It's a comic book! Actually it's a story about a comic strip storyline, and the public reaction to it. I was slogging through the stories that my NY Times blog subscription has accumulated over the past several days and came across a headline that caught my eye: "A Death in the Funny Pages Stirs Controversy." Well, being a comics fan, I had to check that out. The story turned out to be, as I expected, about the recent storyline in the Funky Winkerbean comic strip, written by Tom Batiuk, about a character who was originally diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, only to suffer a relapse within the past year or so, and, recently, dying. Death in the funny pages being such a weighty theme, and breast cancer being such an emotionally-wrought disease anyway, the article itself was fairly straight-forward in describing the story and eliciting comments from the author and a couple of readers who provided the pro- and con- viewpoints on the appropriateness of that particular type of story in that particular medium. Then, there were the online comments on the story. 165 of them as of this writing. We should have that many comments on our blogs! Not that all the comments are well-informed, mind you...
The first part of the story was originally published seven years ago as Lisa's story and that story arc, together with the recent strips, are being published in a new volume, Lisa's story: the other shoe, which I've just recommended for purchase using the very fine online Recommendation For Purchase form on our web page.
So, now I'm curious-- do other library workers not involved in selection ever feel guilty about suggesting items that their library should add to their collections? Am I abusing my status as an employee of the library? Or am I hopefully trolling for blog comments from a peer group who may actually post a response?
As always, your comments are welcome.
1 comment:
I request items all of the time. That is what the form is for, silly!
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