Levar Burton Thinks Comics are Awesome!
The following makes me all kindsa warm and fuzzy! Levar Burton, Geordi La Forge, Mr. Reading Rainbow thinks that comics are cool! He totally supports using them to get kids into reading! And he was into them as a kid! Check it out! This is from an interview on bigshinyrobot.com. If you're interested here's the full interview. Also, thanks to Angry Black Woman for bringing this to my attention!
QUESTION:
What makes comic books great literature?
LEVAR BURTON:
People ask me all the time, because I did Reading Rainbow on PBS for 25 years, “How do I get my kids to read?” And I say, “Find something that they’re passionate about.” If it’s comic books that they want to read, then buy them comic books, for goodness sakes. Comic books are good literature and, like science fiction, they have a tendency to really draw us toward that part of ourselves that imagines that which we create.
I’m one of those people that believes that there was some kid back in the 1960s watching Star Trek, and he kept seeing Captain Kirk pull out this communicator and flip it open - and that kid grew up and became an engineer, a designer of products, and we now have a device that is more common than the toaster. How many flip phones do you see on a daily basis? That which we imagine is what we tend to manifest in third dimension - that’s what human beings do, we are manifesting machines. The metaphor of a man who has an external electronic device, something man-made that serves him and somehow serves humanity, and that he becomes so aligned with that device, with the power of that device, that at one point he can discard it - I think that’s a real metaphor for the human journey. One day we won’t need a transporter device to get from one place to another. And it begins with the wheel and then migrates through airplanes to some future technology that we can’t produce yet but we can imagine. Imagination is really the key part of the human journey, it’s the key to the process of manifesting what our heart’s desire is.
When I was a kid, it was comic books that pointed me in that direction and from comic books I went to science fiction literature, which is still one of my most favorite genres of literature to read. Don’t underestimate the power of comics and what they represent for us and how they inform us on the journey of being human - because it’s powerful. It’s very powerful. They give us permission to contemplate what’s possible. And in this world, in this universe, there’s nothing that is not possible. If you can dream it, you can do it.
QUESTION:
What makes comic books great literature?
LEVAR BURTON:
People ask me all the time, because I did Reading Rainbow on PBS for 25 years, “How do I get my kids to read?” And I say, “Find something that they’re passionate about.” If it’s comic books that they want to read, then buy them comic books, for goodness sakes. Comic books are good literature and, like science fiction, they have a tendency to really draw us toward that part of ourselves that imagines that which we create.
I’m one of those people that believes that there was some kid back in the 1960s watching Star Trek, and he kept seeing Captain Kirk pull out this communicator and flip it open - and that kid grew up and became an engineer, a designer of products, and we now have a device that is more common than the toaster. How many flip phones do you see on a daily basis? That which we imagine is what we tend to manifest in third dimension - that’s what human beings do, we are manifesting machines. The metaphor of a man who has an external electronic device, something man-made that serves him and somehow serves humanity, and that he becomes so aligned with that device, with the power of that device, that at one point he can discard it - I think that’s a real metaphor for the human journey. One day we won’t need a transporter device to get from one place to another. And it begins with the wheel and then migrates through airplanes to some future technology that we can’t produce yet but we can imagine. Imagination is really the key part of the human journey, it’s the key to the process of manifesting what our heart’s desire is.
When I was a kid, it was comic books that pointed me in that direction and from comic books I went to science fiction literature, which is still one of my most favorite genres of literature to read. Don’t underestimate the power of comics and what they represent for us and how they inform us on the journey of being human - because it’s powerful. It’s very powerful. They give us permission to contemplate what’s possible. And in this world, in this universe, there’s nothing that is not possible. If you can dream it, you can do it.