Hooked on Comics

I was the kid who couldn't read. Then Spider-Man and his pals let me in on the story.

By Ahmet Zappa

From Reader's Digest

Change Text Size

Change Text Size
|
Bookmark

Bookmark

Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
|
Print
|
E-Mail

Related Topics:

Dyslexia

My trouble with words became a serious problem for me when I was in the third grade. The class had started reading aloud, and every day I was panicked that I'd be called on. I'd cower at my desk, hoping my classmates would finish the passage before it was my turn.

I didn't really know what I was experiencing back in the early 1980s, but now I know it was dyslexia. When I tried reading a paragraph, my eyes skipped whole sentences. When I wrote, I thought I was getting everything down on the paper -- only to find that entire chunks and letters were missing.

Home was the one place I never felt self-conscious. As the son of musician Frank Zappa, I had anything but a normal childhood growing up in Los Angeles. Still, despite what people might expect from two rockers, my parents never did drugs, and they encouraged learning. Our house was always full of interesting people -- artists, scientists, actors, musicians -- with great stories to tell.

My mom, Gail, recognized that I didn't process information like other kids. When I was young, she read to me a lot. One story I loved was Leo the Late Bloomer, a picture book about a tiger cub who takes longer than others to read, write, draw and talk. I realize my mom chose that book for a reason.

Still, even with my family's support, school didn't get any better. After I was diagnosed with a learning disability, it actually got worse. In fourth grade, I spent most of the day in a portable classroom with a teacher, her smelly dog Nigel and other kids with learning problems. I started pretending I was sick so I could skip going, and completely stopped doing my assignments.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents decided to let me be home-schooled. They hired tutors to prep me for the GED, but when I took the test, I filled in all the bubbles randomly, thinking I was cool. My mom and dad threw in the towel and said, "Make yourself a diploma."

Life got pretty boring -- until I discovered my parents' comic book collection. I found I could follow the story through the pictures without reading the words. I was hooked. I bought a Spider-Man compilation, and reading it felt like reading a real book. I've since learned that dyslexics are advised to limit the amount of information on the page. Comic books, with their short phrases in block print, didn't confuse my eyes the way lines of text did.