College Paper Slams ‘Persepolis’ Reading Assignment

Van Jensen

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book writer. In addition to ComicMix, he contributes to Publishers Weekly and Comic Book Resources. He lives in Atlanta, and his blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

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4 Responses

  1. mike weber says:

    The controversy over whether "Watchmen" would be allowed to compete for the "Best Novel" Higo Award at the 1988 New Orleans SF WorldCon comes to mind. It was my contention (and that of a lot of other people) that "Watchmen" qualified under the Hugo Rules (at least as then written; ther emay have been rewrites in the intervening twenty years), which defined the category as for "works of fiction of at least 40,000 words".I spent an evening (on and off) arguing with John Guidry about this at the time – John's response to any argument, from "the rules say it qualifies" to "a lot of people are voting to nominate it" was "It's not a novel, it's a comic book."(Of course, compared to other adminstrative Bad Ideas associated with that WorldCon, the "Watchmen" controversy sort of fades into insignificance…)

  2. Marilee J. Layman says:

    If young people are so bad at reading comprehension, how does the editorial writer expect to be read?

  3. John Tebbel says:

    Only Americans think pictures are less difficult to "read" or less enlightening than prose. After the comic censorship scandal of the Fifties scads of research was done proving that comic book reading is not a factor in a person's ability to read or appreciate prose.

  4. Maria Hartmann says:

    Does anyone know where I can find a copy of this editorial? I just had my high school students read PERSEPOLIS for a summer assignment and would love to explore this issue with them. I followed the link above, but it says the page isn't found…any ideas? Thanks so much! -Maria