Wednesday, April 19
12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Peña Room (Room 301)
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
RSVP required
Abstract
For the great majority of their history in the United States, comic books represented the opposite of literature, and adult cultural gatekeepers filled radio waves and newspaper pages to explain how comics threatened literacy. This talk examines the very short period when that relationship changed. Although anti-comics rallying cries were common in library journals going all the way back to the 1940s, teen librarians of the 1990s and early 2000s saw in graphic novels a kind of text that suited their philosophy of librarianship. The comics industry, for its part, saw in libraries and the graphic novel format a way to diversify the market away from the comics specialty shop and the boom-and-bust speculator consumer base that made the old business model increasingly untenable. One title in particular, Sandman, served as a crucial product as teen librarians and the comics industry came together through the graphic novel, and Neil Gaiman, the author of Sandman, served as an unexpected bridge between the two communities. Set against the long history of libraries and comics, this talk explains how, at the turn into the new century, the comics industry discovered teen librarians and teen librarians discovered graphic novels.
Bio
Joe Sutliff Sanders is a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College and a specialist in children’s media in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story (Johns Hopkins), A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child (Minnesota), and, most recently, a book-length study of the pivotal children’s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series (Wayne State). In addition to his current project on comics and librarianship, he is co-editing a book of new essays to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of his favourite book, L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon.
