So what do Robin the Boy Wonder and the White Rabbit have in common?
Both characters have been played by Kamran Darabi-Ford, the young British actor cast as Dick Grayson in the Batman Live arena show now touring Britain.
He’s also played “the fey Simon in Cameron Jack’s exciting and successful production of Lord of the Flies,” and “an acrobatic Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC Fringe Festival.”
I think you new fans are getting far, far to[o] spoiled! I remember when I had to wait and see if the local drug store actually ordered my favorite comics. No internet, no wizard [magazine], no comic store by me. Why would you want to know everything before the books even come out? It's like being told what your Christmas presents are before you get them!I have to agree with that attitude. The superhero genre has long relied on storytelling surprises: characters popping up unexpectedly, heroes having had a plan all along, people not being who or what they seem. In these slow-paced days, the companies keep upcoming plotlines secret for years—which also gives them the power to reverse course.
Scott Hedley on Facebook alerted me to a Playbill ad seeking unpaid actorsin New York for Dorothy in Oz, “a skewed take on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, set in a mental hospital.” The featured parts:
Dottie - A mentally disturbed seventeen-year-old, who has been involuntarily committed to the Oslin Center, a psychiatric institute in Kansas.I’m guessing this adaptation has a different target audience from The Yellow Brick Road, mentioned here and just reviewed in the New York Times.
Aunt Em - Dottie’s aunt and legal guardian.
Mrs. Goode/Glinda - Dottie’s flaky therapist, as well as one of the characters in Dottie’s hallucination.
Dr. Green/The Wicked Witch of the West Wing - The insensitive doctor in charge of Dottie’s case, as well as the antagonist in Dottie’s hallucination.
Skarekrow - A goth-rocker suffering from severe drug dependency and depression in Dottie’s hallucination.
Rusty - A heartless ruffian with anger issues in Dottie’s hallucination.
Mr. Lyons - An overweight sexual deviant with “performance issues” in Dottie’s hallucination. . . .
The Great Oz/ Dr. Oslin - The mysterious man, whom Dottie and her friends seek for aid in her hallucination, as well as the busy head of the Oslin Center.
Dora feels like she’s caught between two worlds: on one hand, she is expected to embrace the Latino family traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation, but she also wants to be a contemporary American teenager… She sometimes thinks she’s trapped between a pinto bean and a cheeseburger. Dora can’t figure out where she fits in, and she longs for a place where she can forge her own identity.Converting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a coming-of-age story is, I believe, driven by the need to cast a teenager as Dorothy. The original tale is about discovering competency rather than identity.
On the eve of her coming of age quinceañera, a mysterious woman disrupts Dora’s fifteenth birthday fiesta to foretell a journey of discovery that will take her far from home.
Sure enough, a gran tornado carries Dora (and her little dog, too) to a magical world filled with munchkins and a wicked bruja who’ll stop at nothing to steal Dora’s ruby zapatillas.
Dora meets three friends, each from a different Latin culture, while traveling on the amarillo brick road en route to the Emerald City. She seeks the only person who can help her return to the world she knows… the superstar who has all the answers: the Wizard of Oz—la Maga de Oz.
So just how does DC respond to this totally spontaneous and unexpected fan response? How do they adjust their plans realizing that they’re about to kill off the breakthrough character of the year? Well they do nothing… really. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead they decide to continue their original plan for the War Games crossover in which they killed off Steph Brown just for the sake of well… it was a crossover and for some strange reason you can’t have a crossover these days without killing someone.But everyone knows that comic books are planned months in advance. By the time DC got word that Robin sales were staying up, the magazines that showed Stephanie dying were well into production. And the company probably had further storylines planned out, with Batman becoming more isolated and Tim Drake back as Robin and full of adolescent angst. The company was on that train, and couldn’t jump off.
It's not the gender, it's the energy. I've spent a couple of decades thinking about this, in no small part because of the reaction to MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN. This is a book I wrote first person female, yet it is still considered a "boy's book." I cracked my brain over this for a long time, and in the end I came to the conclusion that it's about the "storytelling energy" of a story. . . .Coville has been talking about that blend for years, which is why I feel comfortable quoting his Facebook comments.
The very best (and most successful) books partake equallly of male storytelling energy (action!) and female storytelling energy (relationship).
Jo Rowling merges them seamlessly.
Wherever we go we invariably hear someone in the crowd say that the "Big Secret" is: sugar water, hairspray, unicorn tears or Mountain Dew. Other than attracting every ant within five miles and throwing piles of cash out the window these magic additives would accomplish little, if anything. . . .While that article pooh-poohs the importance of the surface tension of water within the sand matrix, NASA says that’s definitely a force in how sand castles stick together.
In a word the big secret is "friction". More specifically, the sum total of all friction between the grains acting on each other. This is why compaction is so important. When you compact sand you increase the friction between the grains.
Uncompacted sand has relatively large pore spaces between the grains but compacted sand shrinks these spaces increasing points of contact between the individual grains and thereby increasing the friction between them. The more friction there is, the more resistant the grains are to separation.
Damp sand sticks together because water forms little grain-to-grain bridges. Surface tension--the same force that lets some insects walk on the surface of a pond--acts like rubberbands between the grains. Adding water to damp sand fills spaces between the grains. The bridges vanish and the sand begins to flow more easily.In sum, there’s an equilibrium state between wet and dry, which probably varies for a particular form of sand. The sand at Revere Beach might be particularly well suited for this type of sculpture.
It was one of the most depressing weeks of my life, because we basically spent the whole week in this horrible office planning how to kill this poor teenage girl who I really liked. I thought she was a great character and she was one of the few friends that my character had, and I tell you the whole thing about her being Robin, was simply a trick.Another of the scripters in that conversation was Bill Willingham, then writing Robin. In 2005 he talked about suggesting that Stephanie Brown become the Teen Wonder:
The whole way through it was planned purely as a trick to play on the readers, that we would fool them into thinking that the big event was that Stephanie Brown would become Robin but we knew all along it was a temporary thing, and she was then going to die at the end of this crossover story.
It was really seedy, and I think about two days into it, I basically said look, I don’t want… because they planned this big long torture scene, I said I don’t want to really have anything to do with that. . . .
So when there was that big online debate about Stephanie Brown’s death I felt kind of really pleased and vindicated, and the other person who I think was probably happy about that but I don’t think she’s ever said so in interviews was Devin Grayson who was writing Nightwing at the time… she raised several issues during this meeting, she was one of the other writers in the meeting who said how come we’re always killing off the girls, and also how come we’re killing off the ethnic characters, there was a lot of debate in that meeting, well ultimately it all came down to this is what we’re going to do.
Thus, Stephanie’s death was long part of the company’s thinking, probably as part of a plan for Tim Drake’s maturation. Her becoming Robin was a later addition.The death of Spoiler was locked in before I was asked to take over the series, but it was my idea to let her become Robin for a short time before that. My thinking is that it would be nice to give her at least one moment of glory, accomplishment and success, before all of those horrible things that were destined to happen to her.
Some savvy (or cynical) readers foresaw what would happen. In July 2004, before he became “Grumpy Old Fan” at Newsarama and Robot6, Tom Bondurant wrote: Readers could be forgiven for any cynicism at this development. After all, this was the third Robin in twenty years. Besides, DC would never let Robin stay a girl — they’d have to crank out a whole new set of action figures, for one thing. (Female Robins had shown up in The Dark Knight [Returns] and other alternate-history stories, but never before in the “real” books.) For 64 years, in the comics, on TV, and in the movies, Robin has been a dark-haired boy, not a blonde. Changing the costume, as DC did with Tim in 1990, was one thing, but changing gender was something entirely different. Furthermore, DC is cranking up for a major storyline involving Gotham City gang wars, and promising carnage — and Stephanie would be a bigger casualty as Robin than as Spoiler. The whole thing smelled of marketing. . . .A clear sign of DC’s lack of commitment to Stephanie as Robin appears on the cover of Detective Comics, #796, the only issue of the two main Batman books to show her in the Robin costume before her death. “Batman & Robin… Together Again?” it asked. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, or a promise of a long partnership.
I don’t hate Stephanie, but I can’t see her staying Robin for very long; so it looks like the wait is on for Tim’s comeback.
When I draw, I am DA POOF! Able to fly at the speed of light and headbutt my enemies. I am AWESOME!So now young American women are winning the comics contests, the national science fairs, the World Cup semis. Not to mention the usual spelling bee. Do teen-aged boys need to step up their game?
I even make little comics for my friends, trying to make them laugh.
And speaking of Oz books for adults, the Boston Globe let loose with some details about Gregory Maguire’s next novel:
Concord writer Gregory Maguire has announced that he’ll release a book this fall that draws the curtain on his highly popular “Wicked [Years]” series. “Out of Oz,” which hits shelves Nov. 1, was mostly written at Maguire’s home in Concord, where he lives with his husband, painter Andy Newman, and their three kids.Maguire dropped a couple of details in April 2010 to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but the novel could have evolved greatly since then.
The book weighs in at 550 pages and will contain three maps of Maguire’s Oz universe. The author told us today that he kept this last book under wraps during much of the writing process, just in case it didn’t work out—or he changed his mind. He also told us that he named the book before writing it, and that the title is a nod to “Out of Africa,” as well as an announcement of the end of the series, which spawned 1995’s “Wicked,” 2005’s “Son of a Witch,” and 2008’s “A Lion Among Men.”
“Look folks,” Maguire told us, with a laugh, “I’m out of here. I’m done.” He promises that the last book will keep Oz as it has been in his other novels—a gritty, political, sexual place where magic is possible. “People actually go to the bathroom,” he said, of his Oz. “There is sexual dysfunction.” He added that “Out of Oz” is as close to “Gone With the Wind” as a “Wicked” book can get.
"It is an Oz Book, so it is a children's book, but it isn't for children," Sackett said. "It doesn't have sex or anything in it, but it deals with philosophical themes, political themes and psychological themes. All of this could be completely lost on a kid."The fictional Hitler’s minions also include Laurel and Hardy.
In the book, Hitler rallies portions of the Oz population to his side. After becoming the Reichschancellor of Oogaboo, he turns its people into a military unit. He incorporates the people of Runnymead, who like to run, into his Panzer unit and incorporates the winged monkeys into his Luftwaffe division.
"He has a pretty formidable army for Oz by the time he gets to the Emerald City," Sackett said.
He found a plane headed back to New York. During the war, he said, it was tough to find regular flights, but a lot of small operators jumped in to fill the gaps—guys who might own one airplane. 
In the midst of unprecedented and grave problems in the world around us, artists and communities are responding with new, urgent energy. Whether raging out loud or searching deeply inward, our muses are rising to the challenge of turbulent geopolitical, economic, and environmental crises. Red Sun Press invites submissions of work for a show addressing the critical problems of our day and how we perceive, confront, rationalize or reject them.Submit up to 5 pieces for consideration. Two-dimensional work only. Maximum size: 3' in either dimension. Email to mosborn@redsunpress.com. Please keep file size to 1 MB each. Emails must include:
From Rose Fox at Genreville:
I’ve been putting together the program for Readercon, and I was entirely shocked when two women we invited told me they don’t feel smart enough to be on our panels. I’ve never heard anything like that from a man. [EDIT: A woman has emailed me to say she heard a man once say "Readercon is where I go to feel stupid"--though I wouldn't classify that the same way as withdrawing from the program.]This particular discussion involves the world of science fiction, and its awards and anthologies. The situation is probably different in other literary genres; as one example, as Fox quotes Liz Williams, “in urban fantasy…women do seem to be on strong ground.” (According to Library Journal in 2008, “Contemporary urban fantasy started as an offshoot of horror fiction rather than sf/fantasy but has blended with other genres, most notably romance and mystery.”)
I’m also pretty sure I received more “may I be on your program?” requests from men than from women (I’ll try to remember to keep statistics next year). It’s pretty well known that that sort of behavior is socially gendered.
I would not be at all surprised if female authors are more likely to self-sabotage by saying “I’m not good enough to be in this anthology” or “I don’t have anything that works for this” or “I can’t write in that genre”, while men might be more likely to send in a story that’s a little off-topic, or send something unsolicited even if the anthology is supposedly closed to submissions.
Marvel and Paramount Pictures, which is distributing "Captain America: The First Avenger," figured they would simply release the film as the truncated "The First Avenger" in foreign countries. But in a surprise, Paramount's overseas operation objected, arguing that Captain America had too much brand value, even in spots like France that are leery of embracing Team America too readily. . . .Ironically, this movie is set during World War 2, when the US and USSR were allies. There are tales of Captain America fighting against the Nazis alongside the Soviet Army. Of course, the 1950s version of the character was anti-communist, but those years were officially written out of Steve Rogers’s life story when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived the character in early 1964.
In the end, the studios decided that Captain America would keep his name in all but three countries: Russia, Ukraine and South Korea.
A few paces ahead, Aquaman had caught up with Green Arrow.
“Your boy’s looking good,” he commented, both because it was true and because he was making an effort to honor the role he had assumed as Green Arrow’s chief entertainment.
“Yeah, he is, isn’t he?” Ollie sounded pleased. “That kid’s always been a looker. They all are. No wonder people like to speculate.”
Arthur frowned slightly as Ollie laughed. “I meant he looked healthy,” Arthur clarified.
“Oh, yeah.” Ollie was undaunted. “I meant the hero-sidekick thing, how everyone assumes we’re doing dirty things with these gorgeous kids in the—”
Arthur used his most regally authoritative voice to cut his friend off. “I know what you meant.”
“You never got that as much. Guess the whole breathing underwater thing is freaky enough. But Bats, man! Well, look at that kid, no wonder.”
she’s careful to point out that Inheritance is about father/son dynamics, not gay culture. “But are the characters in Inheritance aware of gay culture?” she asks rhetorically. “Sure. And they get to joke about it, just like I, as the narrator, get to joke about it. I’m joking with the reader, the characters are joking with each other.”The book continues to produce a strange reaction from fans of its characters. Some of those readers simply aren’t “slash” fans. But others are. One widely noted reaction came from Maelithil:
Grayson says DC knows her well enough by now to know what she’s doing, “and they seem to enjoy it.” They’ve asked for changes in previous stories, but Inheritance went through without any complications.
I'm on page 60 and have had to leave the room to scream into a pillow. Repeatedly. . . .And that from a blogger whose userpic says, “Batman was only defeated once and that was by Dick Grayson’s thighs.”
I've reached the phase wherein I'm too embarrassed to continue, and too curious to stop. It's too rich to be subtextual porn, it's too laden with innuendo to be textual and serious.
Over at Boston 1775, I detailed my disappointment in the picture-book biography Henry Knox: Bookseller, Soldier, Patriot, by Anita Silvey and Wendell Minor.
All of Minor’s paintings are handsome and evocative. But I can’t recommend the book because the text contains too many errors and exaggerations. Some of those mistakes appear in popular biographies of Knox, such as the notion that the heavy cannon from Fort Ticonderoga were “all the working artillery of the Continental Army.” But others I can’t find any support for.I also took note of how Steve Sheinkin’s The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, and Treachery, which I haven’t read yet, has won a Boston Globe/Horn Book Award.
look closely at the word balloon in the top left corner — you can see all the dialogue has been covered in white-out, and replaced with the text written in the small circle right above the change. Those notes are in Stan Lee’s handwriting. This is obviously a change made at the very end of the process.Lee must have rethought that bit of dialogue, though it’s not clear why.
Lee writes in the margins in the second circle, “More speed lines,” which you can clearly see were added to the image because they are fairly shaky, once again, much different than Sinnott’s impeccable line-work.This documentary record bears out Lee’s recent testimony about how he worked with Kirby, which in turn is consistent with his past statements. He cultivated the image of a blowhard, but he was an honest blowhard.
