Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland's schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers' discomfort when their children were spotted with comics.

"They tried to justify it by saying to me, 'Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we're just trying everything,"' she said. "We're trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education."

In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.

"There were some teachers at first who thought: 'Oh my God, comics? What's next?"' said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. "I think the teachers changed their impression."

The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Francoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus."

Mouly said that she believed her books had "enormous" potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Asterix.

"The one thing that retained my son's interest night after night was the comics," she said. "Whatever that light bulb is went on."

At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project's after-school programs.

At one table, Jamie Collazo's and his friends' faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like "Ultimate Spider-Man," "Super Smash Bros." and "Wolverine's Revenge."

"I'm a game freak," exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was "when you collect a lot of games and you can't stop playing them." Reading, he said, "is kind of boring to me."

But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.

Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that "reading is kind of boring," but said comics were different.

"Superheroes, comics — that's when it gets interesting, because you get to see all the cool stuff," he said. "We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff."

By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by American Indians, and aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings ("to be countind you," one child wrote in lieu of "to be continued"), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like "mysterious."

Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising, and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives.

"Because it's their story," he said, "they want to make it right."