Adult Fans Of Comic Books: What They Get Out Of Reading

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When people think of comic-book readers, they typically get a vision of a stunted person who lives in his parents' basement and spends countless hours arguing the minutiae of his particular popular culture interests (see Figure 1).

Contemporary writings about comic books often contain infantilizing words such as Pow!, Bam!, or Zap! in their titles (e.g., Eggers, 2000), sound effects made popular in the 1960s Batman television program. Such depictions are emblematic of how comic books have been regarded in the United States for four decades.

At best, they have been seen as a childish diversion and, at worst, as texts that deaden intellect and moral reasoning, linked with juvenile delinquency and a ...
... host of other social ills surrounding young people (Wertham, 1953). Although perhaps not regarded in such draconian terms currently, comic books are still often regarded as pieces of juvenile, junk culture (Wright, 2001).

Despite gradations of taste, comic books have remained popular to a wide range of people, from the adult males in their twenties and thirties who typically make up the superhero comic audience to the growing number of manga (Japanese comic books) readers that includes adolescents, especially girls (Glazer, 2005).

Educators have recognized both the artful complexities of these texts and their growing popularity among students, and have developed programs and practices to use them to foster learning and engagement (Frey & Fisher, 2004; Jacobs, 2007; Newkirk, 2005). This growing attention being paid to comic books and graphic novels compelled me to undertake this study, in which I explored the roles these texts have played in the lives of self-identified adults who read comic books in terms of their academic and social development. Put simply, what uses did they get out of reading comic books, and why should educators care?

The current study was an exploration of how readers used popular culture texts, extending from the works of cultural theorists like Jenkins (1992), who researched television and movie fans. A number of educational researchers have examined lifelong reading n qualitative terms, focusing on diverse populations as the United States and abroad (Alvermann, 2001; Binders, 1997; Guerra & Farr, 2002; Knobel, 1999; Vloje, 2000; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002; Young, Dillon, 5c Moje, 2002).

With their examinations of how various people navigated their social worlds, these studies evolved around the lives of adolescents and students) their findings are pertinent to literate practices as the definition of what separates adolescent from adult becomes more fluid and ill-defined (Lesko, 2001). additionally, the increased attention to what constitutes literacy for adults, as well as the sheer multitude of manners in which it is acquired and practiced [Brandt, 2001), points to "the distinctive individuality rf each participant and of his or her approach to the cultural universe" (Mackey, 2007).

One consequence of this sheer multiplicity of literacy practices is that they often "jump [their] tracks" (Brandt, 2001) and go off into unintended, unique directions.

I studied these comic-book readers because they were a group who seemed to be emblematic of having made these jumps by virtue of their choice of reading materials. What is more, they have engaged in a specific literacy community for an extended period of time; overall, typical comic-book readers have been identified as being in their mid-twenties (Ghee, 2004; Fetto, 2001; Tankel & Murphy, 1998).

These readers were participating in the practice of lifelong reading, choosing to read a medium that sometimes brought censure into their lives. Some comic-book reading adults felt "a sense of separation from others because of their involvement in a hobby that's supposedly for younger people" (Pustz, 1999, p. 107) because of a misconception that comic books are solely for children. I investigated how these adults used reading in their lives. Comic-book reading is an example of the out-of-school activities that "enrich our definitions of literacy" (Hull & Schultz, 2002, p. 44), pushing the theoretical boundaries of what constitutes literacy.

This study has implications for literacy practices of broader populations, such as insights into how lifelong reading practices evolve, how people interact with others in textual communities, and how people use texts in the course of their lives.