May Questions - Anthologies

Quote from James Baker on May 18, 2024, 12:11 pm

This month's theme is anthologies and we're discussing these titles:

• Drawing Lines: an anthology of women cartoonists by various (Dark Horse)
• Sensory: life on the spectrum edited by Bex Ollerton (Andrews McMeel)
• All We Ever Wanted edited by Matt Miner, Eric Palicki, and Tyler Chin-Tanner (Wave Blue World)

Here are some questions about the books to think about to get the discussion going:

• Some of the comics in Drawing Lines deal with particularly heavy topics such as PTSD and body autonomy, as is the case with many anthologies not all the stories included are described on the blurb. How, then, can we provide useful advice about the interest and appropriateness of the contents of an anthology to patrons without having to read through it completely?
• Sensory shows how different the experiences of different people with autism can be. How important is it to have this diversity available in a single book, both for neurodiverse and neurotypical readers?
• One of the strengths often associated with anthologies is the diversity they can capture. Does this mean that the specific theme of hopefulness about the future that runs through all the stories in All We Ever Wanted makes this anthology less important for our collections than others? Why or why not?

And some that are related to comics anthologies in libraries:

• When giving readers’ advisory for an anthology, is it more important to consider whether it includes writers and artists a patron particularly likes, or those the patron particularly dislikes?
• Comics manage a delicate balance between images and text to tell stories as effectively as possible, how does this balance change in the extremely short comics found in anthologies?
• Short story anthologies are often treated as distinct from other fiction in library collections, is this something we should consider for comics anthologies as well? Why or why not?