Fresh Start
So Unshelved wrapped not quite two weeks back, and if there’s one thing both nature and webcomics abhor, it’s a vacuum. You can’t have the world go on without a daily (mostly) library comic written by a librarian, not while Gene Ambaum is drawing breath, by glob! Thus, Unshelved finished on Friday the 11the, and on Monday the 14th Ambaum and Chris Hallbeck launched Library Comic¹.
It’s not Unshelved. It’s a completely new comic written by the same guy, and drawn by the same guy that did the last significant chunk of Unshelved. It’s set in a library, it features overworked, underfunded library staff including cranky reference types, nerdy types, childrens librarian types, all interacting with patrons. None of this is in any way familiar or what you have seen before. These are not the librarians you’re looking for. Move along.
Okay, look, it’s a workplace; there’s only so many character archetypes you get in any workplace, much less one as specific as a library. Is Martin the Mirror Universe Collen? Is Dewey reborn in Esther, Mel in Lucy, or Tamara in Laura? No, no, maybe. Look, Ronald D Moore took the grittiness and moral ambiguity of Deep Space Nine and mapped it to another set of pre-existing characters and ideas to produce Battlestar Galactica; similar themes, similar tropes, in service of a different story. Same deal here.
Ambaum will have ideas from the day job for approximately forever, and Hallbeck will infuse these characters with their own quirks; the are professionals, dammit, and as long as a community (that would be librarians) is looking to see their lives and experiences in comic form, A&H are going to meet that need². And given that libraries are meeting so many needs in so many communities, giving the selfless people that work in them their own laugh-chuckles seems like a pretty fair tradeoff.
NB: This will likely be the last posting of the week; I’ll be in transit or in a pie coma for the next several days, in observance of American Thanksgiving. If you celebrate (or don’t; lookin’ at you, CANADA), please go safely and enjoy the respite (from life, from me, from whatever).
Spam of the day:
Let’s talk!
Over the past few months the written-in-Portuguese, originating-from-Russia spam claiming to be from a frustrated woman neglected by her husband who wants sexytimes from me has undergone a slight but noticeable change: the age of the fake woman in question has been adjusted downwards from 47 years, to 37 years, and now to 27 years. Spammers, no 27 year old woman has ever been referred to as a MILF, just a suggestion. Oh, yeah, and the woman in the photo is maybe 23, so there’s that, too.
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¹ Whoa, guys, don’t give away the story with the title! Spoilers!
² The fact that said community temperamentally inclined to buying a metric squatload of books I’m sure has no bearing whatsoever on the choice of topic and audience.
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