Deirdre Hollman always read the funny pages in the newspaper growing up, but didn’t really get into comics until she had a child of her own. She saw that her son liked DC and Marvel comics like Nightwing and Batman, and Hollman wanted to diversify his reading material. She headed to Harlem to pick up a few comic books featuring black characters so her son could see some heroes who looked like him.
“My son was really excited,” Hollman says. “He understood it.” She then started to use comics as a teaching tool at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She used the graphic novel about Malcolm X and John Lewis’s March series to teach black history.