This brief article discusses how carefully selected comic strips can become great teaching aids for (English Second Language) ESL instructors. They are beneficial in part because they provide brief conversations in English with pictures that help convey the meaning of the words. ESL teacher Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, author of Speaking American English Well, uses the cartoons to help students learn how to phrase in English. She believes that students do not learn to write by writing words, but rather by writing phrases. Comics are especially useful in teaching language because they can be used with students who possess a limited proficiency. A lot of vocabulary is not required to decipher a simple visual cartoon. The humor inherent to comic strips can also serve as a powerful teaching tool. Very often the humor is found because words can have more than one meaning, and the context can very often change a word's meaning. In addition, since language learning always involves cultural learning, humor can serve as a window into a culture. It is necessary to know what the cultural norms are in order to understand what makes something unusual, and therefore funny.