This guide was created by Grant Young, one of the Academic Librarians for the Arts and Humanities, and Frederik Kohlert. It focuses specifically on comics and graphic novels. Depending on your interests, you may also find some other resources relevant to comics studies in these subject guides:
The UEA Library has thousands of books and articles related to comics and graphic novels. This guide will highlight some of the key resources - encyclopedias, comics collections, journals and other websites that will help you. And because comics can sometimes be hard to locate (on the shelves and in the catalogue) make sure you look at the Tips for finding comics and comics studies literature in the Library (below).
While there's lots of information on wikipedia and other websites, these online reference books may be more reliable
These academic journals are available through UEA
The Comics Grid (ISSN-2048-0792), 2011-
Articles from these journals are indexed within the Library Search, but they can also be accessed via the links above or the Journal A-Z (type in title or the ISSN) - if you go in this way (rather than Google) then you shouldn't have to hunt for the log-in or pay money!
The UEA Library is rapidly growing its comic and graphic novel resources, but finding them can sometimes be a challenge! This section will give you some tips on how to track them down.
The Library uses the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) to organise its physical books, which is different from the Dewey system common in public and school libraries and can take a bit of getting used to. Most books about comics or comic collections will be in the PN6700s, within the Literature collections on the first floor (note that there is also an oversized sequence elsewhere on that floor). But some will be in the Art collections between NC1300s-1700s, which deals with "Caricature, Pictorial humor and satire" and includes comics and animations. Others will be scattered throughout the library because they deal with particular subjects (e.g. Maus is in the Holocaust section, D804.3) or are intended for particular audiences (e.g. children's and young persons' comics are in the PXs). And the majority of the library's new books are now e-only! So you will need to use the Library search to ensure you find everything...
A large and growing proportion of the Library's books (and almost all of the journal literature) are only available electronically. So in addition to browsing the shelves and accessing resources from reading lists, you will need to become skilled at using the Library's search tools. Most academic libraries, including UEA, use standard Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to tag their books and many articles are also tagged with these subject terms. The main ones for comics and graphic novels are "Comic books, strips, etc." and "Graphic novels". You can use these as Subject searches in the main Library Search or in the Books+ search (go to their Advanced Searches and select subject). The search could be narrowed by adding more keywords or alternatively filtering your results.
But if you're wanting to include journal articles and be more comprehensive, use "comic*" as the search term rather than "Comic books, strips etc" and search using keyword rather than just subject. Note that the asterisk (*) will pick up things that have the term "comic" or "comics".
Wanting to find all the books and journal articles related to comics studies (spoiler: it's a lot of stuff)?
Try pasting this into the main 'Search Everything' box:
("comic*" OR "graphic novel*")
This is asking the search to bring back everything that has "comic*" as a keyword (title, author, subject tag abstract etc) or "graphic novel*" as a keyword (the brackets and OR are important here). It will bring back most of the books and journal articles we have. Warning: this will bring back more than 150,000 resources!!!...
Want to narrow this down further?
Use the results filters (e.g. try ticking book or academic journal or setting a date range)
or combine this search with some other terms.
For example, try:
("comic*" OR "graphic novel*") japan*
Unfortunately there is no easy way to do a search that reliably limits the results to books that actually are comics or graphic novels and excludes all the secondary literature about them.
Searching in Books+ or limiting the Everything Search to just Books will cut out the journal literature.
And if you're looking for books by a specific author, then put their surname as Author in the Advanced Search on Books+ and combine it with ("comic*" OR "graphic novel*") as keywords - this will bring up works by that author as opposed to stuff that's about them.
Adding Fiction or Anthology as keywords also might help - but it might exclude non-fiction or autobiographical graphic narratives and other items that you might want.
A few of the Library's comics resources are held in Special Collections, because they are very valuable or rare. The following search in the Books+ search (NOT the Everything search) should pull all these up (along with a few less relevant items!):
("comic*" OR "graphic novel*") "02 Archives"
These more general resources may also be of some use to those undertaking comic studies
