The Most Comprehensive Review of Comic Books Teaching Statistics

As I’m more or less an autodidact when it comes to statistics, I have a weak spot for books that try to introduce statistics in an accessible and pedagogical way. I have therefore collected what I believe are all books that introduces statistics using comics (at least those written in English). What follows are highly subjective reviews of those four books. If you know of any other comic book on statistics, please do tell me!

I’ll start with a tl;dr version of the reviews, but first here are the four books:

• ☆☆☆☆☆ / 5 The Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith Witty, pedagogical and comprehensive, this is the best book of the bunch! It provides a historical perspective and covers quite advanced topics such as confidence intervals, regression analysis and probability theory. The book contains a fair deal of mathematical notation but still manages to be accessible.
• ☆☆☆☆ / 5 The Manga Guide to Statistics by Shin Takahashi This book is perhaps a bit more manga than statistics but still manages to cover the basics of data analysis and hypothesis testing. The artwork is great (if you like manga, that is) and the storyline is cute (again, if you like manga). If you don’t like manga and/or hypothesis testing, then this might not be your cup of bubble tea.
• ☆☆ / 5 The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics by Grady Klein and Alan Dabney Does a decent job at introducing hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, but I found the both the presentation and the content lacking in many respects. The writing is constantly “chopped up”, where a sentence can span several panels, which makes the book tedious to read. The artwork is ok but looks (to me) like it is missing outlines. The content is very focused on normal sampling distributions, unwarrantedly so if it aims to be a general introduction to statistics.
• ☆ / 5 Introducing Statistics, a Graphic Guide by Eileen Magnello and Borin Van Loon The artwork is absurdist, perhaps it is too cool for me but I found it annoying. The content is a mess, a haphazard mix of historical facts, probability theory and statistical concepts. It is also full of obscure explanations and outright errors. Would not read again.

The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

Written in 1993 by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith this is still the book, out of the four reviewed, that feels most up to date. It covers a wide range of topics starting with summary statistics and basic probability and working its way through probability distributions, experimental design, confidence intervals and linear regression. It even touches on more advanced subjects such as resampling methods. The book is not written as a standard comic book with panels and a story line, rather it is a well written, easy going text that is accompanied by the fun and lively sketches by Larry Gonick.

The book doesn’t skimp on the mathematical notation, which might put some off, but the presentation is still more accessible than most of the introductory stats books I’ve come across. If you are interested in the statistical programming language R, a thing to note is that many of the graphs in the book are made with S, the precursor to R, like the scatter plot below:

Like all the books reviewed here the Cartoon Guide to Statistics is focused on frequentist statistics, but at least the Bayesian perspective gets a mention:

This is a great book which is witty and pleasant to read (+ it is pretty cheap). Highly recommended!

Amazon link: The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

The Manga Guide to Statistics

This book, written by Shin Takahashi and illustrated by Iroha Inoue, is one in a long series of Manga Guides translated and published by No Starch Press. Like the Manga Guide to Databases or the Manga Guide to Calculus, the Manga Guide to Statistics takes a subject with a reputation for being difficult and technical an