Other Story Forms: Comics

A panel from Beautiful Darkness

It all started for me when I was a librarian at the Queens Public Library in the early 90s. Shortly after I arrived, I was charged with starting and curating a comics and graphic novel collection. I hadn’t grown up reading comics and was a complete newbie. The library entrusted me with a budget of a few hundred dollars, which I took to a comic book shop (can’t remember which one now, or even which borough it was in). When I told the guy at the desk that I needed to start a collection for a public library, well his face lit up like Christmas. My only limit was that I could only buy bound books (actual comics are too ephemeral for public library use). He got out a big cardboard box and filled it with the basics from DC, Marvel, Vertigo, Dark Horse, Image and others. 

Curating a collection means you have to read it, or as much of it as possible. I’ve been reading comics ever since. While I appreciate DC and Marvel, the classic superhero comics don’t really light my fire (I prefer the movies as my superhero delivery medium). What really turned me on were the darker, quirkier graphic novels like V for Vendetta, Sin City, Watchmen, Maus. These are the comics I would later go on to buy for my own personal bookshelf.

Like genre writing, comics are often pooh poohed as a literary form, but they have so much to offer! If you love the lush visual stimulation of movies and also love reading, comics are the best of both worlds. Yet they are very much their own thing. They are a variety of story telling experience that shouldn’t be neglected. While it is important for writers to learn guidelines about plot beats and characterization. The greater the variety of storytelling experiences you engage in, the deeper your intrinsic understanding of story will be, and it will pay off in your writing.

There are a million million comics out there, and a million websites and blogs to tell you about them.* Here is my idiosyncratic list of the best comics I read over the last year (many of them borrowed from my local library, so not necessarily published recently – the Austin Public Library maintains excellent comics collections for both adults and Kids, BTW).

First:

If you’re curious about comics, but feel like you can’t quite connect with the form, a good place to start is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Written in 1993, it is still a relevant and passionate primer for medium.

Saga

Series:

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fionna Staples. Vaughn also wrote Y: The Last Man. This one has me hook line and sinker. It’s a sci fi soap opera in the best way. At the core it tackles issues of relationships and family.

East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta. Apocalyptic (as in the Book of Revelation) religious themes set in a science fictional weird west. Volume 1 was an excellent beginning, the following volumes are a little uneven in their pacing. The large cast of characters can make it hard to connect to emotionally, but when it hits its stride it’s brilliant. 

Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. Another weird western about love, both twisted and true, and sacrifice.

Big Questions

Stand alones:

Big Questions by Anders Nilsen. A flock of small birds trying to make sense of a strange event. Very post modern in the literary sense. Beautiful minimalist artwork. Here's a NYT article about the book.

Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann. A miniature world rendered in beautiful watercolor that is both violent and poignant. It captures the darkness and light touch of true fairytales perfectly.

Trillium by Jeff Lemire. I found this one challenging but worth it. Some sections are intentionally formatted upside down or progress backwards through time as truly star-crossed lovers travel through time, space, and alternate universes.

The Wrenchies by Farel Dalrymple. I found the artwork arresting and the characters fascinating. Ultimately, the story failed for me. It had too many ideas, which made the plot hard to follow and required too many characters, so that I couldn’t connect with the core of the story. Still, so much potential! I will read more by Dalrymple.

reMIND

Some things for younger readers:

Stuff of Legend by Mike Raicht. This is a little dark in places, but the whole family fell in love with the characters and the world.

Cardboard by Doug TenNapel. We've been reading the very productive TenNapel's books for years. He's the creator of Earthworm Jim, Tommysaurus Rex, Ghostopolis, Bad Island... Cardboard is one of his bests IMHO.

reMIND by Jason Brubaker. Talking cats, and evil lizard king ruling an underwater kingdom. Great stuff! This comes as a gorgeous hardbound two volume set or you can read it for free on his website!

Monster on the Hill by rob Harrell. Adorable characters, lovely story. Great for younger kids.

Marzi by Marzena Sowa. A memoir in comic book form.  Marzena shows us what her childhood in Poland was like during the end of communism there. Beautifully told with lots of history

Clan Apis by Jay Hosler. A good story with real science about bees written by a biology professor.

The Wrenchies

* Criminally omitted from this post is the fact that the web is bursting with amazing web comics, only a fraction of which get bound into physical books. They deserve a post of their own, but since I have no idea when I might get around to writing such post, check out io9’s list of Best New Web Comics of 2014, or their 17 Fantastic Completed Web Comics to Binge Read.

Yes, I’ll Bang the Drum for the Library…

"For Rebecca and Sylvia, the new library can't come soon enough!"

A woman walks in to a library in her old gardening shirt, after taking the dog for a sweaty walk and picking up her kid from school. Why? Because that’s what she does every Thursday.

On this particular Thursday, a lovely reporter was there, and asked her for her thoughts about the awesome-sauce new library being built down the road. What can the woman do but fluff her hair and turn to the guy with the hulking camera on his shoulder.

So there’s my sound bite and there’s my 9-year-old browsing the shelves at the Austin Public Library. Of course, for the rest of the afternoon I was distracted by all the ridiculously articulate bon mots I could have said if I’d only known that I’d be talking about libraries on camera that day.

 

Going to the library has been a part of my life, well, all my life. I’ve blogged about my own mother taking me to the library. After college, I got my Library Science degree and worked as a librarian in New York City for several years. As a parent, a reader, and a writer I find the library invaluable. When I was interviewed, I didn’t know what angle the story would be taking, and I’m glad I got to be the one of the voices cheering for the new library.

 

Now that I’ve seen the story, let’s be clear: I am all for transparency and realistic planning. According to the story, the original estimate for the library was 125 million. If that number had been in the bond in 2006, then the current price tag of 120 million would have been under budget. It was wrong to misrepresent the amount this project would cost in the bond, no matter the intentions.
 

That said, can we stop measuring our tax expenditures on cultural institutions in terms of cops and firefighters? It’s a false comparison or at least a facile one. It's definitely a tired old argument. Yes, money is tight and needs to be allocated carefully, but for any self-respecting city this is not an either or equation. I mean we expect both emergency services AND libraries, right? Why shouldn’t we have a library as nice as the one in Seattle or San Diego?

I believe all the arts are worthy of some portion of our tax dollars. I believe a free and open public library that offers books, materials, electronic access, databases, classes, meeting rooms, and yes, even a coffee shop is a cornerstone of our democracy. Above and beyond all of that, there is just something relaxing about walking into a building full of books. 

Well, relaxing until the reporter and her cameraman show up! 

Of Libraries and the Books that are in Them

My hometown library when it was new.

It looks much the same today.

When I was growing up, Tuesday was library day, or maybe it was Thursday. I can't remember now, but I do remember going with my mom every week without fail. I grew up in a small post-industrial town south of Buffalo and north of Pennsylvania surrounded by farmland. Its heyday, as a center of tool and die, brick, and furniture manufacture was history long before I was born. But Western New York was a lovely place to grow up, and Jamestown had an excellent library.

My mom dumped me in the children's room (fine with me) and went off to collect her reserves and pore over the new book shelf and maybe read a few pages of the New York Times. Once I was finished assembling my own pile of books, I would swing by the little art gallery or maybe fiddle around with the microfische machines or just go directly to bugging my mom. 

I have always loved reading. Earning my English degree forced me to read broadly and taught me to read deeply. Throughout my education, including my masters in Library Science, I assumed that everyone read for the same reasons I did, to encounter great thinkers' thoughts directly on the page, to wallow in lavish prose, to savor poetry. For me, reading is an adventure, as with all good adventures, I thought some exertion should be involved. I still look for books and authors that will challenge me, show me new horizons, maybe even change my mind. 

After I got my MLS degree I moved to New York City to work at the central branch of the Queens Borough Public Library. Living in the city was eye-opening, so was working in a big public library. I discovered that I was only one kind of reader, and that people read for a myriad of different reasons. *

Queens is an incredibly diverse borough, and QPBL carries a huge range of material. I remember looking at a spin rack of Korean romance novels. Inside, the back covers were covered with Korean symbols that the readers had penned. I asked the librarian who worked in that department about it. She said that each reader would write their Korean initial in the back of the book once they'd read it, so that they wouldn't read it again by mistake. I thought, how satisfying could a book be if you could accidentally read it over and not know? Yet those books were read to pieces, the back covers of every one filled with readers' marks. 

It slowly dawned on me that I had a very narrow idea of what I thought reading was. Like most unexamined definitions, it encompassed exactly one person, me. Sure there are like minded souls out there, but there are also rafts of readers who seek entirely different pleasures than I do. 

As Shakespeare said, "There's more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." ** 

This understanding has made me a better writer. Right off the bat, I know I'm not trying to write for everyone. I think, I'm not so much trying to find an audience as I'm trying to find my tribe. Fiction or non-fiction, no matter the genre, all a writer can do is try to reach across time and space, to connect with those readers who seek to share the same challenge or solace or sense of humor with them. I'm looking for that reader who will share my world for a few hours and mark the back cover of my book with their initial. 

* Of course, people come to the library for more than just books. They come to to get music and DVDs. They come to learn English or Spanish or Farsi. They come to look for a job, to surf the web, to learn to type, or sew, or meet friends. They come to play computer games. And if they don't have a home, they come in just to sit in the air-conditioning, and that's okay too.

**  Hamlet (1.5.166-7)