I have not written anything on this site in a very long time, but today something happened that I simply could not ignore. As I was perusing the aisles of my local Barnes and Noble, I came across a father and son having a conversation in front of the fantasy novels. The father was holding a copy of Piers Anthony’s book The Source of Magic. He was waving it around and yelling at his son in Spanish. When I was the boy’s age, I was a huge Anthony fan so I knew from the start that the father had already made a horrible mistake, he was holding book two of the Xanth novels and not A Spell for Chameleon (book one). The true issue however was not that the father had the wrong book but it was instead the words that were coming out of his mouth. Granted my Spanish is more than a bit rusty, but there was no way I could misinterpret the words I have heard so many times before, “UN COMICO NO ES UN LIBRO!.” That’s right, a comic is not a book. This man, could not have been any more right and any more wrong all at the same time.

No, comics are not books, they are a different beast all together. They require the ability to intake both written words and pictures at the same time, sometimes forcing the reader to blur the line with the occasional onomatopoeia as both picture and word. They force the brain to work overtime, remembering large amounts of information in order to follow decades of story arcs and characters. In essence, the life of a comic book reader is one big memory game.

According to Dr Neil Cohn’s research, the sequences of panels and art actually engage the same sections of the brain as reading a prose novel. They require the intake of pieces of information which must be processed and understood, “Sequential images have a grammar like sequential words do.” So why is it that the comic book should be viewed as something lesser? I suppose that this is the ever present legacy of the horrible Dr. Fredric Wertham, a man whose crusade against comics did more damage to the genre than Adam West’s Batman and Halley Berry’s Catwoman combined. Wertham’s “research” about the corrupting ability of the comic book has been discredited by Carol Tilley, who proved that his findings and records were mostly falsified. Yet the comic book fans are still being forced to stand up for the medium.

Back at Barnes and Noble, I stand by the books and watch the father and son argue more. The boy does not seem to have the capability to explain why a comic is just as good as a novel and I am sure that if he did, the father wouldn’t care to listen. The father continues to insist that a comic is not a book. I suppose he doesn’t know that Time Magazine named Alan, Moore’s book Watchmen one of the top 100 books of the century. He probably also never heard about how In 1991, Neil Gaiman’s comic The Sandman won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction.

This is the moment where I come to the big problem I have with what happened today. The father places The Source of Magic back on the shelf (in the wrong place) and tells his son they are leaving. So not only does the boy leave without a novel, he leaves with nothing to read at all. This is exactly the kind of experience that turns people off to reading. No doubt, this young boy will forever remember being berated by his father in the book store, in front of a complete stranger for the things he wanted to read. The reality is, it doesn’t matter what you want to read, just as long as you are reading. Be it comic’s, memoir, horror, science fiction, classics or the back of a box of Cheerios, it is the intake of ideas that matters most.