Susan Lee is a busy, creative person wears a lot of hats. (That's probably why we get along.) As a playwright, a filmmaker, a screenwriter, a teacher, and a painter, Susan has made her mark in many different fields. I know she's made her mark on me as a director and as a friend.
I recently interviewed her at length about her new graphic novel and webseries - both based on Mastermind by Michael Patrick Sullivan - as well as other projects she has lined up.
I thought readergirlz would like what she had to say about strong characters:
"What motivates me is when a piece speaks to me. As a director, it's always the language first. If something isn't well-written, I won't do it. [...] So I always want something that's smart and intelligent. Something that has characters who are complicated and rich. Characters you want to spend not just two hours with but want to take them home and make them dinner and dig even deeper into them. It has to make me want to explore why the characters are the way they are."
- and why she finds being a teacher so delightful:
"What I love about working with kids is how open and vulnerable they are. They're not afraid to tell you what they think. And when they grab on to something, they hold on for dear life. My favorite part is when they have a breakthrough and they achieve something they never thought they could. And to have them step back from their drawing or their painting and have them gasp in wonder at what they've created, there is not enough money in the world to compete with that. They astound me with their ability to create and with their openness and access to their emotions. They make very single day at work a pleasure and so very worthwhile."
Read our full-length interview at Bildungsroman! Share the link and help get the word about Susan's works so she can get an awesome publishing deal for the Mastermind graphic novel!
Important links...
Life On Its Side Productions: Website | Facebook | Twitter
Mastermind: Website | Webseries on YouTube | Facebook | Twitter
Susan's Blog: Diary of a Mid-Life Crisis
In dream library world, planning would probably be Step 1 in building a graphic novel collection. But in real library world, I didn’t make a plan for how to define, collect, catalog, process, and shelve graphic novels. I just started buying them.
As I’ve blithely added materials to my graphic-novel-and-nonfiction collection, I’ve run into all kinds of interesting questions: If I shelve my graphic novels by author, am I devaluing the role of artists? If I have a graphic adaptation of a novel, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, do I shelve it under the name of the adaptor, or the original author? Can I make a meaningful distinction between superhero comic books and other graphic novels? If I do make that distinction, where do I put series about heroes without superpowers? And don’t even get me started on nonfiction.
I find these questions inspiring, and I enjoy doing what I call “remerchandising” my collection. However, the tech services department doesn’t appreciate me doing what they call changing call numbers randomly and putting graphic novels stickers on whatever I feel like. Not only that, but since I started serving on the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee, people have started asking me these questions like I’m an expert, and I’ve realized that for some libraries, these unanswered questions are actually obstacles to building a great graphic novel collection.
So now that I’ve completed real library world Step 1 (buy a bunch of cool new stuff!), I’m ready for Step 2 (plan). In other words, I’m ready to try answering the inspiring questions. I don’t think there are necessarily right or wrong answers to these questions–it depends on your population, physical space, the conventions in your library system, etc.–but I do think that sharing answers is about a million times more efficient than operating in a vacuum. So I’m posting my planning questions here for you to consider, and hopefully share your answers to.
My three main questions are:
- What do you include in your graphic collection? Are books about graphic materials (like Understanding Comics), magazines like Wizard, how-to-draw books, and anime DVDs part of the mix?
- Do you subdivide your graphic novel collection? What are the sections? Manga/Other GN? Fiction/Nonfiction? Masks/No masks? Series/Standalone volumes?
- Do you organize the books by series title, title, or author? If you use more than one of those options, how do you decide when to use each one?
OK, I’ll go first.
- At my library, I like to treat the graphic collection like a special collection and I include anything that I think is related. I find that the circulation of relevant nonfiction and magazines increases when I shelve it with the graphic materials. However, not everyone agrees with me on this, so it may soon change.
- I have been subdividing my collection into manga, comic books, graphic novels, and graphic nonfiction, but we’re moving to interfiling everything because there are too many books that blur the lines.
- We’re going to give books in series call numbers based on their series title. Standalone volumes with one author will get call numbers based on the author’s name. Standalone volumes with a bunch of writers, artists, inkers, series editors, and character creators will be shelved by title.
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