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Canadian Born Chinese
Today we’re taking a bit of a deeper dive into one graphic novel in particular. And to the surprise of no one who’s been reading our recent posts about our Comic as Object Project or Drawn Together, this will be doing double duty as an assignment for our Head Alien’s LIS 518 course at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.
As some of you might have already guessed from the title of this post, the graphic novel in question is American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang…
Social climbing
Once upon a time I had a shoebox full of favourite comic strips that I had diligently cut out of the newspaper… Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, to name but a few. Somewhere over time and over moves, I lost that box, much to my sadness.
But if the strip got popular enough, some publisher would come along and reprint them into a little book…
Because stickers
This post for the Comic as Object Project doesn’t even care about the comic part… this one is just about the object part. We just get to sneak it into the project because the object incidentally happens to be a graphic novel… and apparently quite a well known and well regarded one. And by a Canadian creator. And also incidentally the same creator who was involved in our previous fancy box post.
Not important.
This is why we bought the book…
But it’s a fancy box
So as part of the Comic as Object Project, I want to share with you a series of comics called Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta, published in 2019 by TKO Studios. A series of six, Sentient tells the story of the U.S.S. Montgomery, a deep space colony ship whose AI, VALARIE, must help the children left aboard survive after all the adults are killed.
But the story is not what’s important here…
Okay, yeah, that’s a comic book…
We would be remiss as part of the Comic as Object Project if we didn’t take at least a passing look at the format that probably most people would consider a ‘real’ comic book: the 6 5/8 inch by 10 1/4 inch 16 page plus cover saddle-stitched booklet format, known affectionately (or derogatorily, depending on your personal stance on such things) as the “floppy.”
Living on the wrong side of the racks
In this first post to be included under the umbrella of the Comic as Object Project, we want to share a book that is both the most recent to be acquired here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library but also a throwback to the very first comics we ever read as a kid: Archie Digests!
The Comic as Object Project
As part of our Head Alien’s ongoing studies at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies, this project starts with a basic, and I think self-evident, premise taken from a different medium altogether – that a video call is not the same as an in-person meeting…
Drawn Together, Judged Together
Today’s assignment? To investigate “a graphic novel or comic that has been challenged recently in western society.”
Our choice? Well, it’s the 2019 winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Best Picture Book, among other accolades…
