• Early debates around comics
• An optimistic outlook

In 1657, John Amos Comenius, a Czech teacher, educator and writer, published Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an illustrated Latin textbook for children. This was probably one of the first examples of pictures being used in formal textbooks. It became renowned and was widely circulated. While not exactly a comic, it has some relevance to the debates that came later, as we shall see. Since the dawn of the 20th century, comics had been finding ever greater currency and circulation. The cartoon had evolved into the comic strip which in turn had grown into the full-fledged comic magazine. Even as comics became more and more popular worldwide, during the 1930s, they increasingly began to draw the attention of academics. This was true especially in the United States, where comics saw phenomenal growth and were read by a large percentage of children. Educators were thus forced to turn their attention to this medium and it underwent rigorous scrutiny. It was by no means a straightforward path, for there were an equal number of critics and supporters of comics. Gray (1942) outlines the following problems that North (1940) stated with respect to comics:

Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed-a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems-the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child's natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder makes the child impatient … Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the "comic" magazine....

However, in the same paper, Gray quotes two professors of the time, W.W. Sones and Robert Thorndike, who strongly advocated using comics for educational purposes. In the pamphlet Children and Comic Magazines, Sones says:

The comic book is a widespread feature of the current environment of children. As such it must be recognized by parents and teachers as an influence on child growth and development. Whether it is to be positive or negative in its effects can be controlled. If comic books are ignored, ridiculed, or forbidden, we encourage rebelliousness, the forbidden fruit is made more attractive, and an opportunity is lost to share an interest with the child. On the other hand, both in school and at home this interest may be capitalized to promote many lines of desirable growth and development. (as quoted in Gray, 1940).

Of course, this is mostly a reactionary defence against the criticisms, such as the above mentioned examples stated by North, which were being levelled at comic books. However, Sones also felt that comic books brought a number of distinct benefits to the child, as he later stated in his paper The Comics and Instructional Method (1944). He says:

The potency of the picture story is not a matter of modern theory but of anciently established truth. Before man thought in words, he felt in pictures… It's too bad for us "literary" enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless, pictures tell any story more effectively than words. (Sones, 1944, p. 239)

Similarly, with respect to the use of comics in teaching and learning language, Robert Thorndike praised comics in his preliminary report on the study of comic magazine vocabulary:

We have here an educational resource which (1) provides many thousands of words of reading experience;(2) introduces the child to a wide range of vocabulary, including many useful words which stand in need of additional practice by the typical child in Grades IV-VIII; (3) provides interest appeal and picture context to make reading and vocabulary experience of a fairly advanced level attractive even to the retarded reader. The teacher and librarian should be aware of the positive contribution of these materials as an out-of-school supplement to the child's reading experience. (as quoted in Gray, 1940).

The very fact that such debates were taking place shows that comics were increasingly being considered a bona fide literary genre, and their use in education, and their place in school libraries, was beginning to be taken seriously. They were no longer just 'funnies' that appeared in the back pages of newspapers. Comics researcher Gene Yang (Yang, 2003) cites the work of a number of educators, including Sones (1944), to describe how comics had made their mark upon the consciousness of American academia:

Academia took notice, initiating over a decade of debate, research, and writing on the educational value of comic books. University of Pittsburgh professor W. W. D. Sones (1944) reports that between 1935 and 1944, comics "evoked more than a hundred critical articles in educational and nonprofessional periodicals"… Many of Sones' contemporaries undertook similar research. Robert Thorndike and George Hill, for example, analyzed the vocabulary of words found within comic books… Paul Witty led a study examining the reading content of comic books with 2500 school children… Educators also began designing comics-supported curriculums. Thorndike partnered with DC Comics and Harold Downes to create a language arts workbook that starred Superman (Sones, 1944). A few years later, the Curriculum Laboratory of the University of Pittsburgh and the Comics Workshop of New York University devised and implemented an experiment using Puck – the Comic Weekly in hundreds of American classrooms... The educational use of comics was of such importance that the Journal of Educational Sociology devoted the entirety of 1944's Volume 18, Issue 4 to the topic.

Through the 1940s, therefore, the outlook of comics in education was optimistic, notwithstanding the opposition from many quarters, for there were a number of educators looking at comics as legitimate learning material. However, things were soon to change, as we shall see in the next section.
 

A page from Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1857) by John Amos Comenius, one of the first textbooks for children to use illustrations combined with text.

John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the writer of Orbis Sensualium Pictus, is also considered the father the modern education.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comenius