A SALES boom in comics has halted the alarming decline in children’s reading habits, new figures revealed this week.
Kids’ comics and graphic novels have reached an all-time peak, worth almost £20million in the UK last year.
Meanwhile, the latest edition of the US Dog Man comic, which was also a box office smash at the cinema earlier this year, has now shifted over five million copies.
And Scots comic book experts have opened up about how the sales boom is creating a whole new generation of passionate readers.
Author Adam Murphy believes that educators need to lose the “snobbery” around comics and embrace the fact that kids just love them.
The Stirling-born writer and illustrator has been designing kids’ comics for the last decade but in recent times has seen youngsters now being “crammed in” to his workshops.
And he believes our education system needs to reflect their changing reading habits.
He says: “People need to realise how valuable comics are for kids and education.
“There’s actually a much higher percentage of rare or unusual words used in comics because they are picture-supported, so you can get away with using more difficult words.
“I will put a word in not knowing if kids are going to understand it, but they’re able to work out what it means as they can see it in context with the picture.
“So we need to break away from that kind of snobbery because they are learning from it. It doesn’t mean they can’t read classics as well.
“But it shows children can get meaningful stories from all kinds of places.”
Recent data from the National Literacy Trust, based on interviews with over 76,000 responses, revealed there is a crisis of reading enjoyment among children.
Just one in five eight to 18-year-olds said they read something daily in their free time last year – the lowest levels recorded since 2005.
However, Karrie Fransman, from Comics Cultural Impact Collective, insists not all the research made for depressing reading.
She says: “The National Literacy Trust also produced a separate report looking at comic book readers.
“They found that nearly twice as many children and young people – 58.6 per cent – who read comics in their free time enjoy reading, compared with the 33.1 per cent who didn’t read comics.”
The Superhero genre continues to be hugely popular, but the home-grown market has recently exploded with kids eager to spend their pocket money on a host of comic-style stories such as the Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney along with Jamie Smart’s Bunny Vs Monkey books.
Adam, 47, says: “I just finished a week-long tour of schools on the back of World Book Day and pretty much every class was crammed into the gym for the sessions. I will give a few tips on how to draw and then it’s pretty much heads down as everyone comes up with their own characters and stories.
“For kids who aren’t that great at drawing or writing it doesn’t matter, as the great American comic book writer James Kochalka said that comics are closer to our thought process as we think, not in moving pictures, but in little snapshots.
“That’s why putting a story down in comic book form is so much easier for kids.”
Adam’s hugely popular Corpse Talk series sees the author in comic book form interviewing famous characters from history, such as William Shakespeare, after digging up their zombie bodies.
He says: “That’s one of my favourites as I also did this four-page adaptation of Macbeth. So some of my young readers were perhaps introduced to William Shakespeare through the pages of a comic.”
And Karrie, from Edinburgh, says attitudes around comics at home should catch up with the rest of the world.
She says: “In France, Germany, Belgium, Japan and America there are huge comic industries. So we need to bolster the British comic industry as there’s a massive untapped market here.
“We’re also getting a lot of neurodivergent people too as we’ve found many autistic people love reading comics.”
Edinburgh-born comic artist and writer Edward Ross, 39, who wrote the popular Graphic Novel Builder, says: “The cool thing with comics is you don’t need this multi-million pound budget to make one.
“All you need is a pencil and a paper. When I was a kid, it was the Beano and the Dandy and while we’ve still got those, there’s now Phoenix, the Bunny vs Monkey and Dog Man, which are flying off the shelves.”
He adds: “So many schools and teachers really are embracing comic books, but I’d like to see that across the board as they shouldn’t just see reading comics as not a step towards reading.
“We can’t discount their importance. Even if a kid only ever reads comics, they’re still absorbing information.”
