Rocket Bomber - article - comics - commentary - Bach - Batman; Amadeus - Avengers -- Sanity and Salvation in Numbers

Everyone else is offering free and unsolicited advice to DC Entertainment’s Diane Nelson, and I figured that I should, too. Hey, it’s how you stay “relevant” these days, right? Anyway: My advice concerns bookstore presentation and the challenges that it poses your funnybook subsidiary, and I offer it in the form of an experiment: Ms. Nelson, sometime today, walk into your local Barnes & Noble and head to the graphic-novel shelves. Now, find that little row of Batman books and ask yourself: Where do I begin? That one’s actually fairly easy to answer if you’ve read a newspaper or two: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. So now pretend you’re a potential customer returning for a second book and ask yourself: What next?

That one may take some time to work out — if nothing else, there’s a sizeable contingent of comics fans who believe that the seemingly obvious answer, Miller’s Dark Knight Strikes Again, is a mistake — so give it a few minutes and then set it aside and ask yourself a second question: Where do I begin if I’m buying for a nine-year-old boy?

That’s the reason why those Batman comics aren’t selling better. And just about everything else, for that matter. You’re welcome.

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There is at least one idea I’ve been meaning to introduce (or perhaps ‘import’ is the better term) to comics scholarship and that is the idea of a Standard Catalogue.

…and something of similar name already exists. The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide is an excellent reference for what it is. But… [jedi] this is not the book we’re looking for. [/jedi]

The closest parallel (indeed, my direct inspiration) is from music:

In modern music there is certainly a discography for each artist, though it is a rare artist or group who has enough albums to actually merit a comprehensive listing in (or out of) one of the major encyclopedic efforts — but the term ‘discography’ itself is a reflection of how easy it is to compile this kind of information, as songs are conveniently compiled onto discs whose publishing information and copyright date are known. In comics, a complete chronological listing of an author’s or artist’s work would be a nice thing to have — though that’s not the sort of thing we’re looking for in this case.

Also, certain music labels can be said to have a catalogue — Decca Jazz, Deutsche Grammophon, and Stax Records spring immediately to my mind (you may have other favs) — but this is also too broad: Marvel, DC, Vertigo, Dark Horse and Image could also be said to have catalogues of this type.

…and the confusion engendered by decades of output, occasionally byzantine (and even anti-consumer) numbering systems, naming conventions, reboots, crossovers, spinoffs, one-offs, and original graphic novels are exactly the mess we’re trying to sort out.

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Harken back, dear Reader — to an earlier age, a different kind of popular entertainment, and a similar rats’ nest of undated manuscripts, spotty publication, revision and deliberate obfuscation:

Imaging you’re a classical music scholar trying to figure out some way, any way to make heads or tail of Mozart’s catalogue: handwritten manuscripts in the composer’s own hand, first generation copies, fifth generation copies, works of dubious origin and provenance, and more often than not no indication of when it was written, why, for whom, or for which instrumentation past a few scribbles in the margin (when there is any marginalia).

Tack on a suspicion by some that W.A. Mozart’s father may have helped his young son with orchestrations and arrangements for the very earliest of works, and that other compositions from the very end of Amadeus’s life (notably the Requiem) have been completed by his friends and students and here is a tangle that makes a Hulk chronology look simple on it’s face.

Enter Köchel.

[If you hate umlauts, let me advise that it is more-or-less correct to spell that “Koechel” in English, and if you pronounce it ‘kershel’ you’d be a lot closer to the Deutsch than the incorrect ‘cockle’]

From the wiki: “In the decades after Mozart’s death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel succeeded. Köchel’s 551-page catalogue was titled Chronologisch – thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts (Chronological – Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart).”

This is one approach, and a very successful one. Though the Köchel catalogue has undergone several revisions (most recently in 1964) one can note that every CD released of Mozart performances will include the K. number as a natural, accepted part of the title of the work.

Using Köchel as a model, though, has one drawback: the catalogue is chronological, and a chronological listing doesn’t help when we’re trying to read Batman.

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We don’t have to stray very far before we find a second model. The Bach enumeration is more recent (1950) and addresses a different set of problems:

again, from wiki:

Schmieder chose thematical arrangement instead of chronological for several reasons, of which, probably, the two most important were:

* Many of Bach’s works have uncertain composition dates. Even if the score is dated, it could mean nothing more than the date it was copied, or re-arranged, et cetera. …
* The Bach Gesellschaft had been publishing Bach’s works since 1851 (abbreviation: BGA); these existing publications grouped Bach’s works by genre (or musical form), so listing according to this established practice was less confusing.
…
Ordering the complete list of Bach’s compositions by opus number or by publication date were both out of the question: Bach didn’t use opus numbers, and few of his works were published in his lifetime.

The BWV numbers (again, more German: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or Bach Works Catalogue) like the Köchel numbers are accepted as the official listing and are readily found on CDs and printed versions of the works. And a thematic listing is just as valid as a chronological one, so long as it is internally consistent.

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And there are other music catalogues, for other composers.

The point I’d like to bring home is that these are works of scholarship, independent of the creators and publishers of the works (and often, ignoring whatever system publishers have invented for themselves, and also ignoring exact chronology when it makes little sense to strictly order things by publication date — even when those dates are known)

Someone (Köchel for Mozart, Schmieder for Bach) went through, looked at every extant work, and set up a system.

As is true of any work published in academe or as part of the scientific process: the systems they came up with were subject to review by their peers — and even after each was accepted as the ‘official’ system, later scholars (with proper citations and proof) have been able to add onto, update, and re-number works — and the whole system works without an Official Designation (which DC and Marvel would insist on, but Screw Them: they messed this up to begin with and can hardly object with any credibility when a fan of the right mindset, obsession, and academic rigor imposes order and gives other enthusiasts a baseline for debate, and gives new readers both an entrance to the property and established path to follow).

Given the tools available to us on the internet, and models to readily copy: we can condense peer review and community consensus into a single framework by adopting Wikipedia’s method (and even their software). What we need, though, are brave volunteers to submit the first draft: women and men with the breadth of knowledge to invent and introduce an enumeration, the strength of personality to sell it, and the fortitude to defend it against the slings and arrows of outrageous fanboys.

We need Scholars and Academics. We need Nerds. And the only barrier is years of work involved and the ability to get the word out. You could do this.

(I’d apply, but I don’t like comics that much — manga nerd, thanks, and ours have handy numbers already — and on top of that I have a hobby)

The only acclaim we have to offer is internet ‘fame’; the only reward the satisfaction of getting things right. Though… Köchel did pretty well; his is the K. on every Mozart CD, his name forever linked with the works he loved. Is this enough of an incentive?

image credits: gemstone, wikimedia commons, amazon.de