Novel policy

[muckefuck]

About a month ago, I asked the head of the Art Library what the hell to do with graphic novels. See, according to Dewey, they get classed as "art", but most of the ones we have are ordered and paid for by one of the selectors for literature. The two of them had a nice little chat about the issues involved, the upshot of which finally got back to me: They can't agree, so let's just keep doing what we've always done.

Which is what, exactly? Supposedly, the precedent is to put the black and white ones in Main and the ones in colour in Art, no matter if this splits up series, works by the same author, etc.

Comments

[alfaboy.livejournal.com]

Is there a category for "pretentous attempt to take comic books way too seriously"?

[almeda.livejournal.com]

*gape*

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Those go to "Core Leisure Reading".

Re:

[alfaboy.livejournal.com]

that might be the place... i think "graphic novels" are really dreary... and they're always so overworked... there's none of that spontaneity and energy you had back in the '50s and '60s when nobody took comics seriously.

"The Road to Perdition" looks like somebody's tortured attempt to copy old movie stills... it's all so stiff and awkward.

Although i did like Daniel Clowes's "Ghost World" and "David Boring." Harold Bloom would have a field day with his theory of literary influence as oedipal struggle.. David Boring labors hard to disguise what it unconsciously thieves from nabokov's lolita... probably by way of Kubrick's movie version (Clowes said in an interview he's a kubrick fan).

omigod... i'm doing it myself!

*All* graphic novels?

[zsquirrelboy.livejournal.com]

Even Maus? That, just seems a rather sweeping statement to me...

Re: *All* graphic novels?

[alfaboy.livejournal.com]

okay... you're right. Maus is really good. And i like Joe Sacco's drawing in "Safe Area Gorazde" and "Palestine"... although he's such a propagandist for the muslim side in both conflicts, you begin to wonder if he's in the pay of al-qaeda or hamas or both.

I guess i was thinking of Dark Night and Watchmen and the dismal turn comics took generally in the '80s... it's like these artists wish they were making noir cinema instead of plain ol' comic books. Man, i've seen 1950s stories from the bible comics that had more raw expressive power than a whole decade's worth of daredevil. i guess my tastes run to 1950s horror comics. And i love steve ditko and marie severin... i think they're both really expressive, dynamic artists... even though marie wasn't much of a draughtsman... draughtswoman... whatever...

Another of my favorites is the later work of Robert Crumb when he did these more realistic "classic comics" of nutty stuff like "psychopathia sexualis." And nobody can accuse Crumb of taking himself too seriously.

Re: *All* graphic novels?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I liked both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, though I agree that their runaway success convinced a generation of comics creators to go in a direction that probably wasn't for the best. Moore, at least, seems to have done what he wanted with that sort of thing and moved on (say what you will about "Tom Strong", "Promethea", "Top 10", "Supreme", etc., they're not attempts to recapture the style of Watchmen.) Miller, by contrast, hasn't done anything since TDKR that's interested me.

Of course, I tend to be more interested in the story side of comics than the art, which probably puts me in a minority of comics readers in the first place. (By contrast, you mostly mention artists and writer/artists above, as far as I can tell.) I only tend to notice art if it's really good or (as it seems to be increasingly often) really bad. There are only a handful of artists whose style I'd even recognize, whereas there are writers I make a point of at least trying anything they come out with.

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

I'd file them all in Main on the basis that their primary method of communication is words. People read graphic novels for the story, ultimately, and the pictures are a secondary thing that amplifies the delivery of that story.

But hey that's just my software engineer's functional decomposition mindset.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

People read graphic novels for the story, ultimately, and the pictures are a secondary thing that amplifies the delivery of that story.

That's true for me, but I'm not sure if it's true for the comics market as a whole. My impression is that there were star artists before there were star writers. (Back in the days when credits were haphazard, it probably helped that it was easier to identify an art style than a writing style.) While the writers started closing the gap in the 80's and 90's, I'm not sure whose names sell the most books even now. Perhaps more important, I don't know which academic disciplines are most likely to be looking at comics among literature, art criticism, or the social sciences.

Michigan State University has an extensive collection of comics and related literature, which provides one data point as to how an academic library handles these materials. FWIW, it looks as if they classified them as English literature (PN) rather than as art books (N). (They could certainly have PNs at an art library-- we have some here at our law library, for that matter-- but it's at least a clue.) I'm a public services librarian who rarely strays out of the K's (law), though, so all that cataloging stuff is pretty much a black art to me in any case. :-)

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I managed to forget that muckefuck mentioned that his university uses Dewey rather than Library of Congress call numbers. (I worked briefly in their law library, which does use LC, so that assisted my confusion.) Oh, well-- so much for using MSU's classification as a guideline.

Re: *All* graphic novels?

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, pretty much my total venture into comics wasn't very long and only involved a few items in the 80s. So, when I think of graphic novels Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns pretty much encompass my entire view of the world. I think I also read something with Electra. I liked those two just fine (at this point, perhaps as much for nostalgia as anything else), but I was unaware they generated a generation of bad stuff.

Regardless I think they should be filed under literature rather than art. Then again, like you, that could be because I care more about the writing than the art.