Digital Comics and Critical Librarianship: What, Why and How: A Perspective from the UK

Digital comics are at the cutting edge of how imaginative, immediate, and emotionally engaging stories can be told in the twenty-first century. The creators of digital comics harness new and emerging technologies to create and distribute innovative forms of storytelling. The ways digital comics are created, published, and consumed means that they can circumvent traditional publishing routes and have the capacity to reflect and contribute to social and cultural change by foregrounding marginalized voices. Just as readers are able to engage with and enjoy these new expressive forms, it is vital that cultural institutions record and recognise these new methods of creative expression. This chapter describes the challenges of collecting digital comics as well as how a critical librarianship approach can maximize an academic library’s potential to be a more inclusive site for collection development and preservation.