According to the US government comic books are not educational

[Iron Fist]

The US government considers pizza a vegetable. So I'm not going to put much stock in their opinion.

[bert]

Yeah it's the advertising part. Still bites that I can ship movies and video games cheaper then comic books.

why not ship in a priority mail box?

single cost as long as they fit, and you don't need to declare what's in the box unless international?

(that's how i typically get my comics, in a priority mail box)

[Doc Omega]

at Age 10 I was reading at a college freshman level. I am convinced I owe that to comic books

[Mikekerr3]

How do I know?

Because usps only ships educational material through media mail and comics don't qualify and are prohibited.

Just cost me $12 dollars to ship my dad in Fl 5 comics. They were moderns so the comics cost as much as shipping. I could of shipped 5 movies or video games cheaper.

Does our government not realize what comics mean aand that some people only learned to read from them.

If it weren't for video games magazines do you know how illiterate I'd be? More so then now. They helped me because I had interest in them.
USPS is not truth,justice and the American way. That's anti American.

Outside op peole lerning toread, wht education value to Comics have? If learning to read was enough catalogs would be educational. there are exceptions like "Charlies War 'or 'Maus' but those are very few and far between.

[kodave]

Outside op peole lerning toread, wht education value to Comics have? If learning to read was enough catalogs would be educational. there are exceptions like "Charlies War 'or 'Maus' but those are very few and far between.

This is a pretty ignorant view of what constitutes "education" in general.

For starters you're super-imposing your value and quality judgments as if they're universal. There are many good comics series that are written and illustrated to a high degree that are on par with many good prose books and authors that go beyond "Maus" and "Charlie's War." I'm not going to pretend like all prose is great nor am I going to pretend like the quantity of very highly regarded comics begins to rival what prose has given us over hundreds of years. The art form of sequential comics as we know it is still relatively new, even compared with traditional books as we know them.

Second, there can be educational value in analyzing and deconstructing even the crappiest or most action packed T&A nonsensical comic books you can find. Those books are often reflections of some part of society and the times in which they were written. What educational value is there in say, The Real House Wives of OC or 50 Shades of Grey or the Transporter movie series? Not much on the surface, but all could be analyzed at an academic level for various reasons. Thus they hold educational value, and even low brow comic books are the same. Is that the primary use or interpretation of those types of media? No, but the potential is there.

This is why, as far as the USPS goes, they do not discriminate against the kind of content within books, CDs, DVDs and whatever media they allow to qualify for the reduced Media Mail rates. But they do have to draw a line somewhere, and that line excludes "periodicals" because those are often already tangled up in their own shipping classification and because of the proliferation of ads which can at times surpass the amount of non-advertising material contained therein. Many periodical publications exist purely as advertisements disguised as real content. There's certainly an argument that National Geographic or the Economist or newspapers or tabloid supermarket checkout isle crap or consumer catalogs should be allowed to be mailed at Media Mail rates. There's certainly an argument for the educational value of video games, particularly with fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and other things of that nature in addition to what you could academically glean from the video game content itself. But again, lines have to be drawn somewhere because at a certain point, you can take this line of thinking to the level that any object could potentially have educational/academic value. Where the USPS drew the line is pretty fair, all things considered. If people want video games or periodicals considered Media Mail, they should write to someone in the USPS or whatever body is in charge of overseeing USPS regulations to petition for a change in the rules.