Regular readers know that my lovely wife is a first grade teacher. She’s taking a class right now about literacy, and she shared some recent reading with me from an article entitled Expanding Vocabulary Instruction to Foster the Development of Word Consciousness by Susan Watts and Michael F. Graves:
Comics strips provide another option. Comics strips supply inviting reading material in which word meaning are essential to the humor. Puns, idiomatic expressions, and words with multiple meaning often provide the core of humor.
So basically word-play in cartoons an comics helps to promote robust vocabularies in children. Woo! Go comics!