What an A/V Archivist Does

My Opinions about the Kennedy family are usually jaundiced to the point of incandescence, but especially so now since one of that bunch is about to present himself as the empty chamber in the upcoming governor’s contest in my home state (Rauner is decidedly a live round). Anyway, this is the only panel you need from the (I presume) inadvertently hilarious comic Female Force Vol. 1, which features the inspiring life stories of not only Caroline Kennedy, depicted above, but also Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Sarah Palin. The excerpt you see here was snapped from a third- or fourth-hand beater copy in the buck bin at a used bookstore; I certainly didn’t pay money for this. Published in 2009 by Bluewater Productions, the title seems to have not fared so well, perhaps due to the fact that three of the four principal applecart-overturners advanced to their position via family ties (two of them due to marriage to powerful men, a great way to stick it to the patriarchy), and the other is, uh, Sarah Palin.

Well never mind any of that. This panel’s immortal contribution is not only the suggestion that Caroline found her position with MoMA on merit alone, but the laff-riot depiction of how workers in A/V archives spend their day. I can’t entirely fault artist Vinnie Tartamella for grasping at straws here; A/V people are notorious for obfuscating their work to the noobs, to the field’s ultimate detriment. So, while his anatomical proportions, particularly the size of the hand to the arm to the face, are howlingly out of whack, as is his assumption that archivists spend their days hauling (16mm?) projectors to and fro, ready to run one-of-a-kind, fragile films through machines which malfunction in the best of circumstances. Or that MoMA keep their films in taped-up cardboard boxes. Or that their prints range from 400′ to…360′? 375′? Again, the reel-to-hand ratio is difficult to discern here.