How to read a comic with a child who can't read yet

Before you read a single bubble, turn the pages slowly together and ask what is happening. Who is in this box? What do they want? What went wrong? A child of four can answer all three from the drawings alone. That is the first thing comics teach: a picture is a sentence, and a row of pictures is a story.

Let the child point and tell. You don't need to correct a guess. If they say the dog is sad and the next panel shows him laughing, ask what changed. Going back to look again is exactly what good readers do with words later.

Show the reading path with a finger: the top left box first, across the row, then down to the next row and back to the left, like the words on a page. Some books bend the rule with a big panel or an arrow, and spotting those is a game in itself. Manga printed the Japanese way runs the other direction, and has its own guide.

The white gaps between panels are where time passes. Ask what happened in the gap. The child fills it in, and that is reading between the lines, years before anyone uses the phrase.

A speech bubble has a tail that points at whoever is talking. A cloud with little circles under it is a thought. A spiky bubble is a shout. In a panel with two bubbles, the higher one, or the one further left, is said first. Read each bubble aloud in a voice for its character, and point at it as you read, so the child sees that those marks are the words you are saying.

Sound words like BONK and SPLAT are a good first thing for a child to read alone. They are big, they match the picture, and they are fun to shout.

Following panels in order, keeping track of who is who, guessing what comes next and noticing when the guess was wrong are the same things a child does with a chapter book later. The words come when they come. A child who has looked at a hundred comics already knows that pages hold a story, that a story has a start and an end, and that books are worth opening.

Keep the sessions short and stop while it is still fun. If the child wants the same book every night, that is fine: they are learning it well enough to tell it back to you.

These 8 series on Peabody start at age 6 or younger and are told mostly in pictures. Each page lists the books in order, with a checklist that stays on your device.

• Pizza and Taco, ages 5–8: Big panels with a line or two of speech in each bubble, split into short chapters.
• Owly, ages 5–8: Almost wordless pictures where pictures and small symbols in the speech bubbles tell the story, so a child can read it with no words at all.
• Narwhal and Jelly, ages 6–9: Very short comics in big panels with only a line or two of text each, plus sea-creature facts at the end of some chapters.
• Yotsuba&!, ages 6–12: Everyday scenes with short speech bubbles.
• CatStronauts, ages 6–10: Big clear panels, short bubbles and a lot of space-science words explained as the story goes.
• Magic Tree House, ages 6–9: Short picture-led panels that retell each chapter book with a few lines of text per frame.
• Agent Moose, ages 6–9: Short comic panels with big pictures and a lot of puns, so a child can follow the plot with little reading.
• Pea, Bee, & Jay, ages 6–10: Short books of big panels with very few words in each bubble and puns on every page, made for new readers.

For more, see graphic novels for 6-year-olds or every series on the shelf by age.