lower east side librarian

Alisa Harris was kind enough to donate an extra copy of this book to Barnard. I couldn’t keep my mitts off of the delectable book long enough for it to get cataloged, so I read through it before turning it over to technical services. It’s a juicy compendium of comics by women, many of whom will look familiar to zine and minicomics fans: Liz Baillie, Alisa, Missy Kulik, Cathy Leamy, Danica Novgorodoff, and MK Reed.

The graphic novel told story of a corporate thug turned hero of the working man after he gets fired from his job shilling feel good ultimatums is full of clever political puns and...cleverisms. Seriously, you'll marvel at the authors' wit on nearly every page. They provide data (in the form of clever satirical ads) to back up their anti-capitalist point-of-view. The art seems (to my ignorant text-biased self) to be right in tune with comic book superherolands. My chief complaint, if you can view it as one, is the denseness of the clever. I can see this working better as a daily comic strip where stopping to marvel at the wit doesn't pile up all at once to give you a repetitive smirk injury.

I've really got to stop reading graphic novel comics (and tween novels) when more often than not my review starts with a disclaimer that it's not my genre. I was drawn to read the Batwoman story because the Twitterdome was full of "DC's first gay superhero" buzz. It's true that comics don't speak to me the way I think they should, but sometimes they really really do--like if they're written/drawn by Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel, so I keep trying. However, lesbian though she may be, Batwoman Kate Kane is no dyke to watch out for, not that she isn't scary. She's a soldier manquée (DADT) with a vicious grudge. Speaking of DADT, I should mention here that Dan Choi served as a consultant for the book. You also might want to know that Rachel Maddow wrote the intro.

I'd read DTWOF here and there, mostly on the interweb, like especially when the main character, Mo, decided to go to library school in 2001, and the link to that strip got forwarded around the bibliosphere like crazy. But without regular exposure, I had not realized just how brilliant the biweekly comic strip is. I can't believe (okay, I can believe but don't want to) that it isn't syndicated in every newspaper that carries Doonesbury, or at least Boondocks. I'm guessing it's the title? Which is unfortunate also because this comic is relevant to all people with radical left politics. Maybe even liberals!

New! Favorite! Book! Ms. Barry covers some similar turf as she does in The Good Times Are Killing Me, but O!H!D! covers a broader spectrum of her "autobiofictionalography," plus it's illustrated. In color--over 200 pages. I'm impressed Sasquatch Books was able to put this out for $24.95 in '02. Barry did some zen painting exercise where the artist explores her demons, and this is the result. She shares 17 of hers with us, mostly about her childhood and adolescence, but a few take place in grown up life.

Comix with footnotes--hubba hubba! But of course one's enjoyment is tempered by the fact that the facts presented about the prison industry are infuriating.

The more I read Lynda Barry, the more I wonder what kind of a crazy childhood she must have had. Boys and Girls is comics depicting painfully familiar incidents from childhood, adolescence, and also adult life. A section on finding your perfect love mate cracked me up, especially the Success Begins at Home quiz...

Don't tell anyone, but I snatched I Saw You from the NYC Zine Fest fundraiser. Julia deliberately left it behind when she split, and, well, I was grabbing my zines from the merch table, and, uh… I justify my action with the knowledge that I will give the book away, perhaps to someone else who was at the benefit. Julia, claiming she was only a comics drawer and no writer, gave a great performance of two well-written essays at the zine reading, so I was curious what her work was like. She actually only has a couple of comics in this anthology of illustrated newspaper and online missed connections ads, but they're perfectly charming, as is her introduction, and I assume the clever idea to have the (alpha by first name ♥) bios all be personal ad style. For example:

Greg Means
www.tugboatpress.com
You: most beautiful woman in the world
Me: great personality

The Long Way Home, which I got from the Miami-Dade Public Library via Columbia interlibrary loan, takes up where the tv show leaves off, more or less. So far having read the first and third installment, I haven't really learned much about what happened immediately after the destruction of the hellmouth and Sunnydale, just that Buffy, the surviving Scoobies, and the potentials have relocated to Europe. And that somehow along the way, Dawn got turned into a giant, which is possibly some kind of mystical STD.