I was seven years old when I read my first comic book. Asterix and Caesar's gift has never really ranked amongst my favourites in the long-running French children's comic book series but the impact it had on me at the time was nothing less than life-changing.

Response to a plethora of historical forces that devalue comics, including hostile cataloging standards, led to the creation of the Best practices for cataloging comics and graphic novels using RDA and MARC21. The guide supports comics cataloging using current standards, recognizing the great diversity in this sequential art medium, as well as needs particular to public, academic and special libraries. With this, and related current and future projects, the Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table (GNCRT) hopes to promote equity in comics cataloging, and improve patron access to comics.

This article presents a case study reflecting on the first two years of collecting crowdfunded comics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The case study demonstrates the significant resource investment required to start such a specialized collection, and that the project met its goal to diversify the comics collection by adding titles from BIPOC and LGTBQ+ creators.

Applying a Linked Open Data (LOD) approach to modeling the visual structure and content of comic books and graphic novels enables the description of these works to be enhanced through the process of semantic enrichment. This strategy may be particularly impactful for graphic medicine, a non-exclusive genre of comics that communicate medical and healthcare information, including personal stories of illness. However, the metadata for these works may lack references to healthcare-related vocabulary, thesauri or ontology that would more precisely describe their contents. This material may include pages and panels that illustrate specific medical topics, such as symptoms, side-effects or treatments — subjects that often overlap with other healthcare challenges, including mental health and illness. Exploring an LOD approach for describing comics content may potentially enhance the discoverability of this material and its ability to be remixed and reused, and better connected to other information resources.

How can instructors and librarians collaborate to provide the interpretive scaffolds for students to critically engage with visual primary materials? The authors, an English faculty member and a faculty instruction librarian at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester (UNH Manchester), used graphic fiction as the textual basis of information literacy (IL) instruction, encouraging students to interpret primary and secondary sources using visual literacy heuristics and critical inquiry skills. Their student-centered, inquiry-based IL session for a Capstone Shakespearean Adaptations course focused on critical thinking and research question design. Using woodcuts from primary historical texts and images from contemporary graphic fiction adaptations of Macbeth, the instructors decentralized the classroom, empowering students to ask probing questions about illustrations of witches in early modern English source materials. Students used their questions to explore interpretations of visual depictions of powerful women in historical primary texts and contemporary graphic adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Guided by the instructors, students decoded images using the metadiscourse of graphic fiction; generated questions to inform their own inquiry into the topic; applied their IL skills to new texts; and interrogated the biases of received narratives about women who transgress societal norms and expectations, both in the early modern period and in the contemporary world.