Ya know, it's been a minute since I've written about archives in comic books. Unlike movies and television, finding evidence of an archives or an archivist within comics requires a lot more research, aka reading, that's far more time-consuming while producing fewer results. Novels will often give you some indication that characters or settings are archival, regardless of whether the terminology is correct. Film and television are easier to navigate by skipping ahead or fast forwarding, so perusal of an episode or a 90 minute movie takes all of a few minutes to confirm suspicions.
Comic books, however, don't always come with comprehensive synopses nor do their collected volumes or stand alone graphic novels give away significant details of the plot/story on the back cover blurbs. Finding evidence of archives in comics either means the book's creators explicitly use archives as a deliberate setting, I happened to read that particular issue or book and found it myself, or I get really lucky when researching and come across a review that mentions the location or profession of a character. More often than not, it's dumb luck and I managed to read between the lines well enough to determine if a comic will return something to write about.
Such is the journey of how I got to The Blue in Green! From the creative team of writer Ram V and artist Anand RK along with colorist John Pearson, letterer Aditya Bidikar, designer Tom Muller, production artist Ryan Brewer, and published by Image Comics, The Blue in Green is a horror book about the drive to produce great art, failure, and the spectre of romanticized suffering we attach to art and artists wrapped around the world of jazz music. The title itself comes from a piece of the same name that's often attributed solely to Miles Davis, though it's widely agreed upon that Bill Evans, pianist and former member of Davis's sextet, at the very least co-wrote the piece if he wasn't the sole creator. The meaning of the title expands on the themes within the book with the blue in question relating to the longing or sadness one feels in the midst of envy, the green.
So we have a musical piece with a controversial origin with a name that invokes desire and jealousy as intertwined. It's the perfect foundation for Erik Dieter's obsessive pursuit to uncover the identity of an unknown jazz musician he finds in a picture kept by his mother after coming home for her funeral. Erik himself is a failure by his own estimations. Instead of becoming something great within the jazz scene, his talent a regular point of interest within multiple conversations in the book, his sense of self-worth coupled with his mother's discouragement during his formative years placed Erik "in the periphery of greatness".
It's that subdued ambition, that longing to understand why he could never transcend his mundanity that sets him down the path of discovering the identity of the unknown jazz musician. His first mode of research is through oral history via Ollie, the music director of a local jazz club and a veteran of the scene. While Ollie doesn't necessarily recognize the man in the photo, he does clue Erik into the club where the picture was taken, Orson's Timbre. From there, Erik does some online research where he finds a digitized flyer "in some collection" and an article from a newsprint archives that mentions the club in 1974. Orson's was at the center of drug and crime-related events, which culminated in a fire that practically destroyed the building and killed several people in the late 1960s.
While I'm fairly certain the creative team wasn't trying to comment on archives specifically, I think there's a greater discussion to be had in the amount of effort Erik has to put into his search. It's important to understand the ways in which archives are created and who they're created for. While we want to live in an egalitarian world where archives are for all, history shows us that that's never been the case. Erik is a black man trying to find information on another black man in a random photo his mother kept that includes a long dead jazz club in a neighborhood that's either been abandoned or is in the process of being gentrified. The odds of him finding anything in an archival institution are slim, if I'm being generous. And that's not just because archival institutions have historically favored white narratives. There's also the distrust of minority communities towards those same institutions that prevent them from donating their history out of fear that it will be purposefully lost or forgotten. And we can't forget the fact that digitization projects are costly and labor-intensive, which means even if an institution had anything of interest to Erik, it's likely that the time and money wasn't there to get the materials online by the time he went looking.
A pivotal moment in the book sees Erik connect with another elder of the jazz scene, Amelia, the woman who owned Orson's Timbre and still owns the building. She's repurposed the business as needed, but there's an attachment to the club's history that prevents her from selling the plot, much to her son-in-law's chagrin. Erik convinces, aka pays, the son-in-law to let him talk to Amelia. It isn't explicitly said, but she's likely suffering from dementia, so there's no guarantee on the accuracy of her memory. Erik, however, manages to get through and convinces her to share what she knows. He finally gets a name to the face in the picture: Dalton Blakely, a man "chased by ghosts". He also gets a key to the second floor office of Orson's Timbre where Amelia saved everything she could after the fire. Again, there was something to be salvaged but it never seems to have crossed Amelia's mind that what remained after the fire had historical significance. Even if it did, who would take it? Who would care?
While there is explicit horror within the book, Ram V's prose beautifully captures what it means to be haunted. As Erik takes shelter in the ruins of Orson's Timbre's second floor office during a rainstorm, his echoing steps through the building prompts this narration:
Old things have power, you see. They've survived our lifetimes. In their presence we are ephemeral. Their stories impose a greater weight upon our reality. Their gravity pulls us into them. And music...is perhaps among the oldest of all things.
Riding the heels of this banger of a thought, Erik finds himself surrounded by the fire-damaged office that's full of dust, history, and stacks of recordings from performers at the club, auditions, and studio sessions. He even finds a recording by Dalton Blakely, "Two Wings from Labadee". The "discovery" of what would be a treasure trove to any archivist or music historian, however, doesn't spark solace or satisfaction in our protagonist. Instead, Erik can only think about the recordings as "Ghost sounds scarred into black vinyl, eaten by mold and rot."
The grim yet reflective language Erik uses in these moments hit me the hardest as I was reading the book. While there is always a need to correct the morbid language surrounding archival materials and archives themselves as morgues or the place where records/documents go to die, death is still inherent to the creation of archival collections. Verne Harris' most recent book, Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis, delves into philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of "hauntology," where elements of the past return and are always present. Archives are and have been tools of oppression built upon a foundation of bodies - both figuratively and literally. To be an archivist, to work within the profession of archives, is to be surrounded by ghosts and yet those spectral presences can redefine the purpose of the archives if we listen to them.
If Dalton Blakely was chased by ghosts, then Erik Dieter is pursuing them. Every step of Erik's journey in The Blue in Green is built upon the fusion of history and jazz, the latter acting as a broadcast of the former. When Erik plays Dalton's record, the reader is privy to Anand RK's visualization of immigration, poverty, discrimination, and police brutality. Dalton carried that history with him and conveyed it, and his trauma, through his music. But, in the end, all we have of him is a photo, a recording, and snippets of a life. We see his artistic expression only within the context of pain and suffering because that's what's left behind. And, really, the only thing we can actually rely on is the work that he created. Everything else is based on outside observations and assumptions as we see through an old case file report and diary entries from Erik's mother later in the book. And while Dalton's music might endure, it did survive a fire and roughly forty years of improper storage, his ghost remains on the periphery; he remains subject to the ravages of time and the distance of history.
There is a much bigger conversation to be had in The Blue in Green about generational trauma and the romanticism around suffering as a prerequisite to the creation of great art. But that isn't the purpose of this article, so I'd encourage you to seek out the book and give it a read. I'm still thinking about it weeks later and still don't feel like I've said everything I want to say about it. The archives are sparse in the narrative, but the conversation around archives within this type of story is something I find interesting and, hopefully, you will too!
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