This is a Weird-Wide News post about a weird way of presenting the news. The Japanese read more newspapers than we do in the West, but like our kids, the Japanese kids are reading much less news than their parents. The response to this has been to launch newspapers in a Manga style.
One of the points I make in my kids’ sessions is that we have a crap attitude to illustration in Ireland and the UK. We tend to think of pictures in books (and that includes comics) as an aid to reading. They’re like the stabilizers on your bike. Once you can read, you can unbolt the pictures and throw them away, as they are no longer needed. Grown-up books don’t have pictures.
Could that possibly have something to do with the fact that, while the Irish are world famous for turning out novellists, poets and playwrights, we are not known across the globe for our contribution to the visual arts?
And yet we think nothing of reading newspapers and magazines that are full of pictures. Unlike someone who is reading a book, an adult is not considered dim, or illiterate, because they read an illustrated newspaper. And some of the pictures in those papers are in colour!
The Japanese do value illustration, it shows in their media and in their culture. So it makes complete sense, in an online world where it is obvious and easy to show the news in pictures as well as words, that they should start providing illustrations for the news. I should say ‘go back to’ illustrating the news – before photography, this was exactly what the newspapers used to do. They drew pictures to illustrate their stories.
Producing the news in comic book form is a brilliant idea. Not only could it get kids more interested in events that are going on around them (if done right). But it would also show those outside the children’s books industry how, in a world full of computer generated images and stock photography, there is still no substitute for someone who can draw a story.
