From Detroit Public Library Annual Report 1984-85.

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Stranger Things

Andulka
Peter Solarz
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Not today Justin
h

Kaledo Art

JBB: An Artblog!
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trying on a metaphor
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Origami Around
Cosmic Funnies

pixel skylines

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

JVL

izzy's playlists!

Love Begins
Keni
seen from Sweden

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from Brunei
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
@literarilymanga
From Detroit Public Library Annual Report 1984-85.
he died
🌱📚📖 COVER REVEAL 🌱📚📖 ¡Qué magnífico! We are thrilled to reveal Paola Escobar’s gorgeous cover for PLANTING STORIES: THE LIFE OF LIBRARIAN AND STORYTELLER PURA BELPRÉ by Anika Aldamuy Denise, hitting shelves January 2019! Preorder here!
Follow la vida y legado of the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City—the groundbreaking woman who influenced generations of storytellers. This extraordinary biography and immigrant story is perfect for the pioneers in your life, both young and old.
(Fun fact: Did you know that Pura is also known as the namesake of the Pura Belpré Award, the children’s book prize presented each year to a Latinx writer and illustrator whose work reflects the Latinx cultural experience?)
It's a good skill to have. Let us tell you how.
They need to see themselves reflected in stories that celebrate everyday beauty.
“But if the same editors at the same publishing houses are pushing the same tales about Harriet Tubman, Dr. King, Muhammad Ali, and how black people “overcame,” often written and illustrated by white writers and artists, well, they will have missed the opportunity to really nourish our children.“
I love children’s books, but I get that not everyone does. That said, I came across two August books in the mail pile that take a critical (and, yes, more grown-up) approach to kids lit. Was The Cat In The Hat Black? by Philip Nel explores at the hidden racism behind popular children’s books, and Wild Things by Bruce Handy provides context and analysis for childhood classics like Little House on the Prairie, The Giving Tree and Goodnight Moon.
If you ARE into picture books, Chelsea Marshall and Mary Dauterman just published a satirical one for adults called What Are We Even Doing With Our Lives?
Had to include this interior image – because public radio and tote bags:
- Sydnee
Images: Oxford University Press, Simon & Schuster, Dey Street Books.
Kids who have never finished a book on their own before can pick up a graphic novel and be done in an hour and feel empowered. … They’ve never had that experience before. They finished something.
Author Raina Telgemeier
Any self-respecting comics fan cringes at the phrase “comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” But any self-respecting comics fan also has to admit there are some great kids’ comics out there — especially right now.
In fact, comics for early readers are booming; even big publishers like DC are getting in on the action.
Yes, Some Comics Are For Kids — And They’re Big Business
(via nprbooks)
Neil Gaiman on Libraries and Librarians.
Books are the way the dead speak to us. Bless this beautiful post.
Forget Brooding Superheroes — the Big Money Is in Kids’ Comics
There’s a new comics connoisseur in the family, and given her appetite, she’s a consumer force to be reckoned with.
For the vast majority of my 31 years on this Earth, I was the only comics reader in my family. I’ve been picking up funnybooks — most of them, I’m slightly ashamed to say, of the superhero variety — for decades and, with the exception of some parental dabbling in NPR-approved works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, mine has been a solitary pursuit when it comes to my clan.
So when my 10-year-old half-sister and I found ourselves in a bookstore a few months ago, I thought I’d be the cool older brother and see if I could introduce her to the world of sequential art. I grabbed a copy of Raina Telgemeier’s kid-oriented, magical-realist graphic novel Ghosts, and handed it to her. “I’ve got something cool for you to read,” I told her.
She gave me that cluck of the tongue and roll of the eyes that are all too familiar to relatives of children at that age. “Ugh, I’ve already read all of Raina’s books, Abe,” she said.
READ MORE
How to Read Aloud to Children
Don’t infantilize. “Talk to a child as you would a friend,” says Jim Dale, 81, an actor and Grammy Award-winning audiobook narrator of more than two dozen children’s books, including “Peter Pan,” “Around the World in 80 Days” and the Harry Potter series. If a passage contains a tricky or antiquated word, encourage your listener to figure out its meaning. Allow for questions and tangents. “A story that should only last five minutes can take an hour, which is wonderful,” Dale says. Researchers call these story-time interruptions “nonimmediate talk,” and studies have found it benefits children’s language development. Think of the interaction between reader and listener as a collaboration more than a one-way transaction.
READ MORE
All aboard the Library Train: Subway stations offer free e-books
Ride the subway, read a book. New Yorkers do that every day. But now the MTA and the city’s public libraries are making the commute even wordier, so to speak, by offering free access to hundreds of e-books and e-book excerpts.
The six-week program called Subway Library is a partnership with the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queens Public Library. Commuters waiting in underground subway stations can connect to free TransitWirelessWiFi on their mobile device and then click on the SubwayLibrary.com prompt.
NYPL librarian Gwen Glazer helped pick the hundreds of e-books and short stories now available. “We realized that people on the subway often are looking for something to do and looking for something great to read,” Glazer told Fox 5’s Lidia Curanaj. “However long your commute is, however long you’re on the train, we have something for you hopefully.”
To promote the program, the MTA unveiled a Library Train that is wrapped to look like the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room on 42nd Street. The Library Train will run on the E and F lines.
“The New York Public Library’s mission is to make information and knowledge accessible to all, and this exciting partnership with the MTA is certainly right on track,” NYPL President Tony Marx said in a statement. “By making thousands of free stories easily available to subway straphangers, we are encouraging reading, learning, and curiosity.”
The available books and excerpts fall into several categories: New York Stories, New & Noteworthy, Select Shorts, Children, and Young Adult, the MTA said. These are some of the titles available: Soar by David Banks, At Balthazar by Reggie Nadelson, The Soul Is Not a Smithy by David Foster Wallace, The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis by Karen Russell, Bayou Magic by Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Who Could That Be at This Hour? by Lemony Snicket.
Webcomic Artist Feature: Kosmic
I recently interviewed Kosmic, who is the creator/artist for Feast for a King. As the comic has adult themes and content (which are discussed in the interview), I’m providing a link that you can follow should you choose to read the interview. I don’t believe in censoring content because of the rating, but as most of the posts here on this blog are meant to be appropriate for all ages, I’m leaving it up my followers to decide whether they want to read or not. Personally, I think the comic explores themes that are suitable for older young adult readers (college-age and up). However, it’s not my job to push it on readers. Should you want to read the interview, it’s here: http://cooljazsheepie.tumblr.com/post/160533832933/webcomic-creator-interview-with-kosmic-of-feast
Manga Review: Pride and Predjudice
Hi all! I promised to have something up every week (and now I’ve fallen behind), so today, it’s back to manga reviews. This week, I’ll be looking at the Udon Manga Classics version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I had the pleasure--if pleasure is the right word--of reading the original novel in college in my Brit Lit II class. It was an annotated version with critical essays in the back and my professor had the class look at the book from a social perspective (i.e. Why Elizabeth needed to secure a husband and why Darcy was the best choice).
I admit that reading the manga version went a lot faster than reading the novel version and in some ways this was good and in others, bad. More on that shortly.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this Brit Lit staple, the summary is this:
Elizabeth Bennet is the second oldest daughter in a very large family. They are not poor per say, but all of the children are girls, and thus the estate does not stay in their name after their parents die. As such, all of the girls must find a suitable husband. A rich bachelor, named Charles Bingley, comes to rent a home nearby for the season. He is accompanied by his friend, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, and his sister, Caroline. There is a ball and Charles falls in love with Elizabeth’s older sister, Jane. They are very happy together and it is assumed that Jane will be married off. Also at the ball, Elizabeth meets Darcy and they strongly dislike each other from the very beginning. Time passes and eventually, Darcy convinces Bingley that Jane doesn’t really love him and they leave. Jane is heartbroken. Elizabeth is even angrier at Darcy and wants to set things right. But he left, so there’s not much she can do outside of encouraging her sister to write to her love. Also, during this time, Elizabeth is courted by Mr. Collins, a distant cousin of her father, who is set to inherit the estate. Elizabeth finds him boring and wants to marry for love, so she rejects him. Then, she is courted--ish? flirted with by George Wickham, a soldier. Wickham was raised by Darcy’s father and tells her a story of how Darcy cheated him out of his inheritance and cast him on the street. She feels really bad for him and this adds to her feelings of dislike for Darcy. But he is flirty with all the ladies of Elizabeth’s family and the neighborhood, so she doesn’t pursue him as a viable love interest. She goes on a trip and meets Darcy, who confesses his love for her. She rejects him because he seems to be only offering marriage as a favor in addition to ruining Jane’s happiness, and disgracing Wickham. Meanwhile, Wickham ends up eloping with Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Lydia, and they run away. At this point Elizabeth is distraught and reaches out to Darcy for help. He explains in a letter that he is sorry he offended her and misjudged Jane and that Wickham actually gambled all of his inheritance away and refused to do anything respectable with himself. Darcy ends up paying for Lydia’s marriage and encouraging Mr. Bingley to go back and marry Jane. Elizabeth realizes that she also misjudged Darcy and they fall in love. The end. I’m sure I missed some stuff, but that’s the gist of the story.
Now, on to the manga. It is very stylized in terms of art. If your idea of romance is a fluffy shoujo, this is it. Everyone has giant eyes and is beautiful--even the men (except Mr. Collins). I love my fair share of shoujo, but sometimes this is off putting. The emphasis is placed on keeping the characters pretty and nuances and expressions are sometimes lost in favor of a doe-eyed glazed expression. In the actual book, Jane is supposed to be the most beautiful of the sisters and Elizabeth, beautiful in a very plain way. In the manga, you really can’t tell. Also, rather than be a proactive heroine, Elizabeth is sort of just reduced to being a typical love interest. In manga adaptations like Twilight this works. For this, it doesn’t. At least for me, because Elizabeth wanted things outside of finding a man to marry her. In the book, she had character growth. In the manga, she experiences a lateral progression.
If you read shoujo manga for the hot love interests (I’mma be honest, sometimes I do), Pride and Prejudice has you covered. Darcy, Bingley, and Wickham are stylized as extremely attractive men by shoujo stanards. Mr. Collins, however, is not and it stands out. It was a bit strange to see the art style “broken” in favor of a more comedic approach to developing Mr. Collins as a character. He even pops out of a teapot at one point. As a reader, it made me question why I suddenly had to suspend my disbelief for this sort of thing. Darcy is also sort of reduced to a brooding shoujo love interest, but it kind of works. Kind of.
I mention that reading this went fast for me. While I can read a lot of standard-sized manga volumes in about an hour or so without a problem, the speed at which I read this was sort of a problem because I was tuning out and even with re-reading, I felt like I was glazing over things--or the story was doing it for me. This is not something that you really want to do with a story that does not have future consecutive volumes. But that’s me. Maybe you’ll find it more engaging. If you like all your books to read fast, this is a good choice.
Overall, if you’re looking for a compilation comparison piece or you really like Brit Lit enough to have manga versions of your favorite stories on hand, this book is a pretty good read. You can get the basic, fluffy version of the story without having to worry about the language or the fine details of the plot.
If you’re interested in your own copy (and your library or bookstore doesn’t have it), you can find it on Amazon. (I linked my copy that I ordered, but there are cheaper versions available.)
Have you read Pride and Prejudice? Do you have any thoughts you want to share? Leave a comment or send me a note or an ask! See you soon!
A Chat About Creativity
Hello! As y’all know, I’ve been talking to various webcomic creators about their individual comics. Earlier this week, however, I got to talk to Kristina about her creative process and how she brings her webcomics to life. Check it after the cut!
This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Niina Eveliina, creator of the webcomic Numb. Check it out after the cut.
Hello! I was lucky enough to have more interest in webcomic features than I thought. Today’s interview is with Merriam Hayden. Read it after the cut!
Hi, all! It’s time for another webcomic feature! This week I interviewed Micah, creator of The Roommate from Hell! Read the full interview after the cut!