Rex Libris is a very talky, computer-drawn black-and-white comic (it looks like nothing else so much as Chris Ware's very early Floyd Farland strips) about a semi-immortal, two-fisted librarian. I, Librarian collects the first five issues of the series, in which Rex retrieves an overdue Principia Mathematica from Space Warlord Vaglox amid other crises. Think of L-space by way of Raymond Chandler, and you'll be in the ballpark.I expected to love it, but I found it a real slog -- it's relentlessly wordy, never giving the art space to carry the story and just not as tightly and crisply written as it needed to be to bring the concept off. For example, when you open this book up, on the first page of art are the Five Laws of Librarians:
1. Books are to be read.Flat, bland, and tepid. That "his or her" could be eliminated with a bit of thought and rewriting, and #s 4 and 5 are frankly lousy. All of the dialogue and captions in Rex Libris are on that level -- not bad, not substandard, just long-winded and ungraceful. It made reading the book -- which has a lot of captions and dialogue, many of them in Rex's on-and-off tough-guy voice -- something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.
I'm hoping that the great librarian-action comic is still out there to be found; perhaps it's Jason Shiga's Bookhunter, which I'm still looking for.
7 comments:
You can read Bookhunter online.
"I'm hoping that the great librarian-action comic is still out there to be found"
What do you think of R.O.D. (Read or Die)?
Reword the Five Laws? You might as well reword the Bill of Rights or the Ten Commandments, or even Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Raganathan's Five Laws of Library Science are the definitive statement of What Librarians Do, or at least what our ideals are.
As for librarian comics, it may not be much in the action way but the librarian comic is Unshelved.
Steve: I haven't read R.O.D. yet, but I'll look for it.
Lois: I'm sorry to hear that clumsy phrasing is official, but it is clumsy. But I was wrong to attribute the clumsiness to Turner; I apologize for that.
I'm not saying the ideas of the laws are bad; just that they're expressed poorly. One would hope the guardians of words would be able to do better than that.
I've never quite gotten into Unshelved; I look at it every now and then, but it always seems to be the bland retelling of some random book in dull art -- I've never managed to hit a section actually about the various librarians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_or_Die
ROD has a better slogan than the "five laws":
Peace to the books of the world, an iron hammer to those who would abuse them, and glory and wisdom to the British Empire!
Andrew: Then you're apparently only seeing the Sunday strips, which are "Book Talks" (librarian-speak for mini-book reviews designed to pique readers' interests). These are often passed around in fandom since SF works are often involved -- for example, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother was featured a couple of Sundays ago.
The regular librarian stuff is in the Monday through Saturday strips. Like many strips they tend to follow a particular theme or thread throughout a week. As a librarian myself I sometimes wonder if non-librarians get some of the jokes.
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