the classics, condense them (leaving out everything that makes the book
great), are just as badly printed and inartistically drawn as other comic books and, as
I have often found, do not reveal to children the world of good literature which has at all
times been the mainstay of liberal and humanistic education. Th ey conceal it” (36).
Legitimacy
After the success of Spiegelman’s Maus (which won a special Pulitzer Prize in
1992), the “graphic novel” won a quickly-accelerating recognition as a “legitimate”
medium. New graphic novels now receive critical attention from reviewers at the
Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, from Publishers Weekly, National Public
Radio, and wherever serious books are discussed. In recent years educational comics
in the format of graphic novels have served as the leading edge for comics in general
to fi nd acceptance in bookstores, schools, and libraries. In the United States, sales of
comics and graphic novels to schools and libraries rose from around $1 million in
2001 to $30 million in 2007.
Series
A number of established book publishers have added lines of nonfi ction comics,
joining those comics publishers (such as Fantagraphics or Drawn and Quarterly) that
also publish serious comics. Pantheon Books published Maus (which Spiegelman had
originally serialized in his RAW Magazine), and went on to publish other important
nonfi ction graphic novels including Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003.) By 2006, a
Pantheon Web site expressed a hope for an end to the booming interest in graphic
novels “if a ‘boom’ means watching every book publisher on the planet madly scram-
ble to start a Graphic Novel imprint regardless of love for (or understanding of ) the
medium, and paying over-infl ated prices for substandard work—simply because they
heard it’s the ‘hot new thing that all the kids are into’ [... .]” Th e new competitors did
succeed in bringing out additional valuable titles.
