Why Doesn’t Everyone Read Comics?
Welcome back to Graphic Novel Insider, the newsletter about comics publishing. Today’s topic is: Why doesn’t everyone read comics? Or, put another way, Why do so many people consider comics NOT REAL BOOKS?
When my daughter was in elementary school, I was the parent in charge of the school book fair. Her NYC public school did not use Scholastic, rather a local independent book warehouse that gave the school a larger percentage of book sales, but also meant us parent volunteers were in charge of merchandising. Two years in, I’d had enough of explaining to parents that graphic novels are indeed real books (much realer, IMHO, than those paperbacks that are blister-packed with plastic jewelry, but no one’s complaining about those), and I came up with a plan.
Instead of putting all the graphic novels on the graphic novel table, a long-standing tradition at this book fair, I was going to shelve them by age. So Real Friends was going to go next to the Princess in Black books. Smile would go with the middle-grade prose. Amulet would go next to Harry Potter. All real books, on real book shelves.