Musings about some of my favorite fantasy literature for young readers, comics old and new, the peculiar publishing industry, the future of books, kids today, and the writing process.
From Marc Tyler Nobleman’s interview with comics scripter Arnold Drake:
when Bill [Finger] was looking for an idea for Batman, one of the tricks that he used was to open up the Yellow Pages in the phone book and just kind of ripple through it. Where his fingers stopped he’d say, “Piano tuner…I wonder if there’s a story in a piano tuner?”And then, of course, Finger would imagine the piano to be giant-sized.
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J. L. BELL is a writer and reader of fantasy literature for children. His favorite authors include L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. He is an Assistant Regional Advisor in the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators, and was the editor of Oziana, creative magazine of the International Wizard of Oz Club, from 2004 to 2010.
Living in Massachusetts, Bell also writes about the American Revolution at Boston 1775.
3 comments:
All right, what in the world is supposed to be happening with that piano? That is the worst representation of a piano action mechanism that I have ever seen --
Your friend, The Piano Tuner
I believe the Dynamic Duo have been captured, tied up, and left lying on the giant piano strings. They're rolling away from the hammers striking the strings. And yes, those hammers don't look like anything involved in an ordinary piano.
Now, to be fair, this sequence comes from an episode of The New Batman Adventures called "Legends of the Dark Knight," in which kids tell each other stories about Batman. This particular adventure is an homage to the Bill Finger–Dick Sprang comics of the 1950s. Within the TV show it's filtered through the memory of an unconscious guard and the imagination of a child, so it's (ahem) not supposed to be realistic.
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