AIDS Educational comics Available to Purchase

Cartooning is an industry, a subculture, and a field. Educational cartooning is none of these. It is a flexible, popular art that is constantly being reinvented by diverse people working in isolation from each other. As an educational cartoonist, I have been aware of this lack of communication for years. Recently, Michigan State University's Randy Scott, the world's preeminent comic book librarian, sent me a list of the comic books about AIDS that are included in the Educational Materials Database of the National AIDS Information Clearinghouse. (For addresses of materials discussed in this article, see sidebar 1.) I was astounded. As of June 1990, their list included 46 titles from almost three dozen sources. After years of keeping an eye out for AIDS education comics, I had found out about only 15 of these titles.