Dave Berg was a major figure in the history of comic books and cartooning but you'd never know it from the comic book news sites on the Internet. I posted an obit here more than 55 hours ago. I just did a quick search to see who else had picked up on the story and done any independent reporting and couldn't find a bloody thing. It's all over the newsgroups because I posted the info on several and other folks carried it over to other forums, including a website message board or two.
Since it's a world wide web we live in, I may well have missed some site that mobilized to give the late Mr. Berg his due but it would be a teensy exception. I couldn't locate one little news item anywhere that didn't merely quote and/or link to my announcement. Not all sites can be expected to cover something like this, of course. Some do not strive to present the latest news or update themselves on a daily basis. But many do and I found several that reported on this weekend's grosses for the Spider-Man movie but had nary a mention of Dave. Of course, you can put that together in five minutes by quoting the AP or Variety news items. Finding someone who can write up a little bio of Dave Berg might take fifteen minutes.
If I sound snide about this, the tone is somewhat intentional. Last August, when Chuck Cuidera passed away, I got into a debate in one of the newsgroups with a fellow named Pat O'Neill, who writes for a couple of different comic news publications. Pat had half a hundred excuses for why it's too difficult to report obits on the veterans of the comic book industry in a timely manner. Not one of them made a lick o' sense to me, one of the few people in the field who actually bothers to do it. (Nine months later, I have yet to see a single obit online about Cuidera that was not extracted from what I wrote about him. At least, a couple of print ones finally turned up and featured a little of their own research.)
Dave Berg's death will not go unreported. MAD has issued a press release which everyone should be quoting in the next few days. I'm pretty sure we can expect the mainstream press to cover his passing and for all that material to find its way onto the online sites, probably buried well below the preview of the costume from the forthcoming Daredevil movie. But for those writers and artists who were a little less famous than Mr. Berg, very little is said. Robert Kanigher and Tom Sutton recently left us and some sites that purport to cover the comic field could scarcely have given them less attention…and what was there was only there because some fan posted it on a message board.
During my back-and-forth with O'Neill, someone else chimed in to ask me what I expected or wanted. My reply was along the lines of, "I'd like to not be the only person covering this kind of thing." Even if other reporters might not hear immediately about someone's death, once it's widely reported on the Internet (which Berg's has been, for more than two days now) any halfway-decent writer could plug the name of the deceased into a couple of search engines, make one or two calls or write one or two e-mails and put together some coverage with very little legwork. But they don't.
So I emphasize: I would like to not be only person covering this kind of thing. If you care about it, how about politely — or even impolitely — suggesting something to the various Internet sites that promise to bring you the latest news from the world of comics? Suggest they rearrange their priorities a bit. I'm starting to really dislike the realization that if I don't drop everything in my life and whip up some sort of an obit, it either won't get reported or those who claim to cover the field will take their own sweet time about it. This is high on the long list of things that are too important to be entrusted to the likes of me.