Curation is always the key

The morons who have embraced AI drek to pump out tonnes of unreadable books overlook one tiny fact - there is already a shitload of stuff to read in the world, and we really don't need truckloads of literary slop to fill any gaps.

There are so many books to read, so many comics books to inhale, and so many movies and TV to watch. In this age of endless streaming, there is always something new, and centuries of novels and non-fictions works to discover and dig out.

There is one key to this mountain of entertainment that threatens to mentally drown us. It is, has, and always will be reliable curation from trusted sources. 

Not just critics that resonate with your own tastes, or your pals telling you to check out some sick shit, but in the way compilation albums and reprint comics always try to give you the best bang for your buck, and as much variety as humanly possible, and you can still see the choices somebody made about them.

Many of the comics I read growing up were cheap and cheerful reprints for the local market, usually in glorious monochrome. Big thick superhero anthologies and endless horror comic reprints. Sometimes the collections brought together a small run of similarr comics, other times it was a baffling selection of different stories, from all different eras. This is how I read my first Golden Age comics, sandwiched between more modern adventures.

The curation of these reprints could sometimes be a little baffling - although the worst example I ever encountered was the first Love and Rockets I ever read, which was in a British edition which treated all the Locas stories as standalone pieces like they were Archie comics or something and bounced around all over the place in an extremely confusing manner.

In other mediums, there is less curation than ever before these days. The power of the TV programmers has definitely faded - entire populations used to be at the whims of people who decided which soap operas they got to see, and that job has been largely handed over to the consumer, (which can truly be fucking exhausting sometimes). 

There is still curation on the radio stations playing in your car on the way to work, but that only lasts as long as the broadcast before fading away forever.  But I was digging out my CDs from storage recently, and so many of them are compilations given away free with the finest British music magazines, and I adore the selections. 

Some of these CDs date back decades, but there is still a personal touch to them that can still be heard on the discs. Someone out there chose to put these tracks on these collections. Somebody decided on the pacing of an album, and how it should start, and how it should end.

And I still see it in ancient comics that I still find in second hand stores, where some faceless editor from long ago decided to out something together, and you don't know the name of that editor, but you can tell they really, really liked Alex Toth.

In an age of endless algorithms that still struggle to get the point, nothing beats the human decision to put something together with something else, and you can still feel the impact of these decisions in crumbling comics and forgotten CDs, all these years later. Although I'd still love to know who thought it was a great idea to fill the early 2000ad annuals with the bloody Phantom Patrol.