The stack on the nightstand keeps growing. All the same character, all known by heart, all reread. And somebody who means well — a grandmother, a teacher, you at eleven at night — says the line: “yes, but that isn’t reading.”
It turns out there is a table for this.
A comic has 53.5 rare words per thousand. A children’s book has 30.9. Nearly double, in favour of the stack on the nightstand. This is reason 7 of ten reasons someone won’t read, and the only one that gets solved by changing your mind. Nothing at home has to move.
How much rare vocabulary is in a comic?
There is a classic count by Hayes and Ahrens, from 1988, that Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich reproduced in American Educator in 1998. It measures how many rare words turn up per thousand across the places somebody meets language:
| Where | Rare words per 1,000 |
|---|---|
| Abstracts of scientific articles | 128.0 |
| Newspapers | 68.3 |
| Popular magazines | 65.7 |
| Comic books | 53.5 |
| Adult books | 52.7 |
| Children’s books | 30.9 |
| Cartoon shows | 30.8 |
| Expert witness testimony | 28.4 |
| Popular prime-time adult shows | 22.7 |
| College graduates to friends and spouses | 17.3 |
| Preschool books | 16.3 |
What counts as a “rare word.” The study defines it as one outside the ten thousand most frequent: “roughly a word that is outside the vocabulary of a fourth to sixth grader.” And it adds why that matters: “for vocabulary growth to occur after the middle grades, children must be exposed to words that are rare by this definition” (Cunningham and Stanovich, American Educator, 1998).
Two honest readings of that table, before anyone uses it in a family argument:
- The comparison that matters is with children’s books, and there the gap is wide: 53.5 against 30.9.
- The comparison with adult books calls for caution. 53.5 and 52.7 sit close enough that “comics are richer than a grown-up novel” would be stretching it.
And a note on the date: the count is from 1988. The comics corpus of that era leaves out manga, which went on to take over the market. If somebody publishes a modern replication, this table gets updated.
What work does reading a comic actually do?
The visible work is reading the speech balloons. The work that counts happens somewhere else: in the gap between two panels.
One panel shows somebody running towards a door. The next shows that somebody soaked in the rain. What happened in between — they went out, the door opened onto the street, it started raining — gets supplied by the reader. Nobody writes it down. Every gap between panels is a compulsory inference, and a page holds six or seven of them.
That is exactly the work being asked for by “why do you think the character did that?” The difference is that in a comic they do it fifty times in an afternoon, without being asked.
On top of that: holding track of who is who across a series, following a sequence in time, and reading mood off a drawn face.
Want to see the scaffolding of a story from the inside? Here are the parts of a story explained with an actual story — the same pieces, different bodywork.
Will they move on to “real books”?
They might, and this piece will not promise it.
It is the line in every article on the subject — “comics are a gateway” — and looking for the evidence behind it turns up very little. What is measured is the table: that while they read comics they are meeting rare words at a rate nothing else in their day matches, except a book.
So the comic stands on its own, for what it does today. Treating it as a waiting room for something else also has a practical cost: the reader notices, and noticing that your thing is the lesser version of something better is the fastest way to drop it.
What if what they read is terrible?
It happens, and it is a real objection. Endless series, industrial artwork, repeated jokes.
Two things at once. First, the rare-word rate in that table holds up fairly well regardless of literary quality: the lexical density of a mediocre comic still sits above a good children’s novel. Second, quality does matter, and the route to improving it runs through widening the offer. Withdrawing what is there works against you.
And it is worth knowing what withdrawing costs. In a survey of 1,755 British families, “more than eight in 10 children agree their favourite books –and the ones they are most likely to finish–are the ones they pick out themselves” (Scholastic, 2015). Taking away what they chose takes away the part that makes them finish.
How to build on what they already read
Without asking them to give anything up:
- Ask what it’s about. No quiz, real curiosity. Someone summarising four volumes of plot is doing reading comprehension out loud.
- Go to the library and ask for the section. Public and school libraries catalogue graphic novels and somebody there knows them. That is the good list, and it is free.
- Find the graphic novel of something they already like. Plenty of classics have a panelled version, and so do plenty of history and science series, made by people who know what they are doing.
- Try the sideways jump before the vertical one. From comics to a picture book with long text, or to illustrated non-fiction. That is where the four formats and what each one does comes in.
- When they want a book without pictures, let them pick it. That is when three things you can measure with the book in your hands earns its keep.
What to say when someone in the family says it isn’t reading
Three lines, from least to most argument:
“They’re reading more rare words than they would be watching television.” True, and gentle: 53.5 against 22.7, and the table is published.
“School and public libraries catalogue graphic novels alongside novels.” The institutions whose job is deciding what counts as a book settled this a while ago. That is why the section exists, with a librarian attached to it.
“I’d rather they read something every day than nothing three times a year.” This one comes out after the other two. And it comes out without winning the argument: whoever raised it almost always did so because they want that child to do well.
Where to go from here
This week, sit down and ask them to tell you what the one they’re reading is about. It is the cheapest conversation there is, and it will tell you what they are after in that series: humour, belonging, controlled fear, a friendship. That is what to look for next, in whatever format.
And if comics don’t catch either, there are eight more causes worth checking, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change, in the ten reasons.
Where these numbers come from
- Cunningham, Anne E. and Stanovich, Keith E., “What Reading Does for the Mind,” American Educator, 1998. Table 1 is adapted from Hayes and Ahrens (1988), “Vocabulary simplification for children: a special case of ‘motherese’?”, Journal of Child Language. Source
- Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, UK edition. A sample of 1,755 parents and children aged 6 to 17, fielded in summer 2015. Source
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