Comics helped me love reading

When you are dyslexic, reading can be a problem for some people. Imagine a 5 years old girl learning to read. Her teacher asks her to read a sentence to the class. Her hands begin to sweat, her heart is racing and the words look like symbols. She tries to pronounce the first word and she doesn’t know how to form the sound of the first word, the letters are moving, literally moving on the page. She starts to feel self aware, self conscious, which leads to low self esteem. I don’t need to imagine because that was me. Reading and reading out loud was my worst nightmare when I was a child. I would rather do shores than read to my mum. One day my mum gave me a Beano comic. Even if I couldn’t read all the words I could still follow the plot. I was hooked. I was hooked on the adventures, hooked on the cliff hangers and hooked onto reading. It went from the Beano to the Dandy to Marvel then to DC comics. Now I have over 8,000 comics, most are stored at my mums. I love everyone of my collection because they were more than scripts, sketches and illustrations. They were my salvation, my fantasies and my safety blanket. Reading a book would take me weeks. I would be in awe of fast readers who could digest a book in days. Without my comics, I probably wouldn’t know how to read.