Keith Chow, senior editor of the "Secret Identities" anthology, sent in a link to an article by "American Born Chinese" creator Gene Yang about comics in education. And Yang knows whereof he speaks -- he's a computer science high school teacher who's created a website about comics in education and has created a webcomics teaching tool called Factoring with Mr. Yang. Here's an excerpt from the article:

... the comics medium by its very nature is a "multimedia medium." It is a single, unified medium made up of two distinct media: text and still imagery. By teaching your students to read and create comic books, you are teaching them to analyze the very nature of information, a 21st Century skill.

When a student creates a comic book, she is forced to think deeply about every piece of information she intends to communicate. She must continually ask herself, would this be more effectively expressed as a picture in the panel or as text in the panel's caption box? Since the comics medium offers her a choice between the two, she can no longer take a particular medium of communication for granted. She must base her choice on an analysis of the nature of the information.