libraries

After Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in 2004, the fate of Valiant's comic library was a mystery. Just one year later, the rights were snapped up by an investment group with the intent to revamp and revitalize Valiant's properties. It took some time, but in 2012, Valiant Entertainment emerged with familiar faces ready to take the publisher into the future. Now, just three years later, Valiant is home to a host of critically acclaimed series, and soon you'll be able to read almost all of them with nothing more than a library card. Hoopla has already locked down deals with publishers like DC, Dark Horse and Image, but starting today, it will also count Valiant among the members of its comic book collection. As a partner of the public library system, the app allows anyone with a library card at a participating location to access thousands of comics, as well as movies, books and music. With the addition of Valiant, series like Archer & Armstrong, Bloodshot and X-O Manowar will be available digitally, giving Hoopla nearly as diverse a line-up as any of the the paid comic reading apps available on the market.

The Dark Horse Comics catalog is an incredibly extensive and diverse collection of books ranging from sci-fi to horror and manga to fantasy and everything between. Since it was founded in 1986, Dark Horse has been home to the likes of Hellboy, Aliens, Sin City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Astro Boy, Blacksad, and a host of other fan-favorite characters and franchises. Now all those stories can be found at your public library thanks to a new deal with Hoopla, which will see 125 different Dark Horse trades and collections added to its catalog this week, with 900 planned by the end of the year. If you don’t know, Hoopla is a digital/streaming service that’s partnered with thousands of public libraries across the US to offer library members access to music, movies, books and comics through your mobile device. A month ago, Hoopla added Image Comics to its service, which already included DC and Vertigo, as well as IDW Publishing and Boom Studios offerings. Adding Dark Horse now means there will be close to 4000 comics alone within the app for you to borrow from the digital library.

Your local library is about to get an injection of Image Comics thanks to a new deal with Hoopla digital. Available through more than 4000 libraries in the United States and Canada, Hoopla offers a digital collection of movies, books, audio books, music and comics that bolsters your public library without the worry of being out of stock and the burden of late fees. We spent some time with the app this past week in advance of the new deal with Image Comics, and spoke with founder and owner of Hoopla digital, Jeff Jankowski, about the service and it's future as a place to find comics with ease.

Censorship is a serious issue. It's one of the reasons that we here at ComicsAlliance always show our support to organizations like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and rally behind creators who have been subjected to governmental restrictions on their work. Occasionally, though, there are incidents of people pushing to get books banned that slide right past concerning and directly into the world of hilarious ineptitude. Such is the case with Reverend Phillip Missick of Texas's amazingly named King of Saints Tabernacle Church, who pushed for the Cleveland, TX public library to remove manga like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight from its library, owing, of course, to it being a demonic product of Satan that would drag otherwise saintly children directly into the gaping maw of Hell itself. That, of course, is nothing new. What makes it amazing is that he didn't stop there, going so far as to declare pretty much everything around the manga to be the product of Satan, including a few Harry Potter toys, a bouquet of dried roses, and the actual room itself to be "occultic and demonic."

How did you celebrate Batman Day? If you missed it, the day of the Dark Knight was July 26, and libraries all over the country commemorated the occasions with some creative, literacy-encouraging activities for kids -- and apparently at one, a bear. Random House's library marketing wing partnered with DC Comics to send event kits to libraries, and also set up a Pinterest board for photos of libraries' various celebrations. Check out some of our favorite photos.

If you're still on the fence about paying for digital comics instead of their print counterparts, your local library could soon offer a very free workaround for reading single issue comics and graphic novels. Come July (tentatively, anyway), iVerse Media will launch Comics Plus: Library Edition, a new digital comics platform spanning HTML5 web browsers/mobile devices/tablets that participating li

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Music: Wavves frontman Nathan Williams is teaming with artist Nicholas Gazin for Negative Dad, a potentially 12-issue comic series about "...heshers, evil parents, cat people, juvenile delinquents with partially functioning mutant powers, aliens, dreams...

Movies: X-Men: First Class gets a yearbook of sorts with new character images courtesy of Fox. Libraries: Eduardo Zepeda from Weslaco Public Library won a $20,000 Great Graphic Novel Library Giveaway prize at the Texas Library Association's Annual Conference last week...

TV: The Wonder Woman TV show casting sheet could be your stepping stone to supporting role stardom if you fit the right criteria... and David E. Kelly digs you. Should be easy enough to hang with the freshly-cast Adrianne Palicki, right? Gaming: Marvel Vs...