Graphic Novels in Your Media Center: A Definitive Guide [Paperback]

If you work with elementary or middle school children in a school or public library, and have been reluctant to add graphic novels to your collection, this book gives you everything you need to finally get started confidently building your collection. Even though this book was published in 2004, it still (as of 2011) is relevant, and even contains some great features that other books published since are lacking.

First of all, this guide spends the bulk of its time discussing elementary and middle school readers, unlike most other graphic novel guides which are really geared toward teen and adult titles. This is not, however, just a book of lists. If all you want is a big book of lists, consider Graphic Novels: A Genre Guide to Comic Books, Manga, and More (Genreflecting Advisory Series) which has a lot more titles but aren't arranged by age level, so you'll have to flip through the whole book to find the titles for younger children. However in this book, for example, the list of recommended titles for elementary readers only has nine titles -- but all nine are excellent and most are still in print. The entries on these titles include reviews, content advisories, and pictures of the covers. There are also often sample pages from the books, which no other guides include, and really help you feel confident about purchasing the titles.

Second, this book includes a section on "How to Read a Comic Book." If you have, literally, never picked up a graphic novel before, this section has lots of sample pages with labelled diagrams explaining panels and gutters, and some of the artistic features to look for. Every guide to graphic novels should have a section like this, and yet none of them do, so this feature alone makes this book stand out.

Third, this book has an entire section of lesson plans -- another great feature that I haven't seen in any other guides. Although the plans are specific to some of the graphic novels recommended in this book, they could certainly be easily adapted to any other GN you have in your collection. There is also a really good explanation of multiple intelligences and visual literacy which, along with the lesson plans and some other tips in the book, you can use to help get the other teachers and administrators on board with the idea of a graphic novel collection in your library.

I especially enjoyed the section "Practical Matters" which discusses how to catalog and shelve graphic novels, lists publishers, binderies, and distributors (including comic book stores), and has a great list of high-quality websites, most of which are still working.

My only criticism is that there was not enough specific discussion of Japanese manga, which is currently the hottest and most popular type of graphic novels in libraries. Although a few manga titles were in the recommended lists, there should have been a sample page explaining how to read manga, since they are often published right-to-left in the Japanese style and therefore have to be read "backwards." How can librarians explain to their students how to read these titles if they don't understand it themselves? If you want to buy manga as well, you will also need to read the superb library guide Understanding Manga and Anime to help demystify the trends and titles.

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