“Curated and edited by cartoonist Reimena Yee, the library was developed to provide language for creators, readers and other colleagues in the ecosystem to speak about comics on its own terms.
Comics form a unique narrative medium with its own formalistic and visual-linguistic qualities that are not found elsewhere. It is also a chimaeric, multimodal medium: it is not film, not verse, not visual art, not rhetoric, but it can contain many of the devices of those mediums as well as its own native ones.
The library is an attempt to lift the veil. It identifies and catalogues comics devices that are unique and specific to the medium. Sometimes it may catalogue devices that are analogous to those from other mediums, but only if they are transformed into a particular formal expression initiated by and in service of its adoption into comics. The library is supported by examples from various artists across different genres and styles.
The library is grounded by these philosophies:
- By comics, for comics
- Collaboration with scholars and educators
- Accessible, open, free and constant
- Recognition of past work”