About
The Creators:
Gene Ambaum is a library guy who lives in the Pacific Northwest. In his spare time he reads and dreams of having more spare time. He co-created and wrote Unshelved.
Willow Payne publishes a new The Haunted Skull comic ever month — give them a read! She is a Massachusetts-based artist who has also worked with Gene on Unshelved Book Club comics and their as-yet incomplete epic Barbarian Girl: The Burning Blade of the Badlands. She graduated from The Center for Cartooning Studies in 2014 and will inevitably take over the comics world. Her favorite authors include Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Philip Pullman. She took over as the artist for Library Comic in June of 2019 with strip 581.
Pat Coleman is an artist, musician, cat dude, and library person by marriage who lives outside of Chicago. He started working on Library Comic in November 2018, with comic 496, and ended in May 2019 with comic 580.
Chris Hallbeck is a super nice guy and an ace cartoonist who co-created Library Comic and drew it from November 2016 to October 2018 (comics 1 to 495). He lives in the middle of the country away from prying eyes, like Ben Kenobi out in the Dune Sea (but with a family). In his spare time he makes things from LEGO. He’s also the creator of Pebble and Wren and Maximumble. He also drew Unshelved for a while toward the end of its run.
Three of us have extremely understanding wives, one of us aspires to that.
Our Characters: (click on an image to see all strips containig that character) (Images will be updated to Willow’s style as the characters appear in the comics.)
Lucy: Assistant Manager. Still believes it’s possible to be in control.
Martin: Reference Librarian. Books mean a lot to him. (Maybe a little too much.)
Gigi: Library Assistant. Likes to quote rules and procedures to everyone.
Laura: Library Assistant. Total geek.
Esther: Young Adult Librarian. Knows what’s good for you.
Jody: Library Assistant. Pragmatic problem solver.
Mike: Library Assistant. Hates the way the library is run, so he runs a little library of his own.
Luke and Mildred are the library pages.
Stephanie: Library Assistant. Sick of the sound of your voice before you say the first word.
Grant: Librarian. “We live in the future, stop clinging to the idea that books have to be physical objects.”
Jane: Children’s Librarian. Works hard to get kids into books. Parties harder.
Howard: Ghost. Donated the original collection and the building to the city.
Book Reviews
Gene reviews a few books each week that he really loved and read (or reread) recently. There’s no other criteria than that.
If you wrote a book you’d like him to review, your best bet is to email him a quick pitch for it.
Full disclosure: Gene gets a lot of review copies. He prefers epubs or PDFs if you want to send him one. Submitting a book for review is no guarantee a book will be reviewed (or reviewed in a timely fashion).