Phil Schaap hosts a daily radio show on Columbia University's radio station called "Bird Flight". It's roughly 90 minutes long, and it's about Charlie Parker, and that's been true for nearly 30 years. If you've ever heard it, you know it's not just about Parker--
it's also about Schaap, a man who knows more about Charlie Parker and jazz than just about anybody on the planet. (The article about Schaap in Da Capo's
Best Music Writing anthology includes multiple anecdotes to back this up; the best one is undoubtedly when Sun Ra "kidnapped" Schaap so that Ra could find out his own biography from the guy prior to a club date.) Schaap's memory is beyond even a comic-obsessive's definition of remarkable, and his desire for more--Charlie Parker music, Charlie Parker information, Charlie Parker facts, What Happened to Charlie Parker on That Tuesday--remains just as strong.
John Peel died in 2004. He was an English radio disc jockey, although he did quite a bit of other stuff as well. His career is one that encompassed a much wider strain of music than Phil Schaap, but it had a similar sort of obsessive quality to it--Peel was always on the hunt for the new. He brought entire genres to radio listeners before anyone else, he extolled the virtues of unknown artists and bands, and while Peel was more than willing to call out to the past for quality, Peel's shows weren't the sort of thing that could randomly be moved across the decades indiscernibly.
There's something of immense value in both Schaap and Peel's approach to music, although it's probably easier to praise Peel. After all, he was the guy in the trenches, a man who was aging in a medium that extols youthfulness above all other qualities. But constantly moving forward has its negative marks against it as well--if you're constantly digging new holes in the back yard, you'll never make it to China. If that's your goal, you have to throw down in one location. While Peel probably took more knowledge of the long view to his grave than Phil will, Phil's depth of specific knowledge is just as worthwhile. But what was lost with Peel--and it's not hard to call it lost, when you consider how splintered the audience for music criticism has become--was that sort of breadth. Few go to one individual for everything anymore--you get your rap writing from one, your treacly nu-folk writing from another, a list of aggregate numerical ratings from others, or you just get everything from your brother.
So which one are you?
Comics has a lot of Phils. That's not an insult, although the more aggravated stereotype of the "every Frank Castle appearance ever" does exist and probably shouldn't be a model for any sane person to follow. Delving into self-defined buckets of obsession, churning and turning every aspect of a specific fictional character that--if we're going to be honest--is rarely going to have that same depth of thought put into its creation and maintenance as can be found in its audience. That's a part of comics, and it's not only the purview of the Thunderbolts reader--there's a subset of comics readers who, like Phil, can tell you more about George Herriman's life than George Herriman knew himself. Phils are the type who loudly reject casual reading, surreptitiously using the phrase "just looking to be entertained" while secretly pursuing the Holy Grail of completionist intake. There's a Jim Aparo
Deadman that retells the death of Jason Todd from an alternate perspective? There's a Frank Miller back-up story that pre-dates 300 but uses a similar character design? I mean, sure. If it's cheap. (Even if it's not.)
Meanwhile, the Diamond distribution system forces a John Peel consumption. It's not just the latest issue of
Stormwatch that "comes out" on Wednesday, it's also the English translation of "You Are There," the latest collection of
20th Century Boys. It's new, even when it's just new to us. And due to the low print-runs and the difficulties inherent in re-orders, some of that new stuff will disappear off the shelves within weeks of release, the same way that copies of
Parker or
Asterios Polyp entered a weird period of "we're waiting on a new printing" within months of their initial appearance. It doesn't take that many trips to the comic store before the buyer realizes that some of this stuff--the good, yes, although sometimes it's just "the popular"--may disappear into the secondary "collector's" market the same way that a first printing of
Chew might. Like Phil, they want to take it all in, but like John, they want to keep up with all of it as well.
Theoretically, this would be the moment where one would point to the professional comic Peels, the men or women who do the trawling and trolling for the reader, the ones who voraciously plow into the swamp of comics to find the Ones That We Should Care About.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically?
Not so much.
See, people like Peel were rare, and today, they're rarer still. They weren't just critics, they were Tastemakers, Trendsetters, and they were paid to do it. They found the stuff that only a few obsessive Phil types could, but they had a receptive, vocal audience that attacked that "stuff" with the same voracity with which the recommendation had been delivered to them. It wasn't that the actual Peel had an audience who only did what he said--track down his listeners' yearly "favorites" and listen to the excitement with which Peel responds to the choices he didn't care for--but that Peel was somebody that the audience trusted enough to take chances on. Not just for reggae, or punk, or The Fall, or electro, or girl group pop, or soul, or drudge, or scludge, or fill-in-the-blank. For everything music. He was somebody who knew what he was talking about, and even when you disagreed with his choice, there was never a doubt that it was a random lark, a favor for a friend. He cared about where music was going, and he fired his estimable intelligence towards convincing his audience to do the same.
Comics doesn't have Tastemakers, maybe they did once, but that time is gone. It's always been a fractured landscape anyway--initial chunks of comics criticism doled out in fanzines or fan clubs, with the occasional academic polemic turned out for audiences in the low hundreds--and the Internet was able to finish the job of fracturing quicker than it's been able to on music and film. We all do it, you, me, the guy at the store--reading only those who agree with us up until they say something we don't like, we burn bridges, blog ourselves, trusting no one. After all,
That Guy likes Guggenheim's
Blade series--what's he know?
That Girl's favorite comic last week was some manga about dating--all the smart kids know it was the GI Joe/Cobra Special!
The one place where the Peel style of "look upon this perfect diamond" survives is, sadly, in the dusty archives. Like their parents--or really, anybody's parents, or just the Platonic ideal of "parents"--before them, there's more than a few places where old comics are found and resurrected with the type of fervor and detailed exposition that only a fan could be capable of. Speaking of the virtues of the old newspaper strip, the Golden Age crazy, the EC horror, there's plenty of excellent, smart people doing neglected classics a service. Good for them. But they aren't Peels. They're Phils, and as smart, funny and intelligent as they can be, we've got plenty of them already--if there's one thing comics has too many of already, it's people obsessed with the past.
What about the rest of it? Where's the individual who will dive into Wednesday's delivery of cardboard boxes, dash their hands across the distended shelves, pulling and opening the new classic we haven't heard about yet, the comic that wasn't written by the ex-editor who knows all the big bloggers, the comic that couldn't make the Diamond catalog due to its lack of pre-orders?
They're never coming. There will never be a website that has a comics writer like Peel. Like movie reviews and music criticism, the internet has destroyed all of the potential jobs available for future John Peels. As the old guard of film & music die off, they'll join in line with comics, with a wide swath of user-generated content and aggregate "score" based reviews taking all of the eyeballs. But because of the nature of it, the fact that it's user-generated content--you can control it.
You just have to decide which model you want to follow.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
