Don't judge me

Let me first say, great planning Prof. Fitzpatrick, I couldn't imagine a better book to assign over fall break. Seriously.
On the other hand, I did feel a bit strange reading a comic book in the airport. This is probably because I've never been "into" comic books. I own a few Calvin and Hobbes, and the Maus books, but I guess I never caught the comic fever. When I got on the plane (after the pilot announced we would be sitting on the runway for TWO HOURS!) the man sitting next to me asked how I was doing and I told him I didn't mind the delay so much because I had a lot of work to get done. Then I pulled out the book, and he gave me one of the oddest looks I've ever received.
When I got home, my mom picked up the book and said, with a tinge of disgust, "What is this?!" and when I told her it was my homework for the break, she gave me one of those motherly "humphf" noises and walked away.
I don't mean to say that I somehow think less of the comic form, but as McCloud says throughout his book, it's been sort of devalued. Not many people outside of the hardcore comic fan circles take comic books as seriously as other art forms. But, it was a bit hard for me to follow his argument, I often had to go back and re-read passages, reminding myself that there was an important message imbedded in the book. I kept skimming through the frames, going for the ones with more detail and less text. This became an even bigger problem after I realized that there was ::gasp!:: a color section to the book! I'm not sure I absorbed anything in the pages before that section, I was so anxious to get to the color pages (kind of like when you read a book for school, and a few pages in the middle are just pictures, and you anxiously count down the pages leading up to the picture section).
Revive made the comment about all textbooks being in comic book form, but I'm not sure that I would get as much out of them that way...