Malinda Words: Gateway drugs to A-B-C

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 237th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

‘A-B-C’ is shorthand for elementary steps of any kind, not just the English language or indeed any language at all. The A-B-C of all things can arrive in many ways and those who’ve learned the relevant subject alphabets would know. I can speak about language or, more specifically, reading.

The thought was inspired by a quote shared by my friend Aaron Kuder, a comic book artist who illustrates for the Fantastic Four and has worked on numerous books which include ‘The Amory Wars,’ ‘Legion Lost,’ ‘Green Lantern,’ ‘Death of X' and ‘Infinity Countdown.’ I haven’t read any of them, I confess. All I know is that I knew Aaron as a gentle human being and a true friend long years ago, way before he became famous in the comic book industry.

The quote: ‘Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.’

It’s an observation offered by Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman, who is professionally known as Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist, editor and comics advocate who in the year 2022 received the medal for ‘Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,’ from the National Book Foundation.

So I was thinking of the gateway drugs to literacy that I had encountered. I remembered someone commenting on an article I had written about the weekly children’s paper, ‘Mihira’: මිහිර තමයි අපට පොත් කියවන පිස්සුව පුරුදු කළේ (it was Mihira that got us addicted to the reading madness).

Yes, but ‘Mihira’ would have been a second-tier drug, for those who read the paper would have already known the A-B-C or the ‘ayanna-aayanna’ of the Sinhala language. Storytelling would have preceded all that. Parents or grandparents would have read some children’s books, drawing attention to the illustrations.

Art and Aaron are probably thinking about the ‘Mihira-stage’ of reading. And I think they are right. It was S.A. Dissanayake’s fascinating cartoon characters that got us hooked. We waited for Monday because that was the Mihira Day. That’s when we could, as children, meet our friends Boo, Baba, Thus, Batakola Archchi, Punchiththa, Yodaya etc. They were the characters who made those stories memorable.

The characters themselves were like snippets from stories, they were so effectively portrayed by the various artists who contributed to ‘comic papers’ such as ‘Sathuta’ and ‘Siththara.’ They came with words and after a while, we learned to read the visuals in the words themselves. Yes, comics were like gateway drugs to reading.

Perhaps because our parents belonged to a more textual rather than visual generation and understood that words could conjured pictures as effectively as would the configurations of line, space and color, we weren’t encouraged to read ‘comics.’

‘Trash’ was a descriptive that was used, I remember. Over the years, my father did get interested in Asterix and Obelix, the inimitable characters created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. There was also Tintin. There was the series ‘Landesi Hatana’ surreptitiously passed around friend and read while we thought the teachers weren’t looking.

There were lots of comics from the USA which, looking back, was all propaganda that tried to make us believe that it was ‘America’ and America alone that defeated Hitler or that white people brought civilisation to the land that’s now called the United States of America. There were love stories too, I remember.

And then the super hero comics. Superman. Spider Man. The Fantastic Four. We devoured these and began to love stories and storytelling.

I am not sure if we graduated into other genres, for now I feel that if it is about good storytelling, a good comic book artist is no less effective in offering insights into the human condition, even if the characters are nothing like the people we meet as we travel around our everyday.

There are those who never read comics who did become literate of course, but Aaron and Art are correct too; comic can be a gateway drug to literacy for some. It was one that worked for me and for this I thank once again, the Mihira and S A Dissanayake. Mihira was read. It was read by the children and grandchildren of the first readers. Mihira still has ‘comics.’ It is still a drug that gets people hooked on to the insanity that is reading. Yes, sends them spiralling into the dizzying heights of literacy.

The 2023 edition of the New York Comic Con will be held from October 12-15. Aaron Kuder will be there. Art Spiegelman too, perhaps. There will be many comic book artists who have been dishing out gateway drugs to literacy. This is a fist-bump, an embrace and a word of gratitude to all the comic book artists who held my hand and took me to the wonderful world of literacy. From A to B to C and so forth.

08 October 2023

Gateway drugs to A-B-C

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