I love seeing this sort of thing: an MIT professor explains health care reform in comics form. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is around 1,900 pages and 400,000 words. I’m sure that most lawmakers have not read the entire thing. Professor Jonathan Gruber worked with illustrator Nathan Schreiber to put across the information in an 152 page comic called “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works.”
I sincerely believe comics have a stronger ability to convey difficult information because of the combination of words and pictures. This is not a “dumbing down” of the information. We are visually wired, and the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words is a cliche because there is a deep truth in that statement. At their best, comics use words where necessary and not just to describe what’s in the pictures. Each can communicate information in unique ways. Working together, the images and words can help people understand things much more quickly than using only one or the other. Continue reading
