Panel Check! Racist images in comics.

Before shelving a book in our collection, no matter the review nor recommendation, here at the Takoma Park MD Library we always run a ‘panel check’ on every graphic novel we add.

This means I read a great many comics of course, the point here is to confirm where a book belongs in our collection, and in our children’s section to avoid any upsetting surprises for patrons hunting for an appropriate book for their kid.  Adult language, realistic violence, sexually charged situations, mature topics– these are all reasons why a book may step up the ladder to the next higher age category.  (See promotion criteria at the bottom of this article).

Occasionally we get ambushed by a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing and buy a book intended for a young audience, but discover a single panel of art that bumps it to a higher category.   Kid-to-grown-up ‘booby-trapped’ books are especially upsetting when an otherwise great story, appropriate for all ages, is derailed by unfortunate racial stereotypes or caricatures.

Here is a smattering of otherwise excellent books that are tainted by their own prejudices.

Why not Comics? (Some history).

Underground, you can feel the weight of the cliff face overhead.  There is a solemn quiet in the tribe, even the bundled infants keep respectful silence.  All would be dark, but you have brought fire with you,  bundles of rivergrass twisted together burning brightly.  White Streak pours water on a pile of powders, dips his hand into the mud and strokes the wall, leaving a swatch of color.  He scratches with a burned stick, here and here.  Behold:  an animal,  then a herd, running, powerful.   Here a hunter carries a spear, here a spear has pierced the skin of a great longhorned bison that staggers and soon will die to feed the tribe.

Stories told in pictures have been with us for as long as we have recorded story in any durable form.  We are hardwired to understand images, and make stories in our heads to make sense of these images.  It is an important part of our mental heritage, and in fact one of the building blocks of ‘culture’ itself: the ability to pass on information via visual representations.

Criteria for judging quality in comics (from a talk at the University of Maryland).

I always enjoy our yearly session talking comics with the ‘gradual’ students at the College of Information Sciences at UMD, in large part because interesting questions get raised that I had not yet considered.  Here the question was:  ‘If you were developing an award for comics, what criteria would you decide if a comic is noteworthy?’  In other words, how do I tell if a comic is good?

Top 15 list for Reluctant Readers, and how to ‘Comics Jam’!

Here is another letter from a school media person:

Hello,
I’m planning on introducing a reluctant reader group to graphic novels and I am thusly wondering what would be your first 15-20 buys?  

I am planning on introducing the titles and then letting the boys select one title then maybe next session having them report on their book.

Do you have any experience with reading groups, and if so does this seem like a format that would work, or should I run it differently?

Reader questions and follow-up to the MCPS media specialists in-service learning day: Some YA books, challenges and ‘What’s the difference between Shonen or Shojo manga?’

Clearing old business off my desk.

Thanks to all who attended our discussion on Comics in Libraries at the Montgomery County Public Schools  in-service learning day this summer.    As usual it feels like we never have enough time to talk through all possible topics, so I’ll try to circle back to touch on issues that were raised in each session, or questions that came to us from participants afterwards.

What are some Age-appropriate books for middle schoolers and young adults, not too ‘childish’?

There are many.  The great thing about middle schoolers is that they are willing to read a wide swath of books, all-ages to teen issues.   All ages books check out well to– well — all ages.  With middle school kids you can also risk ventures into some manga, and put some books in front of them with deeper themes or content.  I will begin to preview some of these books of the next couple months.  But I’ll detail a few general interest books for YA’s after the jump.

Superheroes. Are there any titles for kids anymore? (Yes)

At the New York Comics Convention some years back I sat in on a panel where the Marvel rep discussed the difficulty they had in training their in-house staff to write for an-all ages audience.  He said that for many years they were simply pulling writers and artists from their mainstream books  and instructing them what not to say or draw.  No guns, no blood, no ‘language’ or suggestive situations, and so on.  The results were awkward, uninteresting, clunky.

No surprise since studies show the average age of most comics collectors is over 30, and most comics writers and illustrators nowadays grew up reading comics, and have moved on to adult themes: cynicism, decay of common values, despair, etc…

Generally though the genesis of superhero comics can be understood to be adolescent hormonal fantasies.   Bulgy men and women (with correspondingly exaggerated characteristics of male/female bulgy-ness) swoop across the sky in skintight costumes, solving problems by pounding them to pulp.    These are testosterone surges running rampant.

And if there exists a sort of magical thinking in the idea that you can simply smash your complex problems as they arise, well, what’s wrong with a little magic?  It’s enough to realize that there is supposed to be a moral code that allows you to smash your problems, so long as you are doing so in defense of the helpless and not merely for personal benefit.

Comics ‘zoo’ or ‘house pets’. Where do I shelve them?

“Where should I shelve them?”

This is used to be the old Genre vs Format question, now I think it’s more a question of how your customers will find the books– and will they leave the shelves in a recognizable state afterwards.   The question is how efficiently can you feed the beast?  Do you have your comics as housepets, in zoos, or in a wildlife sanctuary?

Montgomery County School Library Media Specialists Professional Day

School media specialists are some of my favorite audience, and the Question and Answer segment is always the most interesting aspect.  I always  find I run out of time to discuss all of the topics planned in advance, and try to build in room to discuss our questions and share experiences as we go.  Quite frankly we could simply run a 45 minute round table discussion and learn from each other.  Very enjoyable.

As Graphic Novels and sequential art have become generally accepted as belonging on the shelf next to other forms of literature, I find I spend less and less time defending the artform and more time talking about what’s new, what’s next, how to pick good books, where to shelve them in a collection etc.

(Actually I miss the debate.  I’ll probably spend a few lines in various blog posts in this blog in spirited ‘defense’ of something that may no longer need a champion).

But for now I’ll spend a few posts talking about some of the issues we touched base on and perhaps even a few that we missed.

If a picture is worth a thousand words

…consider the narrative possibilities of an artform combining both.

This blog is to preview and review choice graphic novels added to the collection at the Takoma Park MD Library.   Our local Library is a small public library on the outer edge of Washington DC, the last independent public library in all of  Maryland.    Small as it is, we have an active comics readership in the area, and a vibrant and dynamic collection.

This blog is an effort to promo and preview our comics selections, and talk about comics at the macro and micro level.  How they work, why they work, what’s cool.

And I’ll probably find myself off on tangents about things only peripherally related, since that’s how my brain works.   I hope I can entertain as well as inform.  We’ll see.