Review: Rex Libris: I, Librarian by James Turner

by Chriss Cornish published: February 6, 2008 No Comments

This Book Is About

In this first collection of librarian adventures, Rex must confront the powerful Space Warlord Vaglox and retrieve the overdue Principia Mathematica while his fellow librarians attempt to fend of a manifestation of blood-thirsty Vandals set on burning down the Middleton Library to the ground.

The astonishing story of the incomparable Rex Libris, Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library. From ancient Egypt, where his beloved Hepatia was murdered, to the farthest reaches of the galaxy in search of overdue books, Rex upholds his vow to fight the forces of ignorance and darkness. Wearing his super thick bottle glasses and armed with an arsenal of high technology weapons, he strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers, and can take on virtually any foe from zombies to renegade literary characters.

My Thoughts On This Book

Nigh invulnerable action librarians. Just what your life has been missing.

I discovered Rex Libris: I, Librarian at Comix Experience in San Francisco during my Thanksgiving vacation up north. It was interesting but the volume of lettering and level of shading turned me off. But I kept thinking about it, the whole vacation the graphic novel kept popping into my mind. So, when I got back into town I went down to Comic Kazi to see if they had a copy so I could take another look at the series.

It must have been that I was rushed towards the end of our visit to Comix Experience, because I had a lot easier time reading Rex Libris the second time around. There is a lot of lengthy lettering for a graphic novel, but if you start at the beginning you get eased into the volume of text so it feels natural as you go. When I’d first flipped through the book in San Francisco I’d started in the middle of the work and so the amount of lettering had felt distracting at the time.

The art style has a very geometric, computer-drawn look; as if Flash and Etch-a-Sketch had a love child. But it’s carried off well enough that the illustration has a fresh kind of feel to it, with emotion and expression successfully conveyed.

The writing’s pretty good and humorous. My favorite line is when Rex tells a young couple necking in the library to cut it out and the awed youth tells his date, “The Librarian has spoken, Sally! We dare not disobey!”

The first scene involves a demon samurai who wants to check out a copy of Evil Made Easy without a library card. Things get ugly when Rex stands on library rules. Fortunately, thanks to a quick trip to the reference section, Rex is able to discover the demon samurai’s weakness and defeat it. Oh, and the first mission involves snowman-based alien lifeforms.

And I rather like the idea that, in James Turner’s world, insurance doesn’t pay you for damages resulting from the incident you’re insured against. Rather, insurance keeps the incident from happening. So, if you’re insured against fire than you aren’t flammable. It’s an amusing idea and a convenient “that’s why” catch-all device for things like breathing in space and so on.

The characters are fun, as well. They’re: Rex Libris, the main character, who was a librarian in the Library of Alexandria and now works for Toth at the Middletown Library; The Administrator, Toth, who’s the Egyptian god of writing and has an obsessive need to keep the library dust precisely arranged in order to keep the universe in order; The Sphinx, who guards the sci-fi portal to the underground base beneath the library (aren’t you glad part of your commute doesn’t involve solving riddles for Greek monsters?); the beautiful Hepatia Krupskaya, new librarian at Middleton and recent SAS course graduate; Circe, former Greek goddess known best for luring men and turning them into pigs, who has let go of her angst in her olderage and is also a librarian at Middleton (and bakes awesome cookies); Simonedes, Rex’s telekinetic roommate beneath the library, who was turned into a canary by Circe and harbors world domination urges.

The premise of the work is that it’s the graphic novelization of Rex Libris’ autobiography, so there’s occasional interferences from the publisher (but not in a crazy Excel Saga kind of way).

Shadetastic Or Blankcity: How Well This Shaded?

Rex Libris isn’t shaded. All of the colors are solid and range from gray to black, with shapes stacked on each other to create an illusion of shading. Again, part of the computer-drawn visual. It works for the most part, though a later issue I looked at had a word bubble with light gray lettering on a slightly darker gray, which was hard to read. I didn’t have any particular problem following action, reading text or differentiating objects in I, Librarian, though.