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Comic books are now becoming a part of public library collections. In Brazil, public libraries are organizing special branches or departments for comic books, calling them Gibitecas. Discusses the reasons for public libraries to collect comic books, and reviews the range of motives that took Brazilian librarians to provide them to their customers. Also analyses the difficulties for collecting and disseminating comic books, with special attention to the characteristics of comic book publishing.

Soon after the first regularly published newsstand comic book went on sale in 1934, and especially by 1938 with the arrival of Superman in Action Comics #1, comic books were established as a distinctly separate entertainment medium from newspaper comic strips. To boost circulation, some titles introduced liberal amounts of sex and gore, and this caught the eye of parents, teachers, and librarians. Comic books were widely disapproved of for many years, and any library actively collecting them would have had angry parents to deal with. Possibly as a result of this general disapproval, New Serial Titles excluded comic books by policy from the beginning, a policy not reversed until 1979. In addition, the Library of Congress has never provided cataloging for comic books, which may have discouraged librarians from keeping what they had acquired. To make a sad story even longer, comic‐book distribution was almost entirely on the newsstand and not through subscription nor the book‐trade channels that librarians normally use.

Purpose – Crime, criminals, the criminal justice system, and criminal justice system actors have traditionally occupied a prominent place in popular media. Comic books and graphic novels are no exception to this trend. Despite this, these media have received comparatively little attention from criminal justice scholars. This chapter seeks to explore the depiction of crime and justice in modern-era comic books and graphic novels.

Methodology/approach – Content analysis techniques were used to examine 166 individual comic books from the modern age (mid-1980s to present), including those compiled in graphic novel form. Particular emphasis was placed on issues of crime control and due process.

Findings – Clear criminal justice themes were seen across the sample, including an emphasis on crime control and crime prevention. Further, comic books featuring the individual characters of Superman and Batman portrayed opposing conceptions of justice, such as justified/unjustified use of force and a willingness to follow or break the law.

Research limitations – This research represents an exploration of the depiction of crime-related themes in comic books and graphic novels, but is by no means definitive. It would be useful to extend this research by examining other eras in comic book history as well as other comic book characters and publishing companies.

Practical implications – The public's perceptions of the criminal justice system ultimately affect societal views of the legitimacy of the system. Since legitimacy is a requisite for compliance, it is important to understand factors that may influence these perceptions. These may include comic books, graphic novels, and other popular media.

Originality/value of paper – Comic books stories and themes have long reflected the times. However, it is unclear how crime and the criminal justice system are portrayed in the comic book world. This chapter is an attempt to fill a gap in the extant literature by examining this often neglected form of popular media.

Comic books are finally being recognized as a scholarly medium in literature, art, history, popular culture, and many other fields of study. Blanket disapproval of comic books, however, continues in all but a few academic libraries. Librarians do face philosophical and practical challenges to acquiring comic books, but it is both possible and desirable to do so. Valuable selection tools and Internet resources are examined, along with annotations of significant comic book creators.

Women’s representation is widely debated within the comic book cannon. Many comic and cultural scholars argue that women characters are overly sexualized, objectified, or excluded from this literary genre (Child, 2013; Danziger-Russell, 2012; Fesak, 2014; Lepore, 2014; Simone, 1999). However, few scholars have adequately addressed how comic book readers make sense of women’s representation within graphic storytelling. The author’s research addresses the issue of women’s representation in comics with special attention to how audiences interpret these supposed images of women’s empowerment. Capitalizing from the author’s time spent working at a local comic book store and a series of 20 in-depth interviews that the author conducted with comic book readers, the author draws from a series of personal field notes, participant observation, and transcribed interviews to understand how gendered relationships in comic books manifest in real-life experiences. Ultimately, the author argues that static comic book stereotypes about hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity shape consumers’ gendered realities. More specifically, this study demonstrates how popular character archetypes like the love interest, the nag, and the slut are redefining readers’ relationship to women both within and outside of comic book culture. By examining this culture, and its audience at large, this research advances a more nuanced understanding of how graphic narratives contribute to gender difference and violence against women, thereby situating women’s empowerment within popular culture.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rituals and communicative practices that simultaneously create community, out-groups and perceptions of stigma at a local comic book retail organization through autoethnography. As such this piece explores personal identity, comic book culture and how this comic book shop acts as important third place as defined by Oldenburg.

Autoethnography allows for the simultaneous research into self, organizations and culture. As a layered account, this autoethnography uses narrative vignettes to examine a local comic book retail organization from the first person perspective of a collector, a cultural participant and geek insider.

The term geek, once brandished as an insult to stigmatize, is now a sense of personal and cultural pride among members. Various rituals including the “white whale” moment and the specialized argot use help maintain community in the comic book shop creating a third place as categorized by Oldenburg. However, these shared communication practices and shared meanings reinforce the hegemonic masculinity of the store, leading the author to wonder if it can maintain its viability going forward.

This autoethnography was performed at a local comic book shop, connecting communicative and ritual practices to organizational culture, hegemonic masculinity, geek culture and personal identity. It also argues that one need not be an embedded organizational insider to perform organizational autoethnography.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage and assist collection of adult‐level, graphic novels and book‐length comics by women, and to demonstrate the breadth and depth of such work.

This paper provides a brief history of women and independent comics, tracing the medium's development from the 1970s underground comix movement to the present day. Individual creators and their works are discussed.

In the early years of independent comics, many of the women creating them were consciously reacting to an overwhelmingly male‐dominated profession. There was a high degree of shock value in these early works. As time went on the comics still tended towards the autobiographical, but storytelling gained importance. Most of the women creating comics today are still doing so from a woman's point of view, but their target audience seems more universal.

Graphic novels are in increasing demand, both for scholarly and leisure reading. Guides to collecting graphic novels exist; however, the vast majority of the artists included in these guides are men. This paper fills a gap by introducing librarians to several women graphic novelists who have been overlooked thus far.

In analysing the beancounter image's trajectory, from its birth to its persistence, in European French language comics between 1945 and 2016, this paper explores why artists continue beancounter image usage in popular culture.

Beancounter characters have been studied in an application of Iconology (Panofsky, 1955) in order to unravel how individuals make sense of cultural artefacts and how, in turn, the visuals shape cultural belief systems at a given time.

This study reveals that comics artists usage of the beancounter image results from their critical reactions to management and capitalism whilst at other times the usage is an indication of authenticity. Motivation for the usage is not constant over time nor is the impact of the beancounter image. Both appear dependant of the level of artistic freedom experienced by the artist.

Based on a single media (comics) with a unique characters (European French language) this study deepens exploration of the ways in which accounting becomes entwined with the everyday and implies that further research is needed.

Extends the work of Smith and Jacobs (2011) and Jacobs and Evans (2012) by focusing on a genre of popular culture over a long period, and by adopting a critical viewpoint. Also expands the possible applications of Panofsky's (1955) Iconology in accounting studies.

Cartooning is an industry, a subculture, and a field. Educational cartooning is none of these. It is a flexible, popular art that is constantly being reinvented by diverse people working in isolation from each other. As an educational cartoonist, I have been aware of this lack of communication for years. Recently, Michigan State University's Randy Scott, the world's preeminent comic book librarian, sent me a list of the comic books about AIDS that are included in the Educational Materials Database of the National AIDS Information Clearinghouse. (For addresses of materials discussed in this article, see sidebar 1.) I was astounded. As of June 1990, their list included 46 titles from almost three dozen sources. After years of keeping an eye out for AIDS education comics, I had found out about only 15 of these titles.