The stack on the nightstand keeps growing. Same character, same series, every volume known by heart and reread anyway, with a flashlight, long after lights out. And somebody who means well, a grandmother, a teacher, or you at eleven at night, says the line: “Yes, but that isn’t reading.”
It turns out there’s a table for this.
A comic book has 53.5 rare words per thousand. A children’s book has 30.9. Nearly double, in favor of the stack on the nightstand. This is one of ten reasons a child won’t read, and the only one that gets solved by changing a grown-up’s mind. The child can keep right on reading.
How much rare vocabulary is in a comic?
There’s 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 where people meet 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 a word 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).
Before anyone brings the table to Thanksgiving dinner, read it carefully:
- 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 of that era leave out manga, which has since taken over the shelves. If someone 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 someone running toward a door. The next shows that same someone soaked to the skin. What happened in between, that they went outside, that the door opened onto the street, that it started pouring, gets supplied by the reader. Nobody writes it down. Every gap between panels is an inference the reader has to make, and a single page holds six or seven of them.
That’s exactly the skill a teacher is reaching for with “Why do you think the character did that?” The difference is that in a comic, children do it fifty times in an afternoon, without being asked, and with a grin.
On top of that: keeping track of who’s who across a long series, following a sequence in time, and reading a mood off a drawn face. That’s a lot of curiosity at work for something called “just comics.”
Curious about the scaffolding of a story from the inside? The parts of a story, explained with an actual story shows the same pieces in different bodywork.
Will they move on to “real books”?
Maybe. It’s the line in every article on the subject, “comics are a gateway,” and when you go looking for the evidence behind it, you find very little. What’s actually been measured is the table: while they’re reading comics, they’re meeting rare words at a rate nothing else in their day matches, except a book.
So the comic earns its place for what it does today. Treating it as a waiting room for something better also has a practical cost: children notice, and discovering that your favorite thing is the lesser version of something else is the fastest way to drop it.
What if what they read is terrible?
It happens, and it’s a fair objection. Endless series, assembly-line artwork, the same joke on every page.
Two answers hold at once. First, the rare-word rate in that table holds up fairly well regardless of literary quality: even a mediocre comic tends to sit above a good children’s novel in lexical density. Second, quality does matter, and the way to raise it is to widen the offer. Taking away what’s there works against you.
And taking it away has a cost. 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, UK Kids & Family Reading Report). Take away what they chose, and you take 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. Real curiosity, no quiz. A child summarizing four volumes of plot is doing reading comprehension out loud, and usually enjoying it.
- Go to the library and ask for the graphic novel section. Public and school libraries catalog graphic novels, and someone there knows them well; their list is the good one, and it’s free.
- Find the graphic novel version of something they already love. Plenty of classics come in panels, and so do plenty of history and science series, made by people who know what they’re doing.
- Try a sideways step before an upward one. From comics to a picture book with plenty of text, or to illustrated nonfiction. That’s where the four formats and what each one does comes in.
- When they want a book without pictures, let them pick it. That’s 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 gentlest to most persuasive:
“They’re meeting more rare words than they would watching TV.” True, and kind: 53.5 against 22.7, and the table is published.
“School and public libraries shelve graphic novels right alongside novels.” The institutions whose job is deciding what counts as a book settled this a while ago. That’s 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 needing to win: whoever raised the objection almost always did so because they want that child to do well. So do you. You’re on the same side. (And if the worry is about minutes, look at what the famous twenty-minute rule actually measured.)
Where to go from here
This week, sit down and ask them to tell you about the one they’re reading. It’s the cheapest conversation there is, and it’ll tell you what they’re hungry for in that series: humor, belonging, a safe dose of fear, a friendship. Look for that next, in whatever format it comes.
And if comics don’t catch either, there are more causes to check, 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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