Young boys should be encouraged to read comic-book annuals such as the Dandy and Beano or books based on Disney tie-ins to get them into the reading habit young and help them to keep up with girls' at school, a government adviser says.

Chris Brown, the author of Boys into Books, a reading report commissioned by the Government, has included many comic-style or graphic books in a list of the Top 200 new works he has drawn up for 5 to 11-year-old boys.

Such books had great appeal for many boys and could be of enormous educational benefit because they stimulated visual responses to the pictures as well as intellectual responses to the words, he said. He regretted that schools and parents dismissed them too often as not being proper books.

“On the Continent, picture-strip books take up quite a high proportion of children's book sales and are very prominent in shop displays. But here we still tend to be a little nose-in-the-air about them,” he said.

Mr Brown said that Japanese-style Manga comics were particularly popular. “There is a very fine Manga Shakespeare appearing play by play and if Macbeth turns up in this style it will be perfect for 9s to 11s,” he said.

Mr Brown, a retired head teacher, was speaking at the launch of a £5 million government scheme, Primary Boys into Books, to encourage more boys to read. Research shows that boys are ten percentage points behind girls in English at Key Stage 2 at the age of 11. Ministers hope that better reading habits among boys will help close the gender gap.

Research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found that girls are much more likely than boys to read for enjoyment: 78 per cent of girls, against only 65 per cent of boys.

Under the scheme, public libraries, working with the School Libraries Association, will lend books on Mr Brown's list to schools in their area.

Graphic novels and comic-type books feature heavily in the list. They include Jeff Limke's Jason: Quest for the Golden Fleece, about the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and Satoshi Kitamura's Stone Age Boy, about a boy who trips and falls into the Stone Age. Espionage, ghosts and aliens are also featured.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said: “It's vital that we get children, especially boys, into reading, and the earlier the better.

“Over a third of ten-year-olds are playing computer games for over three hours a day. I am in no doubt that this choice of gaming over reading has a knock-on effect on how well they do at school.”

Mr Brown said he had restricted the list to books published in the past two years or so because he felt that libraries, schools and parents would already know about the classics.

In a separate initiative, also backed by government cash, the charity Booktrust will send a list of poetry books to schools. Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate, said: “It's just nice to get a lively, colourful and fun book of poems in front of children and suggest to them that they can just enjoy it.”

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