by Adam Arthur
If there is one activity that fills any geek’s heart with joy, it’s collecting. After all, collecting is the entire premise of that geek media lodestone, Pokemon. DJ Big Phill’s quest as a collector, therefore, follows a similar narrative. His journey as an art collector is a pure expression of geek bliss – but more than that, it serves a deeper purpose. The film Collections in Black follows Big Phill’s journey to catalogue comic book art featuring Black representation, providing a window into the development of how Black Americans have been portrayed in (and contributed to) sequential art over the decades.
Collections in Black was screened on October 24th at Carnegie Mellon University’s Hamburg Hall. The film portrays conversations between DJ Big Phill and other collectors of Black comic book art he meets as he attempts to compile the artwork that would later come to form the Collections in Black exhibit at Pittsburgh’s August Wilson African-American Cultural Center. Some of the highlights of the film included DJ Big Phill acquiring a large collection of the work of Billy Graham, the creator of Marvel’s Luke Cage and a frequent contributor to stories about the character Black Panther – the latter set in the fictional, utopian Afro-Futurist country of Wakanda. At various expos and conventions, we see DJ Big Phill speaking to other individuals about the representation of Black Americans in comics, and the importance to readers and collectors of seeing Black experiences, community, and identity represented in superhero stories.
Today, films like Black Panther are major, blockbuster hits. However, during the Q&A session hosted after the film, DJ Big Phill made a point that the earliest positive representation he found of a Black American in comic book art was in 1941 – prior to which portrayals of Black Americans tended toward comically grotesque racial caricatures, reflecting the biases of (White) America at the time. In mentioning this, DJ Big Phill spoke to the importance of preserving the history of Black American comic book art through the years. Another of the Q&A panel discussants – Kimberly Jacobs, who at the time of this writing is responsible for exhibiting the Collections in Black Exhibit at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, attested to the difficulty of curating and maintaining now-antique comic book art, thus ensuring that its significance can be preserved for future generations.
Also attending the Q&A were Marvin Wynn and Manny Theiner of Comicsburgh, as well as Isaac Fisher of Incubator productions. Just as DJ Big Phill and Kimberly Jacobs viewed their most essential mission as preserving the past, Marvin Wynn, Manny Theiner, and Isaac Fisher all viewed their objective as shaping the future – specifically, by providing encouragement, a platform, and moral support to future comic book creators. In addition to the contrast between the future and the past, another difference between the panelists that they discussed was their respective artistic objectives: commercial success, versus “art for art’s sake”. Manny Theiner, a promoter in Pittsburgh’s alternative music scene also known for his female-led independent superhero film series Heroineburgh, made a powerful case against the commercialization of art. DJ Big Phill responded by discussing the advantages of releasing commercial art when it came to ensuring an artist’s financial security and stability.
Regardless of the objectives of a work of art, however, it eventually becomes part of the cultural lexicon. It shapes how people understand the reality of the world around them – and that is why representation, including of historically marginalized voices, is worth cataloguing. DJ Big Phill has therefore combined this nobility of purpose with the pure geek joy that comes from collecting.
Adam Arthur holds a graduate degree from Florida State University. He is the author of two poetry collections, Levers of Power and Sound and Substance. A transplant to Pittsburgh, he has lived in the area for three years and takes inspiration from his surroundings in his written work.
PETRICHOR 
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