Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

A Good Investment After All

I heard on the radio the other morning that Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment, home of comics heroes Spider-Man, the X-men, and Iron Man, for the stunning price of $4 billion dollars. That could buy a lot of plastic sleeves to protect those comics! With the trend of movies being made from comics, it makes sense for Disney to own the content that it could use to make new movies, and then fill time slots on its television channels, and make all-new action figure lines, and then paste superheroes onto lunch boxes and pencils and notepads and folders and everything else you can paste a superhero onto. It looks like a savvy purchase, even though Disney's stock went down after the news broke. I just love to see comics discussed as news.

When you're ready to investigate the creative well that the world's largest entertainment company will now be drawing from, you could pick up The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia : a Complete Guide to the Characters of the Marvel Universe. Published by DK Publishing, the source of myriad exhaustive guides to everything from Spiderman to Horses, Spain to Hockey. The Encyclopedia combines an A-Z list of characters with essays about Marvel comics through the decades. For advanced study, you should definitely take a look at the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Multiple volumes, thousands of characters, alternate worlds and all the information you need to really geek out.

Oh, Scott McCloud, I have totally fallen for your bespectacled alter-ego in Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art. You lead me, Virgil-like, through the concentric circles of meaning in the comics world. Okay, I may be overstating it a teensy bit, but I do think this book is swoon-worthy, if only for the fact that it makes something invisible and ephemeral into something concrete and understandable. McCloud explains how all the elements of comics come together to create meaning. And he manages to do it without making it clinical or killing the beauty of comics art.

I have to admit that I am not really a superhero comics fan. Many friends over the years have tried to help me see the error of my ways and I have tried, really I have. What keeps me reading comics are stories about people's lives, whether they are autobiographical or use cartoon animals as stand-ins. Ivan Brunetti and I think along the same lines. He has collected a selection of the best contemporary "art comics" in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. Brunetti hasn't just selected Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Award winners, though they are represented in this two-volume anthology. A very personal selection of stories and excerpts, this book presents what he considers the best piece from each person, and unlike many comics anthologies, women artists and writers are fairly well represented.

The Library has a large collection of comics, including Marvel and other superhero comics, Manga, and a wide range of alternative and art comics for children through adults. For a short sampling of graphic novels, check out our Graphic Novels booklist in the Readers section of the Library's website.