The Lottery...

The suggestion had been made some time prior to SPX that I would succeed Rob Clough as guest curator for the Library of Congress, in accordance with a partnership facilitated between the entities in 2011, “where representatives from that institution would comb the floor and [select] minicomics, self-published comics, original art, flyers, Ignatz Award nominees and other publications that otherwise would skip the LOC and be lost forever after their initial print run.” I greatly admired this impulse, the idea of preservation – for a long time, that was a stated goal of scanlators, of pirates, of varied unscrupulous types on the internet who’d ‘curate’ selections of lost, gone comics, without permission, for the edification of all. Now, of course, everyone excerpts images on Tumblr and reblogs them all over, the process having gained legitimacy by honing itself down to details tiny enough to curl within some community understanding of fair use. In contrast, I can scarcely imagine anything more legitimate than the Library of Congress... .... By the floor’s opening on day two, I had begun to realize a conflict of ideology which threatened to gridlock my Congressional mission in a manner that would surely raise criticism for indelicate metaphor. To “curate,” is to suggest some application of taste. However, to “preserve,” is to seize the occasional opportunity to whisk an only potentially superior work away to safety. Generally, I picked works: (1) with which I was familiar; (2) which I knew I liked; (3) which the Library did not already possess; and (4) which none of the other librarians had selected in their combings. And so, I would select Julia Gfrörer’s Too Dark to See, but not her new minicomic, because I hadn’t read the latter. I would select Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, because it was a British book released early enough to slip through the cracks. I would select Ryan Cecil Smith’s SF Supplementary File 2 because it bore a conceptual character unique to comics. I would select Warren Craghead’s How to Be Everywhere because it had a formal character unlike anything else. I would select Laurel Lynn Leake’s L3 #2 because I’d managed to read it at the show and I liked it a lot. I selected all the comics because I liked them a lot.