Parenting & Family Quote by Stan Sakai

Sakai’s lament lands with the weary authority of someone who’s spent a lifetime trying to coax attention onto a page. As a cartoonist, he’s not defending “literature” in the abstract; he’s defending sustained looking. Reading, for him, isn’t a moral virtue. It’s a muscle that makes his entire medium possible: the patience to follow sequence, to sit with ambiguity between panels, to let meaning accumulate rather than explode.

The line about video games does two jobs at once. On the surface it’s a familiar generational gripe, but underneath it’s a comment about the economics of attention: games don’t just compete with books, they train the brain to expect constant feedback, constant reward. Comics, ironically, straddle that gap - they offer immediate visual pleasure while still demanding the reader do narrative work. That tension makes Sakai’s worry sharper, not softer.

Then he pivots to numbers, and that’s where the quote shows its real intent: he’s diagnosing a marketplace, not merely a classroom. “90% of the books…5% of the population” is less a precise statistic than a mood of cultural consolidation. Reading becomes a niche behavior, and once it’s a niche, it’s easier for publishers to chase safe bets, for bookstores to thin out, for riskier voices to get crowded off the shelf. The subtext is quietly self-interested in the best way: when reading shrinks, the ladder for creators shrinks with it.

Coming from a comics veteran, it also reads as a warning against treating “content” as interchangeable. If stories become primarily something you play through, binge, or scroll past, the slow, private act of building a world in your head starts to look like an outdated technology. Sakai’s point is that it’s also the technology that made modern imagination scalable.