ALIA Graphic May 2021 Roundup

 Welcome back to another ALIA Graphic Roundup of all the latest news, new releases and updates on all things comics. 

This month The Ledger Awards, also known as the Comic Arts Awards of Australia revealed their 2021 shortlist. This seems like a great opportunity to spend the last of your yearly budget topping up the graphic novel collection with a great list of Aussie graphic novels! And just a reminder, when you add works from Australian creators to your library collections, those creators can be compensated through the Australian Lending Right Schemes (ELR/PLR) for the loss of income through the free multiple use of their work in Australian public and educational lending libraries. 

Don't forget there's only a little more than a month to go until our inaugural ALIA Graphic Novels and Comics Book Club commences! Our first meeting will be all about introducing new readers to comics and so we will be looking at some good starters: They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker; Ms Marvel volume 1: No Normal, by G Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona; and Alone by Christophe Chabouté.

Our first online meeting is planned for Sunday July 25th at 3:00pm AEST. Please send an email to aliagraphicinfo@gmail.com to let us know if you’re interested. We can't wait to get started sharing our passion for this medium to Librarians, Library Technicians and all other library staff and supporters around Australia!

News

• Blake Lively and Diablo Cody have teamed up to adapt Lady Killer, a feature adaptation of a comic book from Dark Horse Comics.
• The life and times of one of the world’s greatest singers, Freddy Mercury, is soon coming to bookshelves from Z2 comics! Freddy Mercury: Lover of Life, Singer of Songs, will chronicle his life from his childhood in Zanzibar, growing up in England, to becoming beloved by millions of fans the world over.
• Publishers Weekly have published two great profiles this month worth checking out. One is with Australian creator Lee Lai about her recently published graphic novel Stone Fruit. The other one is with Ed Brubaker who is publishing Friend of the Devil, another graphic novel in the Reckless series. For more Lee Lai - check out this month's Creator Chat Podcast.
• The #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force has announced that BOOM! Studios have begun to work with them to achieve the Task Force’s goals to ensure that all writers who are owed royalties and/or statements for their media-tie in work are identified and that Disney and other companies honor their contractual obligations to those writers after acquiring the companies that originally hired the writers.
• There have been a lot of tributes upon the death of Kentaro Miura (May 6, 2021), world famous creator of best selling manga, Berserk. ‘Mr. Miura was known for his spectacular, apocalyptic style; specific images - a humongous sword, a monster cloaked in shadow - are immediately recognizable to his fans...The influence of “Berserk” can be seen in popular video games like Dark Souls - whose monsters adopt the gargantuan scale of Mr. Miura’s - and on such TV shows as “Castlevania,” on Netflix.’ (NY Times). There has been a huge outpouring of grief and shock in the manga fandom.

Collections & PD

• New York Public Library has published a helpful list of great graphic novels to add to your classroom library.
• New York City SChool Librarians’ Association are developing a series of webinars called Manga in Libraries. The May webinar has been uploaded to the NYCSLA YouTube channel and it’s available here. The series continues through June to August. You can find all the info here. 
• Continuing with Manga, The Graphic Library has published an excellent blog post: Beginning Buyer’s Guide of Manga for High School Librarians. Library Journal has also published a pretty handy guide of Must Have Manga worth checking.
• Kevin Wolf has compiled and reviewed a list of titles related to climate change and environmentalism for the Graphic Medicine website. A really interesting set of books.
• And we have two great webinars about comics in the classroom. The first is from Comic Con International’s YouTube channel, and the second is a Library Pass webinar. Both of them are worth a watch. 

Media & Resources

• Book Riot have published this excellent article discussing 3 great comics anthologies and why they are worth reading.
• Are comics for kids or aren’t they? This article from Book Riot discusses how comics and readers have changed from The Golden Age to The Modern Age.
• Circulating Ideas episode 199 - Steve chats with John Ballestro, editor of The Library’s Guide to Graphic Novels, along with many of the contributors, to discuss the ever-changing ways that graphic novels are created, packaged, marketed, and released, exploring such topics as the history of comics, collection development, cataloguing, and specialized resources. 

New Release Graphic Novels - May 2021

Junior & YA

• Goblin - Eric Grisson, Will Perkins (Dark Horse)
• Metropolis Grove - Drew Brockington (DC Comics)
• Minecraft: Wither without you Vol 2 - Kristen Gudsnuk (Dark Horse)
• Ms Marvel Vol 3: Outlawed - Saladin Ahmed, Minkuy Jung, Joey Vazquez (Marvel Comics)
• The Sprite and the Gardener - Joe Whitt, Rii Abrego (Oni Press)
• Sunshine - Jarrett J. Krosoczka (Scholastic - Graphix)
• Wynd: Book 1 - James Tynion IV, Michael Dyalinas (Boom! Box)

Adult General

• Coma - Zara Slattery (Myriad Editions)
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Volume 3 - Spike Chunsoft, Kuroki Q (Dark Horse)
• Dark One Vol 1 - Brandon Sanderson, Jackson Lanzing, Colin Kelly, Nathan C. Gooden (Vault Comics)
• Finder: Chase the lady - Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse)
• Gideon Falls Vol 6 - Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino (Image Comics)
• Invisible Kingdom Vol 3 - G. Willow Wilson, Christian Ward (Berger Books)
• The Neil Gaiman Library Volume 3 HC - Neil Gaiman, Colleen Doran, Scott Hampton, Paul Chadwick, Troy Nixey, Michael Zulli (Dark Horse)
• Resistance - Val McDermid, Kathryn Briggs (Profile Books Ltd.) 
• Save it for Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest - Nate Powell (Abrams)
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength - Alison Bechdel (Vintage)
• Stone Fruit - Lee Lai (Fantagraphics)
• Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol 3 - Grant Morrison, Yanick Paquette (DC Comics)

Prefer to listen to the monthly roundup on a Podcast? Each month we select a few favourite news items and new releases to discuss on our ALIA Graphic Podcast Roundup. Listen at Apple Podcasts. 

Adventures in Space and Time - ALIA Graphic celebrate Library & Information Week 2021

This week ALIA Graphic Novels and Comics celebrates Libary & Information Week!

To celebrate this year's theme of Adventures in Space and Time, the team have decided to share a few of their very favourite comics about space and time. There are of course hundreds, if not thousands and even millions of comics and graphic novels that delve into the adventures in space and time theme. 

I mean practically every superhero comic ever written has a main character from another world and lets face it, a browse through any collection would likely see almost every comic having some connection to this genre! 

We have some obvious ones, but our team also thought it might be a nice change to check out a few of the less mainstream titles that you wouldn't usually come accross. Please enjoy this eclectic selection of comics to take you on an adventure through space and time.

Here by Richard McGuire is a comic about a corner of a room and the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. For an in depth review check out this article by Wired - 5 reasons to read the time-traveling graphic novel Here.

Saga by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image Comics) - This series is an epic space opera/fantasy that follows a mixed-race family from opposing sides of an interstellar war. This best selling series has 54 issues to date (which in Brian Vaughan's words is the half point of the story) and is currently on hiatus, so you have time to catch up.

Park Bench by Christopher Chabouté is a silent comic that details a simple park bench and the lives that it witnesses over time. Un peu de bois et d'acier (The Park Bench) was adapted into a silent black and white 45-minutes short film directed by Antonin Le Guay (Sandgate Productions) in 2014.

Black Hammer series by Jeff Lemire and artist Dean Ormston (Dark Horse Comics) - This Eisner Award-winning super hero saga follows a group of super heroes who get trapped in space and time after saving Spiral City from the Anti-God.

Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities by Jason Shiga  - This children's original graphic novel is a new take on a “choose your own adventure.” A boy stumbles upon the lab of a mad scientist who asks him to choose between testing a mind-reading device, a time machine, and a doomsday machine.

Laika by Nick Abadzis - a young adult / children's graphic novel based on the true story of the Soviet space dog that was the first living creature to orbit the Earth on Russia's Sputnik II in 1957. Laika has been continuously in print since it was first published in 2007, when it received numerous international storytelling awards and has been translated into ten foreign language editions. It is widely considered to be a classic of the medium and continues to be a gateway book for those who have never experienced the joy of graphic novels and comics.

The Time Machine By H.G. Wells, Illustrated by Rajesh Nagulakonda Adapted by Lewis Helfand. Wells’ classic adventure gets the graphic novel treatment in this ultra-compelling and concise adaptation. Just one of at least 6 comic adaptations of the classic.

We hope you've enjoyed our picks. Stay tuned at the end of the month for our monthly roundup blog post and podcast of all latest news, resources and graphic novels.

Seeya!

ALIA Graphic April 2021 Roundup and Book Club Announcement

Do you want to provide the best Readers' Advisory around comics that you can?

Do you get nervous about what graphic novels your library should be purchasing?

Do you want to read these materials yourself, but don’t know where to start?

Luckily for you, ALIA Graphic Novels and Comics is starting a book club especially for librarians! 

Each month, we will have a theme to help with professional development in libraries and we have put a lot of thought into how these themes can grow both a love of comics and further best practice around their use in libraries. 

Our first meeting will be all about introducing new readers to comics and so we will be looking at some good starters: They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker; Ms Marvel volume 1: No Normal, by G Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona; and Alone by Christophe Chabouté. These choices represent a mix of the different genres that comics and graphic novels can cover and are all great gateways for reading and worth having in library collections.

Some of the things we’ll be discussing include how (and when) to include comics in recommendations, preconceptions people may have about the medium and how they can overcome them, and what qualities make a comic an ideal introduction to the format.

This book club will be open to librarians from across Australia (and beyond) and as such will be held online. Our first meeting is planned for Sunday July 25^th at 3:00pm AEST and we hope to make it a monthly event. Please send an email to aliagraphicinfo@gmail.com to let us know if you’re interested. We look forward to chatting with you about all things graphic novels, comic books, and libraryland!

The April Roundup is also available as a podcast, with Iurgi and James discussing the latest news, their favourite new release graphic novels and discussing the upcoming book club. The episode also includes an interview with Daniel Wee, a specialist collections librarian at Monash University. He's the custodian of old rare books and that includes one of the largest collections of comics in Australia. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and if you like what we're doing, hit the subscribe button and leave a review.

News

• The sequel to the incredibly influential March graphic novel is Run and will be out in August. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin continue as writers, with L. Fury and Nate Powell on art duties. 

• Publishers Weekly reports that as sales of middle grade graphic novels continue to grow, publishers are now moving to expand the range of graphic novels for early readers, in an excellent article.

• Heidi McDonald looks into stream TV and film adaptations of graphic novels, how they drive sales of the original source and how publishers are responding to this, published in Publisher’s Weekly.

• Melbourne writer Tom Taylor continues conquering the world of comics with numerous publications and it has been announced that he will also be writing a Superman series, a character that has always meant a lot to him. We can’t wait for this series.

• Scholastic halts distribution of a Dav Pilkey book and Pilkey apologises for passive racist stereotypes in its pages. 

• YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens nominations are coming in and the Spring Roundup is out.

• The Hugo Award finalists have been announced, including for the Best Graphic Story or Comic category.

Collections & PD

• Shannon Live, Kaitlyn Roach and Dr. John Weaver shared their insights on how they work with graphic novels in the classroom, how they demonstrate their impact on learning, and how they partner with librarians. The 60-minute presentation was moderated by LibraryPass’ John Shableski.

• If you’re curious to know what the best selling graphic novels were for the September to December period in the U.S., the data is now out: Top 10 kids graphic novels, top 10 superhero franchises, top 10 manga franchises, top 10 author graphic novels.

Media & Resources

•  Podcast: Alice Jaggers talks to Graphic Medicine Reviews Editor Kevin Wolf about graphic medicine. 

• Educator and Reader Guide: OniPress has published a free educator and reader guide for Brenna Thummler’s Sheets and Delicates graphic novels. 

New Releases

• Junior and YA

  • Dear Super-Villains - Michael Northrop, Gustavo Duarte (DC Kids)

  • Hound Heroes #1: Beware The Claw - Todd Goldman (Scholastic)

  • The Last Kids on Earth: Thrilling Tales From the Treehouse - Max Brallier and various artists (Viking Books for Young Readers)

  • A Shot in the Arm: Big Ideas That Changed the World - Don Brown (Abrams)

  
  
  

General Adult

• Black Widow Vol. 1: The Ties That Bind - Kelly Thompson, Elena Casagrande (Marvel Comics)

• 
  Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles - Fermin Solis (SelfMadeHero)

• Hellblazer: Rise and Fall - Tom Taylor, Darick Robertson (DC Comics)

• Sirens of the Norse Sea: The Waters of Skagerrak - Françoise Ruscak, Gihef, Philippe Briones & Marco Dominic (Humanoids)

• Still Alive - Safdar Ahmed (Twelve Panel Press) - could also be YA

• Power Rangers: Drakkon New Dawn  - Anthony Burch (Boom! Studios)

• Sleeping Beauties Vol 1 - Stephen King, Owen King, Rio Youers, Alison Sampson (IDW)

• Suicide Squad: Bad Blood - Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo (DC Comics)