On Comics and Literacy

I'm just blogging this because I keep having conversations about comics and literacy, and I wanted to have this up somewhere I could easily point to it. It's a quote that was forwarded on to me by Caro Fickling of The Phoenix, who knows rather a lot about such things, and it makes several great points far better than I could ever hope to. So here you go:

The 21st century is a visual world with a visual culture, but also requires high levels of reading competency. Comics, as sequential art, are a pictorial representation of a narrative. Comic art combines printed words and pictures in a unique way. Many literacy skills are required, including the ability to understand a sequence of events, to interpret the characters’ nonverbal gestures, to discern the story’s plot and to make inferences.

- International Federation of Library Associations paper at their 2009 Conference.