Growing up, I was a reader. I liked anything that remotely caught my attention, mermaid books, fairy books and princess books. I read them all, and I loved them.
As I grew older, things changed. Our generation shifted the minute they got their first phone. A 2024 survey of digital well-being by Statistics Canada found that in 2020, around 96 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 had a smartphone.
This left no room in our generation for freedom beyond a phone. Everyone my age had one and was glued to the screen, so I wanted to be too and learned very quickly how easy it was. I no longer read a book. I consumed media, whether it was Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat or eventually TikTok.
I didn’t have time for reading. This generation has been bred to be too distracted by their phones, so that everything else is considered long-form content, including books and even movies. That required a longer attention span than we had. I forgot how to imagine if I couldn’t have an image in front of me.
That’s when I found comics. They truly possess a whole separate type of value, demonstrated by the way they are held in such high esteem among collectors and general readers alike. A press release by Heritage Auctions said a copy of a high-grade Superman 1, a 1939 first-edition, sold at auction for US$9.12 million in November and is the most expensive comic ever sold.
Heritage said a previous Action Comics 1 previously set the record at US$6 million. These numbers show just how much some people are willing to spend for a piece of art and literature that I have heard people call "childish."
My love of comics didn’t last long before I got older and started seeing how people around me reacted to seeing them, usually with distaste. I would hear things like “It’s for boys,” or “comics are a lesser form of fiction.”
But that simply isn’t true.
I believe comics deserve more recognition despite the negativity they face for “being for children,” for the way they blend art and literature into a digestible format for people of any age.
A 2022 Booknet Canada report called Canadian Leisure and Reading stated that overall, book consumers ages 18 to 29 are the most likely age group to have read comics, manga or graphic novels.
Comics are a life form entirely on their own. A piece of art that melds with literature to make something else entirely. They are the perfect form of entertainment to help engage those who don’t read books but love reading, and those who need something visual to be kept entertained.
Scott McCloud's 1993 book, Understanding Comics, explored the idea that the traditional thinking that great works of art and literature are possible only when kept at arm’s length isn’t the reality.
He recognized, as I did too, the older I got, and the less I allowed society and others to define what I liked and how I liked it, that comics are a beautiful form of entertainment.
“As children, we ‘show and tell’ interchangeably. Words and images combining to transmit a connected series of ideas,” McCloud wrote. “Indeed, words and pictures have great powers to tell stories when creators fully exploit them both.”
Books are great, but they leave so much to the imagination, and movies leave too little. McCloud wrote it best, that “when pictures carry the weight of clarity in a scene, they free words to explore a wider area.”
