How Superhero Comics Teach Information Literacy Part 1

OK. I had this idea and submitted it to be published in a book about comics and information literacy and the rejected it. Sad face. I know I could type this out and send it to be officially published and maybe one day I'll take the ideas here and reuse them for an article, but.. that's a long process and I think this is too important to lock up for long periods of time and potentially a paywall.

So I'm going to do a series of posts about how superhero comics inherently teach information literacy and how you as a librarian can tap into that and use that to advocate for comics or even help people understand information literacy. No clue how many posts there will be if I'm honest.. but here's the first.

Early example of a Marvel Citation

If you've ever read a lot of Marvel/DC Superhero comics especially from the 60's, 70's and 80's, you will have noticed these little boxes with editors notes in them. These small notes often told readers when things happened in previous issues or in unrelated titles. Obviously these notes were intended to be sales gimmicks to drive readers to go buy that issue to read the referenced events first hand, but I'm sure all of you have already realized what they really are.. They are citations! Obviously they don't follow any particular citation format and they're not used consistently (especially today), but for young readers especially this may be their first introduction to the idea of telling people where this information came from, which is obviously why we cite things to begin with.

This leads to the next step in the chain. We have a source cited, now we have the act of discovery, searching for and finding the cited issue so the reader can see the information first hand and read the story first hand. And readers will do just that, without much prompting. This is because Marvel and DC have a universe of shared characters and teams with a shared timeline. This concept is referred to as continuity.
The beauty of this is that by having this complex rule of what happened and didn't, what matters and doesn't, the reader is forced to seek out and understand what sources are "reliable" and what ones aren't. With the citations of early issues, the searching for confirmation, now the reader begins to be able to pick up clues easily and quickly to see if things work or don't. If the history follows or doesn't.

It may be hard to see, but after reading for a while, the fans just learn how to navigate and tell. The same way you can tell the bias of a book, article, or news site just by reading, comic readers learn this navigation through the process.

This is epitomized by Marvel's long standing "No Prize", a prestigious gift of literally nothing, that is given to fans who notice issues and lapses in the continuity. Stan Lee came up with this idea in the letter columns, which again encouraged readers to look and see errors and write in about them so they would be recognized. DC had a similar thing on a vastly smaller scale with the concept of Earth-B. Essentially, DC fans noticed that when certain creators worked together all the rules of continuity went out the window and everything was just.. off. Because of this, one editor affectionately named one of DC's multiple Earths, Earth-B, where all these mistakes happened. The B referenced Brave and the Bold, where this happened a lot, and a number of B-named writers and editors that happened to write books that weren't always in line with the rules of continuity.

So you're now asking, how can I use this? Well.. obviously one is to promote reading comics. They teach these steps for you. Another is to point the steps out to an older comic reader or audience and let them see this as examples of information literacy and information seeking behaviors. This can be done as a whole or with individual examples.. I'm sure some of you can come up with even more ways to use this though than I can and if not, well at least you're aware.