librarypunk - 022 - Nonfiction Comics

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

Repeat guest! We’re joined by Matthew Murray of the Book Club for Masochists podcast to talk about nonfiction comics. What are they even for in libraries? Was Full House a comic book? Find out on this exciting episode of librarypunk.  http://bookclub4m.com   https://twitter.com/bookclub4m https://twitter.com/MidniteLibrary Articles on collection development for graphic novels Collection development for graphic novels in academic libraries: results of a national survey Graphic Novels: Collecting, Cataloging and Outreach in an Academic Library.  Japanese manga in translation and American graphic novels: A re-examination of the collections in 36 academic libraries ten years later Things mentioned: Global Webcomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisner_Award_for_Best_Reality-Based_Work

Um, let's see. I don't have an opening ready. Shit. I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm a sysadmin. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian and my pronouns are he him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian and I'm pronouns are she her. And we have a repeat guest. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm a librarian. And my pronouns are he, they.

And I'll introduce myself. And what's your catchphrase now? Oh, what? My catchphrase? Yeah, now that you're a recurring character, you need a catchphrase. No, you can just do the applause every time I walk in. Perfect. Yeah, I'm also host of...

Poochee! I'm also host of Bookcloth or Mascist Readers Advisory Podcast, where we read a different genre at random every month. So our most recent episode was cyberpunk fiction. And our episode next month is about flash fiction. So check that out if you're interested. What is flash fiction? Oh, like Don Bartholme? Flash fiction is just really short stories.

Yeah, that's John Barthelme. Yeah. I was really into Don Barthelmay in college. I really loved Flash fiction. So I am stoked about that episode. Flash. Great. Ha!

Not, you could write Flash fiction about Flash Gordon as well if you really wanted to. But we're here today to talk about comic books, graphic novels. Camics. But first, since we've a recurring guest, we have to have a recurring segment. So this week, we are bringing back anime news. France gave away 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books or music. Books ended up being 75% of all purchases made through the app since it was introduced nationwide in May and roughly two-thirds. of those books were manga, which I, from what I know about French cultural officers in the government, that must have really pissed them off. So I fully support this initiative by the French government.

There is legitimately a controversy in France in comics about how much manga is produced, is published, translated and published and purchased because people are saying, hey, there are French comic artists who don't have any money because people are spending all their money in Japanese comics instead. It's an interesting thing. But I think it's honestly, I think people just probably wouldn't be buying comics at all if they weren't buying those. So, you know, buy what you want.

Yeah, goddamn Rinten Tin, greedy little bastard. That's... Or Tintin, right? Rintenden is the dog. Rintin is the Nazi dog, right? Oh, Ten Ten's Belgian, never mind. The Franco-Belgian comic industry, yeah. Asterisk.

Is that a French one? Yes. I had to read that in French class. Yeah, there's some really great French comics out there. I know some Spanish comics, Mafalda, which is like their Nancy. Anyway, yeah, they had like Mafalda bedchites and things like that. really cute little character adorable

so yeah yeah I think the only thing that could have pissed off French cultural ministers more is if they spent all their money on like Moroccan hip hop it's just yeah definitely anything that encringes

on the French language they also could yeah any like anything Algerian like anything made by immigrants probably they would hate knowing French people or maybe just things made by Americans Or, oh, you know, it would have been really fascinating, like, how annoyed they would have been if they just bought, like, Quebecois cultural things.

Just everyone bought Scott Pilgrim. Well, that's not Quebec. So, yeah. What they really need is, like, the French Canadians from the maritime provinces. Shout out to my people. Oh. Who, the Akkadians who survived. Yeah.

that have produced the Guli Doirin. Yeah. That very small group of people that produced anything of cultural significance importing something into France. Okay, so this can actually lead directly into our topic of nonfiction comics

because do any of you know what the first ever nonfiction comic produced in Canada was? No, I'm guessing. I need to double check the title of this. But it was, Shit. So it's Melody by Sylvie Rancor.

It's a comic by, it's an autobiocomic, about being a stripper in Montreal. Ooh. Nice. First ever nonfiction comic in Canada. It had newsstand distribution in Quebec. You could go to like any newsagent in Quebec in like the 1980s and find this on the shelves there. That's amazing. Oh yeah.

Melody, story of a nude dancer. Yeah. It's really... It was available from the LaGron and Quarterly Library. Yeah, they reprinted it a few years ago and in English. So if you want to read it, check it out. I think I thought it was really like fascinating because the person that made it had no connection to comics from what I can remember. It was just like, I'm going to make this thing and make it like an actual magazine that you can buy in shops.

And it's all about me being. And also you can buy it at my strip shows. Fascinating thing. So check that out. But yeah, we're talking about nonfiction comics, nonfiction graphic novels. first, graphic novel is the term that we use in the library world all the time about this, which basically just means comic book with a spine, and a graphic novel can be nonfiction. This is something that trips people up sometimes because they think the term novel means it's fiction,

but in comics world, graphic novel can be fiction or nonfiction. Actually, same goes in the prose world. You can have a nonfiction novel in the prose world. So suck it, snobs. Anyway. That actually brought me to something because I don't know anything about books. So when I'm listening to Book Club for Massacist, I'm always confused about like industry terms that you use, like trade paperback. And I was reading in one of the articles you sent me that when you take like diary comics and collect them, that's not a graphic novel, it's called a trade paperback.

So this is a thing that is people argue about all the time, much to my frustration. Figured. So you have people to say, oh, that's not a graphic novel. That's a trade paperback collection of comics. But really, especially in the library, you're going to call the section graphic novels. You're not going to call the section trade paperback collection of comic books. So just go with the term graphic novel for all of them, fiction or nonfiction. People, at this point, whether we like it or not, that's the term that people understand to mean a comic in book form.

That's your takeaway, everybody. That's your call to action. Make sure everyone calls some graphic novels. You just called them comics as well, although that has led to one hilarious misunderstanding at a borders crossing where I said I was going to a comic convention and the person thought I was going to some sort of comedian, like stand-up comedian event. Yeah. Well, they just call everything they do comedy and all the forms of comedy are degenerate forms of the art. Right, of course. And that's why you don't have a punchline.

Like, you don't have your signature line yet because you haven't been to that kind of. kind of comic conference. Right. Yeah. What you need to do is go to that kind of comic conference and develop your signature line. So the next time we come on Library Punk, you will have a signature line. Maybe I can just have our listener suggest one for me. I'm in with that.

We'll have a Library Punk contest. Come up with Matthew's signature line. Yep. We'll put out a poll. You can vote more than once. Stuff the ballot box. I don't care. Democracy is a sham.

Perfect. You know it's just going to be Steve. Like three entries from Steve. I watched the Democracy's a Shamm episode of King of the Hill last night. Hey, if I tell you, it's not going to come true. Exactly. I was so proud at Luan voting for a communist for like two seconds until I don't know who she voted for. Because if she tells you who she votes for, it won't come true.

Welcome to Brittany Murphy RIP RIP I miss her What a brilliant actress So I wanted to ask like a genre defining question

Because after we did The manga episode I went out and got Marx's Capital Illustrated And I also got the capital manga So Marx's Capital Illustrated Is a book

With comics in it But it is not sequential images Would you call that A comic? There are times when the border between comic and illustrated prose or whatever it happens to be are a fine line. And there are books that I've seen classified as graphic novels that I don't consider it to be comics because I'm like, this is not fulfilling what I expect from a comic book, which is multiple panels per page used to tell a story or convey a message or something. I read one recently, and this was really interesting,

and that a lot of it was multiple pages of just like nature? And they were multiple panels per page. And it was all just setting a scene of like where it was set. But I'm just like, without the context of more of actual story happening after this, is this a comic or is it just a bunch of pictures of trees? Are you seeing the forest through the trees? What's those Grim Reaper comics? I should get back into those.

They stopped kind of making comics and started doing watercolors. and it was really nice. It's like death and butterflies, I think. But when we were talking about coming up with this episode, subject, we were like, oh, could we do American comics? Could we do nonfiction? And then I realized I read and own a lot of nonfiction comics, which I don't really think about very often as them as nonfiction comics.

But one I have that was kind of interesting and, like, genre bending is called the dialogues, conversations about the nature of the, universe. The guy who, Matthew, are you familiar with this book? I have not read that one, no. It's pretty interesting. The guy is a physicist and he wanted to do something like graphic medicine. So he's like doing graphic physics. And he trained himself to illustrate. So he took like a lot of live drawing stuff. And I would say as a comic, it's not a good comic. But as an idea, it's a really interesting thing because he draws too lifelike. And so there's no stylistic structure to it that I would normally expect from a comic,

but he did it all. There was a comic that there was a book that came a couple years ago, a nonfiction one, that used a lot of basically clip art, like the artist had drawn themselves and the other characters and then just reuse that image every time they were in like on the page. And I was like, this is failing what I expect from a comic book. I want more art in it. And I think it's so interesting what people want out of these things and what people think about when they read them. And I think especially for nonfiction comics, sometimes like the audience is not necessarily comic readers.

I think you will find that a lot of people that don't read comics have read some nonfiction comics. Like the three of the bigot ones that people have read and that we'll know about are mouse by Art Spiegel. about his parents' experiences being Jewish in Germany during World War II, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, about living in Iran, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. And so people, and those are all like memoir comics, or not, mouse isn't a memoir, but it's like biography, history thing. So it's fairly close. And so those are things that people have read, but I find I don't hear people necessarily talking about the art in them as much necessarily. And I think that happens with some of the other memoir and nonfiction comics that you get is that like the art is not necessarily the point of them. It's the story and the art is just a way to tell a certain story.

Does that make sense to people? Yeah, that makes sense to me. I've read what is it, Fun Home. And yeah, it's more about the story than the art. See, I read Persepolis and the art was like right up front and center with Persepolis for me. But I guess that's because like the movie also came out, which I haven't seen. But the movie is basically just the animated graphic novel. So maybe in my mind, the art is more synonymous with that one.

I'm not saying any of those three titles specifically are ones in which the art does not matter and that the artist did not think about the art. But I think there are non-fiction comics out there in which that is the case. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Or at the very least, the art is, how can I put this? the artist is not striving to do anything interesting with the art, which you might find in other things. It's like the difference between like a documentary that is just like talking heads versus a documentary that is doing other things with the same story.

So I've like, if I may speak, I've read quite a few, I suppose. So I guess a good example of that from what I'm drawing from my head is. Harvard Piccaro's American Splendor where he always has a different artist typically are crumb but he has some other artists draw him in certain contexts. Yeah, he worked with a lot of different

other creators. So he would have he was the primary storyteller though so he's the primary vector for these stories and he has different artists draw him and so that provides you a different context of his life. So to some extent that's an artistic choice but it's very much this like slice of life

documentary style like you're saying, documentary style nonfiction presentation. So he documents having cancer for a year and like adopting a daughter and things like that. So it's these very kind of mundane things where the art isn't as important as the storytelling, which is really the core of it.

Versus, you know, I think of someone like Linda Barry who is so much style in what she does where it's just very incredibly style. but also does this, you know, the style is part of the storytelling in the way she does the art because she is first and foremost an artist in her work. So that's kind of how I would approach those nonfiction storytelling approaches using two examples that you should check out. Yeah, Harvey Pigar is a really interesting creator because he was, he was like one of those early kind of alternative comics, creators doing biocomics, memoir stuff. but he wasn't drawing them and he had a number of other artists during them. But he also did, like, he did music reviews in comic form.

He did, like, history comics and stuff about politics and things like that he had other people drawn. Yeah, things about jazz. Yeah. And which I think is so great. And I feel like you don't see a lot of that. And I would love to see more of it. Yeah, people aren't really illustrating their kind of minute passions in the same way that people used to to some extent. Yeah.

And I'm not saying they don't exist. like all of everything I'm saying that may or may not be common. There's so many comics out there now. Oh, I know. Yeah, there's just, yeah, I think like, especially with the advent of the web, they've exploded in different ways because with web comics, you're seeing some of those become published as volumes, which is another thing I've seen where, you know, you see the single panel sequential pages of, you know, an accumulated work of web comics or something like that.

I find web comics very, so another comic, a big nonfiction comic that a lot of people have heard of and that ties into the, you know, using comics to talk about other things is understanding comics by Scott McLeod, which is, you know. I've read that. Well, I took a graphic novel as literature course. Yep. First, yeah, did that whole shebang. It's like the comic to explain what comics are and how they can be used to do things. And what frustrates me is it talks so much about. about things like panel to panel storytelling and page layout, I think are things that it mentions

in that. And then you look at the web comics that are designed to be read panel by panel, like one panel at a time on a cell phone. And the page layout doesn't matter in the same way. Exactly. Yeah, because like it's it's back to serialization, but in this reinvented form. So it's a paradigm shift on serialization to some extent. So like through a single panel, You can tell a story. Like, it's that, it's, it's almost like a Hemingway-esque kind of thing. Like, through a single panel, you can tell a story over, like, a really tight story over the arc of, you know, however long. And certain comic artists are really great at being able to design a page in such a way that it can add to the, like, the theme or the feeling that is going on in the comic.

Oh, exactly. Like, taking an Instagram grid or something like that and doing it that way. Whereas, like, so many of the comics you see in so. social media are more like comic strip, like newspaper comic strips in some ways, and that it's like, oh, yeah, it's like three panels or four panels or whatever in the same format every time. And this isn't to say that you cannot do really interesting things or tell really interesting comics in that way. But it is just looking at like it's a new limitation that I think creators are still learning to deal with. I was reading some stuff by a comic creator called John Allison, who's been doing web comics for decades at this point. He's well known for bad machinery and scary go around. and he had he did giant days which came out in single issue form from boom for several years it was quite popular and he says he was looking at how to put his comics into some of these like webcomic platforms that are you know panel by panel things and he said that it's just a completely different way of making comics than he makes he's like I want to have a page with multiple panels that have

a flow and things between them and that I can vary the size of the panels however I want and stuff like that. So on words, I guess. So memoirs are a massive part of, especially adult, nonfiction graphic novels. They are what people read, what people are interested in. But there's a lot of other, and this was, I thought, really interesting, is that the Eisner Awards are the big comic book industry awards that exist. And this year, 2021, they added Best Graphic Memoir as its own category for the first time. Previously, memoirs had been included in best reality-based work, which I think is a terrible name for an award,

but that's what it was called. But they're like, you know what, there's too many memoirs coming out. We need to split this off into its own category, which I think is fascinating to think about. But if you want a list of, you know, all of the best reality-based work comics that have been released over the like ever since that award's been around,

I wrote the Wikipedia page for it. So that'll be in the show notes, I'm sure. You can go and look at all the nominees for that award for the last, however long it's been around, like 15 years or something. So you have memoirs. Tied to that, you have biocomic, like biographies and stuff like that, which are very similar. But then there's a lot of other types of comics that are out there that I think people can be looking at if they're looking at developing their library collections. Like, honestly, I think the first places you go to are like things like memoir and bios because that's what people that are reading, like adults that are reading comics often want. And it depends on your audience as well.

I think there's a way to do a lot of interesting, like, LGBT collection. Definitely. Because, like, last time you mentioned Nagatakabi, and I've ordered all of her volumes that are out, and I've pre-ordered her upcoming volume. So I'll put those in the show notes again. But the same with, like, web comics. There's a lot of things that are very interesting that you can build a collection around. And, you know, memoirs is just a huge thing.

Like I have like today as the last day of the rest of your life, which I think was was featured at Toronto Comic Arts Festival, TCAF. Okay, I got there eventually. It was like one year I really wanted to go. And of course, I was a grad student, had no money. So I was like, I'm just going to buy some of these comics and pretend I went. Close enough. What I did is for cataloging, I went through my collection development policy at my university because I wanted to see. because I knew we have like a librarian who's interested in graphic novels and he puts on

like tabletop games and stuff like that. He's into nerdy stuff. So he does like programming for that kind of on his own. And I found that in our collection development policy, they don't use the word comic graphic novel or trade paperback. Pretty much the only place that they show up is in our juvenile literature material and our popular reading. And the collection development says juvenile literature material is acquired to support the education and English curriculum and follows the same criteria and guidelines established for the collection. And then popular reading is access to popular reading material as a means of providing a stress relieving activity as well as recreational and educational reading to the community and rounding out the collection. That's it. That's

all we got. I think that's so common in so many places. I don't know how many libraries specifically have graphic novels in their collection development policies. But, you Especially if you're looking for ways around that, I think memoirs can be really great because they do fall into so many categories and categories where you want to have that support. Like you mentioned Nagata Khabi's work. My lesbian experience with loneliness is the first of those graphic novels. But you have a lot of comics by queer comics creators talking about their own lives, which are just such a great voice to have in your collection. I wonder thinking about our previous episode that I just listened to. I wonder how much of that comes from the zine culture that a lot of queer spaces had.

I wonder if we were just sort of, like, as a community, just naturally predisposed towards the art side of things. So it's no surprise that we got into, you know, memoirs and making comics and stuff. And I always think of what's, oh, God, why is it? I can't think of what it's called the Allison Beckdale. Fun home? Fun home, yeah. No, no, her comic. Are you my mother?

Oh, Dikes to watch out for. Dikes to watch out for. Yeah. I used that in a webinar the other day. And that's like where the Bechdel test comes from too. So it's like a landmark in popular culture. Like that's a, it's become such a cultural landmark from her comic series. That's their comic series.

Yeah. Yeah, I did take a look at our collection development policy and there's nothing about. Nothing specific about comics or graphic novels there, which didn't surprise me because we're a public library. So it'd kind of maybe be a more natural fit than in some academic libraries. But yeah, I'd be interested to hear if anybody else has comics and graphic novels and stuff called out specifically in their collection policies and like what that means. And also like what it means when where you're putting them, like how you're cataloging them,

how you're shelving them. Like, are you putting mouse in a. graphic novel section? Are you putting mouse in a section with books about the Holocaust? Yeah, or like some libraries will put a lot, like, depending on the graphic novel itself, they'll put a lot of them in special collections, even if it doesn't necessarily meet a criteria that you would need for special collections. But like, because of how the collection development policy was made, special collections started the purchasing for graphic novels and graphic materials.

So I've been a few places where just to see a lot of things that I would have thought, oh, that probably doesn't need to be here. Like sometimes that stuff ends up there, like a box set or something, you know, that's slightly oversized. Or if you have single issues of comic books, those are often going to end up in special collections as well because like how do you what do you do you do with this otherwise yeah or it's unevenly done because i i've at university of illinois i was doing a major research project on um comics and it was unevenly dispersed let's say so like some things would be you know bound volumes as a

periodical and some would be single issues in the stacks in a special binding in a special bookbinding. Others would be special collections and special binding. Others would be bound serials and special collections. It was just totally all over the map depending on what it was. And yeah, it's pretty wild. This is something that I think anyone in public libraries that uses the Dewey Decimal System still for their nonfiction collection. If you have a separate graphic novel collection, go and look in your nonfiction section and see what's classified under 741.59, which is, I think it's 59, somewhere around there. It's 741.

Yeah, it's 741.59. I'm almost positive because that's how I used to go. When I was in high school, I used to go try to figure out, like, I was end of graphic lit. And I was also really fucking arty. And so that was where, yeah. And so that was like, I was like, well, they're just like, I was. like they were filling up all the um they kept changing how they were doing you know all the literature in the library and so you know sometimes they'd have some graphic stuff with a young adult and then

sometimes it'd be in other weird places so i kind of had this strategy for searching this is you know my brain on why i'm good at shit and so then i figured out like just because my mom would spend all of her time browsing for movies and then browsing for books so i just would like figure out, try to figure out where all the, like, hidden things in the library were. And so I think I was searching for one thing in particular. And I figured out where the 741s were. And I was like, this is a fucking gold mine. And then I just wrote that call number down. And like, at any time I went to a library, I would start checking there. Yeah. No, I had a friend who for her MLIS capstone project actually took that sort of scattered nonfiction, you know, what's considered what and condensed,

like moved it all into a graphic novel collection. And I was a page at the time, so I was putting these books away and it was always really confusing for people because we would be like, oh, well, you know, if you're looking for like comic strips sort of things, you have to look here. But if you're looking for like mouse, you have to look here. And yeah, the whole project was taking all of that. and putting it all in one section as an adult, as an adult graphic novel section to match, because we had, you know, comic and graphic novel sections for YA and for kids, but we didn't have one for adults and it just like didn't match up. But yeah, telling patrons, you know, you have to look at the 741s for some things and then elsewhere for other things. And if you want fiction,

you have to dig through the fiction. And yeah, I feel like it's a better decision just to have a graphic novel section. And it does just depend on like, how you, like, I think it makes more sense to have a graphic novel section or depending on your library to just interfile things in the sections that they're relevant for. So, you know, put, if you have, you know, Nagata Cabby's book or, you know, Alison Beckdale's books, like putting those with other queer nonfiction so that people that are looking for those sections can find them. But putting them all in the 700s isn't, like, people have to go and look for them specifically, really, is what it comes down to. Yeah. I mean, I can understand.

understand why some public libraries tend to mirror what bookstores do because it's just what people are more accustomed to even though classification has its place. It does lead to the very funny thing where like, you know, you mentioned that, oh, comic strip collections are in 741, but like this collection of web comics is not. And you're just like, who is making this decision at this point? It's like, because this was in a newspaper, it goes into nonfiction. But this one that's on the internet goes into the graphic novel section. And it just doesn't, it's a mess is really what comes down to.

Yeah, I think our web comics when they started to like trickle in. And this was, you know, a good like five or six years ago at least. They would start to go into fiction. So it was like, yeah, if you were looking for questionable content, you have to look in fiction. If you're looking for Dilbert, you have to look in 741. one. So. Pass on Dilbert.

Holy shit. Yeah, just get rid of those. That's a weed. Yeah, sorry, I even brought that up. I am triggered. You've triggered the lips. I think, I think it's good to bring up because we can tell people to get them out of their libraries. Yeah.

Today's library punk tip to get the Dilbert out of your libraries. So actually, one of the previous IT people where I work now had put like the, the daily Dilbert on the IT, like, SharePoint page. And it bothered me for so long. And just like last week, I realized I could just delete it. Nobody would probably even notice. So no more Dilbert on our, you know, intranet sharepoint page, Hallelujah. Okay.

Here's the crossover between Dilbert comics and nonfiction comics, which is that I have made a mini comic. And some of these are available online, link in the show notes, of just. Gilbert comics re-dialogged with North Korean propaganda slogans. Oh, incredible. Some of them work remarkably well. Sookablet! I've been waiting all day to use that.

That reminds me of Garfield without Garfield. Yeah. Which for some reason just absolutely kills me every time. I like a full house without Michelle. Wait, the TV show? Yes. And they just read it. But it was like before, it was the B.

It was, yeah. Carrie, you missed your opportunity. to gas like Justin into thinking that Full House was a comic book and not a TV show at all. I mean, they did have novels. They did have novels of the Mary Kate and Ashley Adventures. I never read any of them. Which are all nonfiction, right? Because those are based in their real life exploits.

Absolutely. That's absolutely what it takes to be in a Wilson twin. another area I really wish I had that drop Pizza Hey Give me pizza Yeah what were you going to say Matthew

So another area that I think there's some really interesting nonfiction stuff being done is in like journalism and political comics Like political cartooning has been a thing for a very long time But I think the last few years is really made A comeback in an evolution online turning it to more than just, you know, the single panel things that you would see in newspapers to becoming much more in-depth work that is being done.

No, I mean things like the stuff that's being, like, well, the classic journalism comics creators Joe Sacco, who did like Palestine, Safe Area Garageda, footnotes in Gaza, those works that are incredibly in-depth pieces of journalism where he went to those places, he studied things, He did the history work. He talked to people. He interviewed dozens of people to create these things. And he spent someone drawing them. Like he is someone that puts a lot of effort into creating the art in his comics as well.

And they are great. Those are the comics that my parents read. They can be like, oh, a new Joe Sacco comic. Maybe I might want to check this out even though I don't read comics that often. But then you have other stuff like the online stuff that I mentioned, like the Nib, which is kind of like a political comics magazine that has shorter pieces, but also long-form comics

that would be multiple pages in a print form that go more in depth into things and have research and talk about political things that are happening, either like doing reporting or talking about people's own experiences and everything like that. And I would love to see more libraries

trying to get the print copies of the nip that are available. And I know it's a challenge to buy something like, that that probably isn't available through any library. I'm pretty sure that it's not available through any library distributors. But if you can finagle a way to get those into your library collection, I think you should definitely do it because they're producing some great comics out there and voices that are just not necessarily in other books about politics and stuff that are coming out

and talking about stories that may not be getting reported in other places as well. Yeah, there are also some full volumes that I've seen. So, like, Zach Wiener-Smith did Open B-B-Dubbys. And I think the Nib did a B-Gay-Doo Comics collection that collects a lot of their work. So that is a book you can get. But they've also done, like, kind of twice a year magazine, magazine and quotation marks, like volumes, anthology volumes as well. But, yeah, Jack Wiener-Smith has done, what was it called?

The borders? Open borders. Yeah. And then I think the other one was a book. I don't think that was illustrated, but it was like technologies of the future or something. I don't remember if that was illustrated or not. What I was going to say earlier when you're talking about,

some things I read in the article, one of the articles you sent me was that they end up in special collections because comics end up like donated. So that's probably one reason why a lot of comics end up in special collections. So I can think of like some gay comics that, ended up in our special collections just because they were donated by someone who was as part of a larger collection of like gay erotica. That track.

And nobody else wants to take care of them probably. Why don't people ever give me gay erotica is what I want to know. Well, have you asked for it? Like personally or for your job? Instead of giving it suggestions library, give it to me. Yeah. This is your opportunity. I mean, have you seen the internet, though?

I'm pretty certain that you don't need print gay erotica anymore. Yeah, but you do. I feel like someone specifically choosing to send you some, though. Like that's got that personal touch. Yeah, what if the power goes out? Yeah, Justin, please tell us all about that. You know. Good point, good point.

I had no power for like four days. I was really bored. Had nothing else to do. Oops, all crunch berries. Did you see this is a spooky cereal that has all the different marshmallow spooky people? Like Countsocula and fruit fruit? Yeah.

My favorite growing up. was I really liked Frankenberry. Yeah. You might think I'm a couch, a popular person, but I don't really like chocolate that much. I like Frankenberry a lot. Boobberry's okay,

but Frankenberry, that's the good shit right there. That's the prime cut. Well, now there's one that has all of them in one box, I believe. What? That's anarchy. That's like suicide cereal.

Oh, yeah, you put orange juice in it. That's the only way to eat it. See, you want to know something hilarious? No. Oh, okay, never mind. Not on this convo. We're very serious people, Jay. Oh, okay.

Yeah, don't you know me? I'm so serious. Yeah. Why so serious? But yeah, so you know, like, the movie Get Out and how she's a psycho who eats her fruit loops separated, like she eats them dry with like a bowl of milk? My boyfriend does that So I think I might be dating a crazy person Because he does eating the cereal separate thing Cold hour

Yeah, I know, it's hilarious No, that's not I told you not to tell that story I thought you were joking Wow Oh, but speaking of comics and cereal I don't know if anyone else here was a save-a-lot kid but Count Chaco, Captain Chaco.

And they only ever had two comics on the back the entire time that serial was out. They only released two comics on the back of those boxes. And then the rest, I got those for years. So I'm kind of worried about when they were manufactured. But yeah, troubling stuff. Matthew, when we were talking, you mentioned the problems with collection development for self-published material. And you mentioned Bone by Jeff Smith. Yeah.

Could you go into that a little? Sure. Well, like, a lot of libraries don't like to collect work that is self-published because they think it's like not of a high enough quality for their, like, I don't know. Like, there's a number of reasons why people don't want to do it. But there is, there isn't stigma. Like within the traditional publishing world of like prose books, fiction and nonfiction, there's definitely a stigma surrounding self-publishing your work. And that it's like, it's not good enough to be published by a real publishing house. But within the comics world, that stigma does not exist because for so long, honestly, there were not a lot of publishers out there doing comics.

And so, like, if you wanted to do your own thing, you had to do it yourself. You had to publish it yourself. And back in like the 80s and 90s, there was a big push from creators saying, hey, don't just give your ideas away to Marvel and DC as well. Like, you know, if you want to write comics, you can write for them. You know, you might want to work for these creators, but you don't own anything. You don't own the stuff that you've produced. And so self-publishing it, doing it yourself, you own all the copyright, and you get to keep any profits that get made off this or like you get to do whatever you want. You don't have to deal with an editor.

And so it's a very different kind of like approach to producing work in that way. And so you do have these comics like Bone that was self-published originally and it's still self-published, you know, that are things that libraries, of course, have because, you know, they've won all these awards and everything. but that if they are, if they, if they probably don't even realize that it is self-publish. Because it's, it's published by cartoon books. And they're like, oh, it has a publisher. And like, and then they don't realize that cartoon books only publishes Jeff Smith's stuff and has three employees, one of whom is like his wife. Yeah, I didn't know that before, you know, this. Yeah.

When I worked at a public library, sometimes I would like look up stuff like that to see, to just like look up a series. And I think I found that out when I was like looking up bone books. I was like, huh, that's interesting. Like, it was really fascinating to me when I figured that out because I was trying to figure out the series and like when they were all published. Oh, that's very complicated. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I went to the publisher website and I was like, oh, this is a little rag tag.

Yeah, and found that out. And I was like, oh, that's a real situation. Huh. So, anyway. But, yeah, now I'm just remit. remembering that all. Cool. Flashback. And it also means that you have stuff that is creator-owned and has been self-published, but then is released from another publisher and stuff gets moved around and everything like that. So it's a thing that exists. And I think people don't, people definitely

don't view comics in the same way, which I think is a really interesting thing. And then you look at crowdfunding sites where so many comics are published now. And so like virtually all, not all, but a lot of the comics that are being published through crowdfunding sites are self-published, you know, and self-published material. And comics readers don't care. They're like, as long as it's good, it doesn't matter who publishes it, which is really kind of an interesting thing to think about. And the stigma around like prose has definitely disappeared in the last, or is still disappearing,

I should say. And so self-publishing your work is a lot less controversial than it used to be. How would you say that like the, rise of like really accessible things like twine and other like interactive fiction plays into like self-published comics and stuff I mean because obviously self-published

comics have been a thing but do you see any sort of correlation in how those might relate and what libraries might do to sort of maybe collect that kind of self-published narrative? Well one of the things that people can do

to look into that is give me one second but look something up. Sorry. I fucking knew I didn't get this music. There is the global webcomics archive that's being collected by Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, which is designed to keep webcomics around so that if their websites go offline, they're still up there. And that currently has 310 different webcomics in it.

Holy shit. Yeah. And so that's the thing that you can check out, and you can submit suggestions that you want to it. Because that's one of the things with webcomics. It's like, you know, someone starts doing it and they do it for like, you know, a year or six months or like five years. And then they stop and the domain lapses and suddenly that comic doesn't exist anymore. That's happened to me with one that I really loved that the artist just stopped. Yep.

And it's not even there anymore. And it's very sad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That happened to me with, there was these like Arthurian, like, erotic web comics that were happening. And then the author stopped. started writing something else and took all of the Arthurian smut cycle comics offline.

And I think if you go onto their Patreon, you can still see them. But this is like great erotic like Arthurian story totally just isn't online anymore. Jay, the Arthurian smut cycle is like 1,000% something that you would be interested in that I would think. Oh, I've read it. I know. but it's like completely something for you. Yeah, the author now is writing this one called Dead Love, and it's like a T for T, like Gothic vampire, erotic horror webcomic.

It's pretty good. It was made for you. Yeah. It's pretty sweet. They also wrote these like twine games, like, Eat Dracula's ass. They have a theme. Wow. They're really fun.

But yeah, no, like, the authoritarian smart cycle is just like you can't read it anymore. Like it wasn't finished. But yeah, you know, this is a great, because the art's gorgeous on it and it's just gone now. I think that's like one of the reasons why webcomics became a popular thing to some extent is because people were used to reading things like newspaper comic strips, like a few panels a day. And they might be telling an ongoing story or just a gag. So, like, web comics were like, oh, it's really easy to put up three panels or one page a week or whatever it happens to be allowing creators to do that. Like, there was already an established way.

Whereas, like, if you were writing a novel and putting up, like, one paragraph at a time, are people going to read it? And so it leads to a very different type of reading experience, but also makes the barrier to creating a comic seem a lot lower. It's like, yeah, you have to draw three panels, and you can put that online, and you can make a website or find a website to put that up. Also, you were talking earlier with like Instagram comics. I really miss that it's hard to find new comic artists on Tumblr because they don't use it anymore.

Yep. And it was very flexible. But a lot of those people either stopped making their comics, but usually they're still there unless they deactivate their account. Some of them went off to make comics their full-time job. So like Kate Leth went off to like, you know, she's making other things. I'm like, that's cool, but I like your diary comics. And then I've come back to it after years because it's, It's like a short format that's pretty easy to put out.

I think you're seeing a lot of creators moving to the webcomic-specific portals as well. Things like Webtoon and Tapas and stuff like that. And my understanding is that you can actually make money on those, whereas if you're putting your comic up on Instagram, no one's paying you. Yeah. Tapas is pretty common, but I really don't like the interface. Yeah, it's just different audiences. And then, you know, Patreon is another way. that creators have to get money for making comics that they put out on for free on the internet.

Yeah. And that's that's kind of, again, that's the thing that's so annoying about having young artists kind of being on Instagram now is it's much more algorithmically controlled. And it's really hard to find new comic artists on there. Yeah. It's interesting to look at some of the creators like talking about like how to get popular. And it's like, yeah, like I've seen advice from creators that are like, don't even make your own website right away. Like, just start posting stuff to Reddit. And if you get a couple big things, like have a website to direct people back to or whatever afterwards. And it's so wild to think that like that's how you get popular now.

But I guess Reddit's been around for like, you know, approximately 18 billion years and internet years. So it makes sense to some extent. Guys, I'm going to start putting the podcast on Reddit. You definitely have a lot fewer. It seems like there are fewer webcomics creators hosting stuff on their own, on their personal, own personal websites at this point. It seems to have moved a lot more to congregation sites or posting them on other social media sites, which is interesting to look at. Yeah. Going back to self-publishing, though, so we can talk about like physical formats that

libraries can easily do. I got curious while we were talking and I looked up what's going on on Lulu, which for people who are not familiar, Lulu's like a really easy way to, it's an extremely popular platform for self-publishing books. And I know about it from open education. work because a lot of people, if you want to make an OER textbook, people want physical versions. You just do print on demand and you do it through this company. There's other companies like it, but this is the one everyone talks about. So I just started going through like comics and it's not a bad interface for just searching for comics.

I'm just looking through it now and it looks like a proper catalog. Wow, that's a lot of titties. Okay, hang on. Let me keep scrolling. Okay. Okay, okay. So if you're a fan of tities, definitely check out lulu.com. What kind of comics are these?

Is it LULU? LULU.com. No, I just clicked like comics and graphic novels. You just accidentally found titties? Wait, are you looking for NFTs? Nice fucking tities. How do I find the tities, Justin? The Boo Bang Theory by Man Growing.

This is an e-book. This isn't a comic. Hang on. I'm going to see if there's no cover art. Oh, this is getting weird. Please stop. Okay. You learn about the boobing theory.

Let's go back to nonfiction comics that are even sex related. There's a lot of sex and gender stuff that I think get put out that are interesting and that libraries should have in their collections. Limerance Press is an imprint of owning comics. And they put out the quick and easy guides, which are really great nonfiction comics. And so there's a quick and easy guide to they them pronouns to queer and trends, identities to sex and disability and to consent. And I believe there's more coming out as well. And so there's all nonfiction comics that you should have in your library collection that are about sex. And then there's also the Ojoi sex toy comic sex toy reviews that they've released.

And so that ties together the web comics, because they were originally web comics, being published in a book and sex all in one place. No response from everybody. Perfect. You had a major dropout. All I heard was Ojoi sex toy. Dang it. Did you hear the quick and easy guide stuff? Yeah, I heard quick and easy eye. That's fine. You heard the quick and easy guide stuff? Okay.

I heard bits and paces. I posted one of the covers in the Discord from man growing. So, you know, I just wanted to hear everyone's reaction to that. It's the worst thing I've laid my eyes on in a long time. Thank you, Justin. It's constantly ruining things for me. I do not want to look. Those are some titties.

Jesus. Sorry, Matt. You did a valiant effort to pull me off. Are we bringing the whale tail back? That's what I want to know. Sure seems like it. Matt is regretting being here today. This is what I expect from this podcast.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've got a brand to upkeep. We work really hard with our marketing team to make sure that we stay on brand. Must produce content. Yeah. But no, like Ojoi Sex Toy was one of those comics I really enjoyed reading quite a lot. And I think that, you know, people who do sex education really should look at accessible and not overly boring and openly queer ways of teaching sex ed. And I think graphic novels are a good

way to do that. And I think I would love to do a whole episode on graphic medicine sometime and just really dive into it. That's an area that definitely, like, it's both nonfiction and fiction comics. are books about comics about medicine is really what it comes down to about health and medicine. And so you have the ones like the quick and easy guides I just mentioned where it falls into graphic medicine stuff or they can. But then you also have within the graphic medicine area, you also have fiction-based comics, fictional comics, whatever the term is, that just happen to have medical or health-related issues as major plot points. So it's a really interesting genre. I don't know, like area. I don't know exactly how to define it. But I think it's a really interesting

thing and it's great to see more places develop graphic medicine collections yeah i've been trying to work a little bit on one um i don't have a lot of budget so but i i do a little bit to do a i leave some room in my budget for graphic medicine every year just because i'm into it for lack of a better word and i like to produce it hey there's also a community of graphic health zine makers out there. Crossover till last week. I'm making an X. My hands right now.

So, yeah, it's, and I know that, like, Matthew, no. Is that how you say his name? Mm-hmm. Does some really great work around that. And I'd love to talk to him about that. So this is an open invitation. To kind of close out, something I was picking up from the literature. that I was reading is circling around the labor of doing it.

So like Kerry just said, she's kind of single-handedly doing graphic medicine collection. That seems to be the trend is from the surveys that have been done, it seems like most places don't have a collection development policy for graphic novels. And if they do, it's the initiative of like one person. And if it's not the one person, then it's just like the collection development librarian, who just takes it over. So it's usually like passion projects, it seems. And I think a good call to action is to just, even if it's not your thing,

maybe you look into your collection development policy and make sure all that works not falling on one person and formalize that process a little bit. And also, like, depending on how your library is set up and how collection development is done, like talk to the people that are developing different areas and say, hey, you know, you're already buying books and de-es. DVDs and whatever it is in this area, maybe think about buying some comics as well. And here are some titles that you could get started with or whatever it happens to be. Just that, you know, it doesn't have to be one person in charge of graphic novels.

It can be, you know, whoever is in charge of buying, my mind is blanked on whatever it is. Who is ever is in charge of buying the religion? Literature. Or the literature or whatever it happens to be, say, hey, have you thought about buying comics as well as part of that? You know, you're already buying these other things. This is just an extra thing. So it's spreading it around, I think, is something that can work as well for that. Yeah, I think like, so my workplaces potentially, eventually, going to be revising our, doing a major

overhaul of our collection development policy. So, you know, I think it won't be just me doing it hopefully in the future. it's going to be part of our, you know, additions in the future. I think it's going to be a major part of what we're going to be collecting kind of across the board. And like, so I think that's another thing to consider is like making sure it's part of your collection development policy across the board. If you have subject selectors and things like that, like we do at my place of work. So making sure your subject selectors and everyone are aware and making, and like educating your

faculty about it too, that's another thing that like you can do as well. And so, like, I do a little bit of that as well and making sure that, like, you know, we do, you know, new book releases and stuff. We have some things like that that we send out with liaison work, which is, I'm not always the best at it. But I have some colleagues that are really, really good about it. And, you know, look to people who know what they're doing for communication guidance sometimes. Work tips. Damn it. You beat me to it.

I was going to go bam-a-bang-bang. I got it on a hotkey. Hot-key. Hamhorn hot-key. Yeah, bringing in faculty, I think, is interesting and difficult. I select for the sciences, and you can always, you know, depending on how much leeway you have, but most people hate doing collection development. So, like, no one ever questions if, you know, most of the stuff I buy for the sciences are actually about, like, indigenous perspectives on the sciences.

And that's why I spend as much as I can. So I really should be looking for more graphic stuff. But I feel like I need to have a discussion with our catalogographers before they all go to the juvenile collection. Yeah. And nonfiction comics, we only touched on certain aspects of them. But there are nonfiction comics about like every possible topic out there. There's nonfiction comics about math and philosophy and cooking and travel. Yeah, there's like anime guides to mathematics there.

are, yeah, like there's like anime guides to chemistry and things like that. Like, those are always great things to pick up and they're highly circulated. Those are pretty clutch things to have. And so they can, they can fit into any collection. And that is true is if you're a, you know, an academic librarian looking for stuff for adults. Or also if you're, you know, a public librarian or a school librarian and you're trying to get stuff that's age appropriate for kids or teenagers as well. there are non-fiction comics for every age group about every possible topic if you want to find them and look for them. And I think they're a really great thing to have.

And we didn't even really get into like, where do you put them? Do you have a separate non-fiction graphic novel collection? Or like in public or school libraries especially, or do you just interfile them? And how do you decide what to do with that? Yeah, I was just about to ask because one of the, I don't know if maybe this counts as nonfiction or not, but especially talking all like the public health and stuff, I remember like at the end of, of, it might be, it might be death, high cost of living, or might be at the end of it, by the little PSA about, like, how to use condoms? Yeah. Like, what would you count that? Is that a nonfiction comic, graphic novel thing? But that is included in fiction one. So that one, because the whole thing, I'm like, where would you put that one? Yeah, definitely. That is like an educational nonfiction thing featuring fictional characters. Yeah, where would you put the end of? I mean, that's really what I

Religion. Religion. The religion section. Well, I mean, allegorical works have always been categorized as fiction. So. It would be in the BS's. I always find that's funny where all biblical studies go. It's in BS.

Oh. Yeah. That's a Library of Congress joke. Right? Yep. I helped a monastery move their library one time. So it was like four walls and like three of them were the BSes.

Didn't I hear this episode with Sean Connery in it? Yeah, where's the drop, Justin? Oh, uh, hang on. You sound like on fire, bitch! Wait, is that your, is that your catchphrase, Matthew? I've heard this episode before. Yes, perfect. That's a catchphrase.

We found it. We found it. Mission accomplished. So I think we've covered everything we wanted to cover today, unless there's anything anyone else wanted to bring up last minute. I always want to talk about cataloging comics more, but that can just be in its own episode, maybe in the future. I will advise people if you want to look at some lists. There's the Eisner Awards are a great place to find nonfiction comics. The Yalsa great graphic novels for teens always has nonfiction comics in it.

the graphic novel and comics roundtable, best graphic novels for Adel's List, also had like five of their top ten from the most recent list. We're nonfiction comics. So there's a lot of great ways to find nonfiction comics out there if you're looking for them. And me, you can find me, my podcast, Book Club for Mastikists, a Reader's Advisory podcast, is at bookclub4M.com. For is in the numeral, the key on your keyboard. And we do two episodes a month.

Check us out if you like podcasts about library stuff, I guess. Yeah, the key on your keyboard. idiots. He knows who's talking to. The one that says four on it. Thank you for having me on this episode to talk about comics again. I will talk about comics forever. So, thank you for being our first repeat guest. I'm terrified that this has happened. I think I've heard this episode before. One of us. One of us. Exactly. Yeah, it was the one that I was on. All right. Good night, everybody.