Comics

​From peanuts to Iron man. From Archie to Batman. Comic strips first appeared in newspapers in the late 19th century, with popular strips collated into book form starting with The Yellow Kid in the US in 1895. In Europe, The Adventures of Tin Tin began in 1928 as a 2-page comic in the youth supplement of a Belgian newspaper.

​The late 1930s marked the arrival of the superhero genre with comic magazines featuring Superman and Batman. In post-war Japan, manga became popular, with Astro Boy first serialised in 1952.

​First coined in 1964 by Richard Kyle in a comics fanzine, ‘graphic novel’ is now a term widely used by readers and publishers. The term only came into popular usage in 1978 with the commercial and critical success of Will Eisner’s A Contract With God

​The notion of the graphic novel as a more serious or literary comic form for adult readers became further cemented by three significant titles that were published in the 1980s: Maus (a book on the Holocaust which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991), Watchmen (listed as TIME’s Best 100 novels since 1923), and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

​One of the strengths of the graphic novel today lies in its ability as a medium to tell sensitive or difficult stories in a way that is both accessible and moving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrUmyDMxjwQ&t=170s

• ​Practice your english reading comprehension

• ​Improve your vocabulary and grammar

• ​They offer interesting stories