Comic books help teach investment basics to students
By Michael J. Martinez
Associated Press
NEW YORK — When business students file into Wes Seegers' derivatives and futures course at California State University at Long Beach, they almost uniformly believe their professor is playing a joke on them with the course material.
Seegers uses a variety of textbooks and case studies on investment strategies for his courses — "Some of the most dense and difficult-to-read books you'll ever find," he said. But among the thick volumes of investing jargon, Seegers slips in the latest comic-book adventures of Kaptain Kelmoore, financial superhero and champion of truth, justice and a balanced portfolio.
"At first they think I'm teasing them when I show them the cover," said Seegers, an adjunct professor at Long Beach. "But they do read it and, more importantly, it's written in such a way so that they can understand it and ask intelligent questions about it."
Familiar medium
For 20- and 30-somethings, investing can daunting. But by using a medium that most people are intimately familiar with from their youth, the Kaptain Kelmoore comic books deliver complex investing information in simple language and pictures. The knowledge is served with campy story lines, cheesy nostalgia and inside jokes aimed squarely at the young first-time investor.
The broad, brawny superhero, with a Jay Leno chin and a "financial confusion" detector in an antenna on his helmet, is the creation of Tamara Wendoll, director of marketing for the Kelmoore Investment Co. Inc., a fund company that specializes in equity option funds.
"I didn't want your typical Superman character. I wanted someone more — approachable is not the right word — someone our readers could relate with," Wendoll said. "I wanted someone with a sense of humor, because this kind of information can be difficult to get across."
Using a comic book to impart investment information isn't new. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has published a series of comics since 1994, aimed at elementary school children, to introduce the basics of the monetary system through such titles as "The Story of the Federal Reserve System," "A Penny Saved ... " and "Once Upon a Dime."
Inside jokes
While those books can be educational for adult readers, Kaptain Kelmoore fans seem to prefer the more adult sensibility of his exploits, which include many harmless inside jokes that children would be unlikely to get, including a take-off on an old James Bond movie and a number of allusions to Batman and Superman films and TV shows. And Kaptain Kelmoore has his sights set on more difficult investment fare than the usual grade-school curriculum.
"Because our investing strategy is so different from the usual mutual funds, I'm always looking for new ways to describe not just the fund, but what options actually are," Wendoll said. "You can't sell people something if they don't understand what it is."
An option is the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a stock for a specified price on or before a specified date.
That means that an investor pays the owner of the stock for the right to buy a stock at a target price. If the stock moves above that price, the investor can exercise the option, buy the stock and make a profit. If the stock fails to reach that price, the investor lost only the money used to buy the option, rather than losing on a major investment.
Aside from Kaptain Kelmoore's name and the corporate logo adorning his chest, the comic books don't mention Kelmoore products at all. Instead, the stories stick to basic investor information. In between the large slabs of cheesy dialogue, bad puns and nefarious superhero plots, the explanations are clear and the examples useful.
In addition to using the comic book as a teaching tool, Seegers also uses Wendoll as an example for his students to follow.
"Here's this person with a Wharton Business School degree, and she's done something so completely unique and useful, bringing investor information to the public like this," Seegers said.
