How do you explain economics in plain English? If you're like us at The Atlantic, you use stuffed animals, poker chips, and delicious pies to answer questions about the difference between monetary and fiscal policy and what exactly money is. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, however, has been answering all of those questions and more with an even more unlikely tool: comic books.

And it's been doing that for decades. The New York Fed has published comics about money and finance for younger readers more interested in cartoons than macroeconomics since the 1950s, according to Edward Steinberg, a retired former Fed employee who authored several of the comic books available online today.