The Collingswood Bikeshare

Hola amigos. It's been a long time since I've rapped at you, but I've gone semi-pro, so I've been drawing/painting trading cards and working on the occasional illustration project with the time I used to spend drawing comics for free with little feedback. I do plan to finish my "Where's the Beat" comic and submit it to literary journals in hopes of getting more eyes, but publishing my progress on this blog would disqualify me from submitting elsewhere in many cases, so we'll have to wait a bit.

Long-time readers know that this blog started out as an attempt to share my combined interests in library studies and art, then it drifted more into a regular comics blog, and now I pop in once in a while to share updates on whatever projects I'm currently working on. Well, I never abandoned my library training, and now I work as a cataloger, circulation clerk and restoration specialist at one of the best special libraries in the world, the Collingswood Bikeshare.

Not the usual bike sharing program that rents out fancy-schmancy identical bikes with GPS and stuff by the hour, ours refurbishes donated adult bikes of many shapes, sizes and vintage and leases them like library books for $25/year.

With another female, I'm currently building a bike from an old road bike frame of dubious origin (though stickers indicate it was originally acquired from a Western Toy Store):

 Here I am scraping off the original layers of paint with a scraper. Later I'd switch to Zip Strip. This bike had a storied life including possible theft, judging by the paint layers -- red, original dark Bikeshare green, black spraypaing and lighter, modern Bikeshare green. This time it will be cream and blue.

Here are some before pictures:

Bikeshare brand builds often have BMX handlebars, and this model was no exception:

With new wheels and a cool found saddle, grips and other odds and ends, we have a nice new Bikeshare brand coaster bike!

 I named it Rover, after my cat (it's also the name of that bubble thing in The Prisoner, which fits our classic TV show bike naming scheme).

We still have a week or so of halfway decent riding weather left (it's November 6th as I'm writing this). Stop by sometime!

And be on the lookout for my art at Espressit Coffee Shop all November long.

Do It For the Kids!

Well what have we here in the supermarket magazine aisle within view and reach of tender young eyes and hands? Intellectually stimulating, inspiring and witty reading material like Cricket, Ranger Rick, any comics at all or even Mad? NO! Mind-numbing, base, lowest-common-denominator Justin Bieber pictorial magazines designed as training wheels for Seventeen and Cosmopolitan!



Yes, magazine publishers, supermarket stockers and parents, please work together to deaden our culture and set the next generation up for failure: every month, present these near-identical rags as the only visible reading options. Yes, teach young ladies to lust after some fungible, mop-topped pop star and beg their moms for makeup and trendy clothes so they can look like Selena Gomez.

Nowhere to be found???

This is not funny, and I can’t stand it. Bring your children over to the computer screen. I have a message for them.

Kids, Justin Bieber won’t be babyfaced and non-threatening forever, but that brain in your heads will stick with you for the rest of your life. Please don’t train it to passively absorb rotten pablum at such a young age. It may be difficult to go against the grain on this one, but remember: In the great scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what your peers think re: your taste in magazines and pop stars. Few, if any, of the classmates you have now will still be in your life ten years from now.

Maybe the other kids will think you’re strange because you don’t hang Justin Bieber clippings on the wall and kiss them on the lips, but who cares, seriously. Maybe some of your childhood and adolescence will be lonely and sad because you don’t model yourself after Selena Gomez or whoever is the teen girl star of the moment right now. Don’t worry about it; find a cool hobby to boost your confidence and keep you busy. Ride your bike, play some sports (yep) or go running to wear you out so you don’t stay up at night worrying about things. By establishing these habits, you will be setting yourself up for success and richness in later years.

Beware of the self-fulfilling prophecy, avoid screwing up your life with drugs, alcohol or Mountain Dew, stay humble and someday you will be cool in spite of -- nay, because of your lack of Justin Bieber posters. And the being humble part is important; It is unwise to make a big conceited show about how your interests are so much better and cooler and more obscure than everyone elses; be honest about your tastes, but never arrogant or pushy. Having said that, share what you enjoy if others seem interested; there’s nothing worse than the exclusive cool kid who suddenly gets angry and defensive when other people discover a band, TV show, etc. he likes. And if you really do like Justin Bieber, well, that’s fine, too. We all have our guilty pleasures. But keep an open mind to other things you might like; talents you envy in others that you would like to possess, and spend some time exploring them. Jealousy is nature's way of telling you to hone your talents, study or work out harder to achieve your goals. Many turn jealousy into statements such as, "Sure, she's a great clarinet player and always gets the band solos, but that doesn't matter because she's fat and ugly." Words and thoughts such as that will do nothing to enhance your life. You’re still young, and when you’re old like me and realize you could never be a great piano player because you can only be really great if you start out in childhood, you’ll look back and regret some of the wasted time gone by.

Think about some of the characters you’ve admired in comics, classic literature and movies. Are they materialistic, obsessed with celebrity gossip and desperate for the approval of others or do they have a little bit more depth, soul and integrity? Why not look to these characters as examples rather than create a smokescreen to appease mean classmates who pass judgment on you?

Surely there’s something better tucked away in the back of the magazine rack, there…let’s not let it die out like Nickelodeon Magazine and maybe there will be hope for you yet. Ah! Games and Highlights. What are they doing all the way in the back? Is this some sort of conspiracy?

Well, now they’re in the front, covering the awful trash. Merry Christmas, kids; I have given at least a few of you the gift of knowledge. Enjoy the anachronistic comic exploits of Goofus and Gallant and The Timbertoes. Exercise your minds and develop problem-solving skills with a Games Magazine puzzle or two.

Parents: why not add a few books, strategy games, puzzles, art supplies or musical instruments in with the DVDs this year? It would be great if kids actually had a fighting chance to accomplish something besides sitting in front of the MTV eating Ho-Hos with a glazed, deadened look in their eyes. You can buy very good books for under a dollar on Amazon, and if you register for a free library card you can check out all kinds of books for the kids at no charge. Usually the library has brand-new material in addition to the classics; they don’t simply rotate the same taped-up, crumbling books from the 1950s in perpetuity as some believe.

And do what I did with the magazine rack at your local book, drug or grocery store. What’s the worst that could happen, some store associate tells you not to? This has never happened to me and I’m sure very few would care even if they notice. Do it for the kids.

Six Pack

Here I sit like someone out of the "Stuff White People Like" blog, transcribing stuff into my text editor from my Moleskine notebook. At least it's not a Mac.

Those of you lucky enough to have watched the short, hilarious film from my last entry may have learned that I don't define myself or dictate my happiness through my work, as in the kind of job I have, but through something that will probably never offer me any financial stability -- my hobbies!

I enjoy working in libraries, and I get plenty of satisfaction from helping others with their research and learning bits of trivia in the process, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that my freelancing job, if silly, takes very little of my time while providing me with the financial stability I need to feed myself goulash and tea every day and live in my beautiful, quiet apartment. I briefly felt some shame and guilt in not being able to immediately "work" my Master's Degree, but I'm not alone. The economy is down, and I'm doing what I have to do to make ends meet in the mean time. Actually, I'm doing more than making ends meet. I'm really making mad bank right now, I'm not gonna lie. "Mad bank" for me, as it turns out, is equivalent to like, I'll be up front with you here and could care less if you think this is chump change, $600 a week, but that is way more than I need. I have this amazing power to stretch and save cash, even though I'm one of the last few people around who pays money for (a whole lot of) music. It's magic!

Besides making mad bank, this freelancing gig is also giving me lots of appreciated free time to do a different kind of freelancing -- and that kind of freelancing requires a Moleskine notebook.

Me and the Moleskine have been BFFs since I first discovered it in 2004 as "The notebook used by Van Gogh and xyz important person". Being sort of a modern-day Van Gogh myself, I couldn't resist! Initially, I used the Moleskines to record some of my deepest personal feelings and reflections on my daily happenings. What a waste, right? When people come over to visit and flip through the Moleskine library on my desk, expecting brilliant nuggets of wit, scripts and raw artwork, I silently hope that they'll lose interest before making their way to the older, more emo volumes of yore. I was just a 20-year old kid back then. I didn't know any better.

Now we're in the bronze age of Moleskine. These notebooks are where all my comic scripts are born, and where I sketch people on trains and other public places to inform future, more "serious" drawings. The only thing the Moleskine doesn't do so well is absorb ink. Sure, there's the watercolor notebook, but that's just too precious! I want a notebook that lets me sketch people in pencil, just like in the sketchbook, but also allows me to ink over my drawings with a dip pen. So I'm going to make one!

How To Make a Low-Rent Moleskine Notebook

The first thing I did was cut all the pages for my notebook. I'm using bristol board to fulfill my need for a "cartooning" sketchbook. You can use any type of paper you please, but be aware that thicker paper is more difficult to work with. I used a ruler to measure, then marked off the dimensions of my paper according to the original Moleskine size -- their pages are 7"x5.5". It's a good size. These papers must be folded in half, though, so I'm marking off 11" x 7" pages which will later be folded in half. I absentmindedly marked my dimensions backwards in this visual aid, as I now see. Darn it. I should tell you now that I figured out a lot of this stuff from Michael Shannon's Moleskine tutorial, but mine isn't as fancy as his.

Next, I used an x-acto knife on a hard, unvaluable surface to cut out all of my pages according to the guidelines I drew above. Depending on how thick you want your notebook, you can cut out as many pages as you like, as long as it's a multiple of six. I wanted my notebook to be three signatures thick, so I cut out 18 pages.

SEE THE REST OF THE TUTORIAL UNDER THE CUT!

What I'm doing in this picture is something called "folding". It is important to fold the sheets you cut out so that you'll have a nice Moleskine-sized book rather than a bunch of sheets of paper stapled together. I "kissed corners," as my first grade teacher explained folding to me, and used a pencil to make my folds sharp. I did this with each and every one of my sheets of paper.

Here's where my blog title comes from. I have "packed six" of the folded sheets of paper together, like so, to make a signature. Of course I've done some sloppy cutting and whatnot, but the most important thing is to align all the spines and make sure the bottom of the stack is flush. It's okay if the top and side edges are a bit crooked, or cattywompus (sp?) as Dr. Lavender likes to say.

I made three signatures in all, each with six of my folded papers.

Who knew that that binder clip would ever see the light of day again? I collected all my signatures together, making sure that the spines and bottoms were even, clipped them, and marked the spine for where they will be sewn later. All the needle holes have to be in the same place for the book's signatures to be even in the finished book.

Then I separated the signatures again. To make holes for the sewing needle, I folded the spine over the edge of my CD case. You can use the edge of any unvaluable surface. I used a pin to poke holes in the markings I made earlier. I did this for all three of the signatures, one signature at a time. Again, make sure that the spine and bottoms of each page are even as you do this.

Check it out! Here are my three signatures with their perfectly placed holes.

And now for the sewing supplies. Needles, thread, and wax.

I waxed a couple inches of the needle side of the thread, since I didn't double the thread like when I sew fabric. Don't double up the thread. The wax will hold it in place (or should, it slipped a few times for me). Thread a long strand, you can cut it later.

Sewing the first signature now. I left a little bit of thread (about 2 inches) hanging out where I started. I just threaded the holes I already punched.

In this pic, I'm marrying the first signature to the second signature. When I finished threading the holes in the first signature, I entered the thread into the first hole of the second signature, then went back and forth between rethreading the first holes and threading the second signature's holes for the first time, to "marry" the two together. Then I "married" the second signature with the third, last signature using the same back-and-forth threading. Isn't this complicated to explain. Does it make sense to you? There was also bloodshed and I'd recommend a thimble if you're using thick paper.

Here's what your spine will look like when you've threaded all the signatures together.

Paste gauze onto your new spine, and cut away excess gauze. I know that my cutting techniques are the best you've ever seen.

When the glue dries, trace your little Moleskine innards onto another sheet of paper, which will ultimately be the inside cover. Trace the spine, too so you'll know where to fold and glue. You'll notice that I've drawn an extra panel on the right there, with some tabs. I like and use the Moleskine pocket, so I made a pocket for my low-rent Moleskine.

Cut out and fold like so...

Now glue the spine of your signature pack onto the spine of the inside cover. Also, glue the tabs down to make a pocket. I sandwiched a ribbon between the signature spine and inside cover spine to make a little notebook.

Isn't this fun? I then traced and cut out the outside cover onto a piece of cardboard, a material of which I have an abundance. You can use something a little more classy if you wish. Just make sure it's sturdy enough to meet your needs, and will hold glue well. To finish, I glued the whole outside surface of that "inside cover" page, and glued all over the cardboard and married them together. To make sure the glue held well, I closed the book and pressed it between my two CD cases. Or dictionaries or whatever are fine.

Now I have a ghetto moleskine!

You Are My Life

Spring is in the air, and what's spring without a couple of bunnies? The new seasons of our favorite TV shows are starting up again, but it's reruns here at Bibliowhining. Reruns for the old-time fans, that is. Schoolwork beckoning and spring break in the near future, this entry features a fan favorite: 2008's Bun Home, my parody of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which also satirizes intellectual posturing. I hope you enjoy this bit of sequential storytelling. I hope to turn it into a graphic novel someday.

You can tell this is old material by my naive use of the blue pencil. Blue pencil is the devil, and turned my early self-publishing endeavors into a nightmare. I recommend clicking on the below image to enlarge it and make it more readable.



It seems that many who didn't grow up reading comics have a hard time understanding them. It's no longer the case that everything that comes out must be approved by the Comics Code Authority, so cartoonists have as much freedom as filmmakers, and many have taken advantage of this. Unfortunately, looking at the available comics/graphic novels in libraries and even many comic book stores, it would seem that there are only three options: Manga, Superheroes, or long self-pitying memoirs completely drained of any humor or imagination. Once Fun Home won Time Magazine's "Book of the Year," comics -- I'm sorry, "graphic novels" were suddenly on everyone's radar, inspiring many copycat books, depressing and uncreative autobiographies about someone's failed hipster romance or experiences with the AIDS virus or physical abuse. While it's fine that these books are published as they are surely a comfort to some people, they aren't the only genre available in the adult comics medium. Libraries typically order only these new books which appear in the reviews they read, and the history of comics is ignored. There is a lot of autobiographical stuff that is interesting, and Fun Home, though not my taste, is at least very well drawn, but a lot of the bios and nonfiction that have come out since just don't do it for me.

In general, libraries started to collect movies only in the past 20 years. And yet, all the DVD and VHS collections I've seen represent the entire history of film, in all genres -- classics such as Night of the Hunter and Taxi Driver and The Wizard of Oz are available on the shelves right next to the new releases. I wish that the comics medium was given the same respect in libraries. I don't enjoy reading the trendy autobiographical comics that are being churned out today, and it's frustrating not to see my old favorites on the shelves for others to discover. Fun Home may have come out recently and catalyzed a mainstream popularity of alternative comics, but that doesn't mean that the medium suddenly came into existence in the year 2005, or that there is no older material of value. Also, even new titles that are humorous/satirical/literary are being ignored for some reason -- maybe they aren't being reviewed?

I encourage librarians to order a greater variety of adult comics for their collections; older titles, and also different genres besides superhero, manga, and autobiography. Fantagraphics is constantly coming out with a variety of quality titles, and they also publish reprints of classic comic strips which I'm sure younger readers will find fascinating. The librarian at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (formerly the Cartoon Research Library) is a very helpful person to ask about "key" comics that should be in the collection. I have emailed her for several class assignments, and her responses are always incredibly quick and thorough. Or just ask me!

Though I guess I was sort of an underground cartoonist since age 8, drawing strips which lovingly made fun of other kids in class, I first became aware of "real" underground comics when I was a 13-year old kid browsing the stacks of a public library in South Jersey...I checked out the book Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art by Roger Sabin, and became fascinated by R. Crumb. Of course, the Internet being off my radar at the time, and the library being lacking in actual comics (the title I mentioned was more of a history book about comics), I was unable to explore the medium more. I mean, I probably shouldn't have been reading R. Crumb comics at age 13, but you get my point, right?

Dangerous

Improper cataloging can be dangerous ;)

For this Bibliowhining article, I'm going back to my humble beginnings as a librarian blogger to share my experiences with cataloging comic books -- specifically, comics of the serialized magazine-type variety. I originally wrote this guide for a couple of my friends and colleagues in IST 616: Organization and Access, but I hope it will be helpful to other librarians and library workers. It's not a complete tutorial on cataloging comic books, but it deals with one of the most common problems: how to determine the title of the work.

Happy New Year! I hope that 2010 will bring more dialogue between librarians and comic book industry professionals so that future generations will be able to find that special issue with the utmost ease.

Let the lessons begin after the cut.

How to Find the Title of a Comic Book
By Chrissy Spallone, MSLIS Candidate, Syracuse University
Graduate Assistant, Cataloging Dept., Bird Library

Recently, someone at Archie comics came up with the brilliant marketing plan to have Archie choose between Betty and Veronica.

(spoiler alert!)




But what is the title of this particular comic book? Is this issue part of the “Archie” series, or is it a separate miniseries titled “Archie Marries Veronica” or “Archie Marries Veronica: “The Proposal””?

Here’s the title page, which is what is usually referred to when cataloging books:



The title is the same as on the front cover. Also, the issue number is not present, only the information indicating that this is part 1 of this particular story. The issue # on the front cover is #600, but if we were to catalog this the way we catalog a regular book, it would be separated from the rest of the comic books under the “Archie” title. Plus, it might be filed physically somewhere after “Archie and Friends” and before “Archie Meets the Punisher,” two “spin off” titles separate from “Archie”.

But let’s look at the indicia, located on the opposite page from the inside back cover (click to enlarge):



The indicia never lies: here we can see that this comic book is under the “Archie” title. It’s “Archie” #600. On the front cover and title page, liberties are often taken for artistic or promotional reasons. But the indicia in the back almost always has a typed-out, dry listing of the official information. Catalogers should look at this when making decisions about titles, etc.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this information with your favorite librarian.

By the way, "In The Back" would have been so much more appropriate for this entry title.

In the Back

Now that I'm done with my database proposal, it's time to put that project out of my mind, relax with my little blog, and share some cartooning best practices -- I can't stress this enough. Always have a little notebook on hand and capture gestures from the people around you whenever you can. Most of them won't notice, as you'll soon see.

The primary reason for selecting campus classes as opposed to online ones is the presence of real human entities. It's fun to make connections with them and form relationships. They're also fun to draw! Can you ID these unique iSchool friends? Is one of them you? Eventually I'll comment with a list of names, but just play along with this little game I've created and see how many of your colleagues and professors you can identify.

Let the games begin AFTER THE CUT.


1.


2. Bonus points if you can guess the classes I was in when I sketched these.


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9. This one is pretty easy, even thought I think I drew him "meaner" than he actually is.


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11. This is from last year...I think the fishnets were a creative addition.


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14. Three people to identify here.


15. I don't think the sketch is all that accurate, but the cute shoes are a good clue. Hand and foot studies are very useful.



So what is the point of all this, besides priming me for more "important" projects, like silly comics about the Chinese guys? Do you think draftsmanship will become obsolete as we move toward a paperless, virtual, Twilight-Zone like dystopia? I hope not. I'll post the identities eventually, so please have a shot at guessing them!

Also: Thank you, iSchool for responding to our queries and adding more in-person classes to the system catalog -- er, the course catalog. I'm sure that I and many of my colleagues will be populating those tables with our charming physical presences.

After awhile, dystophile.