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?

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?

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.