The Story of Money

_The Story of Money_ is the title of a comic book that my son brought home from school the other day. Fearing something like _Lighthouse_ I quickly confiscated it for inspection purposes. First I was happy because it looked educationally worthwhile. Then I was dismayed because the back page has a glossary with words like fungibility and reserve requirements - clearly too much for a 2nd grader. Then I was even more dismayed as I started to read - the colors are rather lurid, the overdrawn pictures, the protagonist complete with bad bowl cut, and dialog like, "So, barter is time-consuming; in fact it's prohibitively time-consuming." I finally came around to happy again because: 1. It's full of bad puns and campy humor, 2. It's educational, 3. My son was actually somewhat interested, 4. I was somewhat interested, 5. Fiscal Flash and Monetary Man (keep reading, this is a sequitur).

It turns out that the comic is published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, along with 11 other comic books!! Now you too can own _The Story of Monetary Policy_, _Once Upon a Dime_, and other childrens' classics.

http://www.newyorkfed.org/publications/result.cfm?comics=1

Fiscal Flash and Monetary Man were my first exposure to the zany world of economics comics, back when I was a wee lad of 12 or so. My father used them one quarter to teach a short segment of Econ 101. We produced an audio track on cassette where I voiced the part of a trusty sidekick to Fiscal Flash. This accompanied 35mm slide projections of the comic book pages on the classroom wall. I'm sure that it would be frightfully embarrassing to hear myself today, but I think that the audio tape has gone the way of FF and MM themselves, who have disappeared so completely that they aren't even googleable.