Are comics good for teaching history? From moral panic to classroom darling
I am a creator of nonfiction comics: With the help of other historians and artists, I produce full-length graphic novels about African women and segregation-breaking marines for Oxford University Press; issue-length histories for the Civics for All Comics Group; even one-page graphic biographies for OER Project. So it shouldn’t surprise you when I say that I believe deeply in the power of comics, which we sometimes call sequential art and text, to open doors for students who might not otherwise feel welcome in history classrooms.
Teachers across the country echo this. They describe comics as gateways for hesitant readers, supports for English language learners, and as tools that spark curiosity and confidence. Students say similar things—that comics feel inviting, that they help them “see” ideas, that they make complex stories easier to enter. Don’t believe me? You should read some of the comments in the OER Project Community, especially this teachers’ lounge forum, in which both new teachers and some of our most-experienced old friends described their favorite graphic biographies.
All of this widespread, authentic enthusiasm matters. It deserves to be taken seriously—not dismissed, not treated as a passing fad. But interestingly, it stands in striking contrast to the ways comics were once viewed in American schools—as if they were dangerous or toxic!
The 10-cent plague
If you think hand-wringing over media and kids is a new phenomenon, the history of comics will set you straight. Between 1940 and 1955, the US went through what can only be described as a full-scale moral panic about comic books. Back then, in the era we now call the Golden Age of Comics, comic books cost about a dime, and they were everywhere. This period saw the birth of heroes like Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Wonder Woman. One study from the time (Witty, 1941) suggests that most kids were reading 10 or more comics a month. Of course, as with anything that popular, everyone—teachers, parents, librarians, social workers, psychiatrists, politicians—had an opinion about the trend. And most of those opinions weren’t flattering.
No critic looms larger than psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Now, to most educators who know their history, Wertham is a hero. He wanted to protect children from the harm of racial inequality, violence, and poverty. A crusader for mental health reform and racial justice, Wertham even contributed key research to Brown v. Board of Education. But as every Batman fan knows, you “either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” In his quest to safeguard youth, he also argued that comics cause juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, violence, and even what he called “a new reading disorder”—linear dyslexia. In magazine articles, academic journals, and his bestseller Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham, 1954), he claimed that comics distort children’s moral and intellectual development. Wertham feared that kids would become “picture-gazers” instead of readers.
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Wertham was not alone, of course, and public pressure built as other adults began to wring their hands about the effects of comics on students. The panic culminated in the televised 1954–55 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings. Wertham—dramatic, and truly anxious about whether comics were ruining American youth—was the star witness.
But the truth is, almost none of the claims against comics were supported by credible evidence. Wertham quickly found himself on the opposite side of the argument from people who were normally his allies. Sociologist Frederic Thrasher presented evidence that Wertham selected extreme cases and provided no statistical data. Evidence was introduced from clinical psychiatrist Lauretta Bender (Bender, 1944), who reported that children had no problem telling fantasy from real life. And researchers from the Child Study Association emphasized how little real research existed.
The Senate ultimately agreed. In its remarkably balanced 1955 report, the committee softly criticized the comic book industry for irresponsibility but also declined to support censorship. They simply didn’t have evidence that comics cause harm.
Still, the damage was done: Many comics publishers collapsed, and the industry self-imposed a rating system—the Comics Code Authority—to project an image that they were actively safeguarding children. Yet, strangely enough, the panic also sparked early academic interest, much of it resulting in positive conclusions. Scholars like Thorndike (1941), Sones (1944), and Zorbaugh (1949) began analyzing comics’ vocabulary, structure, and literacy demands. While there is little evidence that they convinced many teachers to use comics in the classroom at this time, their work laid the foundation for today’s conversations about multimodality.
A fever for comics
Today, we find ourselves in a very different moment from the 1950s, yet there’s a surprising parallel. Back then, some adults were certain comics damage kids—even though they had no convincing evidence. Now, many of us are confident comics help kids, but the truth is we still don’t have the breadth or depth of research we need to fully understand how or why they work.
This lack of evidence doesn’t invalidate teacher or student experiences. Quite the opposite: Those experiences are the strongest signals we have. They tell us comics can do something powerful. What we lack is a clear map of when, how, and for whom comics support learning.
Right now, the field is built on promising studies: thoughtful work by Sloboda; Jiménez and Meyer; Stall; Boerman-Cornell; Park; and others. These studies offer compelling insights, but they’re small, short-term, or limited in scope. They point in the right direction, but they don’t yet answer the deeper curricular and pedagogical questions teachers are asking.
Most important, a whole field of scholarship—comics studies, visual literacy, and multiliteracies—now argues that comics are more cognitively demanding than simple texts, not less. Two amazing books—Scott McCloud’s 1993 Understanding Comics and Nick Sousanis’ 2015 Unflattening—highlight how sequential art uniquely blends visual, spatial, and textual reasoning. Their work is tied to the influential thinking of the New London Group scholars like Allen Luke and Sarah Michaels, who proposed that modern literacy requires navigating linguistic, visual, gestural, and spatial modalities. Comics sit right at that intersection.
The promise of comics in the classroom
In 2024, I completed a literature review with historian Bob Bain and learning scientist Rachel Phillips. We found plenty of claims and some intriguing suggestions about what comics could in fact achieve, both in terms of general literacy and historical interpretation (for example, Boerman-Cornell, 2015; and Park, 2016). This study even helped us build some comics-focused learning tools and activities for OER Project. But there’s so much we don’t know about how to make comics that are best for all learners, how to teach comics most effectively, and how to support student learning.
If we want to validate the intuitive insights of classroom teachers and students as they relate to comics and ensure that they have a long-term, meaningful place in education, we need quantifiable data. We need research that helps demonstrate to those that aren’t part of the comic-informed camp that teachers are making confident and evidence-backed choices. We need studies that ask, How do different learners actually read comics? What comic-related pedagogy supports historical thinking? What kinds of comic designs help—or hinder—comprehension? How do we prepare teachers for multimodal instruction? Research that responds to these kinds of questions would allow us to move past the question of whether comics can support learning, and instead inform how we can ensure we’re creating and teaching comics in instructionally sound ways. This research will also further assist in sharpening the saw of those already teaching with comics, and will serve as a tool they can use to advocate for the use of comics across all content areas.
But, I’ll say it again for emphasis: The current lack of large-scale research does not diminish the experiences and anecdotal evidence of teachers and students using comics right now. Their insights are real, valuable, and foundational. They’re exactly why this field deserves deeper study. It’s also why we should share these findings far and wide to show parents and administrators the value of this format—and to encourage other curriculum providers to develop materials in comic form. If we can do this, we can effectively dispel the notion that classroom resources that are engaging can’t possibly be rigorous. Let’s show everyone what comics can do.
Cited studies
About the author: Trevor Getz is Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He has written eleven books on African and world history, including Abina and the Important Men. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.
Header image: Four Japanese-American “evacuees” find time to read comics at the War Relocation Authority Center in Sacramento, 1941. Public domain.