Comics as a cultural delivery system

I have commented on this in the past, the amount of cultural knowledge which I absorbed as a youth through non-highbrow sources, principally comics and entertainment of that ilk. From How Classic Cartoons Created a Culturally Literate Generation by Annie Holmquist.

I recently picked up Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for the first time. Finding the plot rather amusing, I began relaying it to my father over the weekend. Because he had never read the book, I was rather surprised when he began asking informed questions about the story. In no time at all, he was the one schooling me on plot elements I had not yet reached.

“Wait a minute,” I asked. “Are you sure you’ve never read this book?”

“No, never have,” he replied, “but I saw a cartoon version of the story when I was younger and everything I know comes from that.”

His revelation was intriguing, and to be honest, not the first of its kind. Like many in the Boomer generation, my father grew up watching classic cartoons, numbers of which were produced by the likes of Warner Bros.

But those cartoons did more than mind-numbingly entertain a generation of children. They also introduced millions of young people to key facets of cultural literacy, particularly in the realm of literature and music.

Beyond the aforementioned case of Mark Twain’s novel, these cartoons introduced children to stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through the medium of Bugs Bunny. Key quotations and scenes from William Shakespeare’s works were the main theme in a Goofy Gophers cartoon known as A Ham in a Role. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha was placed front and center in a Walt Disney short called Little Hiawatha.

In my case, the purveyor of cultural knowledge was a wonderful publication called Classics Illustrated Comics, abridgments in comic form of most the major classics of the Western canon. I read all sorts of classics in that form which I have never subsequently felt compelled to read. The fact that I read them as comics does not prevent me from garnering 70-80% of the outline.

Which is not to say that Classics Illustrated Comics was a substitute for the classics. Plenty I have read in their original because I enjoyed the story line. Treasure Island was consumed both as Classics Illustrated Comics and in the original. Les Misérables, on the other hand, was consumed only as Classics Illustrated Comics (and latterly as the CD and theatrical production.

The other source of classics was through serializations in children's magazines.

All those sources seem to have fallen by the wayside. More and more, it appears that our cultural institutions are failing to educate our children. Or, as Holmquist notes,

In short, neither schools, nor Saturday morning cartoons seem to be passing on the torch of cultural knowledge and literacy. Could such a scenario be one reason why we see an increased apathy and lack of substance in the current generation?