The article that stuck out the most for me this week was the one written by William Moulton Marston himself.  What interested me in “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics” was where Marston discusses how comics help students improve in school, more specifically in English. In his research he explains how “Excerpts from superman have been used successfully in teaching English in public schools” (Marston 42). This interests me because I have used graphic novels and comic books to help my sister.

My little sister was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was in first grade. People don’t really understand what it means to have dyslexia. Even today it’s kind of hard trying to wrap my head around the difficulties that she has to go through. Dyslexia itself is such a fluid concept and it means something different for every person that has it. For my sister, it means that the she confuses her d’s, p’s and b’s, w’s and m’s. It also means that when she reads, words will flip and letters will move around when they aren’t supposed to. She’s had moments in her life were people, especially kids, have made fun of the way she spells or reads. When she was in middle school, her teacher belittled her in front of her entire class because of her disability.

So my sister worked harder than I’ve seen anybody work to get amazing grades, but it still wasn’t enough to stop those negative comments. People can kind of be evil that way. Plus, dyslexia doesn’t really go away. People just learn to work around it. My sister carried this negativity everywhere, and like Gloria Steinem expressed in her article, she needed something or someone to empower her. So, I did some research, and I read an article that explained that graphic novels and comics help dyslexics read faster and comprehend more. It’s because, like Marston points out, all comics are visual: if a dyslexic can’t understand what they’re reading, they have pictures to help them along.

We were both pretty apprehensive about trying it out, because she’s not the comic book type. She honestly didn’t think it would work, and I was afraid the “pinup” female superheroes would have a negative effect on her (Lepore). But it actually worked. I ended up getting her about six graphic novels, and one of them, Injustice, contained Wonder Woman. Not only did the visual aspect of the graphic novel greatly improve her reading, but she also noticed that she could read faster because every letter was capitalized and the words had different fonts. The pages seemed “cleaner” because they contained color so the letters weren’t as confusing compared to a black and white page.

As I was preparing for this blog, I asked her how she felt about Wonder Woman and her reply was that she really liked Wonder Woman in Injustice, despite thinking she would hate her. She like her because she would try to talk things out with the bad guys before fighting, and only resulted in fighting as a last resort. My sister also felt as though she could be equal to anyone, despite being dyslexic and being female, because Wonder Woman is in a team full of guys and she was still considered their equal.