Watchmen Sticker

[Mohammed Faerber]

Individuallykiss cut vinyl sticker. Semi gloss finish. 3 x 4 inch max size includes a thin white border around the sticker. Not recommended for automobile use. Perfect for placing on your laptop, notebook or almost anywhere your imagination leads!

HBO's OOH initiative around "Watchmen" is the network's latest effort to immerse smartphone viewers in a mobile AR experience tied with scenes from its shows. To promote the final season of hit show "Game of Thrones," HBO in April created a branded Snapchat AR lens that showed a virtual ice dragon when people pointed their smartphone cameras at landmarks such as the Flatiron Building in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The campaign for "Watchmen" expands on that idea by transforming billboards throughout New York and Los Angeles into computer-generated entertainment.

HBO is among the brands that have combined mobile technology with OOH advertising, which not only is a powerful channel that urges consumers to visit physical locations, but also can trigger measurable responses through mobile devices. Constellation Brands' Modelo beer brand this month unveiled an OOH campaign for Day of the Dead, the annual celebration observed in Mexican culture, featuring a billboard that springs to life via AR. Coca-Cola's Fanta soda brand last month launched a similar campaign that let Snapchat users point their smartphones at billboards and posters to unlock digital content including shareable AR filters and sticker packs. McDonald's in August deployed an OOH promotion that included an integration with Snapchat to bring ad posters to life with AR imagery.

Meanwhile, spending on OOH ads grew 4.5% in 2018 over the previous year to reach $8 billion, per the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA). Digital OOH represented 29% of the total 2018 OOH revenue, but there were also increases in the four main formats: billboards, street furniture, transit and place-based.

Amie Wright iscurrently pursuing her MLIS degree at the University of WesternOntario. She has an Anthropology degree from the University of Calgaryand a History degree from Concordia University in Montreal. Aftergraduation Amie hopes to work in a public library system, focusing oncommunity programming and diversity services. She is an avid reader ofgraphic novels, and is eagerly awaiting the Watchmen movie coming outin March 2009.

Ten years ago, librarian M.R. Lavin wrote an article for SerialsReviews that asked, "Do graphic novels belong in libraries?" (1998,44). While much has changed in the intervening years, with graphicnovels now numbering amongst the highest circulating collections inpublic libraries, the question today is not if, but where they belongin the library?1 Are graphic novels, dueto their format, only suitable reading for teens and young adults, ordo they demand place and consideration in adult and/or literaturecollections? Further, what is our role as library professionals inconsidering this burgeoning medium?

Librarian Francisca Goldsmith (2005) has tackled these questions inher book, Graphic Novels Now, and she cautions that the library shouldnot be too quick to judge these collections nor limit perceptions oftheir use, especially regarding how libraries physically classify andsegment these collections to particular bibliographic areas.Goldsmith's suggestion bears special consideration as current Canadianpublic library graphic novel collections adhere to little uniformity inclassification, collection organization or designation. I will arguethat in spite of compelling arguments urging for an increased role ofgraphic novels in the library as a whole, graphic novels-especiallyfictional accounts-are often confined to the library's Young Adult (YA)collections, or are the victims of a confusing mix of classificationsthat leave library users perplexed as to the collections' scope andpurpose in the library. Graphic novels can span the varied realms offiction, non-fiction, historical documentary, and can include Holocaustmemoirs and dystopian fantasies, yet their confusing classificationsleave their breadth of information inaccessible to many library users.

An example of this confusing mix can be found by consulting publiclibrary catalogues in Canada. The Calgary Public Library has classifiedPersepolis-an autobiographical account of Marjane Satrapi's childhoodduring the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979-as Adult Fiction; bycontrast, the London Public Library has classified Persepolis accordingto the Dewy Decimal System (DDS) and has placed it in their Young Adultcollection. This disjuncture is further reflected in library andacademic scholarship surrounding graphic novels. Literary critic EdwardSaid, like Goldsmith, has made a case for the mature and transformativequalities of graphic novels, arguing that graphic novels "in theirrelentless foregroundingseemed to say what couldn't otherwise be said,perhaps what wasn't permitted to be said or imagined" (2002,ii). Yet in practice, graphic novels are often defined within the realmof teens and young adults, and are most often maintained in publiccollections by YA librarians.

To examine these issues and the thorny place of graphic novels inthe library, I will conduct a brief overview of relevant library andscholarly literature on graphic novels, as well as explore thecollections of four public library systems in Canada: the CalgaryPublic Library (CPL), the London Public Library (LPL), the TorontoPublic Library (TPL) and the Vancouver Public Library (VPL). Thesecatalogues have been chosen due to their extensive graphic novelcollections, and the overall size of their holdings and usership. Thisstudy however, is by no means comprehensive, but is rather intended asa preliminary investigation in the treatment of graphic novels inlarge, urban public libraries.

In this survey, I will analyze how graphic novels are classifiedand considered in the literature, as well as how they are classifiedand designated within the library catalogues and collections. For myanalysis of the library catalogues I will focus on a selection ofgraphic novels that fall in two categories blurring the line between YAand adult collections: non-fiction historical memoir and fictionalmature subject matter. The historical graphic novels include theHolocaust account, Maus (1986), by Art Spiegelman; the Iranian memoir,Persepolis (2003); and the historical novelization, Louis Riel: AComic-stripBiography (2003), by Chester Brown. The mature subject matter novelsinclude three vanguards of the graphic novel movement: Frank Miller'sBatman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), and Alan Moore's Watchmen(1987) and V for Vendetta (1989).

I will argue that graphic novels should be used in an increased wayby the public library, and that further, it is the role of the publiclibrary to utilize any and all resources to provide their users withinformative and challenging materials. One of the most moving accountsrecently published about the 1994 Rwandan genocide is not a novel, or abiography, but a fictional graphic novel, Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda(2006); yet it is possible that many adult readers would overlook thisresource due to lingering misperceptions about that format, orconfusing classifications (in the LPL this item is shelved in the TeenAnnex). Likewise, many interested teen and young adult readers mightnot think to search for graphic titles within the DDS overlookingsuch titles as Joe Sacco's excellent journalistic graphic account,Palestine (2001; about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) due to itsclassification within the Dewey section 956.9 Middle East: Syria,Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel, Jordan (as in the CPL catalogue).

Part of the confusion regarding graphic novels as a genre has to dowith the broad range of subject matter and format. As noted above, thegraphic novel is not genre-specific and it can cover the realms offiction, non-fiction, manga, memoir, fantasy, science fiction,historical fiction, historical document, and others. Current publiclibrary collections in Canada include not only Maus, Batman, Louis Rieland Watchmen, as mentioned above, but also the government document, The9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2006); and even a graphic guide toMiles Davis for Beginners (1994). Common to these many variations isthe definition of graphic novels proposed by graphic artist and mediumvanguard Scott McCloud: graphic novels as "sequential art." However,McCloud notes that within this definition lays a spectrum ofpossibility: juxtaposed images, iconography, and the negotiationbetween language and pictures (1994, pp. 8-9, 27, 49). Nonetheless,perhaps due to graphic novels' use of imagery, the first and mostcommon treatment of graphic novels within library and academicscholarship is still within the realm of teen and young adultliterature, often as pedagogical tools or aids to literacy.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) in Wisconsin provideseducational services on children's and youth literature for librariansand educators. Their website has a special page devoted to graphicnovels which they describe as "an essential component of librarycollections for both children and teenagers[that has] enormouspotential for classroom use" (2008, Introduction section, 1). RollieJames Welch (2007), author of The Guy-Friendly YA Library, supportsthis opinion of graphic novels and recommends them as an excellentresource for getting teens, especially young men, into the library.School librarian Mary Jane Heaney (2007) has also noted this aspect ofengaging reluctant readers. Heaney argues that the marriage of imageand text in graphic novels involves readers by providing visualizationin a high interest and pop culture format-a format that makes readingless threatening to reticent readers (2007, pp. 74). Heaney furtheradds that the benefit of graphic novels is not only to their readers,but also to the library itself, as graphic novels can energize thecollection, increase circulation statistics, and foster studentinvolvement in library clubs (2007, 74).

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