Spider-librarians, Spider-librarians,
Do whatever spider-librarians do.
Spinning webs, catching crooks
Did you know, they read books?
Hello, your friendly neighbourhood Spider-librarian here. Guess what movie I just saw? I’ll give you a hint: It begins with ‘spider’ and ends with ‘homecoming.’ So if you guessed Spider-man: Homecoming you’d be correct.
Now I could tell you all about the Peter Parker based Spider-Man comics or the older Spider-Man movies that are available at the library. But that’s just too easy. More interestingly, and very minor spoilers here, is that in Spider-Man: Homecoming a character by the name of Aaron Davis makes an appearance. All you Spider-nerds out there know that Aaron Davis is the uncle of Miles Morales. For those of you not in the know, Miles Morales exists in an alternate-timeline where he picks up the mantle of Spider-Man after Peter Parker dies. Read about him NOW before speculation comes to fruition and they make a movie about Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-man. And speaking of reading ahead of the curve, I hear The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl will be making her way to television screens in the near future…
I also want to take a step back for a moment and talk about the link between comic books and movies. Now you might think the two mediums are as different as can be, but if you stop and think about it, they are both just series of images shown one after another. Movies just do it really fast, 24 frames-per-second fast to be exact. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud really, really stops and thinks about what comics are and how we perceive them. How movies and comics are similar (yet different) and even how the printed word is different (yet similar) to drawings—they are both scribbles on the page after all. Oh, and the book is in the form of a graphic novel, so it is literally filled with illustrative examples.
And if you like Understanding Comics, just know it is one of many (warning! the following term is oxymoronic) non-fiction graphic novels available at the library. And if you haven’t ever read one, a non-fiction graphic novels is a fantastically entertaining way to learn about such things as: statistics, climate change, economics, historical figures, and I could go on… but… my spider-librarian sense is tingling… someone must be in need of a book!
Spider-librarian, aka Alan, out.
