 Comics, and we are going to be up here using the terms comics and graphic novels fairly interchangeably. Comics are a storytelling form. Comics are not a genre. Your graphic novel collection is not a genre collection. That is because comics, as an art form, are a way of telling stories. They are putting a series of images in sequence that are designed to be looked at in sequence and for the reader to attain a certain meaning. That meaning can be anything. There are beautiful and brilliant works of comics biography, philosophy, science, like any topic under the sun, you can make a comic about. Similarly, any audience that you might want to write for, you can write a comic for them. You can write a comic for two-year-olds. You can write a comic for 20-year-olds. You can write a comic for 200-year-olds. All of the people who come into our libraries might be able to find a comic or a graphic novel that interests them. A graphic novel is a certain type of publication that employs comic art. Most of the things that we buy for our libraries that we call our graphic novel collection are not technically graphic novels because they are reprints of previously published material, whether that be in, you know, the sort of standard floppy comic book that we tend to think of when we think of comics or web comics or strips or anything like that. So the language around comics gets kind of messy and that's okay and we're going to use all of these terms more or less interchangeably. None of that supermatters. When we think about comics, we, you know, the first thing when I say comic book that's going to pop into your head is probably Superman and there's a reason for that which we are going to get into in just a second. But the fact that superheroes are kind of dominant in, or have been dominant in comics for a very, very long time, is more an accident of history than it is anything else. And if you look at other countries, if you look at Japan, if you look at Belgium, if you look at France, those are countries who have very rich histories of comics art and who actually celebrate comics art. The new president of Japan, of France, just nominated a graphic novel publisher to be his like minister of culture, like can you imagine that happening in the United States? Probably not. But so the way that we think about comics in this country is actually pretty unique to this country. Amanda's going to tell you why. All right. Hi everyone. So this is a topic that we could delve really deeply into, but we're going to kind of skim the surface today. And the 1930s and 40s is when comics really started blossoming in the United States. Huge readership. It was an enormous industry. It was impacted positively by World War II. Lots of GIs read comics while they were overseas and then brought them back to the U.S. It was read by families, women, men, all genres. There was romance, horror. It was just a really dominant, vibrant industry. And then in the early 1950s, a psychiatrist by the name of Frederick Wortham published a book called The Seduction of the Innocent. Have any of you heard of this book? Yeah. So it's a very well-known book and in this book he connected, he claimed to connect comic readers to juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, petty crime and all kinds of different ails of the youth. And so this got the attention of the U.S. Senate and they ran a series of hearings on the connection between comic books and juvenile delinquency. And this was a disaster for the comic book industry. And so the comic book industry banded together and decided to get ahead of it. And they decided to get ahead of it by creating their own self-censoring comics code. And so starting in the early 1950s, every book published had to adhere to the code and be published with this comic seal. And if it wasn't published with the comic seal, it couldn't be sold in stores. It ended up being the single largest self-censorship movement in U.S. history. It was incredibly, incredibly restrictive. You couldn't use horror in your title. You couldn't use terror in your title. You couldn't do anything supernatural. All, there was no sets. Everything was very chased. Forget homosexuality or any queerness. And it just, crime always had to pay. And the code actually stayed in its distance for decades. It didn't end until 2011. So the code directly impacts how the comics industry has panned out since the 1950s. Starting in the 1970s, the code loosened over time. And when we talked about underground comics like R. Crumb and Trina Robbins and others, especially in San Francisco in the Bay Area, we're talking about comics that were published without the seal. That's what made them underground. Not necessarily their content, although their content is what kept them from being published by mainstream media. But that's what created underground comics. And that's what created this publishing industry that really went through an enormous amount of change. And that is how we ended up being dominated by superhero comics. Because those were the comics that could be published and get around the restrictiveness of the code. It was superhero comics that blossomed after the code. It was chased romances like Archie. And it was licensed comics like Disney and Warner Brothers that really flourished for those decades after the code was implemented. And ultimately, when the Wortham archive was opened up, also in 2011, which just coincided with the deadline of the code, it was found that he faked most of his research. That put hundreds of thousands of people out of business. The only three publishers that survived that were published in the 1930s were Marvel, DC, and Archie. Those are the only three that were publishing pre-code that still exists today. So why do we collect comics in our libraries? Despite what some parents may tell you and some kids themselves, comics are reading. They create a visual literacy that is very important and essential to many young and aspiring readers, especially we know that for boys and English as second learners that comics are a gateway to greater reading much like picture books. And they also circulate. We know that comic books and graphic novels are your DVDs of your print collection. When I worked in Marin County as the teen librarian, I never weeded a book that was on the shelf in the teen graphic novel collection. If it wasn't on the shelf, it was because it was gone. And they all had, they've served until they fell apart. And I imagine for those of you who have comic book collections that you're actively maintaining, that's true for you as well. I wanna jump in real quick. So I wanted to say one more thing about visual literacy. What are comics? Comics are combinations of pictures and words that we look at together to form meaning. Increasingly, that is also what our information environment looks like, right? With the internet and with kids growing up navigating online spaces, what they're experiencing largely are combinations of words and pictures that they're putting together, finding the associations between, and gaining meaning from. So comics and graphic novels, instead of dissuading kids from reading more deeply or reading prose, rather they're reflecting the other kinds of information environments that they're growing up with and interacting with. It's reinforcing the skills that they're exercising in other parts of their research or their information lives. And increasingly, being able to draw connections between lots of visual information is an important skill for people to have. So when we talk about visual literacy, that's one of the main things that we're talking about. And when we talk about struggling readers or English as a second language readers, you have the text in a comic and then you have a picture that is reinforcing that text. So sometimes there are contextual clues that a reader can glean from the picture that might help them sort out the words. And so that's why when we talk about reluctant readers, in addition to them having fun content, being about characters that they recognize and being very appealing, there's also that sense of the images are building upon or reinforcing the language. Also, when you get a comic book, and I can actually say this from experience, I collected comics as a teen and then kind of dropped off through college. And then when I was in grad school, that was actually when I really started reading comics again. And the reason was because I could quickly read a comic book in less time than it would take me to consume a prose novel and get a complete story. So I was budgeting my time pretty severely. I didn't have a whole lot of time while I was in grad school, but I could set aside an hour and get a complete reading experience. And being able to sort of quickly digest a story gives readers who might be struggling that esteem boost. It lets them feel like they can finish something. And we can, as educators and as people who are concerned about literacy, we can use that feeling of accomplishment and that feeling of esteem to kind of push those kids along and expand their reading horizons. Thank you, Jack. So one thing that we talk about a lot is in shelving and organizing your comics is that we are really not pro 741.5. When your kids come into the library or even your adults, they're gonna look for your graphic novel or your comic book collection. And they're not going to want to go find 741.5. We all know that Dewey's problematic for the public anyway. But think of it the way you do Fitchin, right? Fitchin technically has a Dewey number, but we don't shelve anything in Fitchin under Dewey. We pull it out and we highlight it in other ways. And that's the approach that we wanna take and we recommend taking for comic books and graphic novels is to separate them out and put them all together. It doesn't matter what genre they're in. Put them in one space because your readers are gonna come in and they're, just like your DVD patrons come in and look for things, they're gonna wanna go to one section and find everything. They're not gonna wanna have to go to 94.1 to get Art Spiegelman. They're not gonna wanna go to different areas of the library. Put them in one space for them to be able to go and get everything they need. And the other strength, I think, of liberating graphic novel collections from 741.5 is then you're not, like when you have nonfiction works, you don't have to catalog them as comics. You can catalog them by their subject content. So you can put science stuff in the 500s. You can put biographies in the 920s. You can let those books live where their subject tells you they wanna live. And not confine them to a certain genre ghetto because of their form. This is an example of how we manage our spine labels and cataloging at the Berkeley Public Library. So the first line on that spine label you will see is the audience. So teen, no audience label for adults, J for juveniles. It's very, very important to have separate graphic novel collections for children's, teens, and adults, just like we have separate prose collections for children's, teens, and adults because there's some amazing stuff that is being published these days strictly for an adult audience that you would not want to prevent your adult readers from finding because the only place you buy comics is for the kid section. And sex criminals does not belong in the kid section in case anybody had any question about that. But so we put a GN prefix next to, to say that it is part of our graphic novel collection. And then below that we have either the Dewey number for its subject. So like in the example of Persepolis 920 because it's a biography. Oh yeah, introduction to climate change. GN 363.7. Isn't that more useful than having introduction to climate change, GN 741.5, I think it is. And then we put all of our series, especially our superhero series. Batman has been published for more than 75 years at this point and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people have written Batman. When somebody comes into your library looking for Batman, they don't necessarily want to dig through all of the, you know, every writer's last name who's ever touched a comic book in their life to find the Batman stuff, they want to just find Batman. That's what they care about. So all of the series that we collect that have had multiple writers over the course of its history, we catalog them by their title or by the series title or by the main character. Because when you're talking about Batman, you've got Batman, you've got Detective Comics, you've got all of these, what, Sirens of Gotham and all of these various things underneath it. We can just call it all Batman and put it all in one place. People that want it will find it. I have started because especially superhero series like to stop and start and stop and start over and over and over again. So, you know, we have like a hundred Batman volume ones. So we put the date underneath so that people who are reading their way through a series, you know, that's at least some kind of contextual clue to figure out where that volume three that they need is. It's not the volume three that was published in 1970 because the one I just read was published in 2012. I'm gonna go find the volume three that has 2012 and hopefully that'll get me close to it. And then for series that have only had one author, we put, we give those, we catalog those under the author's name. So that's Margaret Atwood's very, very weird Angel Catbird book, has anybody seen this? It's so bizarre. But like the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman was the only person ever write the Sandman, so Sandman spine labels say GN, Gaiman, volume whatever, 1986. Was that everything? Yeah, that's everything I wanted to say. Okay. So we have a extensive resource sheet that we're gonna send out after the program but we wanted to highlight a few things that we find particularly useful as librarians and selection. Full disclosure, no flying, no tights. I'm an editor for them, but they are one of the few librarian driven resources. Everybody who reviews for no flying, no tights as a librarian, all the reviewer editors are librarians as well. It's run by Robin Brenner of a library in the East Coast. I always think of her as Robin Brenner of no flying, no tights. Robin Brenner, yeah, that works. And Eva Vollen of Alameda City or Alameda Free Library. And so it's a really good resource in terms of your hearing from librarians about what they think about what the assigned age category is and how they feel about whether or not this fits in your library. Yalsa, of course, has the ALA Media Wars and they do a graphic novel top 10 list that's invaluable. I've definitely used it to defend comics that have been challenged. I had to defend Old Van Logan by Mark Millar when I was a teen librarian at Novato and which is a book that can be quite graphic but it was on the Yalsa top 10 list that year so I was able to justify keeping it in teen for that reason. Voya, when it's not being a dumpster fire, can also help you keep books in your collection where they belong. I used a Voya review way back when to defend having a Jodi Patol book in the teen section. M.H. Comets, which is the third largest comics publisher in the U.S. and is all creator-owned comics. They do a librarian's newsletter that could be helpful. But the thing that I use that I think Jack uses quite a bit too is Previews which is from Diamond Distributors who is the comic book distributors in the U.S. and they send out a monthly newsletter that is completely invaluable. It tells you what the top selling comics are in the U.S. It has Cat's Corner, which is a long running comic by a librarian as well and it's really an invaluable resource that has a lot of highlights for you and will let you know really quickly what's really going on in comics today. Yeah, the other thing that I noticed that is worth calling out about the Diamond Bookshelf newsletter, especially for educators, while I was putting together the resources for this presentation, I happened to go to their website because I get their newsletter every month but I don't spend a whole lot of time on their website. And their website actually has tons of stuff like core collections lists and lesson plans for a lot of different graphic novels. So I think it's an even more useful source than I originally thought it was. Also, Image Comics I think has been doing sort of the most to specifically brand their newsletters as being for librarians and educators and in addition to telling you about books that they have coming out that they want you to know about because they know that you buy books and they want you to buy their books, they're also pulling in other information about comics in libraries. So while they're, I think that they might be like at the forefront of putting together a specific publication for us, lots of other publishers have regular newsletters that are really valuable. I like the Top Shelf newsletter a lot and I like the Phantographics newsletter a lot, just for what it's worth. Find publishers that you like, go and see what newsletters they have, subscribe to them, yeah. I would also add that you can commonly find Diamond and Image at California Library Association and ALA, especially at annual that they're there and there's somebody you can stop and talk to at their booth and Diamond of course is always at Sandy or Comic Con. So I wanted to talk a little bit as we move towards the diversity part of our conversation today about what the industry looks like today and this really informs what's kind of being published. This is by, oh, I don't have it in my notes. How lovely. Thank you, Lee and Lowe. I was trying to remember what it was called. Oh, there it is, Lee and Lowe and we linked to this in our resources sheet. They did a widespread evaluation of who it works in publishing from reviewers on up and no surprise, guess what? Almost everyone who works in publishing is white, able-bodied, cis-identified, hetero-identified women. From the reviewers on up, it's almost all 90% or more that's who's working in comics. And so then when you see- Except the women part. Except for the women part, which like, hey, look, we're librarians. How many of us are white women who worked in here? So it really informs how the stories that are published. And we know like in children's books that most children's books are about white, able-bodied little boys who are identified as straight cis kids or talking trucks or animals. That is what the vast majority of children's books are today. So we just wanted to highlight this as far as how it informs publishing today. And also, if you are not somebody who identifies as what the majority of publishing is, I encourage you to become reviewers or become active because we need those voices desperately that are alternative voices to what we see dominating publishing today. And now onto our favorite slide we've ever put up. This is why we need diversity. This is a 2015 book, part of the DC Rebirth Movement. It's called Voodoo. It is the quintessential example of how the male gaze is used in comics. Notice in the final panel, her bra is hanging off his head. And it's also worth mentioning that the woman dancing in this is actually the main character of the book. And this is the way that you meet this main character in the first issue of her headlining comic. So. Notice it is not in publication in 2017. I mean, this is, where do you start with the problems with this slide? It's a woman of color, she's being objectified, it's her own book. This guy doesn't matter at all to the sense of the story. And this is modern comics today. And this is why, this is, is this Marvel? It's DC. Oh, it's DC. Which we're gonna get into the problems and challenges of both Marvel and DC as they try to navigate a modern world in comics. But so much of comics is based in this problematic area. So we're gonna delve into some of that now. One of the reasons why we need to focus on and talk about diversity in comics in particular is because they are very visual. If you have a person who is not a white cis male in a comic, like it's obvious. You can tell who that character is. I know there's lots of studies that readers will, readers of prose, if not a lot of information is given about the identities of a certain character, readers of prose will sort of fill in the gaps with their own identity to make those characters resemble them. Comics you don't really have that option because it's clear who you're looking at, when you're looking at it. Unlike fields like film and television where the visual nature of the storytelling is really important, comics tend to be done by very small groups of people. And what that means is there's far fewer, generally far fewer gatekeepers that need to be gone through to convince somebody like, hey, you should have a woman of color in this book. So it makes them, it makes them an area and kind of a target, a place that is ripe for change and that's ready for change if the right voices are there getting in there and advocating for that change. I wanted to share, so there's a comics writer named Justin Jordan and I follow him on Facebook and he posted this Facebook post a little while ago. He ran an experiment in the scripts of his comics because he writes like six or seven monthly comics. So he's working with a wide variety of artists and he ran this little experiment where he wouldn't assign gender or race information to the characters that he was writing just to see what would happen. And here's what he said. What I found was that white and often male is the default for most artists. This is actually true regardless of whether the artist is themselves white or male, which is not hugely surprising in retrospect. It's also true that artists mostly default to what I guess you'd call stereotypical gender roles. If for instance I have a scene that calls for a doctor and two nurses, what I'd usually get is a male doctor and female nurses. Likewise, a call for a soldier almost always gets a dude. As an expansion of that, I recently had a post about a parent and child that didn't reference the gender of either. Pretty much across the board, people left to their own devices defaulted to this being father and son, which while I wrote the question as non-gender specific, actually referred to a mother and daughter. So male and white is the default for most artists working in America even if the artists aren't white, male, or American. What that signifies I think is that there needs to be intentionality from the top down about who we're writing for, about who we're representing in books. And the thing is it's actually unlike in Hollywood where that message has to get through executives and casting directors and all of these different people. Really, all you need is an editor or a writer saying, we're gonna put some diversity in this book. These are the people that we're gonna represent in these roles. And once a writer puts that on the page to be drawn, then an artist sees that and goes, okay, this is what I'm drawing. It's very, very easy for creators to kind of break their default modes if they have the will to do it. I mentioned, or we've talked a couple of times about the resource guide. And in the resource guide, I've pulled out a bunch of articles by Casey Gilley who is my girlfriend, but also is a journalist for Comic Book Resources and has done a lot of really exciting journalism about representation. And she did this one article in particular that's called out in that resource guide where she talked to five different creators in kind of a round table about representation and about where barriers to representation are in the comics publishing world. I encourage you to go and seek out that link in the resource guide when you get it because it explains this whole process really well, I think. So given that we have a need for greater diversity in graphic novels, given that we have recognized that creators are very capable of introducing diversity when and if they want to, it's now worth looking at what some publishers are actually doing. And we're gonna focus on kind of the big three publishers. Image Comics is creator owned and is the third largest publisher of comics in the United States. DC and Marvel kind of vie for, I think DC is pretty solidly the number two publisher and Marvel's the number one publisher. So we're gonna talk about them. Image Comics started in 1992 when a bunch of the big name talent at Marvel and DC decided that they were sick of not having any control of over what they got to write and no ownership of their works after they did it. So they kind of split off and formed this new company that was gonna be all creator owned. And for a really long time, it was basically these creators were just doing knockoffs of the big two superheroes that they were writing in the first place. Over the course of the last 10 years or so, Image's reputation has kind of changed into a place where especially like creators who've already established themselves have a place where they can bring their audience and tell whatever stories they want. And you can see from this set of images from their books, a lot of the stories that they're choosing to tell are stories about different kinds of people. So Monstress by Marjorie Liu features a cast of almost entirely women of color in this kind of steampunky fantasy world. Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick is sort of a women in prison exploitation book that primarily features African-American women. And Saga by Brian Kevan, which is like one of the biggest comics out there at all right now. One of its, both of its main characters are also people of color. But by freeing up these creators who, in large, to a large extent, have already established themselves and already have an audience, but empowering them to listen to their audience and tell whatever types of stories they want, we're seeing a fair amount more diversity in the books that Image is putting out. And all of these books are very successful. All of the ones that I'm spotlighting right now, I'm not saying all Image books are super successful. But, and this is happening in an environment with little editorial oversight, little oversight period. The creators really are kind of able to do whatever they want. And it's nice to see that what they tend to do has more diversity than sort of your standard big two fare. So we're gonna switch over and talk about DC a little bit. And both DC and Marvel have some problematic approaches to comics that are rooted in their past. What DC does really well is the way that they, the varied ways that they depict sexuality amongst their core characters. Wonder Woman this year, if you know anything about Wonder Woman, it's unquestionable that she's queer. It's rooted in her origin. But Greg Recca, while writing Wonder Woman this year, made it canon that she is queer. They also have Apollo and Binditer, which is a gay crime-fighting superhero duo, which is amazing. They have John Constantine, who is bisexual. They have Batwoman and Maddie Sawyer, who that's where you kind of run into some of their, the problematic internal workings of DC is that Greg Recca and J.H. Williams III were going to have Batwoman, Kate Kane and Maddie Sawyer marry and then they cancel the book. Instead of having those couples, that couple get married, claiming that none of their superhero couples should be married in the DC universe. So, but Greg Recca did come back and write Wonder Woman and the current run is astounding. So, that's where DC really achieves what they're trying to do in terms of diversity. They also have, Jean Yang is writing a Chinese Superman. Is that Keenan Kahn? I have the name in the notes. Okay. Yeah, Keenan Kahn. Keenan Kahn. So that's been really successful. And of course, Jean Yang is a little comic book writer that we all know and adore. So that's where DC is really succeeding. Marvel is not doing so well in terms of how they depict sexuality, but they're doing a really good job in reflecting ethnicity and race. They, this is Power Man and Iron Fist by David F. Walker and... Sanford Green. Sanford Green, thank you. Which is a really great series that is for adults that they're highlighting with Luke Cage. They also have Miles Morales for Superman, or excuse me, for Spider-Man in the Ultimate Series where he's half Black, half Puerto Rican. We're gonna talk about Brian Michael Bendus a little bit who was created in Miles Morales and also Ri Ri Williams as the new Iron Man. We have Ms. Marvel, which if you're not reading Ms. Marvel by Jay, or excuse me, G. Willow Wilson, I've seemed to have lost the ability to speak for a moment, which is a recasting of Ms. Marvel, not as a blonde white woman, but instead as a Muslim immigrant teenager. And it's an amazing series. Those are things that Marvel's doing really well. They also have Ta-Nehisi Coates doing Black Panther. They finally hired a Black woman to write a comic. And it's Fratsan Gay who is doing World of Wakanda. So there's a lot of stuff they're doing well there. And one of the series we're most looking forward to that is in Seagull Issues Right Now is America by Gabby Rivera. They have, Gabby Rivera wrote Juliet Tates of Breath, which is a YA book. She is a known queer Latina author and she is writing America Chavez. If you don't know America Chavez, she's amazing. She's queer. She has two moms. She's Latina and she has finally been writing her own series, This Is America Here. And so that's just in its second or third Seagull issue, but when it comes out in trade, that's something you're gonna wanna check out and get for your audience because it's not a character that's represented in comics commonly at all. So we wanna talk about kind of two different points here. One of the ways that Marvel has been sort of making strides in the diversity of their casts recently is by recasting a lot of their central characters as different identities. So it kind of started when you had Miles Morales taking over as Spider-Man. And the way that that all happened is actually pretty great. When they were making a new Spider-Man movie, there was this sort of online presence or hubbub around the idea of casting Donald Glover as Spider-Man. And Donald Glover as an African-American actor. And you had these people online saying like, on the one hand these people saying, oh yeah, Donald Glover, he's a big Spider-Man fan, he'd be a great Spider-Man, this'd be really cool. And then you had the other people that were like, oh no, he's black, you can't, like Spider-Man can't be black. Like obviously you can't hire Donald Glover because Spider-Man's not black. And Brian Michael Dennis heard all of this and was like, well why can't Spider-Man be black? And so he actually killed Peter Parker so that he could bring in Miles Morales. And I really love this story. I think it's the whole sort of death of Peter Parker and then the reemergence of Miles Morales as a superhero I think is a perfect example of how you can do this sort of story well. Because you've got this kid who's so inspired by the legacy of this hero that's gone before him that he really wants to try to live up to that hero's example. And I think it reflects super well. A lot of the relationships that we forge with superheroes. That's the same way that fans interact with these characters. However, in the wake of the success of Miles Morales as a character, Marvel went a little rampant recasting its cast. So the next big move they made was introducing a female Thor where, yeah, which I think is still a pretty good, is a pretty good story. And the way that they built the story had this really intriguing mystery around like why is this dude not Thor anymore and why is this woman Thor? So, but then they recast Hulk as a Korean-American character and they recast most recently Iron Man is now an African-American teenage woman. And over time, these moves start feeling kind of hollow because there's not, like on the one hand, you're giving different audiences a chance to relate to these characters and to really actually see themselves in the roles of these characters. But then on the other hand, every time you do it, it starts feeling more and more and more like a marketing ploy. And if the story isn't behind the recasting of these characters, then it starts feeling kind of hollow. And then the other part of it is, Brian Michael Bendis is the guy on the right side. And so far, he's the only person that has gotten a chance to write the Miles Morales solo book. He's not Miles Morales. And that's not to say he's not doing a great job writing Miles Morales, but it's worth asking if we gave a black creator a chance to write this black character, what else might they be able to bring to the story? What aspects of Miles's identity could they connect with and could they bring out and show to readers that maybe Bendis, just because of who he is, might not be able to see? Another issue around, yeah. I actually, I didn't know that. Oh, that's really cool. Okay, I wanna go read that now. Thank you, Mamie. Repeat the question. Oh, thank you. Yes, she was just pointing out that Jason Reynolds has written a novel about Miles Morales as Spider-Man. So that's super cool, and I wanna go find that now. You know, and on the issue of Creators of Color getting a chance to work on some of these books, Marvel had very, very few Creators of Color working for them for the longest time, and then a couple of, like a year and a half ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was announced was gonna come and bring Black Panther back. Black Panther hadn't had a solo title in a really long time, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who'd just won the MacArthur Genius Grant, was gonna come in and reintroduce this character, and that's amazing, and the stuff that Coates has been doing with the Black Panther book and a couple of spin-off books off of that has been super, super cool. However, it's not like Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only person of color who wants to be writing comics, and the message that that sends, one of the messages that it sends is that you have to be a creator of that caliber in order to get this chance. So it's good stuff, it's bad stuff, there's challenges kind of all around, I think it's worth acknowledging the things that are going really well, calling out the things that are maybe not going as well, and hopefully we will all work towards a perfect and beautiful comics future. And actually there's a little bit of evidence that that might be happening. So the Eisner Awards, if you're not familiar, are kind of like the Oscars of the comic book world. And this is a breakdown of just gender representation in who is winning Eisner's. So in 2012, 18 men or all-male teams won Eisner's for women or mixed gender teams won Eisner's. So that's like four books that had a woman working on them at all. 2008, 26 all-male teams and one female or mixed gender team. 2012, 22 all-male teams and two mixed gender teams. Does anyone wanna guess about 2015? Hands up if you think the representation is getting better. Hands up if you think the representation is getting worse. Okay, many, many people are afraid to put up their hands right now and that's okay. But in 2012, you actually had like relative parody about who was winning Eisner Awards, who was getting recognized as making the best books that are out there. And the books that are winning are also really good and probably you're familiar with some or all of these books, if not you should be. But it's not like these are token awards. There's amazing work that is being produced. And some of those Eisner winners are gonna be up on stage in just a few minutes. So why is this changing? What are some of the reasons for the shifts that we are seeing? One of the big reasons is online communities. Rather than having just sort of isolated people going to their comic book stores where they might be the only person in the store that looks like themselves, now people are more and more able to connect in communities online. This photo is a picture of the Valkyries from Emerald City Comic-Con I think two years ago. The Valkyries are a network of female comic book store employees that have been doing incredible work bringing the concerns of sort of non-standard audiences to the forefront of the comic book industry. The Valkyries, it should be noted, have an offshoot called Valhalla. So while the Valkyries are only for people who are working in comic book stores, Valhalla are also for women who are working in libraries or bookstores or other parts of the publishing industry. I don't get to be in Valhalla, which bums me out because these are like the coolest people in comics right now. But all of the women in the audience should definitely check out this group and get involved in some of the conversations that they're having. They're having a big impact on what is being represented in comic book stores across the country and across the world. They're increasingly a place that publishers are going to when they're looking for direction about some of these issues of representation that we're talking about. And they have the ear of a lot of creators. Like a lot of creators want kind of like the Valkyries seal of approval on their books. Also add that some of these people are also comic book creators themselves, most notably Kate Leth, who is the founder of Valkyries, right? Yeah. She just recently did the Patsy Walker series and she does a whole series. She did Adventure Time. She has a lot of comates and Debbie Huey, who's local is also a comics creator and she's a librarian as well. There are a whole bunch of different Valkyries and Valhallians who are actively working in the industry outside of just working in the book shops. Another place where I think really interesting communities are coming up around different identities are the Black Nerd phenomenon. And like there's increasingly large and vocal communities of Black Nerds or Blurds, which is a word that I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, but it's not my word. But we've drawn attention to a few interesting Black Nerd blogs in the research sheet that we put out. Or we'll be putting them. Another big change in the industry is being brought about by Kickstarter. Kickstarter is creating an economic platform for creators who might not be able to get publishers' attention, but have built up an audience for themselves through web comics or just have a really good idea. And so you're seeing books like Erika Moen's Ojoa Sex Toy. Like how many people think that a major publisher is going to sight unseen publish a book of comic strips, comic strip reviews of sex toys? Like probably not very many, but it was a phenomenon on Kickstarter. And based on the success of its Kickstarter, it got picked up for distribution by Oni Press. Similarly, C. Spike Trotman, who maybe her most well-known project has been Smutpedler, which is a collection of pornographic comics, primarily by queer or non-binary people of color. That's another book that like there's not a huge, there's supposedly not a huge audience for like, lesbian porn comics for lesbians and non-binary and non-gender conforming people, but it found a big audience on Kickstarter and gave itself, was able to find a lot of success. Moonshots, another example, it was a collection of all indigenous comics. So specifically like native creators retelling native stories in modern comics form. So a lot of creators who can't find that success in sort of standard publishing are able to make their works known via Kickstarter. Webcomics have also provided a lot of and been fueling a lot of the change in the comics industry. Noel Stevenson, who did Nimona. Nimona was originally published as a webcomic and built a huge following and then got picked. I can't remember who published it, but it was one of the big publishers, one of the big book publishers, it was one of the big comics publishers. And there are lots of examples of people who are starting in webcomics and finding their voice in webcomics, building their audience there and then taking that to the mainstream. Noel Stevenson went on to co-create Lumberjanes for Boom, which is another title that represents kind of a shift in how we think of comics now. And finally, us, you know, librarians are having a big impact in these conversations. We are looking for books that are speaking to lots of different kinds of audiences and not the standard comics reading audience and publishers know that. A couple of years ago, the love, yeah, year before last I was at San Diego Comic Con and I got pulled into, you know, half hour, 45 minute conversations with like five different publishers who wanted to pick my brain, who were like, how do I reach the librarian audience? They recognize us as a major factor in their success. They recognize the power that we have to purchase, promote books and create readers for their books and they wanna give us what we want and so we have to tell them what we want. That is it. We can probably take a little bit of time if there are any leftover questions, yeah.