I believe Crossgen had a sizable education thing going with trying to get their stuff into schools under the appropriate genres, had suggested lesson plans with the books, etc. Unfortunately, not all their ideas were as good as that one, as they aren’t around anymore.

I’m doing a comic book giveaway using FCBD titles in my school (I’m a part-time school librarian in a Catholic school, and they’re letting me do this!) this week. I’ve donated graphic novels to the school’s library collection here, and they get checked out and read all the time. A number of the teachers are on my side with this, the Principal approved a letter I’ll be sending home suggesting that parents allow their kids to read comics as part of their fun reading. So down here in “Lower Alabama” one school is doing something …

As for comics in libraries, I know that I’ve noticed many smaller publishers and independents getting involved with libraries. I think I mentioned on Saturday that Slave Labor Graphics did a great discussion with school librarians several years ago in Mountain View, CA, about the importance of comics. And as I’ve attended San Diego’s Comic Con over the past several years, librarians have been courted, in booths and in panels (yay for my Rex Libris poster and the Unshelved booth). So I think it is a growing trend. We’re still convincing librarians as well as patrons that comics and GNs are worth having in libraries. Things like FCBD help to get the word out. There are lots of librarians who are much more eloquent than me, but that’s my two cents. Thanks!

Like any other fan of a certain age, I guess particularly those who (like me) grew up in small towns that are probably a couple of hours from a comic book store, I often wonder if I’d ever have paid any attention to comics at all without drugstore & grocery store spinner racks. I guess, to some extent, TV cartoons have helped fill that gap … but again, if the nearest actual COMIC is 2 hours away, will that translate into readership? I can’t imagine how, even with internet availability.

But of course that small town I grew up in, & the not-quite-as-small-but-still-nowhere-near-large-enough-to-support-an-LCS college town I wound up in one county over, both have libraries.

(Where, yes, I read plenty of Heinleins growing up. Another good point.)

Minx is a start, but they could be doing the hell of a lot better.

What Bonnie — and Jennifer and Hayden at the Seattle Library, and Kristen the librarian that comments here, and many, many others — already know, is that kids reading comics is still kids READING. They’re on board. Teachers in public schools are clear on this idea too. It’s the taxpayers-at-large (often the same taxpayers who are crabbing about the public school system) who have trouble with it. And (this is the part that makes me crazy sometimes) comics PUBLISHERS are being very slow to catch on. I think Dark Horse is the only one that’s actively got something in place as an outreach to educators. I could be wrong — I’d love it if I was — but I don’t think I am.

Retailers are picking up some of the slack. Zanadu in Seattle has been very supportive of me, and Spy Comics really helped out Bonnie yesterday. But, y’know, publishers are really the ones that could benefit from this kind of educational effort. How hard would it be, just to take one example, to do a school stop or two in between flying creators to conventions all over the country? Every creator I’ve ever met who did a school or a library thing did it on their own nickel, no publisher ever subsidizes it. (With the exception of Fantagraphics, bless them. And they moved a hell of a lot of Ellen Forney books at the event they brought her to, believe me, it wasn’t wasted time or charity work.)

The example I always think of is Robert Heinlein. You know how so many of us in our 30′s and 40′s started reading science fiction with a Heinlein juvenile? To the point where SF practically was code for “Heinlein” in a teen library? That’s because his publisher, Scribner’s, courted libraries. They asked Heinlein to do library events. They went after that market HARD. Why don’t DC and Marvel ever figure this out?

End of rant. Anyway… the nice thing about the internet is that it puts a lot more of us who do this work in touch with one another, we can network and compare notes and support one another’s events and so on. It helps a lot.

But, as implied above, the library system here (Montgomery, Alabama, a sociocultural backwater so benighted that I swear to god it makes Little Rock look like classical Athens) is so severely underfunded that it has a hard time keeping up its new stock of “real” books. If any of the branches carry GNs, I’m unaware of it. *sigh*

Good on ya for supporting libraries!