Queer Comics for LGBT History Month

October is LGBT History Month! Let us celebrate and read some recently published comics and graphic novels by queer creators and about queer characters and stories!

DIY Different

While gardening, cooking, and home improvement are what most people think of as do-it-yourself, or DIY, in a more general sense anything that you can pay someone else to do or buy ready-made, but do yourself, is do-it-yourself. Let’s DIY Different!

Whether you’re an incessant reader, enjoy binge-watching television shows, or love a long videogame session, it’s storytelling that drives many of our hobbies and passions. If you’d like to take this one step further and are looking to participate in the storytelling yourself, one fantastic possibility is through tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or Numenera. Grab yourself a few friends, some paper and pencils, a set of dice, check out the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook (& Dungeon Master’s Guide, & maybe the Monster Manual), and you’re ready to roll!

Graphic Medicine

Ever read a comic story with a character that has arthritis? How about someone who lives with anxiety and depression? PTSD? Food poisoning? If so, then you’re already familiar with Graphic Medicine!

Graphic Medicine is a genre of comics (with a website!) that examines the intersection of the comics medium with the discourses of healthcare, providing an accessible and impactful method of communicating and sharing illness narratives. These comics cover the spectrum, from published graphic novels (El Deafo), crowd-funded anthologies (Corpus), self-published web-comics (Kate or Die!) and zines ((No) Pain: A Guide to Injury Prevention for Cartoonists), with Graphic Medicine sometimes the focus of the work, other times simply present in a particular character or storyline.

#BookBingoNW2019: Comics

Comics is a magical and mysterious medium that can fill one or all of your Book Bingo card squares this summer! It’s up to you!

Take a look at this recent staff booklist of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Comics and Graphic Novels and maybe try out In Between, a collection of poetry comics by local creator Mita Mahato (and don’t forget to stop by the Ballard Branch where Mita will lead a graphic memoir workshop, Thursday, June 6^th @ 6pm).

For the hungry folks out there, maybe some Food-themed Comics & Manga is what you need in your life? Delicious in Dungeon (currently at 6 volumes of manga) is a dungeon-crawling adventure full of food, friends, and monsters (aka the food).

OverDrive Comics and ‘The Best We Could Do’

The Seattle Public Library has physical comics for children, teens, and adults available for checkout in all of our 27 locations, as well as through our mobile services. We also have comics available through our Hoopla Digital service. But did you know, amongst all of the mysteries, memoirs, and literary fiction e-books, that we also have approximately 1,700 “comic and graphic works” in our OverDrive collection?! This collection includes popular kids comics like the Narwhal and Jelly series, relatable webcomics such as “Sarah’s Scribbles,” award winners like Kindred… and even the 2019 Seattle Reads selection The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui!

Narwhal’s Otter Friend: Narwhal and Jelly Series, Book 4 by Ben Clanton
This is the fourth book of the Narwhal and Jelly aquatic graphic novel adventure series for early readers! While Narwhal enthusiastically accepts newcomer Otter into the friend-pod, Jelly reacts somewhat jelly-ously… (Clanton, a local author, won the Washington State Book Award for the first book in this series.)