they are sooooo clearly mentally lumping them all in with newspaper-style comic strips

ours has a lot of them lumped into the area with like...diary of a wimpy kid

oh...oh no...

Ihdreniel: Remind them that BRENDA STARR REPORTER was a thing, and THAT was a dramatic comic. Was THAT humor? No. may have enjoyed that one as a kid >.> I'd also say show them things like FABLES and SANDMAN, but...well with SANDMAN, problematic origins. >.>

Dick Tracy was a newspaper cartoon too and if I'm remembering right, that leaned heavy into noir tropes at minimum

LOL

Flashback to when the Waldenbooks at the mall first started stocking manga when I was a teen but they'd put it with the baby picture books and I was bringing them to the employees like "um y'all should reconsider"

Maus. That's all I'm saying.

persepolis too

I'm disappointed especially that this is the library bookstore. I'd expect librarians to know better.

the library itself has a whole section for graphic novels! but the library bookstore is run by volunteers who have their own little organization that fundraises for the library

oh nooooooooo

it is so wild to me to still see people conflating medium with genre...

Reminds me of the good old days where preteens could pick up borderline hentai from the local "cult classic" section of the video store...

...on VHS

Also gore

Ninja Scroll might've changed my brain chemistry on a fundamental level ngl

oh man maus and persepolis were the exact counterexamples i was thinking of ty

Yeah our bookstore is alao run by older volunteers. The library staff is busy with the actual library.

Here it's a small group called Friends of the Library

same here

Ditto in my town, too. Last time I was in the library book store I think think the guy running the till was maybe 17

Flashback to the single graphic novel shelf in the children's section that contained superman, gon, hideously gruesome collections of urban legends and true crime, banana fish, a few lost issues of elfquest, Pokemon, and usagi yojimbo

Last summer I went on a bit of a Junji Ito kick and was slightly horrified to see that my library had most of his works labeled as "children's media".
(I did contact them all "guys, you're going to traumatise some poor five-year-old".)

oh noooo I can just imagine my five year old nephew picking up Uzumaki