Search Engine and Navel-Gazing

I tried really hard to come up with a post yesterday so I wouldn't break my streak. I combed through a bunch of bookmarks and everything and came up with zilch, but today - today, my friends, I will post twice. I will remain on the wagon.

(I recently read a piece on Walt Crawford's blog about not posting due to obligation, but when you have something to say, and it made me think a little about the goal of this blog, to find something library-related each day. Is that useless? I don't think so. I can't claim my blog is terribly deep; most of my content is picked from other blogs. But really, no one has to read it. It's a useful resource for me. It's incentive to keep up to date on things going on in the library world, even if I don't have anything really meaningful to say about them. And I may not post about them, but I do read the material. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm not posting for an audience so much as for myself. If you'd like to come along for the ride, you're more than welcome. Comment if you like!)

Right. Where was I? Oh. Look, a comic!

From Speed Bump.

Buttersafe: How Not to Use a Thesaurus

Oh, Buttersafe. You so crazy.

Superman in Four Panels

Superman in Four Panels by Ty Templeton. My favourite part is the bit about the monkey (not anymore).

John Allison On the Danger of Releasing Librarians Into the Wild

John Allison writes and illustrates some of my favourite webcomics over the years. He started with Bobbins, moved to Scary-Go-Round, and is now working on Bad Machinery. Characters have carried over from one comic to the next, sometimes supporting the new cast or, in the case of Scary-Go-Round, pretty much replacing the new characters. The guy is funny and his art has changed so much over the years. Looking at it makes me wish I'd kept up with drawing, or had one good webcomic idea I could've used to practice drawing characters that always looked the same. Anyway, I love Mr. Allison, and it was like a little Christmas to see he'd made a post in his blog about library troubles in the UK. (Mr. Allison is very British.)

Mr. Allison's art style has changed a lot over the years; I really love how his work looks now. His style is very distinctive.

Now go read Bad Machinery, it's brilliant. I think one of the best things to be in the world would be being one of John Allison's characters (it is a very difficult goal to achieve).

Incidental Comics: The Library

A couple of cute comics over at Incidental Comics:

The Library

Confessions of a Book Fiend

Alan Moore On Libraries

Alan Moore, one of the scariest guys in the comic book industry (unless you're afraid of pouches, tiny feet, and big veins in illustrated format, in which case Rob Liefeld's the scariest guy), speaks out on why libraries are important.



You may recall Alan Moore as the author of The Black Dossier, mentioned way back in the day in the whole League of Extraordinary Porn* kerfuffle.

In any case, agree that libruries are important or I swear he'll stab someone.

* I was being cheeky.

Your Favourite Book in Four Panels

Sadly, the contest is closed now, but CBC Canada's All in a Day radio show asked for people to send in summaries of their favourite books in four panels in honour of Jeff Lemire, one of five finalists in the Canada Reads contest. His novel, Essex County, is the first graphic novel to make the finals. The article shows a few entries; I wish they'd had more. My favourite was The Great Gatsby as rendered by Ian Martin, 17.

The facial expressions are awesome. I love the panel where Gatsby demands Daisy look at the money he earned so as to win her love: "LOOK AT IT". The hand drawing and (lack of) punctuation remind me of Kate Beaton, whom I apparently pimp out at every opportunity.

LOOK AT IT

Kate Beaton News and Transgender Literature for Young Adults

Drawn and Quarterly will be publishing Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant! While I love most of Kate Beaton's work I have a special love of her Nancy Drew comics.

In case that is not libraryish enough for you, check out this awesome list of transgender literature for youth from the University of Illinois, because libraries are for answering questions.

The Adventures of Huck Fixed

It is not often I get to steal an entire post from a webcomic, but here it is:

so in case you haven’t heard, there’s a new edition of the adventures of huckleberry finn that removes the n-word and the word “injun” and replaces them with “slave” and “indigenous, valuable american we will always honor” respectively

a lot of people are mad that this totally guts a lot of the punch of the original; after all that’s what the language was and it’s a painful reminder of how we used to think about other cultures

but what does mark twain care, he’s dead and no longer with us, his opinion has every little impact on today’s america oh wait what’s this

Publisher's Weekly also has an article. Them and just about every other book-related site out there.

Chuck & Beans: Life Before Google

The End of the First Semester and Illiterate Babies

Rejoice and make merry, for I am done my first semester of college. One down, three to go and then a library technician diploma will be mine. There's catching up to do, however, so it's time for backdated posting. I can pretend I was here all along!

Let's Hope

Snitched from a lovely classmate:

Kids Are Like Ferrets

"Why DRM Doesn't Work"

A comic from The Brads:

Red and the Comic Book Movie

On Monday night, partially to celebrate two midterms completed in one day, I went to see Red with some friends. Great movie, very funny, good action, I quite liked it.

Red was a brief comic book series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer. There's this retired CIA agent named Frank Moses (or Paul Moses in the comics) who suddenly finds himself pursued by the government - he's been reclassified to retired and dangerous, meaning he needs to be gotten rid of. He gathers his old team together and saves a girl he's interested in along the way.

At the end of the movie I turned to my friend and asked, "Is it just me, or have movies been a lot more fun since comic book movies started getting made?" He agreed. Movies made from comics do indeed seem fun, with a few exceptions (From Hell, I'm looking at you).

Much like the popularity of (or perhaps partly because of the popularity of) graphic novels, all of a sudden it seems like people are realizing that comic books have a lot of really entertaining stories to tell. And since they're already partially visual media, they've got that going for them in the transition to film. Comic book artists started borrowing 'camera shots' from movies, and now those angles and shots are being translated back to film, which is pretty cool.

(In a somewhat related aside, The Ultimates is an alternate version of Marvel comics where familiar faces follow different paths or are re-imagined. One such case of re-imagining came from changing Nick Fury, head of SHIELD, from a white guy with an eye patch to a Samuel Jackson in an eye patch. That was who they decided Nick Fury would look like. This paid off when Ironman was made and Sam Jackson signed on to be Fury. If you missed it in the first movie, it was after the credits and it was awesome.)

Warren Ellis commented about Red on his site. Also, take a gander at Comic Book Movies, a site devoted to comic book movies. (How surprising.)

On Teaching the Graphic Novel

Because I've been up to my ears in this stuff for various minor school projects, here is some more stuff about graphic novels: Alexander Chee talks about teaching the graphic novel.

For me, Marjane Satrapi explained “why comics” best, when she said, at an appearance at Smith College, “I write what I can’t draw, and I draw what I can’t write.” This struck me as an important way to think about the artist-writer creator (a clumsy way to say “someone who can do both”). Most of the texts I taught were written by people of this category, but there are writers for the form, like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, who do not do their own drawings and it would be disingenuous at best not to include their cooperative works with artists, in terms of their cultural impact, but the distinction does ask important questions.

Facebook Stalkers in Contemporary Fiction

Joanne McNeil at the Huffington Post asks Where Are the iPhone Addicts and Facebook 'Stalkers' in Contemporary Fiction?

Hey, it's true. Stalkers and killers and all those fun people in books would be using social media to track people down, right? It'd make their jobs easier.

My guess would be that writers don't want to make their work dated. Are people going to know what Facebook was twenty years from now? Thirty? Fifty? It's not so much of a problem for most books, but you never know what's going to turn into a classic, cult or otherwise.

Cell phones became a problem in horror movies, too. Why couldn't the people just phone for help? So movies started having to write in reasons why cell phones wouldn't work or have the protagonist lose theirs or run out of battery power. They also use all those excuses in books now.

Let's not even start on the portrayal of the internet.

Would It Kill You to Put On Pants?

Admit it, it was distracting and you wouldn't want to hang out with him. Pun sort of unintentional but left in anyway.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Kate Beaton Does Nancy Drew

Too damn big to just post, but here: Kate Beaton draws comics based on the covers of old Nancy Drew novels. And then she does it again, but my favourite is still the first one.

"How do I get into the old person zoo?"

Cybrarian

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella!