Manga, Mythos, and Mediocrity

September 28, 2007 by Betsy Bird Leave a Comment

I had just such a lovely day yesterday. The patrons were sweet and asked questions that I could actually answer. The children crushed only one Lifesaver candy into our carpet. The weather was soft and sweet, the city full of last minute film shoots, and all was right with the world. Aaaaaaaah.

From the Department of Inevitability I bring you Dark Crystal manga. Does this mean that we have Labyrinth manga to look forward to next? The shockingly un-jockstrapped David Bowie done beautiful boy-like for a whole new generation? It’s really only a matter of time. Thanks to bookshelves of doom

for the link.

Monica Edinger is going to start teaching The Arrival in her classroom. She has posted thus far on Introducing The Arrival and Beginning to Read the Arrival. As a librarian I’m always curious about how teachers choose to introduce the books I love to actual honest-to-goodness children. These two posts are a great idea (to say nothing of the series of ideas that other teachers could use in other classrooms).

Author/illustrator/musician/man about town Barney Saltzberg has started a blog of his own. I like that the first picture I saw on the site gave me some pretty cool ideas about what to do for my Halloween costume this year. I know that it’s a headband, but what if you put those cones all over your head, stuck your hair up into them, and colored the hair to look like ice cream? Sticky? Oh yes. But so cool.

I don’t usually poke my head into the world of book banning (really because so many other people do it so much better) but I don’t think anyone else has brought this up and since it involved graphic novels I was interested. Basically a teacher gave a student the graphic novel Eightball, issue #22, to read for a summer reading assignment. The parents then filed a POLICE REPORT about the teacher and now that teacher has resigned. I’m not familiar with Eightball but Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics is and offers a rundown of the case and the comic. Thanks to Dan (I think?) for the link.

As I was trolling through the Punk Farm MySpace page, as per usual, and I notice how cool the friends of the Punk Farm gang are. And then, AND THEN, I see that everyone’s favorite Boov has a MySpace page as well. Special points going out to Rebecca who commented, "Aaah, J.Lo-you are the coolest of the cool.those eyes that smile….you had me at ‘Hello Earth Savage’."

And finally, thanks to Eric Berlin, I now know about a piece of comic work that sings like poetry. If you’ve ever agreed with me about the Triumvirate of Mediocrity, you will appreciate it.

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About Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.

June 2022