Disneyfied?
Bookninja has linked to an article (posted by Yahoo! News) about teachers in Maryland using Disney comics to inspire a love of reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re decidedly skeptical about the whole idea.
Garsh, Mickey. Isn’t Disney so civic-minded and not clawing desperately at its few remaining untapped markets?
Bookninja goes on to imply that reading Disney comics will rot the young minds of schoolkids. Though we at Quillblog love the ’ninja people, today we must respectfully disagree with them. As any serious comics fan knows, Disney has always set an inordinately high bar with their comics for kids, most notably with their classic (and still running) Gladstone line. The original Carl Barks-penned Uncle Scrooge comics – with their globe-trotting Gunga Din-style adventure plots – are especially high-water marks, on a level with Herges’s Tintin series and Jeff Smith’s Bone. This Quillblogger recalls many a happy Sunday afternoon spent reading Uncle Scrooge, which probably taught me more about the pleasures of narrative than many of the middling YA novels my teachers tried to force down my throat.
