EDUCATIONAL COMICS 169
Th e Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s web-comic “Th e Secret
in the Cellar” uses a motion comic slideshow in a Flash Player with limited animation.
http://anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone/comic/XPlayer.html.
Libraries
Libraries have had an institutional bias in favor of graphic novels, but a longstanding
bias against collecting educational comic books, which typically entered the world as
cheaply-printed ephemera. Sol Davidson, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on comics in
1959, has catalogued close to 2,500 educational comics according to the Dewey Decimal
System, and has donated them to the University of Florida Libraries. Th e Sol & Penny
Davidson collection of “special purpose comics” includes a wide range of comics that
were designed to educate, propagandize, or sell goods and services.
Conclusions
Educational comics have been the most diverse of any type of comics, in their pub-
lishers, distribution strategies, level of artistic competence, messages, formats, styles,
and readerships. Because of this enormous variety, any short survey of educational
comics must be incomplete. Educational comic book stories have expressed some of
the best and worst the human imagination has had to off er, as have entertainment
comics.
Several factors suggest that educational cartooning will continue to mature and
develop. Information is accumulating faster than individuals can sort through and
absorb it, so vital facts must be translated into popularly-accessible terms to success-
fully compete for public attention. Cartooning has repeatedly demonstrated its power
as an attractive, appealing, clear, quickly-grasped, aff ordable, fl exible, and eff ective means
to facilitate changes in attitudes, knowledge, and behavior. Further, nonfi ction comic
books have evolved into a medium of great artistic power and subtlety. Consequently,
cartooning, together with maps, diagrams, graphs, and other tools, holds a fi rm place
in the “visual language” we increasingly rely upon to understand our world and our
choices.
Selected Bibliography: Davison, Sol. “Educational Comics: A Family Tree.” ImageText
4(2) (2008), http://www.english.ufl .edu/imagetext/archives/v4_2/davidson/; Giff ord, D.
Th e International Book of Comics. New York: Crescent Books, 1984; Jüngst, Heike
Elisabeth. “Educational Comics—Text-type, or Test-types I a Format?” Image [&]
Narrative 1 (December 2000), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ narratology/
heikeelisabethjuengst.htm; Packalén, L. and S. Sharma. “Grassroots Comics:
A Development Communication Tool.” World Comics (2007), http://www.worldcomics.
fi /grassroots_comics.pdf; Rifas, L. “Educational Comics: A Message in a Bubble.”
PRINT (1988): 145–57; Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York:
Rinehart and Company, 1953.
Leonard Rifas
