Missed It: The CBLDF's ALA Panel

Here's a long post at an insider's web site describing a panel of heavy-hitters from the comics world speaking at the just-past ALA annual conference. The most compelling material to me is the discussion by Neil Gaiman that the embrace of graphic novels by librarians was a key factor in their current legitimacy, which is something that doesn't get considered as much as it should and is an interesting mechanism besides, once you sit and think about it. The one potentially troublesome thing that jumps out at me is in the description of the Gordon Lee case, which becomes in its article cameo a battle on behalf of a retailer making a mistake when I think the key factor and maybe the only important factor wasn't the retailer's behavior but the crappy law involved in shaping the direction of his prosecution. Even though librarians might see Lee's mistake as perfectly understandable and the kind of mistake they might make as opposed to many of the retailers who seemed to see it as proof Lee should have been stuffed in a rocket and shot straight to hell for a mistake they'd never in 100 million years make, I hope the discussion in whatever context stays on the point of law.