 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics of interest to, that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is then posted onto our website for you to watch later. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. Excuse me. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who think might be interested in any of the topics that we've had on the show. We have people from all over the country attending our shows here. So just so you know, here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries in the state of Nebraska. Similar to other states where it would be the so-and-so state library, where the library commission. So we provide services and training and education and consulting to all types of libraries across the state. So there will be topics on our show that are for public libraries. K-12, academic special corrections. I probably missed something. Anything you think of that has a library, we serve them. And our shows here will run the gamut of all that as well. We do a mixture of things here, of types of presentations, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products that we think may be of interest to librarians and library staff. We do sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do things that are specific to what we're doing here through the commission for libraries. But we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning on the line with us from just a little bit up the road in Omaha, from Omaha Public Library is Russ Harper. Good morning, Russ. Good morning. And he is there. What is your actual title there? I know if it's Youth Librarian or Youth Services. It's actually, right now, it's Youth Services Library Specialist, which is a big, long way to say the teen guy. Absolutely. All right. So, and he has this presentation. He's going to talk to us today about graphic novels and collection, collecting and programming. This is a session that Russ actually did last year at our, we have a youth services retreat here in Nebraska every year. That's correct, right? Is where you did this previously? Yes. Yes. And I did not attend that. I was not able to attend that, but I had great reviews and I wanted to make sure we could share it with anyone else, anyone who wasn't able to attend that. So I invited him to come on the show. And so we are going to learn all about graphic novels. Everything everyone wants to know in just an hour. No pressure. Well, I'm not sure I'll be able to cover quite that extensively, but I'll give it a go. Great. All right. So go ahead, take it away, Russ. OK. Well, like Chris had said, my name is Russ Harper, and I have worked for the Omaha Public Library for close to 18 years. I started in the year 2000 and I have been focused on teen programming for about the last 10, 15 years. This is actually a good match for me, too, because in my hobbies and growing up and still today, I do collect comics and graphic novels and draw some stuff on the side, not anything that's going anywhere, but it's a fun hobby. Today, what we're going to do is I'm going to cover three different things, basically, the main part, which I think is probably why you're watching is the first part, which is the collection development. How do you find graphic novels? You know, what are graphic novels? How do you use them in the libraries? Number two is a part that I'm continually cutting down the short history and current trends. That's a part that pleases my little geeky heart so I can go a long time for that, which is why the collection development part is first. And then thirdly, just a real quick hit on some programming ideas that I've had success with in the past. I'm not going to get really in depth there, but there's tons of stuff online at all times, but I'll tell you about some things that I think really do work well for libraries as far as graphic novels are concerned. But first, there is some confusion. What is a graphic novel? The term was specifically used and coined by Will Eisner, who was a graphic artist from the 40s through the beginning of this century before he passed away. The industry awards, the Eisner awards are named for him. So he's very well-known in the industry, but he wrote a contract with God, which he described as the first graphic novel. That's a little bit of here or there. He obviously pledged onto it and it was a great kind of marketing phrase for him. But other people have been used, graphic novels, graphic fiction, comic fiction, those words had been kind of using combination before, just not really prominently out there like that. But graphic novels, it's still a misnomer because it can be nonfiction too. The graphic novels is a form of media. It's not a genre. A lot of people talk about the graphic novel genre. Well, when you have something that encompasses superheroes, real life, science fiction, romance, horror, western, I think we've covered lots of genres, but that's still just the one media. And loosely graphic novels, as I say there at the bottom of the slide, can be defined as long comics, because it's still using the same medium, that comics medium. Fine, but you might ask, what is what are comics? Well, comics, which is often used as a singular noun, otherwise known as sequential art, which is one of Eisner's terms. It's a specific art form that combines words and pictures to tell a story or communicate an idea. Now, usually they're told in panel to panel transition within a single page and also have dialogue and word bubbles. However, and again, this is where it gets gray, there are comics and graphic novels that are wordless, bubble-less and panelist, but still fit that definition of what a graphic novel or what comics are. Again, it's an art form, not a genre. You can literally tell any type of story with comics or graphic novels. And yet another confusing thing, comics and cartoons are often used interchangeably, but at least for my purposes, cartoon refers more to a style of art within a graphic novel and within comics and within animation, rather than that art form itself. This is a good time for me to pause and see if there are any questions. I do have a question. Okay. Is something, I was wondering how, what you were gonna do about defining graphic novels. I also, me, my husband and I are huge comics collectors as well, not artists like you, we don't have that kind of time. We've got the long boxes, both of us, our own sets of those in our house, where we collect them. And I was wondering, comics and the individual issues that come out like once a month or every other month, whatever, are sometimes collected into a larger book. Right, yeah. So then for example, like volume one of That Girl, New 52 is the first six issues of that. Would that be considered a graphic novel or something different? Because, is it like the story needs to be encompassed in that one book and not continue off somewhere else still? Right. What would you think of that? This is where you're getting to the hazy definition. It is, I know. Like. You know, and that's the thing, especially with the monthly superhero stuff, a lot of times they do have like a single story arc within their first say six issues that get collected into a graphic novel. Correct, yeah. I just, I find the word graphic novel itself to be very problematic because it has that word novel there that has lots of baggage and implies something that is not. Which leads people in the wrong direction to start with, yeah. Like the fiction versus nonfiction. Right. And then also the word graphic can get us in trouble because especially if you have a parent who does not know what a graphic novel is, they don't want to be handing something, quote, graphic to their little ones. Yeah. And that's tripped us up before. There's really no great word that describes this art form better than graphic novel, but graphic novel is really not the best word for it. Yeah. Something you still need to figure out, I guess, to just go with whatever. Yeah, yeah. I don't like the word graphic novel as far as that's the end all be all, this is what it's called because like I said, if it's a fiction book, how does, how is that a novel? But I don't know if there's any better words for it. So yeah, I would say at least by those definitions that first collected that girl title would be a graphic novel. And potentially for librarians who are trying to get into this for the first time, they maybe don't want to be too picky about it. And I'm sure you can get into this, but they want to get what do my users want. Right, right. Yeah, and I wouldn't get too hung up on what is a graphic novel. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and it looks like comics, it's comics. Yeah. And it's a bigger thing that will actually hold up better in your library because it's in that physical form as a hardcover or softcover book that's better than those individual issues anyways. Right, right. And that's a graphic novel as far as I'm concerned. But like I said, that definition is very nebulous and can be really twisted around a lot of different ways. Okay, great. Anybody else does have any questions? Go ahead and type them into the questions section or let me know that you have a mic and we will do it that way and you can ask your questions. All right, go ahead, Russ. Okay. So the first part, collection development. This is the big kind of, as far as the idea is that you take away whatever they are, hopefully it'll be in this first section. A lot of resources these days, a lot more honestly than there were 10 or 15 years ago for librarians in this. The first one is a brand new working group that has been formed by the ALA called the Graphic Novels and Comics Books Round Table. And I'm just gonna click that link there so you can get to their page. It'll eventually come up, there we go. Yep, there you go. I'm not logged in right now and honestly I'm one of those horrible people that pays their dues when they have to go to a conference. So I do, the nice thing is that when you have signed up for this or get signed up for it like I was, you do get a digest version of what's going on in the community every day. So I do feel like I'm still keeping tabs on what's happening even if I can't quite openly contribute to the conversation sometime. And I do recognize a lot of the folks that are running these, the Graphic Novels and Comics Books Round Table, they are the people that have really been doing Graphic Novels and Comics Books and Libraries for years and years and years. It's a good working group. But yeah, you will hear as subjects of this conversation, new hot titles, new things to discuss just because they are always bringing things up. Whoops, I'm going one step ahead. I know they do also have a Facebook group for it as well, so if you wanted to, for the Round Table. So if you're not an ALA member, but you still want to keep tabs maybe or in between when you're membership. They do, you can just go and search them and they do have, I'm a member of the group, they do have. And the other great ALA resource at least for teens is Yalsa. And every year they come up with this list of great Graphic Novels for teens and usually there are like literally hundreds of books on here and you can see all the different years in the past and then from this list, they do select a list of the top 10, the teen top 10 Graphic Novels every year. But if you want to get a huge list, let me just look at like here's 2017. Look how long this thing is. So if you're looking for resources, this is another place to find great lists for that. You know, the other thing though is that if you are, okay, so here's the next slide, no flying, no tights. But you know, you have all those big huge lists from Yalsa and from other places and you wonder how am I ever going to figure out what actually I should put in my library. Here's the, in my opinion, the kind of secret weapon for librarians. No flying, no tights was started by Robin Brenner who actually is one of the people leading the charge on the ALA's Graphic Novel Roundtable. This is a review site for libraries about graphic novels, comic books, manga and anime. So you can find weekly if not daily reviews and not just the little short snippets, the more kind of the publisher's weekly style reviews where they do get into a little bit of the details and talk about that. These are reviews that I trust and I should say that with a slight buyer beware, I used to review for this site. But they really have their finger on the pulse of what's happening in the comics world at all times. Plus, they always try to translate it for library folks which is great when you're trying to build your collection. Another thing that they have done, and I don't know if they do these annually or not but they did do them a couple of years ago, they do come out with core title lists for each age group. Now I only included the children's title list and the teens title list since that was kind of my focus for the subject but they do have an adult one too. And honestly, if you go down this list, I could yell names and authors to you for a half an hour. They're almost all on here, the ones that I would yell anyway. If I was going to come up with my core recommendations list, I don't think I could do much better than what's on the NFNT no flying, no tights list. And that's really, when people ask me, what are my recommendations? I say, well, go to these people and look at this list because they really do know what they're talking about. The other nice thing is obviously on that list, they have links to all the reviews. So you can see the original reviews that they themselves have originally done. Any questions so far? We don't have any questions yet. We do have someone that did come in to sing woo-hoo comics. Cool. Someone's saying not a question but thank God that graphic novel and trade paperback are interchangeable. They're glad to hear that. We were talking about before, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the publishers call them the trade paperbacks and that's the word I was looking for, yeah. And the libraries want to call them graphic novels and yeah, they're the same thing. It's really confusing but they're the same thing. So the next place that I go to find information on graphic novels and comics is kind of into comics land itself. Diamond distributors got its start in the 70s, sending comics to independent comic stores. And I described them here as the kind of Ingram and Baker and Taylor for independent comic shops. In other words, these are the people that the comic stores order their comics from. And they have started more and more to pay attention to libraries and market to libraries too. For instance, Diamond Bookshelf is a monthly newsletter. And as it says right there, graphic novel resource for educators and librarians. Now one little thing, this is a great place to go both for, again, articles on upcoming things and also, whoops, I keep clicking the wrong thing. They do have monthly bestseller lists both for the graphic novels or the trade paperbacks right here and I think this connects to an old one, yeah, to July. And if those of you who downloaded my link sheet, there isn't a link to the actual lists but if you click this first link, the bookshelf thing and, oh, it's not there. Well, they do have core list lesson plans. At one point I could click on this and find the monthly top 100 graphic novels. It's over here on the left-hand side. Well, it's just right at the top of that page, but. Oh, okay. Yeah, it says it here, but this is like, this is the end of July for that month. But yeah, if you wander on their website, it's a lot easier than I'm making it seem here. Anyway, but this does have the top 100 graphic novels sold in July or in whatever month you're looking for. They do also do the monthly titles and this is what in the industry are called the floppy's or the single issues. But again, you can kind of look at that and see the trends of what's going to be probably collected into the hot graphic novel once that story arc is done. Again, a little bit of buyer beware where the New York Times for a while had a graphic novels bestseller list and they no longer do. You would think that this might be a good substitute, but really this only focuses on the superhero folks. This only focuses on the actual comics publishers, not so much the independent voices that are being heard more and more these days that are being put out through more traditional publishing houses. But as far as what's going on in the superhero and on that side of it, Diamond Distributors will give you a very good look at and then you gotta realize also these are sales numbers, these are not necessarily anything besides that, but it does give you a good idea for at least the superhero trends are. And I say superhero, but that's really superhero companies. Those companies do a lot more than just superheroes, but of course they all go into the same comic shops. Any questions so far as far as where to find information about building your core lists for libraries? Those are the resources that I really rely on. And again, I could shout individual titles to you until the cows come home, but I can do that literally for days and you're not gonna get much out of that. So hopefully this will give you a little, better resources to kind of tying on to. We do have one question. Are there any resources for French comics? Recommendation websites. And I'm not sure if she means in French or coming from French authors. I don't know if you wanna clarify, but. I don't know. In French. Yes, actually in the French language, foreign language comics. I wish I had something. I really don't. There is, I'm trying to think of the publisher name. There is a publisher that does do a lot of French, especially translations into English. I wanna say to NBM or something like that. But again, they are translating European comics into English. So your question about in French, I really don't have anything for that. I apologize. That's a hard question. And wow, I don't know. You said, I'm assuming there's a French speaker that wants more graphic novels. And I'm not sure. I'm sorry. Well, we'll see if we can find anything. Yeah. Yeah, group mind is good for that sort of stuff. Okay, part two. And yeah, I will go on on this. So let me get my clock out now so that I can make sure that we do this in a timely manner. I see basically three streams of, this is my own idea. This is not, I didn't get this from anywhere. So whatever crackpot theory is totally mine. But I basically see libraries coming from three streams of graphic novel producers. The first one and the most prominent one is the American newspaper and comics and comic book industry, which really started in the 1930s as a book, sort of publishing thing. The second one is Japanese manga, which started for them in the 1950s. And then the translation started hitting us in the 90s. And then number three, the original longer works and or web comics and some European comics, mainly the personal quirky individual voices that don't necessarily get picked up by a company, but are doing their own thing and doing their own graphic works. It's really a combination and those kind of cross pollinate each other. And I'll kind of try to show that as I talk about this. Those three are really how we get graphic novels in library. But before that, there are some sequential art examples even before. For instance, Egyptian hieroglyphics, if anybody's familiar with a Bayou tapestry and I will let you Google that. Those are sequential art. They read from point A to point Z and tell a story. People don't consider that comics or graphic novels or anything. No, but if your definition is a little broader, what sequential art is, then realize that those are kind of the ancestors of comics as we know it. And then they started taking the book form back in the 1830s with Rudolph Tofers. I'm not going to read the French title because I will destroy that. But it did get published into the United States in the 1840s as the Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck. And if you Google Tofery, his cartoons are very fun, very loose, and the stories are kind of goofy. And he was just kind of, he was playing around and all of a sudden found this thing that people liked. More prehistory as American journalism gets its start in the late 1800s, early 1900s, you had Hearst and Pulitzer both trying very hard to draw readers away from each other. And with the new color supplements that happened in the 1890s with things like the yellow kid, which is in that first top caricature, those were big draws to newspapers. They actually hired artists away from each other just because that was the draw to the readership at the time. Now, most of these did not have any sort of sequential plotline past the day of the cartoon, but there are some like Little Nemo is a great example. That did have a weekly to monthly continuity that, again, when they get collected. And believe me, if you haven't yet, go see Windsor McKay's works collected. They're just gorgeous and they're from the early 1900s. And he was doing things there that are still considered experimental today. Last little bit before we get into actual comic books in the 1920s and 30s comics continue to be collected after the fact from newspaper strips and given away mainly. They finally decided, hey, let's make some new stuff, especially for comic books. And that first one is the famous Funnies thing that you see there in 1934. But what most people don't realize is that graphic novels and that as an art form were out of the comics world even back in the 1920s. Lind Ward did a series of woodcut novels, which were wordless that really read as a graphic novel. And they're very dark. I've only read one, but it's a very atmospheric work and it's a very mature work. And he's one of the first people to do a publication like that. That's really where that third independent voice stream kind of starts. But first it kind of gets drowned out in the 40s by the golden age of comics. This is when Superman got his start. Other notable heroes, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, who is going to be the subject of a movie this spring, by the way, under the name of Shazam, by the way, not the Marvel Captain Marvel, but the DC Comics Captain Marvel, who is now known as Shazam. Copyright battles back and forth make things totally confusing. Also, Will Eisner got his start in the spirit and he actually did that as a 16 page insert into newspapers. And as the war ended and publishers were trying to find how to keep their audience, which already was mainly adult audience, even though it was marketed towards kids. And because it was marketed towards kids, the biggest sellers were Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny cartoon comic books, even beyond the superheroes. That story gets missed. But then in the late 40s, as trying to keep their adult readership, they really expanded genre wise into, well, honestly, more adult topics. Things like war comics, crime comics, romance, Archie, Teen Humor got its start around here and also Tales from the Crypt, which you've probably heard of, the horror comics, which led to, believe it or not, just like video games and television and everything else, there were actual, there were actual, I'm not presenting this anymore for some reason. Okay, there were actual congressional hearings and the comics industry decided at the end of these hearings to self-censor itself and they created the Comics Code Authority. And this honestly, in my opinion, took American comics and basically made them stagnate for about 30 years because you could not tell the kind of stories you wanted to tell necessarily, otherwise the distributors would literally not deliver your comics. Without this Comics Code Authority stamp, you couldn't do that. And you can see what some of the interesting things, permutations of that were, the good guys always had to win. Crime and horror could not be in the title anymore. You could not depict blood, you could literally not depict human sweat. It was crazy and the comics industry did that to themself. This was not the government saying the comics had to do. The comics decided we're going to make this all right and they did this to themselves. And at the end of it in the late 50s, the only superheroes that still had their own comics were Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, everybody else, the stories were no good anymore. There wasn't, the conflicts were almost fake conflict. Everybody was a big happy family all the time. It just, it was just kind of pablum. That's what it turned into. Until DC got this idea to kind of, the new atomic age, they kind of worked that into their comics. And so Flash got a reboot, pretty soon the Justice League of America came out and now we're into the Silver Age. And of course, Marvel. It's amazing how many titles Marvel came out with in their first five years that are still going concerns today that are in the movies now. Stanley and all the artists who work with him who often don't get as much credit as he did, really did an amazing job at bringing in reality back into the superhero comics and also figuring out how to tell stories within the constraints of those comics code that still were engaging, compelling stories, mainly by making their characters more like real humans. And the big thing about Marvel is that Marvel, Marvel heroes fought with each other about little petty things, where in DC it was kind of all already was a big happy family. Also in the 60s, I don't have any great examples of this, but below there, it's underground comics started at this time, which were adult oriented comics. They were not used in the, they were not part of the distribution system. They promoted sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but they also were again, part of that third stream, that individual voice, the kind of, different personal stories that weren't being told by the corporate comics at the time. And also they didn't have to worry about the comics code authority because they weren't getting their books sent through those distributors. In the Bronze Age, the comics code authority got a little bit weakened down. The government actually asked Stanley to publish an anti-drug Spider-Man story, and he couldn't put the code on it because it talked about drugs. Literally that's what happened. So he decided to publish one without the code. They also did cute, cutesy little things like, well, he can't show zombies, but Marvel has these weird things that are voodoo zoobembies, which somehow looked exactly like zombies. So they kind of softened the code a little bit and they found creative ways around it until finally it just kind of became a paper tiger in the late 70s, early 80s. Also underground comics began to grow up and those head shops that were there to deal to hippies all of a sudden realized we can expand a little bit and become a comics shop. And they did that. And the distributors that started that became diamond distributors, started doing more of the mainstream comics. And this is how Will Eisner, when he wrote that graphic novel, A Contract with God in 1978, that's how he was able to get it out because of course the traditional publishers didn't care anything about this sort of stuff. So these are all kind of small press, independent publishers and artists figuring out how to get their works out to the public. And in the late 70s, that became the small little comic shop that is still a going concern for a lot of places today. Then what they call the modern age, 1985 on, how are we doing on time? Okay, we're doing okay on time. These three books are really what got the mainstream press into comics. Watchman, Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller about Batman's later years and then Art Spiegelman's Mouse. Again, proving that comics can be about anything that is a memoir of his parents' experience in World War II. And it's a very gripping, personal touching memoir of in history of the concentration camps. That's just, it's still, every time I go back to it, it's one of those things you find something new. The Watchman is the same way every time you go back, that thing is like one of these puzzle boxes. Every time you open it, there's something new inside. You know, and the thing is, it shows how we've grown up as libraries. I remember when Watchman used to be thrown into the teen area because that's where all the comics went. Maybe you should read it first. Yeah, really should read it first. People say, oh, it's the best comic ever written. Everybody should read it. Okay, I can see people who can make that argument and you can make that argument, but handing that to someone who doesn't know anything about comics and saying this is the best comic ever read it, is like handing somebody who just has learned the English language, James Joyce's Ulysses, and says this is the best novel ever read it. This thing is dense. It's not an approachable book. It is something that once your comic's literacy is up, then go read it, because then you'll catch on a lot more of the depth and the subtlety that Alan Moore and David Gibbons did in The Watchman. But because of these three works for practically the first time in America, suddenly comics and graphic novels are respectable in national media. You get time starting to cover graphic novels. You see this in entertainment weekly. At this time, they start paying attention. That sort of thing. Then in the 90s, this is the collector's moon bus in the early 90s where all the publishers realized that hey, they had something here with this grim and gritty stuff that Frank Miller introduced, and they started coming out with special covers and paying attention to the artwork and not paying attention to the stories at all. So you had all these collectors buying all these alternate covers and then the market just crashed. During this time, image comics, a lot of the hot artists decided to make their own company where they could keep their own rights to their creation so that things like Superman would not become the company's property but would stay the artist's property. You also had Neil Gaiman start his Sandman run in 1989 through 1996. His comic is one of the first that really turned adult women into comics readers. Then you had Jeff Smith's Bone, which everybody thinks is a scholastic stand by now. Those all started as single issue black and white comics back in the 90s. And then the last thing, at least in my mind, as far as publications that really had an effect, Scott McCloud's Understand Comics comes out in 1993. And I will say if you want to know more about the medium, if you were unsure about the comics medium and how it works and how to read a comic and all the different little tricks and tips that comics artists used to engage you, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics will kind of peel off that layer and it's like taking a college course into comics theory. And the best part is it's a comic. So it's very accessible and it's a fun read. Last but not least, and this is that second stream is the manga invasion that happens in the late 90s. And you guys probably remember when Borders was around and Borders had the huge manga section. Borders, yes. Yeah. And that was a going concern up until about 2003 or so. It was very successful, a lot of publishers jumped in on that game without realizing what was happening with their fan demographic because Japanese fans and by extension American fans of Japanese media are very participatory in their properties. In other words, if there's not a Japanese translation out yet, a super fan will take care of that and post it online. And that's actually kind of encouraged by the folks in Japan and here's why. This is the reason at least in my opinion why the boom and why the bust for American publishers. Why do the Japanese artists let so many of these scan sites exist online? One answer is Comiket. Now Comiket is a comics convention in Japan that happens twice a year. It has over 500,000 attendees every time, if not a million. It's about twice the size honestly of the San Diego Comic Con and they do it twice a year. And it's not even for what we would call real comics. It's for Doshinji, which are fan fiction derivative works on existing properties that are encouraged by the artist and the publishers because it helps get the word out about their original properties. These conventions though, like in 2008, they did a study on the super fan or Otaku industry and the gross revenue from the sales of Doshinji. In other words, that fan fiction were 27.73 billion yen or 14.9% of their total expenditure for the year. It is not, fan fiction is not poo pooed on, it is encouraged. It is, there are existing manga artists that got their start basically copying and doing fan fiction of their favorite things. And these conventions are basically boosts and boosts and boosts of people doing their fan fiction and selling them there. It's just a whole different attitude on intellectual property rights, a whole different attitude on what it means to be a fan, a whole different attitude on how to be a good fan. A good fan will help other fans read this property by translating it before the company can. The companies have caught on to this now and now the English and Japanese editions of each chapter of the manga titles now pretty much drop on the same day. So they've cut out the illegal scanning. But they've at least minimized its effect. But in the process of learning that lesson, a lot of US publishers went belly up because fans could read the free translations online. But it's still, it influenced, I don't know how many US artists, especially starting in the late 90s through the last decade. And, oh geez, we're already on programming. But the independent artists, and I don't go a lot into that because there's, again, so many voices and so many different things. But people like Raina Tegelmeier, people, I'm trying to think of other names drop, Hope Larson, Faith Erin Hicks, these are all folks that grew up reading those manga and realized I can have my own individual voice just like these manga artists do. And they are really dry, and now that the publishers are paying attention with the success of things like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home memoir and other important graphic works, the mainstream publishers are also letting these independent voices be published and get into regular bookstores and into our libraries. So I really think that those three streams, the American comics industry, the Japanese manga industry, and now for the past 10, 15 years burgeoning independent authorship voices in America, I think all three of those are kind of cross-pollinating each other now and it's kind of a really fun time to get into graphic novels. Just kind of an example, you might have heard of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, if not, you should have heard of her by now. She is a fun, fun, fun tongue-in-cheek Marvel character and her title humor really appeals to teen girls a lot because she's great. But she's being written right now by Ryan North, who got his start. If you go to qwantz.com, you will see a weird thing called Dinosaur Comics. And that is a web comic that Ryan North has been doing for about 15 years now. And on the basis of doing that and a couple side projects based on that, he's not writing a Marvel comic. You never know how you'll get your foot in the door, yeah. Yeah, I mean it's just that's, and I've seen that so many, there's this great Eisner winning series called Lumberjanes, that's geared towards, I would say fourth grade girls and about like fourth grade through teen girls. And they won Eisner awards and they obviously made a big enough splash that DC had let them cross over that independent property with one of their Batman properties. Just for fun, just to publish kind of a one-shot kind of story, but using all those characters together, you know, and that's, all I know is that if I was a creator of Lumberjanes, I would have been over the moon. That's not the walls, oh yes. It's the fans getting to be part of the big guys, but the big guys, Marvel DC, recognizing that these are valid, good, Yeah, and these voices. Oh yeah, it's awesome. Let's get these independent voices in, you know, that's why you have Tennessee Coates, you know, doing Black Panther stuff. You know, it's just, that's what you do. Okay, real quick programming ideas before I take some more questions here. And again, this is really, really quick, but just some ideas of what to do. First of all, there's free comic book day coming up the first Saturday in May, which is also this year May 4th. So it's also slow, okay? That's right, I hadn't noticed that yet, uh-oh, all right. If you are interested in doing free comic book day, the Omaha Public Library now does give out comics every year we participate with a local comic shop and they order comics for us. The individual comic titles are like 30 to 50 cents apiece. They are dirt cheap. You can go to the Diamond Comics distributor website, they have some information on free comic book day, but I would recommend if you have a comic store near you, talk to them and see if they're doing it and see if you can pick you back on their orders if that is something of interest to you. And now is the time to do it. You have probably about two weeks because the shops need to get in their free comic book day orders, usually about the third week in January. So this is the time to look at that. If you go to, there is a website, freecomicbookday.com, I'm just gonna type it in and see if I get there. Well, I'll have to see if I don't put the six in there. There it is. Freecomicbookday.com, they just now announced all the different titles for them and there is a wide variety of titles. There usually is a lot. There's a range from comics for the littlest kids all the way up to adult, yeah. And I like it because it's a good way to get started on a title. You might not be sure you're interested in. A lot of them are, you're not gonna jump into the middle of a story and be like, I have no idea what's going on. A lot of them are one-shots or introducing. Right. Yeah, it's a really low cost entry. Oh, Lumberjanes, the folks who combined with the... Yeah, there they are. They have their own free comic book day issued this year. But yeah, it's a good low investment way to kind of dip your toe into comics land without having to stay there for very long if you decide you don't like it. But yeah, Freecomicbookday is great. It's a relatively cheap program to run. And also, it's a good way to kind of increase some ties into your local community. We're very lucky in Omaha. We have two comic shops that want to work with libraries and are very good with working with libraries. I'm assuming that, you know, those of you who have comic shops in your area, they would be more than happy to do the same thing. But if not, again, go to the Diamond Comics website because they do have instructions for libraries who may not be in areas with a comic shop. Other programming ideas, comic book crafts, if you are taking your graphic novels and weeding them, save those things. They make incredible decoupage crafts. You can, you know, obviously, everybody's heard about the old, you know, wrap a present in the newspaper comics. You can do a lot of crafty things like that just by treating the comics pages as fun decorative pages. And they're colorful and they're usually, they're multicolor, not just black and white like a newspaper. Right, right, yeah, exactly. Another thing is if you have, and again, this needs an expert to run it, but if you have an expert, you can have a comic or manga drawing club. You know, it could be a weekly or monthly thing. I've tried to get it going three times. I've never quite had the teams to do it, the ones who are really, you know, if you have like even three teams that are just really into this, this thing will almost run itself. But again, you do have to have to have somebody that is able to act as an advisor at least artistically for that. And the last little option I wanna throw at you is something that I've tried and I kind of like it. You know, there's so many manga series out there and there are so many, you know, manga series that have like 30 volumes. How do you know which ones your kids want? How much, you know, which ones are the best ones? Of course they should tell you, but you can also do what I call a manga audition book club where the book club reads every month the first volume of a certain manga title. And then you can decide as a book club whether you should continue and get the other volumes. But that's worked semi well for me in the past. Again, I didn't have quite enough kids to really make it run when I ran it. But I think that again with the right group that would be a really fun book club to do. Any questions on anything I've covered? Yeah, let's see, anybody have any questions? Type them in. We have some comments that came in from earlier. The question about the French comics, the, I did find, and I'll show when I, oh here the French comics association is out there that brings together some of the major publishers of French comics into one group. So that would be a place to look at. And there's also an international comics festival that also has its own awards. And that was one of the recommendations from one of our attendees here, Gary says that it might be a good way to, you know, award, look at awards to see what is out there. I just Googled like French comics and came up with some of these things too. Also a comment just, so there is some things out there, just gotta kind of look for them. Also something to suggest when you're talking about Lumberjanes and other ones, Gwenpool, Ms. Marvel, and champions are excellent Marvel titles and books for youth to get started with, yeah. Yeah, Ms. Marvel, I definitely would recommend very highly. Gwenpool is a lot of fun. There's, you have to know a little bit about the Marvel Universe to understand why Gwenpool even exists, but it is fun. Yeah, Batgirl on DC side is pretty good for, you know, for, yeah, I'm always looking at how to get teen girls into it just because that's always kind of the missing marketing piece. Although manga is a great pull, that's really where a lot of women got their start in reading graphic novels is through the manga gateway. And again, a lot of these like Hope Larson and a lot of these independent creators, like I said, they were manga readers growing up. That's the independent voices of today are the manga readers of the past. I read a lot of comics that are, I try to look for ones, I'm not specific, that are written or drawn by female artists as well. And that's honestly a huge movement right now. Oh, it is, yes. And it's really great to see too. Gail Simone is one of my favorites and yeah. She's a great writer, yeah. Then yeah, on artist-wise, Amanda Connor is great. She's the one that helps Gail Simone with a lot of stuff, especially like the Harley Quinn stuff. I'm trying to think of, oh, Vera Brogsel is the other one that I was thinking of that's kind of in that group. She did a book called Anya's Ghost and she is doing stories now mainly for the younger group, like the third through sixth graders. But yeah, this is an exciting time to collect graphic novels because there's just so much out there for all the different age groups and all different voices out there. Which is a big- Oh, G. Willow Wilson too. She's doing a lot of great things. Yeah, she is the writer of Ms. Marvel and I believe DC's asked her to start writing Wonder Woman too. So that should be fun. But yeah, she is a converted Muslim so you get that voice in there, which is just, I mean, it's really, even from 10 years ago, the voices that are doing, even the mainstream comics are so much more diverse than they were. It really was kind of an old white guys club for a long, long, long time and now it's not. No, not at all. All right, so we do have some questions here. All right. Any good resources for catalogers when it comes to determining how to create call numbers for all of these comic series? Ooh. You do cataloging? I don't do the cataloging, although this has come up in discussions in what is now the graphic novel round table for ALA. I've heard this discussion about four or five times over the years. You kind of have to decide as a system how you're cataloging graphic novels. There's a few different ways you can do it. You can do strictly by Dewey, which means you're all going to end up in the 700s and your 750s and 740s are going to be a huge section. What we do at the Omaha Library seems to work well for us as we treat them more like a fiction book where we will put the author's name. We will do it first by the author's name unless it's a multi-author set and then we will do it by the series name. And not always do we do that. Sometimes different series are just with the author's names if different authors have taken over and done different stories arcs. That's the problem you run into with that is if you go by author, then you might split up series. The other way is strictly by series, but that really will lead you into confusion pretty quickly, I think. But those are the three strategies I've seen. And again, you have to decide as a system, I think, really what is the best fit for your library? True, yeah. Someone also suggests 741.5 because it's art. Right. So, and as someone else says, we have them like fiction unless they are non-fiction content comics popping up which are poxming up more and more. Yeah, and we do that as well at Omaha. We put the non-fiction comics in the non-fiction section. We will assign them a Dewey number and we might keep them with the graphic novels area if all those are together. But we also, I don't think we would be opposed to interfiling them if that's how it worked out. But we do slap a Dewey number on the non-fiction ones. And then someone has a question which is interesting and this is, I think it's leading towards many libraries changing how they are arranging their libraries. Have you ever considered arranging them by publisher and characters similar to how the comic book stores do it? I have not personally. And I don't have the, I don't have the mood to make that work. I've heard of people trying that. I have not heard whether it works for them or not. In a library, yeah. Yeah, in a library. Because it's, I mean, I guess you have to see how it goes. Yeah, I mean, when you're going into a comic shop, you're assuming most of the people coming in there, that's the only thing you've got in there and they know what they're looking for or they know how they're looking for it. I'm interested in Wonder Woman. Oh, well, they're all here. Or I love everything published by Boom Comics. All right, I'm going here. Or a particular artist, like I mentioned Gail Simone or someone. Gotta figure out how you're doing things. Depend on who the people are coming in and what they're asking for. And you might change it, obviously, as your collection gets bigger and becomes more of a thing that might be a way to go now. Yeah, I really would love to hear, I know there had been a couple of libraries that did that kind of by genre or by company sort of thing. I have not heard how it went for them though. And I'm really curious to see that too or hear about them too. Yeah, let's see. Well, you did mention one. Someone wants to know, do you recommend any books about comics? You have the previous one, the one that you did. Yeah, the understanding comics. Are there others? There are a few. Grant Morrison did an interesting memoir called Super Gods, where he actually ties his religion into it. But it's kind of a personal memoir of his time in comics. There's not a lot written about comics that don't end up being an instructional how to do comics book. That's yeah, that's what I keep thinking of is like how to write a comic, how to draw comics. And there are some good versions of that. Will Eisner does a few really great kind of comics theory books, but he doesn't talk about actual titles or actual titles or anything. It's more along the lines of the Scott McLeod book where it's kind of the comics theory. I really don't know of any books that are particularly talking about comics, although wait a minute, I just thought of one. Of course, all the people that are in the round table, let me see if this is in our catalog. I'm not sure if we even have it. No, I don't think we do. I'm just gonna Google her, because her name is Snow Wildsmith and she did do a book on graphic novel reviews. And so did Robin Brenner, who runs the No Flying No Tights website, as well as, yeah, she also does a lot of, there, that's the one I'm thinking of. Parents guide to the best kids comics, choosing titles your children will love. There you go, perfect. That's what you're looking for, yeah. And if you do this, I actually did just a Google search, and not a Google, an Amazon search too, on history of comics. And there are some, there's always the ones that are like the, of a particular character or DC. Right, right, yeah, they do a lot of character studies. More general, yeah, there's some things out there, understanding comics, the invisible art. And that's the Scott McLeod again. Yeah, Robert, oh, well, yeah, books. There's the Robert Kirkman series that was a TV show. The Walking Dead? Well, yeah, no, he did the Secret History of Comics. Oh, that's right, okay, yeah, yeah. You're asking for books, but that is a history thing. So if you look for that as something to watch, if you're into that, yeah. But there are some things out there, yeah. Yeah, and it's kind of, I honestly, that would be a great thing to ask the round table because a lot of those folks have written those books. And here's one that someone actually in our audience suggests, Hannah, suggests graphic novels and comics in libraries and archives, essays on readers, research, history, and cataloging by Robert Wiener, et cetera. So there is one specifically for libraries. Yeah, I believe he's part of the round table, see. All right, and when we have another, now I'll just, oh, 10 cent plague is something about comic censorship. There's a, yes, yes, that was written about the congressional hearings and the American, the Comics Code Authority back in the 50s. I don't know about the history of it, yeah, definitely. I just wanna say to everyone, we are at 11.02, but we will finish with anybody's questions or anything else that Russ wants to say. We do not have to be cut off here at 11 a.m., just because that's when we officially go, we're scheduled for, so we'll keep going as long as you have questions or comments and as long as Russ wants to chat. If you do need to leave, because you only allotted, scheduled yourself to 11 o'clock to watch the show, that's fine, we're recording and you'll all get access to the archive afterwards. Let's see, we do have one question, another question here that they said, they're also reading about some public libraries using Hoopla, which allows for digital comics. Do you see this trend growing? Is there a demand for comics delivered digitally in a library like with ebooks? I personally do, we have looked at Hoopla here, the pricing structure is not quite right for our library, but we do have some comics that are available through one of Hoopla's competitors, which is Overdrive. Right, they both do it, yeah. Yeah, those don't work quite as nicely as the Hoopla app, but they do exist. Yeah, I think that digital comics, those are going to continue to be a thing and I think libraries will be very silly not to look at that somehow, as far as adding that sort of content to their collection. Yeah, and obviously it's becoming something new, because now also someone, Hannah here, is saying, RB Digital is also introducing comic books now as well. Right. So definitely it is becoming, everybody wants things right away and the digital and ebooks is so convenient for some people. That definitely these publishers, the e-publishers know they need to get on board with it. There are of course the individual comics, like DC has its own digital and Marvel, but that's just one publisher, these are more, these ways would be better to go for a library as far as here's a whole bunch of different ones that you can access through one of these sources. Yeah, commercially, if you're not talking about libraries, there's an app called Comicsology that pretty much handles all the digital stuff. But yeah, libraries, yeah, they've got the new thing from RB Digital and then yeah, Hoopla and Overdrive have already been doing that for a while. I do think that, yeah, people will want those digitally just like they want ebooks digitally. Absolutely, if that's how they're using a library, sure. Any other questions you have, get them typed in, we'll get them answered or any suggestions you have for where to get comics or programming that you guys have done. I'd like to hear if anybody has done any other programming in their libraries related to it. Someone else does have a comment, well, I'll mention here while we're waiting, so anyone has any, we were talking about suggestions for young people. The creators of the later new 52 run of Batgirl have a series called Motor Crush that is also very good and appeals to young and queer girls. Cool. I've not gotten into that one yet. That sounds very cool. Yeah. Oh, okay, I guess. All right, this next question is kind of, the first part of the question confused me because you've got your jigglypuff on your shoulder there in your picture, and someone starts off saying, can you explain Pokemon to me? And I'm like, that's a whole nother show. Then she says, are they sequential? I think she's talking about Pokemon comics. Are they sequential or stand alone within the various series? I don't know much about them other than kids love them and I don't know what series to pick up. Talking about Pokemon comics, not the Pokemon game which is really cool. We actually have done a show on Pokemon Go in libraries if you're interested, check our archives, anyhow. Yeah, the Pokemon stuff reads just pretty much like any other Japanese manga. The volume numbers are sequential. I know there's at least four different Pokemon series out there. I don't know which is the least current, I'll be honest. But yeah, they do go sequentially from volume one all the way up through whatever the last volume is of that particular title. You might have just pick one or maybe ask your kids which character do you like, I don't know. Yeah, and they'll have their different favorite Pokemon and I suppose it depends on which characters in the manga also like that Pokemon. You know. Oh, someone did, I was asking about programming. Someone says they did a manga conference, how it became popular throughout the world. Oh, cool. That's like a more in-depth thing, yeah. That's something I was actually wondering about about programming. You did mention getting someone to come in and like do a demo, whatever on art, doing the actual how to draw. Now you said, Russ, that you do some of your own artwork and I've seen that through your Twitter and everything but that would be something too, I think. Look for if there are any local artists in your community that are writing their own independent. I mean, here in Lincoln we have a couple of different comic shops and they do bring in some of the local artists that they know of because they're coming to the comic book shop saying, hey, will you sell my independently published thing? But they would be definitely willing to go into libraries, I'm sure. I know I've seen some of them at our Burns and Noble going there and doing like drawing demonstrations on free comic book day or Batman day or whatever but that could be something too, not necessarily manga specific but just comic drawing. Yeah. Yeah, I think any artists and honestly I have yet to see many comic artists that do that that don't want to go out and meet fans or meet potential people. So yeah, if you know somebody like that that's like an almost instant draw for a library program. Definitely, yeah, they wanna see the actual artist but you can't get, you know, probably can't get Gail Simone to come but you never know but you definitely wanna boost up the local artists like you do your local authors of books, same thing. And if you're not sure, I would recommend because I know I keep seeing these posted on the comic book shops pages. Reach out to them and say, can you connect me with whoever? Right. And along those lines. I think you've got coming in. Along those lines, I did not mention this specifically for programming because it's a little more than just a simple program but a lot of libraries have many comics conventions at some point. Yes, any comic cons, yes. Yeah, and that's another way to go. I have never personally organized one so I don't feel qualified about how to make one go but I do know that there are publications on that and there are plenty of other librarians that you can use as a resource for that. Yeah, it's kind of thing you can just, you know, do a Google on Library Comic Con. We actually, it sounds like this a lot but we did an Encompass Live About That back in 2016 organizing a successful comic or maker con at your library. There we go. We do have a show about that but you can look for, there's lots more places out there that have done it. Let's see. Something else that they're including comics and they're radio book critiques that they do radio book reviews. Oh, great. Well, another book someone recommended is Marvel Comics, The Untold Story. By Les Danes. How? It's like, I believe. And... Yeah, he did one for Marvel and there's a similar one about DC too. I don't know the exact title of it. Yeah. And so it's also just including, when you do a general display on a topic of whatever, throw in your comics or your graphic novels as just another type of material we have on this topic. You don't have to be, you don't have to like, be sneaky, I guess is the way to, doesn't have to be specifically, here's our comics but hey, here's a gem and here's a, well, a thing on the Holocaust and of course there, but you know, anything else. Yeah. And honestly, sometimes the comic is the best way to convey that information. Two... People learn very different, in different ways. Yeah. Two, you know, back about 15 years ago, two Marvel veteran comic artists and writers actually took the government's published 9-11 report, commission report, and made it into a graphic novel work. And honestly, it was 10 times more understandable than the silly report was. Definitely has to be, yes. Yeah. So they do have uses, you know, beyond what you would think. That always strikes me as like the perfect example of, you know, the form fitting the message. Cause that other, I've looked through that other thing and you just get confused. Yeah, I don't want to. And I think we'll just do this one last comment here, since we are getting about 10 after and I wanted to mention this too. Someone said Emerald City Comic Con is held in Seattle and they held panels at the Seattle Public Library, specifically aimed at librarians. So that was like the actual real, you know, official Comic Con just for that said, hey, we're going to connect to libraries. And I know that at the like San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con, they do have, they now have panels that come not going to the library, coming to actual Comic Con about of librarians. I know librarians who are actually participating in panels at those, the big guy Comic Con's talking about comics and libraries and how that all works and with education and everything. So it is definitely becoming the comics industry from their side is recognizing libraries. Yeah. And they really are wanting to encourage and let people know about and work with. And for the last few years, there has been a librarian on the Eisner Awards Committee too. So. Yes. Oh, and she says, oh, I didn't know. Cookbooks are starting to make appearances in comic format. Ooh. Yes. Yeah. All right. So it's everywhere. Yes. It literally is everywhere. You know, I used to say about Japanese manga. They're a manga for housewives. They're a manga for plumbers. They're a manga for salarymen. They're a manga for janitors. Literally you can find almost any subject these days. Absolutely. All right. So I think, I think we'll wrap it up now. We had a lot of good discussion here. I'm so glad to have you on here Russ. My pleasure. I enjoyed it. Especially with the whole history of the comics. I know that's something that some people may or may not know everything about it or might know little pieces. But that was great to hear about. We got some great ideas here. And I'm glad everyone was able to join us about this this morning. I am going to pull back control to my screen here. Alrighty. Just to show you some things that I brought up here. So, all right. So here is, this is just the session page for Jay. As I mentioned earlier, we do have the handout and the presentation list done there. The archive recording will be there as well. And I'll send you guys a link to that when it's ready. Some time today or tomorrow when this all gets processed. And so I mentioned some things that we did mention during the show. The Facebook page for the ALA graphic novels and comics libraries round table. It's just a group there. You can join. It's a public group. I'm a member of it. Our posting anything related to it if you're not in ALA or part of that. So we were talking about the French comics. The French comics association is one that I found. And the comic festival that is held in Europe is here as well. So those are some things that you can look at as well. So that will wrap it up for today's show. Gonna get back to our main page here. And as I said, the archive will be done and posted hopefully this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow we'll see. It depends on how go to webinar and in YouTube cooperate with me on that. As soon as it is ready, everyone who attended today and everyone who registered even if they went over to attend live will get an email from me that you know that it's ready for you to watch. Where it will be is here. This is our Encompass Live site and we have our upcoming shows here. But right underneath here is a link to our archived Encompass Live shows. The most recent one at the top of the list. Here's last week's topic was Best New Teen Books of 2018. We would add a link to the recording along with the handout and presentation that Rasa's already provided to us. While I'm here, I'll just just talk about our archives briefly. We do have 10 years worth of archives now in here. 2018 last year was the 10th year of our show Encompass Live. And we do have our archives going all the way back. So this is a long, long page where we now have where you can search the archives for a topic, a name of someone, and you can search everything or just the most recent 12 months if you want something just more up to date. So do keep that in mind as you are searching or look through our archives that we will have some things here. Everything has a date on it. If I scroll down here, here's things from 2016, for example, that when you're looking at something the information may be old, it may be out of date. The service or whatever it is may not exist anymore because it was from eight, nine, 10 years ago. But we are librarians, so we save an archive historically, everything. So everything will always still be up there. Just keep that in mind when you pay attention when you're watching something. Oh, hey, there's our Pokemon Go that I was mentioning anyway. So that is our archives. And I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is our 2019 One Book One Nebraska, This Blessed Earth, a year in the life of an American family farm. The author Ted Genoese will be here with us at the Nebraska Library Commission to talk about his book and to talk about the One Book One Nebraska program. This is the book that everyone in the state is reading for this year. This is one we were actually doing jointly with Iowa, with all Iowa reads. They are also reading the same book. This is because this fall in October, our state library conferences, Nebraska and Iowa, we were doing a joint library conference. So we decided to also do a joint One Book One State title. And we were able to find one that actually covers would be good for both states. Sometimes it's hard to find, is it just Nebraska, just Iowa? If this one is about American family farming. So definitely sign up and join us next week to hear Ted talk about his book and for us to talk about the One Book One Nebraska and all Iowa reads programs coming up. And please do sign up for any of our other upcoming shows. See, I've got some listed here. I've got more coming up for the end of January. Don't worry, we're gonna get everything on the schedule there, just finalizing some things. And lastly, Encompass Live is also on Facebook. We do have a Facebook page. If you are a big user of Facebook, give us a like over there. We remind people of when two shows are coming up. Here's a show, a reminder about today's show, login right now. And when recordings are available of previous shows we post on here as well. Where's the previous one? There we go. So if you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there to keep up with what we're doing. Other than that, thank you so much for being here with us Russ. Thank you for having me. Great, we learned a lot I think. We got a lot of thanks coming through on the chat as well. And hopefully you'll all join us next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye. Take care.