Have you ever wanted to use comics to learn about archaeology but weren’t sure how? Here, we explain where to start by describing the development of Tome Reader, an open educational resource (OER) that uses comics to cultivate archaeological data literacy.
Highlighting comics through Tome Reader, was a great chance for the Data Literacy Program (DLP) team to celebrate the awesome work comics creators do to portray archaeological concepts and the past in different ways. Whether the art and plot are fantastical or realistic, comics are a great literacy tool and, when combined with archaeological material, they offer an opportunity to develop your archaeological data literacy. Comics combine layout, text, and images to create structured observations about the world. Sometimes creators work hard to portray real places accurately, while others use their imaginations to illustrate entirely fictional places with their own histories and archaeologies.
However, making Tome Reader wasn’t easy. One hurdle we faced was that people might think this OER was only for kids, a common misconception about comics (and OERs). While there are great kids’ comics (and OERs) and a lot of kids do read comics, we wanted to be clear about the target audience of the comics from our first list. This, combined with a reviewer’s question about reading level, prompted us to add information about “audience” to our book club data table.
There are a lot of approaches to assessing readability or reading level. Unfortunately, only books published specifically for children often include that. More commonly, publishers state the target audience as an age group, such as children, juvenile, teen, or young adult. Adult audiences act as an unsaid default even if the readability or reading level of a particular book might be associated with “teens”. You can read a data-driven exploration of the relationship between reading level and adult books here.
For American comics, ratings often evolved out of — or came in response to — the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Between 1954 and about 2011, the CCA acted as a within-industry regulating body that dictated what comics should or shouldn’t contain and defined how comics should or shouldn’t portray certain topics. As part of that self-regulation (the CCA wasn’t a legal body), American comics publishers submitted their comics to the CCA for content review and then a seal of approval they could publish on comics’ covers. That seal would look like the image below.
For many reasons, most American comics publishers now have a rating system that includes age-group based audiences as well as the designation “All Ages” for content appropriate for everyone. While this isn’t a reading level, it can help you decide if a comic is right for you. Searching by target audience is also a great way to search for comics and some publishers, such as Kodansha, have that as a search filter.
Audience was an important part of developing Tome Reader because the DLP had to decide how to describe our first list of recommendations. While many of the individual comics on our list were suitable for teens, the DLP had to consider the list as a whole. That meant that because we recommended some comics rated mature (essentially a “for adults” rating) or ones that lacked ratings but had mature themes, we decided that the first list was the adult list, with the potential for future ones focused on material for other audiences.
Now that you know why the first list is the adult comic book list, how did we find those comics? There are a lot of comics out there. Luckily, one of the DLP’s postdoctoral researchers studies comics (you can read one of her articles about that here). So we began by considering comics that our postdoc had studied, reviewed, or just read for fun.
This generated a lot of options for the list, ranging from independent comics like those by archaeological-illustrator-turned-comics-creator Glynnis Fawkes; manga (Japanese comics) with cameos by archaeologist characters like in Cardcaptor Sakura; and mainstream American comics like the Marvel series Doctor Aphra, about an archaeologist from the Star Wars universe. However, online access has changed how people read comics and has created opportunities for more, and more diverse, creators to share and publish their work. So we made sure to add to our potential list by searching for, reading, and evaluating digital comics published and shared online.
We used a combination of keyword search and tag exploration to find digital comics hosted or published online. This began with a basic keyword search looking for archaeology-related content. Unfortunately, few creators use the term “archaeology” to describe or tag their works, even if it is part of the story. Instead they used words related to the topics and periods archaeologists study. So we had a lot more success finding comics by searching for artifacts, ancient periods or places, and ruins. Then we explored the results of those searches, seeing how the creators tagged their content and clicked on those tags to find other works tagged with archaeology-related words.
We also made sure to search a variety of websites and online comics sources. This included searching comics’ catalogs from traditional publishers for new releases or titles we hadn’t heard of as well as online platforms designed for creating, publishing, and reading digital comics. Webtoon and Tapas are two platforms developed for online comics and each had interesting options for the list. However, our final list includes more works from sites like Gumroad and itch.io. Those sites act as marketplaces where creators upload and sell a variety of digital products, including comics. Digital marketplaces can also link to creator websites where you can get physical versions of digital comics hosted on those sites.
From this list, we compared each comic against our program values and other intentions for the book club Digital Data Stories. We also did some background research on the comics’ creation to check that things we had heard about a comic, for example who consulted on its creation, was accurate. The result of this search and vetting was our first list of recommended comics, available as The adult comics book list.
Locating and selecting these comics was an important reminder that finding the right materials relies on what, how, and where you search because each of these components changes what you find. The selection of keywords, exploring how creators tag their works, and which platforms you explore all create different opportunities for finding materials you’ll enjoy and learn from.
We hope this helps inspire your next search. If you’ve read all the comics from the list, check out the recommended resources included in the discussion guides, the book data table, or the links in this article to find more. Or if you have any recommendations for more comics, let us know! We’re always looking for more diverse, ethical, accessible, and archaeology-related reads. Then once you have enough titles for your own list, you can make an archaeology-inspired book club (grabbing some guidance from this Data Story Short).
Image credits: “TomeReader_SelectionBlog_Header” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the AAI / CC BY-NC-SA, adapted from “Cartoons of DLP Staff” by ama from the Data Literacy Program (DLP) / CC BY-NC-SA. “HowWePickedComics-BookDataTableScreenshot” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY as of 3 August 2026. “Comics Code Authority logo” by the Comics Code Authority from Wikimedia Commons is in the public domain as it likely does not meet the threshold for originality but may be under trademark in some jurisdictions. It is used here for educational purposes under fair use. “Comics brown Bag Heading” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY and includes an excerpt from Cardcaptor Sakura volume 1 by CLAMP from TOKYOPOP (2004) all rights remain with the rightsholders, used under fair use for educational and review purposes.
