Unshelved: Library Mascot Cage Match by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

Some comic strips are vastly more likely to be posted in specific places than others. Even decades later, Far Sides cling proudly to doors in various STEM-related departments in universities throughout the nation. Dilbert - probably mostly older ones, if we're honest - lives on fabric-covered cube walls, most often in a position where the worker can see it and passing supervisors can not.

And Unshelved is going to be posted in the sorting rooms and other "backstage" spaces of a library - I'm pretty sure of it. The strip itself ended a few years back after running for roughly the first fifteen years of this century, but that's no impediment: I expect a lot of them were printed out and taped up in the early days, and are still making new appearances, here and there.

I am not a librarian, and my days of regularly dealing with the wild consumer were decades ago. (I was a cashier, and then a supervisor of cashiers, for a Bradlees store starting my senior year of high school. I'm never going back, but I'm glad I had that experience, and it made me think everyone should work a year or two in retail or foodservice, at least once in their lives.) But I like librarians, and I think I have enough library-adjacent experience (library patron, editor, book blogger, book-award judge, retail drone) to comment meaningfully.

And, hey, it's a comic strip that's pretty funny. That was an inducement, too. (I did read the first collection some years ago - this is probably the second, or maybe third, but it doesn't make that clear anywhere.)

So I got Library Mascot Death Match, a random Unshelved book that's the only one available in my library system. (Proof once again that librarians are the opposite of self-indulgent.) It was published in 2005, so it depicts a library that is somewhat technologically out of date - more so, I mean, even than a library today would be, since local taxpayers are not well-known for showering money on libraries to continually upgrade to the shiniest of new tech. But I think the people and concerns and issues are probably still pretty similar, though I wonder if streaming has blown a hole in libraries' role in loaning out various video formats.

The main character is a young slacker named Dewey; given the time-frame, I suspect he was originally meant to be part of my generation, but he may read as a Millennial these days. (there's always a new "those slacker kids," and there always will be). As with any workplace comedy, there is a fair-sized cast around him, and my one complaint about this book is that they are not introduced well - a comic with a big cast needs a page (web or text) to say who the people are and what their deal is.

Dewey and his co-workers deal with the public, argue about their coffee orders and other workplace food issues, and spat with teachers about whose job it is to keep kids occupied at different times of year. There's also a long comics-page-format story in the middle, in which a massively overfunded bookmobile (I think it's supposed to be a metaphor for Amazon, but it comes across as "some other level of government has a lot more funding than we do," which is weird) has to be defeated to save their local library.

It's all a little bit quaint (2005, remember) and a little bit specific (library) but more than a little bit funny. You do not need to be a librarian to find Unshelved funny; I will attest to that. And it's still being re-run online, so you can read it in the wild, as it was meant to be read, without finding this book or spending any money whatsoever.

And that's very appropriate for a strip about a library, isn't it?