Educators use action-heavy Manga books as teaching tool

HACKENSACK, N.J. - Navil Gomez is crazy for Manga. "This stuff is full of drama," says the high school student.

If you haven't heard of Manga, you're probably older than 20. The comic-book-like genre - filled with action and, yes, drama - is all the rage with teenagers, and now educators are hoping to use it to engage young people in schoolwork.

This summer, the test-prep giant Kaplan introduced a series of Manga books designed to help students study for the vocabulary portion of the SATs. And while most educators haven't yet joined the bandwagon, interest in using Manga and other forms of so-called graphic novels in the classroom is growing.

"Within the last year, we've seen student teachers including more and more graphic novels in their curriculum," said Kelly McNeal, an education professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. "We're living in a graphic world - this is highly appealing. Students will read it."

On a recent morning, Gomez and other Paterson high school students in a summer program at WPU were engaged in a lively discussion of the life and times of a young woman in post-revolutionary Iran. The chat was sparked by the class's reading assignment of "Persepolis 2" - the hugely popular memoir-in-comic - by Marjane Satrapi.

"I like autobiographies. But this is much more interesting than just words on a page," Gomez said. "You want to find out what happens to her."

In fact, teachers reported students were actually jumping ahead of their daily reading assignments in the summer class to get to the end of the book.

"The format makes it easy to understand and read," said Whitney Liuen, a counselor in the summer program at WPU, where students were also reading a graphic biography of Malcolm X.

Graphic novels are heavy on dialogue and, of course, visuals.

Manga originated in Japan, and roughly translates into humorous pictures. It is often made into animation, or anime. It has a definite look to it; characters are sharply drawn and there is usually a lot of action.

In Japan, there are Manga comic books for all ages. Here it primarily is the province of teen readers. Manga seems to have particular appeal for those bred on computer and video games and the Japanese animation seen on Cartoon Network and other places, said George Galuschak, librarian at the Montvale (N.J.) Public Library.

"This generation is very visual and Manga really appeals to them," said Galuschak. Montvale began a Manga collection in 2002 and the books circulate about twice as much as other young adult titles, Galuschak said.

Kaplan's foray into Manga is part of a strategy to engage today's students. Manga is the fastest-growing segment in the publishing industry, according to Kaplan, with sales jumping 22 percent from 7.8 million books in 2005 to 9.5 million last year.

In Kaplan's new series, the SAT vocabulary words - like foolhardy, antagonist and oblivious - are served up with a story line filled with no small amount of action, and a T-13 rating that warns of "mild violence, mild gore and moderate language." The first panel of Chapter One in "PsyComm," a futuristic battle between good and evil, includes a "kraka-boom" explosion along with the vocabulary word desolate.

Other titles in the series include "Warcraft"; "Dragon Hunt," which features a blue dragon; and "Van Von Hunter," who battles vampires, beasts and zombies while using SAT vocabulary.

"We're trying to make it as much fun as test prep can be," said Kristen Campbell, national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. "The SAT is still a paper-and-pencil based test, but students are getting information in so many other ways."

The books, like other new Kaplan products such as iPod downloads, supplement traditional classroom and tutoring test prep, Campbell said.

"These are ways that we didn't learn info but they are very real and very popular," said Campbell. "They are convenient and portable. Preparing for the SAT is serious business and students get that, but, to the extent they can do it in a visually appealing format, it makes it a little easier."