Can Reading a Comic Help You Learn? A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, staff in public and school libraries in the United States have been vocal advocates for children and adolescents who want to read graphic novels and comics. Librarians and educators need more readily accessible empirical evidence on the impact of reading comics from applied research.

Our team is conducting a systematic review of research studies that measure learning outcomes from comics-based educational interventions. Initial keyword searches returned 21,891 results. Removing duplicates and further filtering resulted in a data set of 7,976 articles. Team members screened these article abstracts and found 230 relevant references from multiple disciplines. The publication years of the articles range from 1999 to 2026. The number of published articles jumped from 14 in 2022 to 26 in 2023, followed by 24 in 2024, and 25 in 2025.

WordStat was used to identify thematic patterns in keywords and to perform a hierarchical cluster analysis based on association strength, resulting in a dendrogram with 13 thematic clusters. In the coming months, the team will review the full text of these 230 articles to draw connections and conclusions about the impact of comics on learning skills and concepts.