This Sunday I’m leaving town to attend the International Reading Association convention in Minneapolis. I’ve been to a few of these conventions in recent years, and I always meet some really cool teachers who are developing strategies to help other teachers incorporate comics in the classroom. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that I tend to hear the same texts recommended over and over again: MAUS, WATCHMEN, PERSEPOLIS, and AMERICAN BORN CHINESE. It seems that the most common way that comics do appear in classrooms is when adventurous high school English teachers decide to teach the conventions of “comics lit”, and introduce their students to the most seminal works. There is certainly nothing wrong with this. I wish I had gotten to study these books when I was in high school. However, I am looking forward to the day when comics are used not just in A.P. English classes, but in all the different subject areas.

Like many comics fans, I often repeat the mantra that different types of information can be best communicated in different ways; some things are best explained with prose, other things with pictures or a combination of prose and pictures. As Gene Yang put it, “Text is not the most efficient medium for communicating all information. Some information — the sound of a child’s laughter, the borders of a country and the proper method of performing a physical exercise — can best be communicated in media other than text.”

A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with Calvin Reid from Publishers Weekly, and we agreed that the next big trend for comics publishing will be non-fiction. I sometimes wonder if I would have done better in my economics or chemistry classes if more of the material had been available with visual explanations in addition to the text. On the other hand, I always loved my history classes because I have an over-active imagination and so I always had no trouble turning my history books into soap operas. I’m sure it helped that I was a voracious Asterix reader as a child, so I learned to translate the great figures and conflicts you learn about in history class into colorful adventures filled with wise-cracking characters. I love recommending George O’Connor’s JOURNEY INTO MOHAWK COUNTRY for this reason — talk about a book that is perfect for teaching the concept of a “primary source”!

Yes, indeed, these are interesting times. While I can’t predict how much smaller the print publishing industry will ultimately end up, I am willing to predict that comics, both print and online, will keep growing and growing. They are a visceral form of communication that seems most fitting for this era of instant gratification. And yet, paradoxically, while reading comics has a more immediate, intuitive effect than reading prose, the act of creating comics is a laborious, painstaking, and, as a matter of fact, ancient process. Comics creators are essentially hearkening back to pre-Gutenberg days, when scribes hunched over their lecturns and augmented their texts with meticulous illustrations.

“To illustrate” comes from the Latin “lustrare”, which means “to make bright,” and the original Latin “illustrator” meant “one who enlightens” rather than “one who draws.” This is why I am so excited about the developing comics publishing scene. As more creators expand beyond the superhero genre and explore everything from the life of a photojournalist in Afghanistan (see First Second’s heart-wrenching new release The Photographer) to an explanation of Bertrand Russell’s mathematical quests (the upcoming Logicomix from Bloomsbury), we are being treated to an assimilation of art and words that has not existed on this scale since the age of illuminated manuscripts.