From comics aimed at very young children to university-level textbooks, comics are known to be an effective medium for helping people to learn new information.
This is because they represent information in two complementary modes – visual and textual. This is likely to make it easier to move information to our long-term memory, and means that the memory traces we form from the information are richer and so easier to retrieve.
Apart from the cognitive science behind learning, educators also look to comics as a means of improving the motivation of learners. Comics are likely to be more visually engaging than more text-based mediums. Learners may have positive associations with comics if they have read them for pleasure outside school or have watched TV shows and films that are based on them.
However, probably because of the stereotype of comic reading as a childish pursuit, educators may incorrectly assume that reading comics is easier than reading texts.
Paul Aleixo, Author provided (no reuse)
In reality, reading and understanding comics is much more complex than you might initially think. While some comics are very straightforward and aimed at children (think the Beano or Dandy), other comics, including graphic novels, are aimed at adult readers and are more complex and nuanced.
In addition, it takes experience to understand comics conventions, which are often culturally specific. For example, if you haven’t read a comic before it might not be obvious that a round speech balloon indicates audible speech, while a cloud-like one indicates inaudible thoughts. Similarly, Japanese manga have their own culturally specific conventions.
So, counter-intuitively, reading a comic requires more cognitive processes, not fewer. As well as reading the text, readers must also engage in pictorial perception and comprehension and must navigate the spatial positioning of material on the page. They must also integrate all of this information, along with the text, to create a holistic narrative understanding of the comic.
The ‘z-path’
Studies that investigate the way readers process information from comic books are scarce, especially when compared to the work that has been done in relation to reading text. For example, it’s well known that text in books is set up to be read along a “z-path”. You read along the line, get to the end, then zoom back to the start of the next line.
However, what does the archetypal flow of reading look like when reading a comic? The answer to this question is not necessarily obvious, especially when you consider the enormous variation in the way that comic book pages might be structured.
Paul Aleixo, Author provided (no reuse)
Previous work in this area has assumed that readers also follow a z-path while reading comics, or has asked people to self-report how they would read a page. We decided to use eye-tracking equipment to measure how people actually read real comics.
We travelled to comic conventions, set up a stall, and asked people to read the first few pages of a comic while we recorded how their gaze moved across the page. The comic we used was Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen – one of the key texts in the comic book canon (colouring by John Higgins).
Paul Aleixo, Author provided (no reuse)
Free-range reading
We found that the z-path was a great archetypal representation of how people read comics. By and large, people started off on panel one then travelled to panel two. From panel two they were most likely to go to panel three, then they were then most likely to zoom back to the left side of the page to get to panel four, and so on.
However, there was also a lot of deviation from this archetypal journey. People’s gaze did not always flow onto the next panel in the expected order. In particular, there were lots of transitions from one panel to the previous panel. We interpreted this as readers checking contextual information to make sure that they were making the intended inferences and that their narrative understanding was complete.
While there were some limitations to the work (for example, we used a very standard 3 × 3 layout, which is straightforward compared to some comic book pages), it provides a strong foundation for future work looking at comic book reading behaviour in more complex materials.
As well as confirming that comics are generally read following a z-path, it also showed that readers were comfortable jumping to different areas of the page as needed. Reading comics, it seems, is a much more free-range activity than reading a standard book.
From an educational perspective, this finding is one to celebrate. It reveals the complex cognitive work that is being done by learners as they create robust mental representations of the comic that they are reading – what is happening and what it means.
And for those designing educational comics, it suggests that keeping readers’ gaze path preferences in mind would be worthwhile. As well as writing a good script and drawing appropriate images, ordering information effectively across the page is another crucial part of making a pedagogically effective comic.
