In contrast (Warning: Old Geezer Rant Ahead), old school comics taught me a lot. Vocabulary for one. Between Dr Doom, Reed Richards and Thor I learned all kinds of high falutin words. I was calling my playground rivals "witless cretins" when everyone else my age was saying "Doo-doo Head."
In the Powerpuff Girls, Mojo Jojo had it with Bubbles saucy mouth after being called "doo-doo head" (or something along those lines). While the pejorative is silly, the notion of Bubbles having a saucy mouth is hardly the sort of thing that most kids would get.
Plus from a vintage All-Star tale I learned that wet rawhide shrinks as it dries (making it a great tool for strangling Caped Crusaders). From Batman I learned that the Telegraph Bird makes a sound very much like a rattlesnake (allowing the Penguin to effect an escape) and that you can swim out of quicksand if you keep your cool. I learned about undersea life from Aquaman, physics and astronomy from the Atom and Green Lantern, and so on.
Did you learn that it was easy to shoot laser beams at missles and sell a national defense strategy on such a thing? What did you learn about women (only half the world, give or take), apart from their being united in a desire to discover Superman's secret identity?
I was recently reading Doctor Solar, Man Of The Atom (the overpriced Dark Horse anthologies that are sporadically available through my library -- yes, I could download the mess illegally, but books are more readily readable in bed). The science in those books amounted to "because it's atomic..." and quickly turns even sillier than Superfriends physics.
Through Kid Eternity and time-travels by Superman, Batman and others I met historical characters like Billy the Kid, Attila the Hun, Julius Ceasar, Socrates and DaVinci for the first time.
But did you ever question why such luminaries spoke conversational English, or how our heroes ever spoke their dead tongues?
Most of all, comics got me hooked on reading. They led me to Science Fiction, mysteries, historical fiction, biographies, Westerns and thrillers. So yes, comics did make me smarter growing up.
I first saw the word "quantum" in a comic book, and that led me to finding out what it was really about. I'm amazed at some of the little things that I can trace back to Maggin's Superman novels, but I wouldn't have tackled them without having read Superman as a comic book first.
But I seriously doubt reading them today, at my age, would add much to my knowledge. I'm guessing the author of this book likes Seinfeld and the Simpsons because of the irony, the cultural references, the meta-textual whatchamacallits. Even here modern comics aren't that smart, in my opinion, because as I said above all the references and in-jokes simply lead back to other comics. They aren't what I'd call pithy commentaries on modern times, more just an escape from reality. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry would say, but that kind of escapism is a break from learning, not a furthering of it.
It depends on the comic, of course. Warren Ellis' Orbiter is nothing more or less than science fiction put to art.
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