Comic for Education

Comic book is getting more popular nowadays. Children and also adults like reading it. Modern comic book was inadvertently born by two employees at the Eastern Color Printing Company who collected a number of popular newspaper comic strips and arranged them into a tabloid-sized magazine (Wright, 2001). Since 1933, the year when the two employees gave birth to the modern comic, comic has become more and more popular.
Music and film have been commonly used as media in learning process. But comic has not. Although comic is relished by many people of different ages, hundreds of people believe that comic is not good for children. Most comics, indeed, contain bad things that parents are worry if their children will imitate the bad attitude they find in them.
But then, many experiments show contrary view. According to Gene Yang (2003) comic has five strengths to use in education. Those strengths are:
1. Motivating
Hutchinson (1949) found as the result of his experiment that 74% of teachers surveyed found comics "helpful for motivation".
2. Visual
Sones (1944) noted that students of "low and middle intelligence levels" were especially helped by comics' visual quality.
3. Permanent
Using comic as learning media is much different with using film or animation. If students don’t understand a scene of a film or animation, they cannot repeat the unknown scene. But we can do this if we use comic.
4. Intermediary
Karl Koenke (1981) suggests that comics can lead students towards the discipline of reading, especially those who don't enjoy reading or have a fear of failure.
5. Popular
Timothy Morrison, Gregory Bryan, and George Chilcoat (2002) suggest that, by incorporating popular culture (comic, for instance) into the curriculum, teachers can bridge the separation many students feel between their lives in and out of school.
Comic can be an alternative media to learn English. Just try it.