Books are dangerous things according to Maria Berge. In this blog post she reflects on why she reads comic books and invites us all join her.
Book are dangerous
They can be captivating and if you don’t have the personal strength it is impossible to stop reading at night. Comic books (or graphic novels) are the perfect solution to this personal dilemma: I can easily consume the whole book in one evening and still go to work and perform well the next day. And I reread my comic books to a much higher extent than I do other books, the combination of pictures and text seems to continue to amuse me over and over again. Although comic books are an important part of my life, I seldom discuss comic books with other people like I do with books, films or TV-series. Here are three reasons why:
1. Reading comic books does not have the same status as reading books
My mother always told me to read books instead of comic books in the evening because “you get more sleepy from reading books”. When I’d grown up I realised that she had fooled me: she simply wanted me to get into the practice of reading longer texts.
Books have higher status than comic books because reading books is one way to succeed in school and later on academia. (Yeah, I know, I have read great educational and informative comic books about Foucault and bipolarity and so on, but that is not my point here). Books are, like the owl, the symbol of wisdom and knowledge. It is no coincidence that Hermione Granger reads books and not graphic novels.
2. Reading comic books actually needs some practice – and many people don’t have this skill
To get all the nuances in comic books needs some practice like everything else in life. My father didn’t read comic books as a child and he never got the hang of connecting the pictures with the text in the right way. For example, he can’t get the jokes, and if you don’t get the puns by yourself it is not fun when someone explains it to you (this goes for all humour).
I experienced the same thing when I started reading Manga. In the beginning I thought all the facial expressions were exaggerated compared to western style, and it took a while to learn how to interpret and then later appreciate this style. To discuss comic books with people who have not made the effort to gain these skills is pointless.
3. Where do I start the conversation?
I have a colleague who reads comic books too, but he likes different genres than me (in my opinion very traditional books with boring female lead characters), and he does not like the style of pictures in the stuff I read at all.
To find someone who likes reading the same kind of comic books as me is like finding a needle in a haystack. It isn’t as normalised in our culture to talk about comic books and graphic novels as to talk about books, films and television. It’s perfectly fine to talk to other people about books that they haven’t read or films they haven’t seen as long as you avoid spoilers, but it is not the same with comic books, since people always react to the fact that I read comic books as an adult.
An invitation to my readers and my colleagues
So, I share the geeky interest of reading comic books with my life partner, mother and daughters, but apart from them I don’t discuss comic books with other people. It’s not because people react like my research team “You are SO geeky”, but because I have no expectations that people read the same comic books as me. Well, maybe it is time to change that.
So, dear research team and blog readers, make the effort to appreciate comic books and please read the following work immediately – I have read them recently and I need to discuss them all with someone in detail.
