If you’re looking to catch up on business literature this summer without investing too much time in the process, then Corey Michael Blake and Franco Arda have a few SmarterComics they’d like to sell you. How about graphic adaptations of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson? Sun Tzu’s The Art of War? Or How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins?

“You can use entertainment to educate, inform, and inspire,” says Blake, a former actor who is the owner and CEO of Writers of the Round Table Press, a publishing company in Chicago.

Last year Blake presented several business-focused comic-book prototypes—which Arda had paid for—to a wish list of business authors whose work the duo wanted to adapt. The pair had become short-term partners for the sole purpose of launching the first six comic books under Arda’s SmarterComics brand, but published by Blake’s company.

Luminaries like Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell passed, but Chris Anderson wanted in. So did Larry Winget, whose Shut Up, Stop Whining & Get a Life is part of the SmarterComics roster. “Larry responded immediately, he thought the idea was very cool,” says Blake. And, in a nice bit of cross-marketing, the second edition of Winget’s traditionally published book will contain 10 comic-book panels from the graphic adaptation. John Eliot, whose Overachievement is part of SmarterComics first half-dozen titles, also wanted to make his book available to a new readership, says Blake.

“Our audience is the busy professional and the Twitter generation with shorter attention spans who prefer to learn in fun ways,” says Blake. SmarterComics titles, which retail for $12.95, are sold online, at comic-book stores, and at 65 Hudson News airport bookstores. The titles are also available digitally for smartphones, the iPad, and other tablet devices.

Blake and Arda will each continue to publish their own comic-book adaptations separately. Later this year, Blake will release Machiavelli’s The Prince and Robert Cialdini’s Influence under his new Round Table Comics brand. Arda’s SmarterComics titles will include The 80-20 Principle by Richard Koch and Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman.

“People reading these business comic books shouldn’t think of them as written for 5-year-olds,” says Arda, a retired investment banker based in Palo Alto, California, who estimates that 800 hours of work go into producing each 50-to-60-page book. “When the quality of the artwork and text is high, the text and visuals support each other, and readers can grasp concepts very quickly.”

“It’s a misconception that comic books overly simplify ideas and readers get a diluted version,” says Matthew J. Costello, a professor of political science at Saint Xavier University, in Chicago, and author of Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America, which explores how comic books helped shape the post-World War II identity of the United States. “In a well-written comic book, the reader can get all the relevant info that a textbook provides,” he says, adding that he used, as his primary textbook for a statistics and probability class, The Cartoon Guide to Statistics.

Also hard to ignore is these items’ pop-culture allure.

“There’s a hipness factor to the graphic novel form, which appeals to Millennials more efficient at reading images than prior generations,” says Costello. “The format’s delivery of short but intense bursts of information, which is conveyed in a relatively small amount of space, is akin to the brevity of texting and tweets. It’s all about compactness, which is a result of contextualizing words with pictures.”

Starting in the 1980s, there has been a gradual acceptance of comic books as an art form, says Dan Crissman, assistant editor at Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux which publishes books in the graphic-novel format and whose output includes graphic adaptions of The 9/11 Report, the U.S. Constitution, and microeconomics. “Graphic nonfiction appears on bestseller lists and has become popular in academic environments,” he says.

“The first volume of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics—on microeconomics, which we published last year, has done very well,” says Crissman, adding that the second volume, on macroeconomics, will be out in the fall. “It’s unique, funny, and has had great success as a supplementary textbook.”

The value and increasing popularity of the graphic-novel form, says Crissman, rests in how it shows the progression of events and also brings those events to life. “A graphic nonfiction book makes it easier to connect the dots,” he says. “Seeing economics subject matter, for example, within a panel in the graphic format, allows you to visualize more complex concepts and more easily understand them.”

The format also provides a second chance for worthwhile titles. “Comic books can reignite business author brands and help launch new authors,” says Blake.

And for many authors, that’s potentially a lot of pow, bam, and zap.