Big Kid Picture Books

According to every movie about a teenager I've ever seen, I should have had a sizeable stack of comic books hidden under my bed at some point during my life. Apparently, I don't live in a movie, though. My first and only exposure to the medium of graphic novels and comic books came during my World Literature course last year. I must admit that when I first ordered the graphic novels, I scoffed at the fact that I would be reading books with pictures and getting college credits for it. When I got off my literary high horse and finally dove into them, though, I found out these were much more than the big kid picture books that I thought they were.
These graphic novels were challenging. It wasn't as if someone had written a short story, sprinkled some cartoony pictures on top, and spread it out to a full length novel. They had long, detailed, symbolically-rich, plots and messages. I thought that they'd be watered down novels that used pictures to help those with weak imaginations and grasps on the language, but, wow, was I wrong. I actually had a lot more trouble working out the symbolism and messages of a graphic novel than I've had with print-based novels.
With this experience in mind, when I read the section of Jacquelyn McTaggart's "Graphic Novels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" entitled "I Understand the Value of Using Graphic Novels With Reluctant and Struggling Readers. Do They Offer Any Benefit for Proficient Readers Who Already Like to Read?," I agreed completely with the author. She says that "[a]dvanced and proficient readers profit [from] ... [t]his multi-sensory activity [which] stirs the imaginations of more advanced readers and challenges them to use their higher-level thinking, reading, and writing skills (McTaggart 34). The visuals aren't things that detract from the novel and simply the reading for advanced and proficient readers. They add more to them. The visuals can be engaging and imagination stirring, but they can also be an added level for interpretation. That is what I think we so often miss when we think about graphic novels. They make the reader engage on so many different levels in order to truly take them all in. This is were the value for them comes in for the classroom.
So, let's step down from our literary high horses and give these big kid picture books a chance.