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The Sunday funny pages may now seem, even by current print standards, like the blandest, most marginal cultural forum imaginable, but they\u2019ll always feature prominently in my own life story as the place I learned to read. Each week, I\u2019d go from the basic, often slapsticky, sometimes entirely nonlinguistic humor of Garfield<\/em>to the more artistically, emotionally, and verbally advanced likes ofPeanuts<\/em> to \u2014 if I could put in the time \u2014 the forbidding heights of\u00a0Doonesbury <\/em>and Zippy<\/em>, with their detailed images and wordy mixtures of irony and earnestness, or the often mystifying, rarely attempted \u201cserious\u201d comics like Mary Worth<\/em> and Apartment 3-G<\/em>. Each week, I grasped a little more of their stories, their messages, their jokes.<\/p>\n
In adulthood, I\u2019ve come around to rediscover the delight of learning to read English in learning foreign languages. It has something to do with the immediate and perceptible (or at least theoretically immediate and perceptible) return on effort: learn a little more of a language, and you can then and there have that much more of a conversation, watch that much more of a movie, read that much more of a book, navigate that much more of a new environment. Since we learn our native languages in some sense unconsciously, without much in the way of deliberate effort, I didn\u2019t get any particular charge \u2014 not that I remember, anyway \u2014 from learning to speak English. But later, when I opened up the comics each and every Sunday while learning to read English, a deliberate project indeed, I could feel both the rich satisfaction of making progress and the equally rich frustration of sometimes making less progress than I\u2019d expected to.<\/p>\n
And so it\u2019s gone with the work of mastering Korean<\/a>, though since I live in Korea, the evaluation comes not once a week but every day, unavoidably, over and over again. Still, it occurred to me somewhere along the way that I could again use comics as a learning tool much as I used them over a quarter-century ago. On my first visit to Seoul, having come across a bursting-at-the-seams basement secondhand bookstore not only still open at almost midnight but manned by an eccentric owner who served us instant coffee<\/a> (all of which, by itself, probably sold me on Korea as a place to live), I had good reason to snap up the book of Calvin and Hobbes<\/em> strips translated into Korean I found wedged into the middle of one of the countless floor-to-ceiling piles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n