Seeing Lando Calrissian at my local library. I wish librarians were this cool when I was a kid.

Librarians certainly changed since I was in elementary school.  

I saw Lando Calrissian at local library, promoting a Comic-con coming to the library.  A very cool Star Wars standee.

Besides it being cool, it got me thinking.  I remember getting the sense when I was in elementary school that comic books really didn’t count as real books.  Reading them didn’t count as real reading.

What changed?

Maybe we finally realized that kids have been reading comic books for nearly a century.  Maybe because we were losing kids to TV, video games, and the internet and other things.

Maybe we finally realized that comics can be literature.  They use writing to tell a story after all.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic should definitely be considered a work of literature.  

And certainly not a work for younger children, just a heads up on that.  

Alan Moore expanded the comic genre with his work on The Watchman.  

 

Frank Miller brought gritty violence to the story of the Batman in 1986.

But I think mostly I am jealous that my librarian never advertised a comic-con when I was growing up.

These lucky kids.