Sunday, March 12, 2017

Comics - The Gateway Drug



The comics. Most don’t have extended storylines. Or contain important information.
And some of them, quite frankly, are just dumb. But …
If they sit on your breakfast table every day, your kids will pick them up. And read them. And then that leads to all sorts of other things. Like the sports page. And the local section. And international news. And eventually, informed citizens.
The paper can spark conversations about everything from the California drought to the discovery of new exoplanets, the price of Super Bowl ads, and of course, the presidential election.
And yes, this obviously means that you'll need to subscribe to the dead-tree version of a newspaper. Sure, you could read it on your phone, but that’s an individual experience, not a communal one. An online subscription doesn’t allow kids to drip cereal milk on Beetle Bailey as they read with their siblings peeking over their shoulders.
I was a newspaper reporter before I started writing books, so I realize that I consider the news (and newspapers in particular) more important than many people do. I will advocate for the importance of accurate, professional news outlets all day long. But this post is about the importance of the consumption mechanism involved. READING.
You start with the comics. Move on to news stories. Then maybe magazines. Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic, Motocross Action – it doesn’t matter. From there, maybe there’s a turn toward comic books or graphic novels. Or non-fiction. Or that most beautiful of art forms, the novel.
So if you’ve got kids and you don’t subscribe to home delivery, think about popping out for a Sunday paper today. Give ’em the comics page and see where it leads them.

4 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Gateway drug? My parents sure thought so. They took three Sunday papers, the New York Times which didn't have a comic section, the Washington Post, & the Washington Star. Every Sunday my father would destroy the comic sections of the D.C. papers for fear my sisters & I would read them & become corrupted somehow. I never figured out why they were so unreasonably strict. They weren't religious, & I don't think they intended to be mean, but they were definitely weird.

Claire Booth said...

Elizabeth, that is something! I'm curious - are you a newspaper reader now, or did that turn you off from newspapers entirely?

Elizabeth said...

Not at all. I've always been a voracious reader & even worked for an online newspaper as a content administrator for a while. I wrote the police reports from press releases, didn't do any real investigative reporting. I enjoyed the job, but the paper went bankrupt!

PromooCodes said...

I think i saw this comic on Amazon and i will recheck if Amazon.com Offers the comic then i will buy it for sure.