It’s Comic Con this weekend, where teeming crowds of cosplayers and superhero fans — plus a smattering of celebrities —return to the Jacob K. Javits Center for a weekend of mingling and merch. And right there in the middle of it all sits New York City’s Department of Education, which has quietly become a fixture at the convention, and one of the top comics publishers in the country.
“ We know that the way students learn is through a mix of different media, and comics are engaging. … Students really learn well from comics,” said Joe Schmidt, who works in the education department’s central office as part of the social studies and civics team, and as part of its in-house comics publisher, the Civics for All Comics Group.
The education department began publishing its own comics as part of the public schools’ social studies curriculum in 2020, and its collection now includes 46 comic books. Their topics range from the Draft Riots of 1863 to the history of hip-hop. There are profiles of John Lewis, Dolores Huerta and Jack Kirby, and there are issue-based comics on climate change and voting rights.
The comics are distributed to the city’s public schools, and available online to download for free for educators and comics fans across the country. For years, education department representatives have been coming to Comic Con to hand out copies and participate on panels.
One of the newest additions is the “Know Your Rights” comic, which educates readers about their rights during encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The cover features illustrations of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, flanked by a multicultural group of New Yorkers and the Statue of Liberty. The first panels remind readers they have the right to remain silent, ask to see warrants, and choose not to open the door if officers don’t have them. At the end, there are emergency phone numbers and groups to contact for help.
Officials said New York City Public Schools have produced 6 million copies of its various comics, making it one of the top 10 comic book publishers in the United States.
Schmidt, who didn’t grow up reading comics, still appreciates the importance of an origin story. For him, it was seeing how his students responded to comics back when he was still a teacher in the classroom.
“I saw the students gravitating to this book in a way that they didn’t necessarily with a traditional prose book, and it was able to tell a non-linear narrative. It was able to get into symbolism. It was able to get into representation,” he said.
Schmidt said comics boost literacy because they tend to include higher-level vocabulary than grade-level books, and the “synthesis” of words and images advances learning.
“ Comics actually bring together both text and visuals, and does something that just prose doesn’t, which is ask students to synthesize information from both of those things,” he said. “It sounds a little counterintuitive, but for many students, they actually learn better with comics as the text than with a traditional prose text.”
At the education department’s table at Comic Con Friday, which happened to be sandwiched between a “Ghostbusters” slime station and “Star Wars” activity table, kids and adults from the tri-state area were scooping up freebies.
Matteo Soares, 10, a fifth grader from Westchester, said he came to Comic Con because he’s a “diehard Marvel fan.” But he was happy to grab a handful of Civics for All Comics along the way.
“I like all of these,” he said. “They’re cool.”
Fuat Celik, a dad from New Jersey, came by with a wishlist of Civics For All comic titles on his phone.
“ My daughter especially really loves the exposure to the ideas of civics,” he said. “We’re trying to complete our collection.”
Celik, who grew up in New York, said the comics also offer him a way to connect his kids to some hometown history.
Schmidt said he often hears from people outside the city who are interested in the comics, including a gay teacher in Texas who said he printed out a poster associated with the NYC schools’ LGBTQ+ comics and curriculum.
“One of my favorite stories was a LGBTQ teacher in Texas who sent me a picture of some of our [LGBTQ] “Hidden Voices” posters, saying, ‘I can’t get this through my local district,” he said, “and here it is on my wall, here it is on my door. So students know that while I can’t say I’m a gay teacher, they know that I am an ally.’”
The New York City Department of Education will be at Comic Con throughout the convention until Sunday. On Saturday afternoon, it will participate in a panel on the department’s new comic about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican activist group in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On Sunday, the department will take part in a panel on LGBTQ+ comics coming out.
