I suppose this questionaire deals with more of a definitional concern–How does one define "read" versus "view" versus "look at"?
If "reading" here is defined as "my eye balls going from left to right, top to bottom of the page, staring at the English language (or equivalent) and "viewing" or "looking at" is defined as my eyeballs going nonlinearly all over the page without an apparent fixed, pre-destined track, then I am doing both when my brain is processing a comic–(top to bottom, left to right) + (non-linear shifting of eyeballs all over the page) = brain processing of a comic
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We always "read" even when we think we're only "looking." We read images just as we read words.
I know there are a hundred problems with using the Google n-gram viewer – but it does appear to agree with your participants on this one: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=read+a+comic%2Clook+at+a+comic%2Cview+a+comic&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
I suppose this questionaire deals with more of a definitional concern–How does one define "read" versus "view" versus "look at"?
If "reading" here is defined as "my eye balls going from left to right, top to bottom of the page, staring at the English language (or equivalent) and "viewing" or "looking at" is defined as my eyeballs going nonlinearly all over the page without an apparent fixed, pre-destined track, then I am doing both when my brain is processing a comic–(top to bottom, left to right) + (non-linear shifting of eyeballs all over the page) = brain processing of a comic