Oz and Ends

Three Dick Graysons and the Representation of Change

2012-01-29T08:48:00.003-05:00

Reviewing the Robin news this week, I was struck by a statement in Vaneta Rogers’s interview at Newsarama with current Nightwing scripter Kyle Higgins:

Nightwing is one of those few characters that is actually defined and built on a core of change, which is very weird in an industry and a medium that relies on the illusion of change. Dick Grayson is one of the few characters that are built around the idea of growing up.

Dick started out serving Reason for Robin, #9: Robin is still a kid. He represented potential. He was learning, making mistakes, but held the promise of being better. For almost thirty years he barely changed, but he always represented the possibilities of change in the future.

When Dick Grayson became Nightwing in the 1980s, he gained a new symbolic significance. He had been a kid; now he was a young man. But he was still younger than Batman, Superman, and the other heroes he’d looked up to. As Higgins says, his growth now defined his role in the DC Universe saga. He was a twentysomething looking for his place in the world. Would he ever match up to his mentor, or had he unknowingly already done so?

Grant Morrison’s proposal to make Dick Grayson into Batman brought that grand storyline to a close. Dick stepped into his mentor’s boots, and successfully. There was no place new for him to go, or grow. DC Comics would almost certainly have made him Nightwing again, to preserve the trademark if for no other reason, but the company never came up with a satisfactory way for Dick to make that choice which would imbue his character with significance again.

Instead, for a variety of commercial, legal, and creative reasons, the publisher rebooted its entire universe. That change let the editors put Dick into a new Nightwing costume, a few years younger than before. We never saw his choice to step away from being Batman; characters seem to treat his time in the cape as a job everyone knew would be temporary, as in Batman: Prodigy. Once again Nightwing is a young man looking for his place in the world. Higgins’s first story even took him back to his roots at the Haly Circus.

I view the current Dick Grayson character as separate from the character of 1964 through 2011, just as that was a different character from the Dick Grayson of 1940 through 1964 and beyond on Earth-2. The original Dick Grayson came of age as an adult Robin. The second came of age as Nightwing and took over as Batman when almost everyone thought Bruce Wayne was dead. Now we have a third Dick Grayson, also Nightwing. What will his future hold? The possibilities are open once again; all we know is that he still symbolizes growth and change.

In other Robin news, Bleeding Cool reported a rumor that Jeff Lemire would write an adventure for the present DC Universe’s four former and current Robins. But can we trust a gossip website that can’t even spell Damian Wayne‘s name right?

Probably so, for two reasons. Once ideas leak, it appears they’ve been approved. Furthermore, this idea is a no-brainer in terms of serving fans’ wishes. Of course, the potential for disappointment is very high since no actual all-Robins adventure comic could satisfy everyone’s hopes. There’s too much nostalgia to compete with.

Finally, Bully had the Dynamic Duo meet the Infinite Canvas of Scott McCloud. Even more impressive, the little stuffed bull got that scene to work within the confines of a Blogger template!

Teleprompter Fixation as a Sign of OIP Derangement Syndrome

2012-01-27T17:39:00.001-05:00

After winning the Republican primary in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich (shown above in June 2009) threw out an unrealistic plan to challenge President Barack Obama to seven “Lincoln-Douglas debates” and added, “I will concede up front that he can use a teleprompter.” In saying that, Gingrich was repeating himself and repeating a cliché of today’s American right. Folks have even set up a blog for the presidential teleprompter (now inactive).

Everyone can see that President Obama uses a teleprompter when delivering prepared remarks. So do many other politicians, such as Gingrich himself (as shown above), Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin. It’s standard equipment for television personalities and convention speakers.

Obama uses a teleprompter in more locations and situations than his predecessors, as the New York Times has observed. He eschews note cards and papers for three reasons. First, the machines have become more portable. Second, he’s very good at reading from a screen so that he seems to be speaking naturally. (In contrast, John McCain struggled with that task.) And third, he values good writing and precision, as every profile of the man has said.

The teleprompter goes away (I understand the traveling version telescopes down to the floor) after the President has finished his prepared remarks. Then he speaks extemporaneously, as anyone can see—anyone who doesn’t suffer from OIP Derangement Syndrome, that is. Many of those people have apparently convinced themselves that President Obama can’t express himself without a teleprompter.

Large audiences saw Barack Obama speak extemporaneously in twenty-five Democratic debates and three presidential debates in 2008. As for press conferences and interviews, President Obama did more of those in his first years in office than his predecessor. In May 2010, Mark Knoller at CBS News reported:

By my count, Mr. Obama has done six formal, full-scale White House news conferences, including the one on February 9. Four of the six were prime-time events in the East Room that lasted between 52 minutes and 59 minutes. Then there was a 53 minute session in the Briefing Room on June 23 and the disputed 35 minute event on February 9.

But add up all the press availabilities Mr. Obama has done, including abbreviated sessions with foreign leaders, and some solo news conferences at home and abroad, and the number of press events he's done since taking office climbs to 49.

During the same period of time in his presidency, George W. Bush took part in a total of 33 press availabilities of all varieties of which five were formal, solo White House news conferences. Only one was an evening event in prime time. The others were daytime sessions lasting about half an hour.

Besides press conferences, Mr. Obama has also sat for 190 interviews with members of the press, far more than any of his recent predecessors during their first 16 months in office.

And then there are televised events like the “health care summit” in February 2010. You’d think Gingrich’s followers would have seen that Obama can express his ideas (whether or not they like those ideas) without needing a machine.

But some apparently people can’t see that. They’ve convinced themselves that the President is an inarticulate puppet. Either that, or they’re using the “teleprompter” meme to let themselves sidle up to saying this black man is naturally too stupid to think for himself. Since they vociferously deny being that bigoted, the only explanation left is OIP Derangement Syndrome.

The Real Glinda

2012-01-26T08:37:00.018-05:00

From the penultimate chapter of L. Frank Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz, as Ozma, Dorothy, and her family go south to visit their friend:

With hearts light and free from care they traveled merrily along through the lovely and fascinating Land of Oz, and in good season reached the stately castle in which resided the Sorceress.

Glinda knew that they were coming.

"I have been reading about you in my Magic Book," she said, as she greeted them in her gracious way.

"What is your Magic Book like?" inquired Aunt Em, curiously.

"It is a record of everything that happens," replied the Sorceress. "As soon as an event takes place, anywhere in the world, it is immediately found printed in my Magic Book. So when I read its pages I am well informed." . . .

"Then," said Ozma, "I suppose you know what is in my mind, and that I am seeking a way to prevent any one in the future from discovering the Land of Oz."

"Yes; I know that. And while you were on your journey I have thought of a way to accomplish your desire. For it seems to me unwise to allow too many outside people to come here. Dorothy, with her uncle and aunt, has now returned to Oz to live always, and there is no reason why we should leave any way open for others to travel uninvited to our fairyland. Let us make it impossible for any one ever to communicate with us in any way, after this. Then we may live peacefully and contentedly."

"Your advice is wise," returned Ozma. "I thank you, Glinda, for your promise to assist me."

"But how can you do it?" asked Dorothy. "How can you keep every one from ever finding Oz?"

"By making our country invisible to all eyes but our own," replied the Sorceress, smiling. "I have a magic charm powerful enough to accomplish that wonderful feat, and now that we have been warned of our danger by the Nome King's invasion, I believe we must not hesitate to separate ourselves forever from all the rest of the world."

"I agree with you," said the Ruler of Oz.

"Won't it make any difference to us?" asked Dorothy, doubtfully.

"No, my dear," Glinda answered, assuringly. "We shall still be able to see each other and everything in the Land of Oz. It won't affect us at all; but those who fly through the air over our country will look down and see nothing at all. Those who come to the edge of the desert, or try to cross it, will catch no glimpse of Oz, or know in what direction it lies. No one will try to tunnel to us again because we cannot be seen and therefore cannot be found. In other words, the Land of Oz will entirely disappear from the knowledge of the rest of the world."

"That's all right," said Dorothy, cheerfully. "You may make Oz invis'ble as soon as you please, for all I care."

"It is already invisible," Glinda stated. "I knew Ozma's wishes, and performed the Magic Spell before you arrived."

She doesn’t say, “I did it thirty-five minutes ago,” like Ozymandias in Watchmen, but she’s still mighty high-handed.

And from the third chapter of Tik-Tok of Oz, after Queen Ann Soforth has set out to conquer all of Oz from her little corner:

Princess Ozma was all unaware that the Army of Oogaboo, led by their ambitious Queen, was determined to conquer her Kingdom. The beautiful girl Ruler of Oz was busy with the welfare of her subjects and had no time to think of Ann Soforth and her disloyal plans. But there was one who constantly guarded the peace and happiness of the Land of Oz and this was the Official Sorceress of the Kingdom, Glinda the Good.

In her magnificent castle, which stands far north of the Emerald City where Ozma holds her court, Glinda owns a wonderful magic Record Book, in which is printed every event that takes place anywhere, just as soon as it happens.

The smallest things and the biggest things are all recorded in this book. If a child stamps its foot in anger, Glinda reads about it; if a city burns down, Glinda finds the fact noted in her book.

The Sorceress always reads her Record Book every day, and so it was she knew that Ann Soforth, Queen of Oogaboo, had foolishly assembled an army of sixteen officers and one private soldier, with which she intended to invade and conquer the Land of Oz.

There was no danger but that Ozma, supported by the magic arts of Glinda the Good and the powerful Wizard of Oz—both her firm friends—could easily defeat a far more imposing army than Ann's; but it would be a shame to have the peace of Oz interrupted by any sort of quarreling or fighting. So Glinda did not even mention the matter to Ozma, or to anyone else. She merely went into a great chamber of her castle, known as the Magic Room, where she performed a magical ceremony which caused the mountain pass that led from Oogaboo to make several turns and twists. The result was that when Ann and her army came to the end of the pass they were not in the Land of Oz at all, but in an adjoining territory that was quite distinct from Ozma's domain and separated from Oz by an invisible barrier.

In Baum’s books, Ozma has a tendency to want to talk nicely to people threatening Oz so as to convince them of the error of their ways. Glinda doesn’t play by those rules. You threaten Oz—she will take you down. And she may not even bother to tell anyone about it.

What if the Deadly Desert Isn’t Deadly?

2012-01-25T08:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I described how over the course of five books L. Frank Baum developed the desert around Oz from a natural barrier that apparently hid that fairyland within North America into a magically fatal barrier that protected Oz from its magical neighbors and everyone else.

But was the Deadly Desert really deadly? Certainly folks in the Oz books believed it to be. Someone even went to the trouble of erecting signs warning travelers not to venture onto the sands or be turned into dust. For understandable reasons, no one tested that. No one we read about, at least.

A few years back, in an Oz discussion group I put forward the cheeky hypothesis that the Deadly Desert isn’t actually deadly at all—that the legends and signs are simply a way to scare off potential invaders. Again, the books never show us anyone turned to dust.

Who could or would construct such a hoax? The obvious candidate is Glinda, the Good Sorceress of the South. She has a record of taking swift, unilateral, and somewhat ruthless (though far from cruel) actions to protect Oz. She has the intelligence and magical resources to put up those signs.

Not many Oz fans like my realpolitik conception of Glinda, I’ve found. And, to be honest, I don’t actually ascribe to that Deadly Desert theory. In my own stories the swirling sands are still a threat to people made of flesh, even if no one’s died yet.

In the latest Baum Bugle, Nathan M. DeHoff of the VoVatia blog kindly acknowledges my question of whether the Deadly Desert is actually deadly, but he devotes most of his “‘Great Dates and Deserts!’: Some Thoughts on the Deadly Desert of Oz” article as he should: assembling a coherent picture of how the desert works across all the Oz books, including those by Baum’s successors. It’s a thorough overview, useful for writers wanting to review that feature of the Nonestic world.

Also in that Bugle is Marilynn Strasser Olson’s paper about how a humorous article on Death Valley published in the Los Angeles Times in 1890 might have maybe influenced Baum’s invention of both the Deadly Desert and the Emerald City. Unfortunately, Prof. Olson can’t actually show a link from the article to Baum. And I don’t think the parallels are that compelling.

As with Evan Schwartz’s Finding Oz, that if we read late-1890s US newspapers and magazines looking for “Ozzy” details it’s easy to find material that reminds us of Baum, in either its topic or its tone. But that was the cultural milieu. The American press had a lot of humorists in the mode of Twain and Nye. Baum set out to create a fairy tale that seemed modern and American, so of course it reflected the same general topics and concerns tackled by other writers of the day. I want to see a clear link to Baum, not just an assumed connection.

(Illustration above by Eric Shanower.)

Developing the Deadly Desert

2012-01-24T08:48:00.002-05:00

The new issue of The Baum Bugle, the International Wizard of Oz Club’s main journal, includes two articles about the Deadly Desert that surrounds and protects Oz.

The desert wasn’t deadly at first; like a lot of details about Oz, L. Frank Baum developed the desert gradually as ideas and plot points occurred to him. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a sandy waste cuts Oz off from the rest of the world, particularly that odd place (the Midwest) where the Wizard and Dorothy came from.

In The Marvelous Land of Oz, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and their companions fly over that desert out of Oz, where they find a country that apparently uses paper money denominated in dollars. As Michael O. Riley pointed out in Oz and Beyond, Baum’s first two books implied that Oz was nestled somewhere in arid southwestern North America.

But then in Ozma of Oz, Baum had Dorothy travel to Oz by starting in the Pacific Ocean, landing in a fairyland called Ev, and finally crossing the desert on an unrolling carpet. So the countries beyond the desert from Oz are definitely not America. In fact, they seem far from America. Furthermore, while the previous book showed characters standing on the desert, this one implied that doing so would be harmful, or at least unpleasant.

A couple of books later, Baum introduced the alliterative phrase “Deadly Desert.” He quoted this sign erected in front of it:

ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT
TO VENTURE UPON THIS DESERT

For the Deadly Sands will Turn Any Living Flesh

to Dust in an instant. Beyond This Barrier is the

LAND OF OZ

But no one can Reach that Beautiful Country

because of these Destroying Sands

Curiously, that signs stands in an inhospitable, unpopulated spot, so we have to assume that either (a) it was placed there for the benefit of Dorothy and her companions at that moment, or (b) there are a lot more signs elsewhere along the edge of the sand.

Thereafter, the Deadly Desert is always said to be deadly, even when characters like the Wise Donkey manage inexplicably to cross it. In Baum’s penultimate book, The Magic of Oz, it even gives off nauseating fumes that force birds to fly at high altitudes.

And yet, for all the desert’s deadliness, in the entire Oz series no one ever dies on it.

TOMORROW: Tossing out a theory.

“On the shelf, he noticed another novel…”

2012-01-23T13:45:00.001-05:00

A story from Nicholas D. Kristof’s New York Times column yesterday about Judge Olly Neal:

One day in 1957, in the fall of his senior year, Neal cut…class and wandered in the library, set up by Grady, the English teacher whom he had tormented. Neal wasn’t a reader, but he spotted a book with a risqué cover of a sexy woman.

Called “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley,” it was by Frank Yerby, a black author, and it looked appealing. Neal says he thought of checking it out, but he didn’t want word to get out to any of his classmates that he was reading a novel. That would have been humiliating.

“So I stole it.”

Neal tucked the book under his jacket and took it home — and loved it. After finishing the book, he sneaked it back into the library. And there, on the shelf, he noticed another novel by Yerby. He stole that one as well.

This book was also terrific. And, to Neal’s surprise, when he returned it to the shelf after finishing it, he found yet another by Yerby.

Four times this happened, and he caught the book bug. “Reading got to be a thing I liked,” he says. His trajectory changed, and he later graduated to harder novels, including those by Albert Camus, and he turned to newspapers and magazines as well. He went to college and later to law school. . . .

At a high school reunion, Grady stunned Neal by confiding to him that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then, in a flash of understanding, she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book.

So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Yerby. Finally, she found one, bought it and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neal, she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby — all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books out of her own pocket.

Neal told his own story at Storycorps and to NPR.

Sitting with the Tiny Titans

2012-01-22T22:08:00.003-05:00

DC Comics is bringing Tiny Titans to a close soon at issue #50. I’ve read only occasional issues and pages of this magazine, mostly those with an especially high Robin quotient. A put-upon version of Robin is at the center of its cast, who are school-age versions of the second generation of DC superheroes.

The third and fourth generations, each with their own Robins, appear as babies and toddlers. That leaves plenty of opportunity for the older kids to babysit. But not really all the kids, at least equally.

I think the babysitting theme started in issue #4, which DC marketed with this line:

Meet the Little Tiny Titans as they show Wonder Girl just how tough babysitting can be!

Inside, Wonder Girl and another heroine named Bumblebee babysit four teeny-Tiny Titans while Robin, Speedy, and Cyborg go play baseball.

The copy for #15:

And it’s Rose's turn to babysit the Terror Titans when a group activity yields fiery results.

In #23, Robin visits Batgirl and meets two of his little fans.

In #27:

When Raven has to watch Kid Devil for the weekend,…

Have you noticed a pattern?

The cover at top is #29, which came with this copy:

It's Supergirl's turn to toddler-sit the tiny Tiny Titans! Can she handle this crisis of infinite toddlers – or will she burst into tears?

But I don’t recall seeing Robin take on that job. Sometimes he hangs around Batgirl as she does the job because he has a crush on that little red-haired girl. In the “All-Robins Issue” he volunteers to pick up her charges from a daycare center (run by a woman), but he doesn’t actually look after them.

The story in issue #26 has Beast Boy watching over Miss Martian, but the word “babysit” wasn’t part of its marketing copy, and Beast Boy actually insists it’s not his turn. Even if we agree that he really is babysitting here, he’s the only example of male parity I could find. (Did I miss an important panel?)

Most recently, Tiny Titans, #47:

It’s Mrs. Atom’s turn to babysit the Baby Titans – Damien [sic], Arthur Jr., Smidgen, Kid Devil and Jason Toddler. Can she do it alone? Maybe Miss Martian can help!

And Bumblebee is back to babysitting as well. Even when a Tiny Titans story involves multiple baby-sitters, all three are female. Furthermore, Mrs. Atom is a character with no equivalent in the regular DC Universe. [Trust me, Ray Palmer’s love interest Jean Loring is not the same.] She seems to have been created to care for her children and others.

Overall, Tiny Titans appears to perpetuate the idea that child care is naturally a job for girls rather than boys. Ironically, some of Tiny Titans’s biggest fans include readers vocal about pressing DC to expand the exposure and range of female superheroes.

Rick Santorum’s OIP Derangement Syndrome

2012-01-20T08:50:00.002-05:00

For this week’s example of OIP Derangement Syndrome I’m indebted to Nathan DeHoff for his pointer to this report by Charles M. Blow. Because without that evidence, I would have had trouble believing a major politician—even Rick Santorum—would come out strongly against education.

Before finishing a distance fourth or fifth in the New Hampshire primary, Santorum criticized President Obama this way:

I was so outraged by the president of the United States for standing up and saying every child in America should go to college. Well who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America go … I mean the hubris of this president to think that he knows what’s best for you. I … you know there is … I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But, if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him. That’s a good-paying job – using your hands and using your mind. This is the kind of, the kind of snobbery that we see from those who think they know how to run our lives. Rise up America, defend your own freedoms. And overthrow these folks who think they know how to orchestrate every aspect of your lives.

This statement exhibits OIP Derangement Syndrome in two ways. First, Santorum’s mind had obviously been unable to take in and repeat President Obama’s actual policies. For instance, in an address to Congress in February 2009, the President said:

I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.

Not only did Obama say nothing against becoming an auto mechanic, he acknowledged that possibility when he spoke of “vocational training or an apprenticeship.” As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, American manufacturers like educated workers.

Santorum must have felt there was something wrong in Obama’s policy simply because it came from Obama. Under OIP Derangement Syndrome, his mind came up with a distorted version of that policy that enabled him to express his actual gut response to President Obama: “Who are you [my emphasis] to…run our lives”?

Santorum vocally opposes the power of ”this [my emphasis] president to think that he knows what’s best for you.” Of course, Santorum thinks he knows what’s best for us in a lot of ways, and he thinks the government should have to power run many parts of our lives. But to him “this president” is different.

Moorcock: “the prose of the nursery-room”

2012-01-19T22:28:00.002-05:00

From Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh,” as archived at Revolution SF (it was originally written in 1978, revised in 1989, and revised again to note recent authors):

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:
One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926
It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan).

Unlike the tone of E. Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

Wait a minute! Milne’s characterization of Eeyore is hilarious. But his narrative voice is indeed the voice of an adult looking back/down on childhood. Nesbit’s narrative voice, on the other hand, is an author in conspiracy with young readers.

Perhaps the “voice of the nursery-room” is one reason why some of the novels Moorcock mentions—Lord of the Rings and Watership Down among them—are treated as books for young people even though their authors conceived them as books for adults.

Historicity as a Difference Between Baum’s Oz and Maguire’s Oz

2012-01-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

Last month I had the pleasure of hearing Gregory Maguire interviewed about Out of Oz and his entire Wicked Years series at the Cambridge Forum. There’s an edited recording of that conversation here at the Forum Network.

Among other things, Maguire described his childhood experience with L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. His local library had only the first two: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz. He read in Edward Eager’s novels that there were more, but he never saw them. Maguire therefore went on to Narnia, Prydain, Earthsea, Middle Earth, and other fantasy worlds.

As an adult studying children’s literature, Maguire returned to the Baum novels he had missed. “When I finally got to Oz,” he said [according to the best notes I could take at the time], “I found they were a lot thinner than the first two. It doesn’t matter in which order you read them. L. Frank Baum had not been a historian after the first two books. The country did not change as time passed.”

There is a great deal of change in the government of Oz in those first two books. In the Emerald City, the Wizard is swiftly succeeded by the Scarecrow, General Jinjur, and Ozma. Outside, the Wicked Witches perish, and the Tin Woodman becomes emperor of the Winkies. That could leave an impressionable lad with the idea that the other books would also show such historical changes.

But once Ozma takes the throne of the Emerald City and soon all of Oz, every book’s plot is basically a restoration of that status quo, except a little bit better. Ozma’s occasionally kidnapped, confined, and in one book (The Wishing Horse of Oz) magically deposed, but she’s always back in power at the end.

Dorothy and her family, the Wizard, and Button-Bright from The Road to Oz eventually come to live in the Emerald City. But those are the only characters we meet in one Baum Oz book whose lives change significantly later.

Oz not only doesn’t change, but becomes less changeable. Baum established new facts to keep it that way: ageless immortality for all residents, a barrier cutting off the outside world, restrictions on who could practice magic.

For most Oz fans, that’s not a problem—it’s part of the series’ appeal. Oz will always be as you remember. Later books that made major changes in the Emerald City or Ozma’s realm have tended to be less popular. The favorites always return to the beloved status quo.

Maguire acknowledges that his version is different: “What I left out of Out of Oz was that ability of Oz to be permanent in the present.” But since much of his series was fueled by politics, that mutable quality was important to him: “Unless things can change in time, we have no need or reason to work for them to change.”

Of course, unless we can imagine an ideal, we don’t know what change to work for.

Faust on Family Reading Rituals

2012-01-16T14:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's Boston Globe asked Drew Gilpin Faust, Civil War historian and president of Harvard, about her reading. At the end, after name-checking Nancy Drew, she offered a provocative take on a beloved family tradition:

...in my family there were ritual occasions of adults reading to children. For example, my grandmother wanted to develop one-on-one relationships with us by inviting a single child to be read to.

I hated it. I wanted to read to myself. I didn’t want anybody between me and the magical world of the book. My brothers have these memories of sitting with my grandmother and drinking hot chocolate as they disappeared into King Arthur. I would have none of it.

“The Guardianship of Dick Grayson!”

2012-01-15T22:55:00.002-05:00

“You must have read how Batman first took charge of a young boy named Dick Grayson...whose parents, The Flying Graysons of circus fame, had died in a tragic fall from their trapeze!

“Since that day, the mutual affection between this man and boy has been as strong as that between father and son!”

That’s the start of “Bruce Wayne Loses the Guardianship of Dick Grayson!”, a classic but badly-titled story in Batman, #20 (cover date Dec 1943-Jan 1944). It came out of Bob Kane’s apartment studio, with his pencils, Jerry Robinson’s inking, and George Roussos’s lettering bringing out a script by Bill Finger.

And as far as I can tell, this was the first Batman story based on exploring the legal relationship between Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, established in an afterthought back in 1940. In fact, back then the comics rarely mentioned Dick’s circus upbringing, the murder of Bruce’s parents, or what brought them together. Crime-fighting was just what they did.

But then Dick’s paternal uncle George shows up. (The whirling head effect in the first panel is a technique Kane brought from humor comics, his real love.)

It’s striking that Bruce says, “Not after all these years!” Dick has burst onto the scene less than four years before in real time, and in comic-book time Dick Grayson had barely aged. (There was one birthday story.) The same balloon also establishes that Bruce sees Dick “like a son!”

Uncle George goes to court, requiring anguished testimony. Per Reason for Robin, #4, Dick shows more emotion on the stand, but even Bruce is “strained” as he pulls out the word “love.”

But the judge decides that a “nightclubbing, shiftless, café society playboy” is no good guardian for a teenager and awards custody to Uncle George. The Dynamic Duo enjoy a panel of reminiscing…

That upper panel might be the first time the phrase “good soldier” appears in a Batman comic. It’s been echoing since Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Back in 1943 it was an allusion to actual soldiers, of course.

I’m also struck by how Roussos chose to draw Bruce’s “Goodbye, kid, goodbye” in such small letters; that’s a very rare technique in 1940s superhero comics, and it again reflects Bruce’s feelings.

Bruce starts to mope around Wayne Manor (which in this era looks much bigger from inside than from outside). While complaining about unfairness as fervently as any thirteen-year-old, Bruce now calls Dick “the person I love the most!”

Being alone again even affects Bruce‘s work as Batman.

But after the fight Dick has to go back to his newfound relations. A few pages on, it becomes clear that Uncle George is simply trying to extort money from Bruce Wayne, offering him his own teen-aged boy for a mere million dollars. At the suggestion of Alfred the butler, Bruce steps in as Batman. But without his partner, the criminals lure the Caped Crusader “into a man-trap!”

How bad do things look? Batman’s only back-up now is Alfred, and not the ex-special-forces Alfred of today. This was the original fat, comic-relief Alfred. But he knows where to get help: he knocks on Dick’s new bedroom window, and the two of them race off to rescue Batman.

The outcome of that fight hinges on one of the Penguin’s trick umbrellas—a detail established back in that panel of reminiscing. It wasn’t necessary to have read a lot of earlier Batman comics to follow this story. Nevertheless, Finger clearly created it for readers who were already fans of the Dynamic Duo and wanted to learn more about their relationship.

Finally, we have another scene in court, where the judge reverses himself.

Interestingly, this story doesn’t end with Dick’s uncle revealed as a complete fraud; it suggests that he really is a brother of the late trapeze artist John Grayson. I don’t think Uncle George ever resurfaces in the Batman mythos, though.

This story was successful enough that Finger wrote a variation on it in “The Trial of Bruce Wayne!”, published in Batman, #57 (Feb-Mar 1950), with art by Dick Sprang. In this tale, a criminal whom Bruce somehow helped sent to prison seeks revenge by hitting the millionaire where it will hurt the most: he orchestrates a legal hearing to take away custody of Dick.

The crooks in this story attack Bruce instead of Batman, and there are no lost relatives for Dick. Once again, Bruce’s public persona as a shiftless playboy works against him. And in the end he calls the same character witness as before, only this time Finger has Batman speak to the court on panel. (Meanwhile, it appears that Bruce can’t be bothered to show up for his own hearing.)

The “Trial” story never rises to the emotional pitch of “Bruce Wayne Loses the Guardianship of Dick Grayson!”, but it’s a solid example of a story type that usually showed up about once a season: something threatening the partnership of Batman and Robin. I don’t think, however, there were any more stories about Bruce and Dick’s legal relationship, not even when Aunt Harriet appeared, until the 1980s.

COMING UP: The Jason Todd soap opera.

An Individual Mandate Challenge

2012-01-13T21:49:00.000-05:00

In a comment over at my history blog, I recently threw out a challenge. A commenter had called the Affordable Healthcare Act of 2010 “taking control of the entire medical establishment.” Given that the program is designed to preserve and even drive business to private insurers, that Congress shied away from creating a public option to provide competition, and that the system falls far short of the single-payer system that works better for our neighbor Canada, that view strikes me as ludicrous.

I hypothesize that characterizations like that (other examples include “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” “baby-killer,” and so on) are so inaccurate and so ignorant of the spectrum of health-care policy proposals that they can’t be a product of rational thought. Rather, they reflect deeper fears that the critic is unable to acknowledge.

But there’s a simple way to refute my hypothesis. Show that significant figures in the Republican Party used such rhetoric about the same health-care policy before Barack Obama became a prominent proponent of that approach.

I invited anyone to find three examples of significant figures in the Republican Party calling Gov. Mitt Romney’s program for Massachusetts something like a “complete takeover of the health care system” before Barack Obama won the 2008 Iowa caucus and became a presidential frontrunner.

Those three Republican figures can even be Romney’s opponents in the 2008 race. One can even be Ron Paul. But their criticisms can’t simply be “My plan is better than Mitt’s.” They have to be at the same level of extreme vituperation and accusation that Republicans have used about the same program after it became associated with President Obama.

So far no one has replied. And with good reason. In today’s Boston Globe, Scott Lehigh explains:

…the moment Obama came out for an individual mandate, which back then was an idea acceptable to Republicans like Romney and Newt Gingrich, conservatives decided they loathed it because it was an idea acceptable to Obama. That doesn’t make much sense but, hey, that’s politics.

Back in June 2011, Lehigh documented how the Heritage Foundation not only invented the individual mandate but had people advocating for it in the mid-2000s. (Obama, of course, ran against the individual mandate in the Democratic primaries, then moved right and adopted it to placate the insurance industry.)

If people can’t find even three examples of significant Republicans harshly criticizing the policies they now call “Obamacare” before Obama came on the scene, then that’s evidence that it’s not the plan those critics really fear. It’s the man.

Instead, this is an example of what I call “OIP Derangement Syndrome.” That’s the feeling some people have suffered ever since they realized that, despite their own preferences, Obama Is President. Their viscera go “OIP!” and they stop thinking rationally. I plan to highlight more examples of OIP Derangement Syndrome in coming weeks. There seems to be a steady supply.

Limits to Anglophilia

2012-01-12T08:58:00.021-05:00

I’m happy to acknowledge my Anglophilia, but even I found the Anglophilia in Jane Louise Curry’s The Bassumtyte Treasure over the top.

It’s not just ordinary Anglophilia, even. It’s all about the aristocracy, indeed the old aristocracy that remained loyal to Catholicism and Mary, Queen of Scots. The book asks us to root for the aristocratic Bassumtyte family to keep their big house and grounds and servants in the 1970s.

Since it would be awkward to delve into how that wealth was accumulated in previous centuries, or the value of the public services that the tax revenue is now funding, Curry instead embodies that threat as an off-stage villain who’s eager to buy a house. And wouldn’t you know, he’s an Arab prince with lots and lots of money. Arabian aristocracy isn’t so appealing as English.

As with The Lost Farm, Curry starts with a young protagonist—in this case, ten-year-old Tommy Bassumtyte—and his problems—suddenly being sent from New Hampshire to England. The opening chapters are firmly and consistently in his point of view.

But the story doesn’t stick with Tommy. By the second half of the book, the point of view is shifting suddenly among him, his older cousin, an aged ancestor, and other adults as need be. Though Tommy plays a part in the unfolding plot, just as often he’s standing aside as adults do things. And the book’s language doesn’t seem particularly kid-friendly, even for young Anglophiles:

Old Sir Thomas’s plan for the Tudor garden consisted of [a] planting diagram in which each box tree was indicated by a small circle representing its trunk and, on following pages, a series of elevations and one perfectly round tree drawn separately like a lollipop on a short, thick stick. The elevations were side views which showed a long expanse of severe, flat-topped hedge surmounted at each corner and at the pathway opening by a leafy ball. Unlike the present arrangement (or as much as could be judged of it in its shaggy state), on only one of the four sides was there an opening through the outer ledge. Through it could be seen a sketchy representation of another, inner hedge.

Finally, the book is a mix of fantasy and mystery without being really satisfactory as either. As a fantasy it’s timid, with three short visits of a ghost and one peek through time. As a mystery it relies on those fantasy-aided insights rather than rational thinking to reveal crucial details.

Ladies’ Man

2012-01-11T08:35:00.001-05:00

From Bryan Lee O‘Malley’s Scott Pilgrim one-shot, available for free from ComiXology.

The Symbolic Weight of a Dead Munchkin

2012-01-10T09:00:00.034-05:00

At the Mysterious Press, Greg Rucka, scripter of Gotham Central and other well-regarded comics, contributed an essay on how reading Stuart Kaminsky’s Murder on the Yellow Brick Road changed his life.

Granted, he didn’t have much of a life before then. Which is to say, he was an ordinary ten-year-old kid—nothing wrong with that. But, thanks to a bookseller who obviously hadn’t read what she or he was recommending, little Gregory went straight from Encyclopedia Brown and a few chapters of the Hardy Boys to Toby Peters, private eye at the height of the Hollywood studio system.

I'm ten, and my mother hands me this book. On the cover there's a Munchkin with a tiny knife in his chest, and he's lying on the Yellow Brick Road. There's a thin thread of blood that's escaped, and now runs between the bricks. The Munchkin lies in a puddle of light, and the Yellow Brick Road bends away, into murkier shadows. You can just see the lamp itself on the right, but barely, hinting that this isn't Oz.

I stared at that cover for a long time. The title threw me. I was ten, I was a boy, and anything smacking of Oz also reeked of "girl," so I was wary. But that cover, I look at it today - it's to my right as I type this - and I can still remember the delicious sense of menace it gave me, the double-dog-dare to come inside. . . .

The plot, in a nutshell, is this: Judy Garland hires private investigator Toby Peters to keep the murder of the Munchkin out of the papers. Toby learns that Garland's life is in danger. The bodies start stacking up.

Straightline enough. Except I'm ten, and aside from the fact that Raymond Chandler and Clark Gable also show up in the novel (I had heard of the first, had seen films of the second), what Toby uncovers isn't just dead Munchkins. No, no, see, because someone's been making porn films on the old Wizard of Oz sets.

And then Toby has sex in a dentist's chair.

I’m a few years older than Rucka, and I read Kaminsky’s novels as they appeared. I don’t know if I started with Murder on the Yellow Brick Road because of my Oz interest; the first may have been Bullet for a Star, which came out when I was eleven. I was already reading at a high level, including some of my mother’s adult mysteries. I’d read a number of books about prewar Hollywood. I didn’t realize till much later how much Kaminsky played off the southern-California school of private eye novels.

But I never found the emotional connection with Kaminsky’s stories that Rucka did. In fact, in every summer of the late 1970s and early 1980s I probably drifted off in the middle of a Toby Peters mystery. The days were hot, and we didn’t have air-conditioning. I preferred Harry Kemelman and other authors. But for years I did keep trying each new Toby Peters book.

A Westernized Easternized Cinematized Oz

2012-01-09T08:56:00.001-05:00

Once Upon a Blog features Cathy Pavia’s illustrations for The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow, by Joey Green. They meld the characterizations of the MGM movie (which steers Green’s understanding of the story) with classical Japanese art.

(Hat tip to Charlotte’s Library.)

Life-Sized Robin Trophy Case

2012-01-08T09:06:00.000-05:00

This holiday season, Scott Cummings, the editor of The Baum Bugle, kindly sent me this photograph from the Tampa Bay History Center. It shows the Robin costume in a round glass case, just waiting for some fight to symbolically smash.

Actually, that’s not from the bat-cave. As the label says, it’s one of Burt Ward’s costumes from the Batman TV show. (Another view here and a video here.) This case is in an exhibit titled “Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television,” organized by Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

The costume exhibits I’ve been to seem to attract a primarily female audience, but this one is aimed at sci-fi fans, and apparently male fans at that. It includes one of the hats Margaret Hamilton wore as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and an outfit Darryl Hannah wore in Blade Runner, but every other listed costume was made for a male star. Most, if not all, of these artifacts come from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The exhibit has been traveling around medium-sized museums for three years. It closed in Tampa yesterday, and will open at the end of the month at the Midland Center for the Arts in Michigan. And then, the host website says, it’s available through January 2013. So with the right budget, you can host your own authentic life-sized Robin trophy case for months!

“Our brain wants to turn everything into a story”

2012-01-07T16:30:00.000-05:00

At the Tottenville Review, poet R. Salvador Reyes agues that our brains are wired not just to recognize patterns but to recognize predictive patterns because that’s biologically useful. And that wiring is at the root of our human attraction to stories:

When you think about the kinds of patterns that are useful for prediction—patterns that are defined by a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions—it is easy to see that these types of patterns are, in essence, stories. Most predictive patterns are ultimately a type of narrative. Think again about how we just defined a pattern that’s useful for prediction: a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions. Aren’t those also descriptions of plot and setting? When we step back and look at how we experience our world, aren’t we always trying to turn the data from what we study and experience into a narrative pattern that we can make some sense of—and which, consequently, we might be able to make use of in the future?

…not only does narrative provide us with a pattern that can aid in future prediction, it first connects and arranges the data we’re consuming in order to give a comprehendible form and meaning to our experiences in the present. It’s another version of the way our eye and brain translate the tree’s raw pattern data into a macro tree. Our brain wants to turn everything into a story—the same way it wants to turn line, color, texture and light into objects that can be identified and managed by our consciousness. . . .

From this perspective, narrative no longer looks like an ancillary human intellectualizing tool, used primarily to help organize and communicate stories and events between humans. Instead, narrative looks like one of our brain’s core consciousness and universe-building tools. It’s something that we were using to assemble our understanding of existence long before we were using it to assemble the plots of our novels.

So far I’m with Reyes: narrative forms reduce the complexity of life into more understandable, meaningful, or emotionally fulfilling patterns.

But why do we keep seeking out new stories, especially those in modes like fantasy or historical fiction which don’t seem to have much value to our biological survival? Reyes suggests that’s because our narrative-seeking brain is also wired to seek out new stories to make sure it experiences everything useful:

The more unique a pattern is, the greater its potential usefulness. Keep in mind that our pattern junkie is a collector, he’s out to gather and hoard every different kind of pattern he can get his hands on. But like any maniacal hobbyist, he’s always looking for the pieces that he doesn’t already have in his collection.

Actually, unique and even impossible stories would seem to have less potential usefulness than mundane ones. This strikes me as a place to argue for an evolutionary adaptation that goes beyond what’s necessary. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Reyes throws out capitalized terms like Literary Darwinism and Story Theory, and goes into more detail on the “Narrative Complexity” part of his own website.

The Best Movie Adaptation from a Children’s Book

2012-01-05T09:07:00.014-05:00

The Salon article on good and bad cinematic adaptations of children’s books (quoted here and here) got me thinking about my own list.

To judge simply by the artistic distance from the written source to the cinematic reworking, my top choice is The Black Stallion. The novel by Walter Farley was serviceable. Written when Farley was in high school and college, it’s a standard boy’s adventure with ordinary prose and better-than-average horsemanship.

In contrast, Carroll Ballard’s movie looks gorgeous, thanks to Ballard and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. The plot is pretty much the same, and very basic it is. But there are real feelings of loss and risk, giving the triumphal story more layers. And the performances by Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr, and Hoyt Axton are wonderfully natural.

Judging MGM’s Wizard of Oz as an Adaptation

2012-01-04T09:00:00.015-05:00

Last week I quoted a Salon article collecting thoughts by a bunch of writers about their favorite and least favorite adaptations of children’s books. Several had interesting (and varied) things to say about the most famous Oz movies.

Gregory Maguire, author lately of Out of Oz:

I would insist that the 1939 film of “The Wizard of Oz” is better constructed than the 1900 novel on which it is based, and that “Return to Oz” is an overlooked masterpiece much better than the several Baum novels upon which it is based.

(More to come on the contrast between Baum’s and Maguire’s approaches to Oz. I need to get my notes together.)

Jane Yolen, author of so much:

I think the Judy Garland “Wizard of Oz” is better than the book, which, while wildly inventive, has such flat affect and overly simplistic prose that it makes my teeth ache.

(More of Yolen’s thoughts on the book, and my response to that assessment, back here.)

Daniel Nayeri, editor and author:

I don’t think “The Wizard of Oz” can rightly be called a “good” adaptation. It might be a good movie, but it didn’t do the world of Oz any favors (aside from keeping it in print for so long).

While the MGM Wizard of Oz does a lot of things right, it also gets a lot about Oz wrong. The need to add a valuable lesson about life to the story—“She had to learn it for herself”—both brings absolute jibberjabber out of Judy Garland’s mouth and turns her whole trip to Oz into a punishment. I think that’s even more off the mark than making Dorothy a wimp and making Oz a dream.

Musical of Last Month: The Wizard of Oz

2012-01-03T09:15:00.001-05:00

In December the New York Public Library celebrated the Wizard of Oz stage extravaganza that reached Broadway in 1903 as its “Musical of the Month.”

A huge and influential hit when it appeared, the show prompted L. Frank Baum to write sequels to his novel. It provided Dorothy with the surname Gale, the Tin Woodman with his original name Nick Chopper, and Oz with a former king named Pastoria. For fans of the MGM movie, the snowstorm that saves Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion from the poppies was borrowed directly from this show. But hardly anyone remembers the show itself.

As organized by Doug Reside, Digital Curator at the NYPL’s Library for the Performing Arts, the website offers four essays on the show:

Reside with an overview and a downloadable script of the show, based on what was deposited with the Library of Congress for copyright. Shows of the time evolved greatly over their run, so this was probably not what most of the audience enjoyed.
David Maxine, proprietor of Hungry Tiger Press and producer of a CD of the show’s music, on how it evolved under many hands.
Reside on Baum’s attempts at follow-up hits, including an adaptation of Ozma of Oz that eventually came to the stage as The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, and thence inspired the novel Tik-Tok of Oz. Once again, there’s a script to download, this time the libretto from an early draft of that show in the NYPL’s collection.
Prof. William Everett on how The Wizard of Oz pushed along the career of Victor Herbert, whose Babes in Toyland was the next fantasy extravaganza to open in Chicago, and is much better remembered.

These essays are illustrated with some of the images from the NYPL’s huge archive, including the photo of Fred Stone and David Montgomery as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman above.

Cybils for 2011

2012-01-02T16:59:00.001-05:00

The Cybils Award shortlists for 2011 have been announced, representing blogging volunteers’ judgments of what children’s books offer the best combination of quality and kid appeal.

There’s a new category this year of Book Apps. Nominees include three brand names established for decades (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pat the Bunny, and The Monster at the End of This Book) and what look like four originals:

It’s notable that two of the three adaptations are of picture books that were interactive before electronics, and the third plays with the reality of its world. It’s also notable that the originals lean toward the didactic. I’ll probably try some of these out now that iHave an iPad.

Definitely Un-round, part 2

2012-01-01T08:57:00.002-05:00

Early last month the Box Heroes Corps of Atlanta introduced their orthogonal versions of Batman and Robin at a holiday parade.

Also last month, I stumbled across the fact that in 2010 the University of Queensland accepted an undergraduate thesis in the Film and Media Studies honours program titled “Robin the Boy Hostage: The Evolution of the Superhero Sidekick”.

Unfortunately, access to this work is limited beyond this abstract:

The superhero's youth sidekick has become a mainstay within superhero narratives since their introduction in the late 1930s [sic]. This research will attempt to illustrate the change within the sidekick archetype, from their origins within mythology through changes within youth culture and the comic book industry. This Dissertation will also view how these changes have been implemented with the relationship of the most popular superhero and sidekick partnership, Batman and Robin, and view how the characters[’] popularity has halted changes seen within other sidekick characters.

The entry says this item is “Anonymous” but placed in the repository by Mrs. Isabel Bentley—perhaps a university administrator. If anyone has access to the Queensland file, it would be interesting to know more.

The End of Lord Peter Wimsey

2011-12-31T09:01:00.000-05:00

I read the Lord Peter Wimsey novels as a boy, spurred by my mother’s fondness for them and by Ian Carmichael’s portrayal of the character on Masterpiece Theater. Like any good fuddy-duddy, I was therefore a little wary of Jill Paton Walsh’s sequels to Dorothy L. Sayers’s originals.

The first, titled Thrones, Dominations, grew out of notes that Sayers left behind, and her name appears on the cover before Walsh’s. For the second, A Presumption of Death, Walsh had only some fictional letters that Sayers had published as propaganda during the Battle of Britain, showing how her characters were coping with the Blitz. On that book, Walsh’s name came first.

For the third, The Attenbury Emeralds, Walsh had no unpublished Sayers material to draw from, simply allusions and remarks. She is sole author.

The Attenbury Emeralds tries to bookend Lord Peter’s career. The first half recounts a couple of his earliest cases as a detective, with Lord Peter and Bunter recounting the events at great length to Harriet. The narrative thus takes the form of a three-way conversation, interrupted by family business and daily life. It’s an awkward read, though more believable than those Conrad novels in which a narrator supposedly speaks for hours on end.

Naturally, this early case comes back in the book’s second half. That mystery involves a murderer who’s mad (mad, I say!), so I found that plot less than fully satisfying. On the other hand, the mystery of Thrones, Dominations depended on details of the proper dress for royal mourning after the death of George V, so it wasn’t good for the fashion-blind.

I found A Presumption of Death to be the most satisfying of this trilogy, with its interesting wartime setting and good roles for children. It has much the same feel as Sayers’s short story “Talboys,” her only glimpse of Peter and Harriet as parents. There are priceless moments with Harriet and Bunter.

What was truly satisfying, however, was how Walsh drew the whole Lord Peter saga to a close. Sayers left his nephew the Viscount St. George in the RAF during the Battle of Britain, and acknowledged that the young man probably didn’t survive the war.

I remember reading that factoid in a book about the series back around 1980, and realizing that would make Lord Peter heir apparent to his older brother, the Duke of Denver. The duchess was clearly past the age to have another child, even if she and her husband still got along, so the only way that succession would change is if she died, Denver remarried, and the new wife quickly had a male child. Which was, I suppose, what Peter would hope for.

The Attenbury Emeralds explores that situation. It’s set in 1951 as new tax rates and social rules are spreading peers’ inheritances and privileges more widely around the English nation. Peter and Harriet’s boys are at Eton and other public schools, as is Bunter’s son, clearly on the rise. And by the end of the book, Lord Peter is no more.

Which is not to say he’s dead. If in future he does any more mystery-solving, perhaps under another author’s pen, he’ll do it under a different name.

Piling on The Seeker

2011-12-29T09:12:00.002-05:00

Salon asked some children’s writers about movie adaptations, and a couple had interesting things to say about an uninteresting film, The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. I read that piece just a couple of hours after watching the movie for the first time (I had a bunch of envelopes to stuff, all right?). M. T. Anderson is right on the mark about it:

The original novel, published in the ’70s, established a lot of the common tropes of kids’ fantasy novels – for example, the odd penchant of Forces of Light in general for engaging underage teens to save the world. (Really? Is that a wise choice? Are those the only resumes they receive?)

The qualities of the original that make it a classic of the genre also make it a tough thing to adapt into a movie. It’s richly atmospheric and moody, even dreamy, evoking a Celtic Christmas that is ancient and half-pagan – but the confrontations between Light and Dark are subtle. The action is almost ritualistic.

For the movie, they threw the whole Celtic thing out the window and focused on action. By sapping the story of everything that made it particular (its mood and its focus on a seductive blend of British mythologies) they left behind only the elements that have been imitated so many times in the 30 years since the book’s publication that they’ve become cliché. So the filmmakers managed to create something that fans of the book hated – because it gutted the original material – while at the same time boring the hell out of everyone who didn’t know the book, because all that was left was insipidly generic.

Charitably, Anderson says, “Some of the bustling family scenes, scripted by the talented John Hodge (‘Trainspotting’) have verve.” Family was also a major theme in Susan Cooper’s novel as well, starting from the first line, but used in a completely different way. Though one Stanton brother is exasperated by the number of siblings (which the movie doesn’t try to replicate fully), for Will his family is safe and sturdy. In contrast, the movie family is full of nasty teasing, sexual rivalry, and hidden shame.

I was struck by how desperate the moviemakers were to establish that The Seeker was set in the present, not the (gasp!) 1970s. Our first sight of Will is him putting in earbuds. Shortly afterward comes a shot of a line of teens all flicking open their cell phones. (Remember when phones flicked open?) Will’s brothers have a huge screen for their videogames, an older brother Skypes in from Hawaii for Christmas, and Will researches the ancient battle of light and dark through Google.

That technology theme fades away, however, and cell phones and computers aren’t allowed to affect the plot any more than in the Harry Potter stories. The conflict plays out in a series of very familiar special-effects shots. Giant snakes! Water bursting through archways! Glass breaking! Smoke billowing!

Diane Duane concurred on how much was lost:

…probably the adaptation I’ve seen that stands out as most completely screwed-up would be “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.” The basic concept was eviscerated and left staggering around like a zombie-ized shell of itself, and all the good character business was either dumbed down, ripped out or rendered meaningless. It infuriated me, because that book was the anchor of one of the great mid-’70s YA fantasy series, a nuanced piece of work.

I know mood is hard to translate from page to screen. But The Dark Is Rising offers one of the finest lines in children’s literature—“Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining”—and The Seeker managed to screw up even that.

I have no compunction about spoiling what’s supposed to be one of the movie’s big reveals: that Will’s twin brother was kidnapped in infancy, and—despite his growing up in a family with two guilt-stricken parents and five older brothers who love to torment him—no one ever told him. This allows for a sight of the lead actor in an awful wig alongside his regular self in trick shots at the end of the film. Hell, I’ll even give away the ending! The brother returns to the family after fourteen years of captivity in a snow globe as if nothing has happened.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

2011-12-28T08:42:00.001-05:00

Here’s a taste of economist and New York Times columnist Tyler Cowen’s remarks about storytelling at something called TEDxMidAtlantic (evidently the future is moving too fast for the spacebar to keep up).

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones.

The good and bad things about stories is they're a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few stories. . . . There's monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again.

There was a study done, we asked some people to describe their lives. And when asked to describe their lives, what's interesting is how few people said, "mess". It's probably the best answer; I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths.

But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that's a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel," 5% "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." Again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and when something is in the form of a story, often we remember it when we shouldn't.

So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that's exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that's exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read nonfiction books, we're really being fed stories. Nonfiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but everything's taking the same form of these stories.

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like "this" instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics.

Even if we avoid the pitfall of assigning good and evil, we still face the other fallacies of seeking a well-constructed narrative: that things don’t just happen randomly, but for a reason already established in the story; that we as characters affect the outcome of events through our efforts (or fail because of lack of effort); that there’s a lesson or insight to be learned. In writing fiction, I’m eager to create good narratives. In studying history, I’m suspicious of them, yet it’s the natural way I lay out information.

Cowen’s whole talk can also be viewed as a video.

Oz on the iPad

2011-12-27T19:25:00.000-05:00

One of my gifts this holiday/birthday season was an iPad, and one of my first apps purchased for that iPad was Oz, created by Boluga.

The text is an abridgment of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the aesthetic is derived from W. W. Denslow’s illustrations. Not as they originally appeared, though, since the “pages” have also been digitally aged and dusted with grime for a “classic” look. In addition, key phrases are enlarged and laid diagonally on many screens, especially those with no art. As I noted before, Denslow’s thick-line cartooning adapts well to this format.

Kirkus found that shortening the text removed a lot of Baum’s charm. Knowing the story already, I didn’t pay much attention to that, but I agree that a lot of Baum’s strength as a storyteller—his ability to create a verisimilitudinous fairyland through respect for individual characters and quotidian detail—appears in passages unnecessary for the plot and therefore likely to be the first to go.

Some of the screens have interactive elements, but I found them inconsistent. From one page to the next, the art can:

do nothing but look pretty. It’s possible to spot these by the lack of a circular icon in the upper right corner.
come with animation, music, or other sounds, but (aside from rerunning the screen by hitting that icon) there’s nothing for readers to do. This is how the Wicked Witches die, for example.
let readers play with visual elements, though to no clear purpose. I don’t know why one is supposed to knock down the Soldier with the Green Whiskers’s gun. One can fill the poppy field with poppies drifting snowglobe-style from the sky, which is kind of pretty, but it doesn’t seem to grow from the story.
allow readers to be part of the story by, say, taking the Scarecrow off his pole or putting the heart in the Tin Woodman. These screens are, of course, the most fun. But Kirkus complains that such games and puzzles require too much fine-motor control for the app’s intended audience. I must admit I still haven’t got the Guardian of the Gates’s key into the lock—I’d actually decided it didn’t belong there.

Not being able to distinguish one type of interaction from another was also a little frustrating. For example, after Mr. Joker, the clown in the China Country, shatters into dozens of pieces, I kept trying to reassemble him. But I think he’s a lost cause.

Perhaps a version 2.0 will fix those frustrations. But honestly, for 99¢, Oz was a fine way to learn some of the tricks of my iPad while revisiting some familiar faces and places. I was more than satisfied.

Incidentally, I noticed only one sign of the MGM movie’s influence on this version: when the Tin Woodman’s heart goes into his chest, it starts to tick. All the other details are from the book.

Cry Freedom

2011-12-26T08:45:00.001-05:00

Over at Boston 1775, I’ve run an interview with Seamus Heffernan, the creator of a new independent comic called Freedom, set in an alternative 1779 when the American Patriots have lost their war for independence from Britain. We cover his inspiration, research, working methods, and plans for upcoming installments.

The first issue of Freedom is available now. It starts the adventures of Adam Farr, a fourteen-year-old Massachusetts farmboy going into redcoat-occupied Boston to work for a merchant who supports the Crown. Its website offers a preview, a scene in which Adam and his brother encounter trouble at an army checkpoint.

Freedom won a Xeric Foundation grant earlier this year, helping Heffernan to publish in an oversized 8" x 12" format that really shows off his art. This first issue raises a lot of questions, and the saga will probably take years to complete, but it’s off to a very intriguing start.

Weekly Robin Holiday Greetings

2011-12-25T21:13:00.014-05:00

This weekly Robin shares a few highlights from the holiday story in Batman, #15, dated February-March 1943 but on sale the previous December. That was even before Alfred Beagle arrived at stately Wayne Manor.

The tale, scripted by Don Cameron and drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, begins with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson out holiday shopping. (As usual in winter scenes of this era, Dick wears earmuffs.) They see a poor newsboy and give him presents, but the image of his poverty lingers in their minds that night.

Bruce and Dick decide to bring gifts to the three loneliest men in Gotham. But of course they can’t do that simply as a wealthy philanthropist and his ward. No, they’ve got to show off the bat-tech!

One of the men they’ve targeted is a doorman at an “ultra-exclusive” nightclub.

Batman brings the doorman inside and asks the revelers for a show of appreciation for the doorman. The 1% obligingly rattle their jewelry. But because this is Gotham City, any upper-class entertainment is due to be disrupted by crooks. Sure enough, thugs arrive, walk through the now-unguarded door, and hold everyone at gunpoint.

Fortunately, the Boy Wonder has a brainstorm about one of the presents the Dynamic Duo has brought for the doorman.

Also fortunately, these are the two dumbest crooks in the world. (Full story here.)

Bartimaeus Flattened on the Page

2011-12-23T08:38:00.005-05:00

Andrew Donkin shares credit for the script of the Amulet of Samarkand graphic novel with Jonathan Stroud, just as he shared credit for the Artemis Fowle adaptation with Eoin Colfer.

I thought the Artemis Fowle comic was very good, equal or perhaps even better than the novel. However, I thought the comics adaptation of the first Bartimaeus novel was merely a flattened version of the original.

The Samarkand art, by draftsman Lee Sullivan and colorist Nicolas Chapuis, is just fine. Their pictures of a magical London are terrific; I especially like the way their London Eye has the five-pointed pentagram inside it. I found it somewhat difficult to follow how old Nathaniel was in different scenes as the narrative flashed back and forth, but that really points to the larger problem in this adaptation.

Colfer’s Artemis Fowle was practically made for the comics form. The narrative voice is an omniscient, detail-oriented third person. The conflict is built on opposing teams with clear goals. The narrative is built up from plot twists in the physical world rather than realizations in the mental one. The characters cover a broad range of physical types, with corresponding personalities.

In contrast, Stroud’s Bartimaeus books are a triumph of narration. There’s Bartimaeus’s own voice, with its boasts and footnotes, which brief comics captions can barely replicate. That voice helps us follow the djinn through his shapeshifting and world-jumping while in the graphic format we have to see Bartimaeus from the outside.

The novel’s other, third-person narrative voice shows us Nathaniel growing up and working his schemes. It provides the sense of distance useful for an anti-hero while letting us into his head as he thinks and rethinks.

The narration also keeps the timing of different scenes distinct. In the comics version, there’s a short sepia-toned flashback to when Nathaniel was very little, but all the other scenes unfold before us looking like the present, differentiated only by captions saying NOW and BEFORE.

Indeed, I wonder if this form would have worked better if it started at Chapter 11, “The Day Everything Changed”; using Nathaniel’s confrontation with Simon Lovelace to fill us in on the boy’s background and world; and then proceeding chronologically. That approach would have kept Bartimaeus off the stage for longer. However, if we can’t hear his voice in all its glory, it’s unfortunately not such a loss.

“The lessons they want to hand down”

2011-12-22T08:34:00.000-05:00

The Horn Book just sent me editor Roger Sutton’s interview with Daniel Handler on the textual side of Why We Broke Up. I don’t think it’s yet on the web, so this might be a reminder to sign up for the Horn Book’s electronic newsletter.

In any event, at one point Handler (né for book-buying audiences Lemony Snicket) says:

I don’t quite understand what YA literature is. To me it’s the genre where the authors publicly talk the most about the lessons they want to hand down to the reader, even more so than in picture books, I’d say. It seems like everybody who's writing a book for a fifteen-year-old is trying to save a particular kind of fifteen-year-old from a particular kind of thing.

That’s just not true. There’s a whole ’nother kind of YA lit whose valuable lesson about life is reassuring a fifteen-year-old that others are going through a particular kind of thing just like them, so they don’t need saving.

(Unless, of course, the “particular kind of thing” is the adolescent belief that nobody is suffering just like them, that everyone else in high school is having more fun than they are.)

But does Why We Broke Up at the end offer a sense of hope?

Are Today’s Picture Books Too Short?

2011-12-21T09:01:00.001-05:00

Last month, the reviewer, author, and former editor Anita Silvey delivered some sharp talk about picture books in School Library Journal, starting with the teapotted tempest about a New York Times article reporting that booksellers saw some parents hurrying their children through picture books to early novels:

I must admit, I’ve grown quite weary over the last few years of the all-too-predictable response from adults who champion children’s and teen books: attack anyone who makes critical comments about them. . . . The basic premise of the New York Times article—that new picture books are increasingly ignored in today’s marketplace—seems completely sound to me. During the 1990s and into the 21st century, picture books brought in about 33 to 35 percent of the revenue of any major publishing house’s list. As Houghton Mifflin’s publisher in the late ’90s, I observed years when picture books made up more than 40 percent of sales. But today that number has slipped to a mere 10 to 11 percent for most publishers. . . .

So outside of obvious demographics (the big teen bubble and adults who now read YA books), why has this magnificent genre [of picture books] fallen on hard times? It’s certainly not because children don’t need or want picture books. In fact, kids today appear happiest when the combination of art and text extends into chapter books like Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series and even novels like Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Silvey thinks the crucial data is that new picture books aren’t selling, but older ones are, and concludes that the older titles offer features the newer ones lack.

One of those features, however, might just be being older. If parents are buying fewer picture books overall, the books they’re most likely to pick up might be those they recognize from their own childhoods.

The article doesn’t offer data for Silvey’s next conclusion: that older picture books are appealing because they’re longer and fuller. It notes the short word counts of two older books, but not the longer word counts of several others, and it’s not clear whether any of those are on the bestseller lists cited earlier.

Nevertheless, I suspect Silvey is right in her diagnosis. As she notes, there’s tremendous pressure on picture-book writers, especially new ones, to write very short, spare manuscripts:

During the last few years, publishers began to maintain that adults wanted shorter texts to read to children—because of the demands on their time and young readers’ shorter attention spans. In the 1990s, publishers believed that kids didn’t want novels longer than 200 pages—until J. K. Rowling set everyone straight.

While demanding that picture books not be “slight,” editors might be hemming authors in so much on word count that it’s extraordinarily difficult not to be. Is there actually a market space for new “picture storybooks,” or is that still simply a label hopeful authors cling to when they don’t want to edit down their wordy picture-book manuscripts? Are there enough readers of picture-book age to generate sufficient demand for a longer form?

One-Page Wizard of Oz

2011-12-20T08:47:00.016-05:00

This is an unabridged publication of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz in poster form, available from Spineless Classics in the UK.

The same outfit has versions of Peter Pan, Treasure Island, and other classics, all in appropriate silhouettes.

But for £40?!

(I understand that expressing the price with the singular form of the currency—“Forty pound?!”—conveys indignation in British speech. But I could be wrong.)

Not in the Mood

2011-12-18T15:53:00.000-05:00

Of course, Robin still manages to get the pun out even as he insists he’s above such things now.

Something That Makes Letterman Happy

2011-12-17T09:11:00.002-05:00

A well-known critical voice on the opening of the CelebriGum photography exhibit at the Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York:

“At the very core of it, it’s stupid. And so if you take something stupid and magnify it to this extreme, then it’s really stupid. And I couldn’t be happier.”

That quote comes from the New York Times Arts Beat blog. The CelebriGum site itself says that the critic was actually instrumental in effecting the show.

Dragons as an Evolutionarily Adaptive Construct

2011-12-16T20:45:00.005-05:00

At Salon, Paul A. Trout summarizes the hypothesis of anthropologist David E. Jones’s An Instinct for Dragons:

Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years. The three predators are the leopard, the python, and the eagle.

According to Jones (what follows is a condensed summary of a complex argument), ancient primates evolved alarm calls to identify each of the three predators, with each call triggering the defensive response appropriate to the nature of the attack mode of the specific predator. Jones calls this predator-recognition template the “snake/raptor/cat complex.” This complex is the source of what Jones refers to as the “brain dragon.”

The brain dragon emerged when our apelike ancestors left the trees to walk on the ground. rather suddenly, the relatively small brain of Australopithecus had to process a lot of information about many new forms of predators and develop new alarms calls and strategic responses to them. Faced with information overload, the brain of Australopithecus resorted to lumping information into manageable and memorable chunks.

As a result, the cat, the snake, and the raptor were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. This is the hybrid “monster” that came to be known as the “dragon.”

But aren’t European dragons usually reptilian in their facial features? And what about the wings—or is that another carryover from the raptors?

The Whole Tooth and Nothing But

2011-12-15T08:47:00.001-05:00

In last Sunday’s New York Times a frustrated parent (who on second look I find is my college classmate Bruce Feiler) laid into the tooth fairy tradition:

Over the centuries, many cultures developed rituals to mark children’s loss of their deciduous teeth, which usually begins around 5 or 6. In some societies, witches were believed to covet discarded teeth for spells, so proper disposal was paramount. Children have variously tossed their teeth onto the roof (Vietnam, Haiti), buried them with ancestors (New Guinea), fed them to mice (Mexico, Afghanistan) or even burned them.

Americans were the first to popularize the idea of a tooth fairy early in the 20th century, though the custom did not become widespread until the 1950s, according to research by Rosemary Wells, a dental lecturer who lived in Chicago. American parents introduced two wrinkles to the age-old ritual, neither one for the better.

First, in the prosperity-obsessed climate of the 1950s, the tooth fairy began compensating children with cash for the alleged trauma of losing a tooth. Leave it to Americans to debase a perfectly good 3,000-year-old tradition by making it all about money.

Second, and even worse, while nearly all cultures mark the falling out of the first tooth, Americans extended the ritual to cover every tooth, a number that usually reaches 20. These days, losing a tooth is not a quaint right of passage, it’s the Ironman triathlon of parental obligation.

I can’t imagine that inflation has made this ritual any easier for parents. This year’s Visa survey of how much money the tooth fairy leaves per tooth found that the national average is $2.60. (In trying to calculate the median, I discovered that the proffered numbers on how many children receive what amount add up to only 82%, so who knows?)

I don’t think my brother and I ever saw more than small change from the tooth fairy back in the 1970s. Nowadays the idea of putting a dime or quarter in a child’s bed probably seems ridiculous. And what if she swallows it in her sleep and chokes?!

The Crossover We’ll Never See

2011-12-14T23:16:00.000-05:00

Russell Hoban died last night, the Guardian reports.

I remember being struck back in high school by the stark contrast between his delightful early readers and his post-apocalyptic novel. Could there be two authors named Russell Hoban? But no.

“The First Teenage Print Culture” at the AAS, 20 Dec.

2011-12-13T20:43:00.000-05:00

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, has just announced this upcoming seminar:

On Tuesday, December 20, at 4:30 PM, Lara Langer Cohen--an assistant professor of English at Wayne State University, and a current American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellow—will be presenting a regional academic seminar, titled:

Inventing Teenage Print Culture: The Postbellum Amateur Press

In the late 1860s, hobby printing presses for home use appeared on the market, leading to an explosion of amateur newspapers-nearly all written, edited, and printed by teenagers. Although amateur journalists were spread throughout the country, they were enmeshed in a tight-knit virtual community forged through exchanges; local, state, and national associations; and a determinedly insular focus; indeed, many amateur papers consisted of little more than columns of news about other amateur papers. This presentation will explore how the first teenage print culture helped shaped emerging ideas about adolescence, particularly the combination of rebelliousness and conformity we continue to associate with it today.

This seminar will take place in the the Society’s Goddard-Daniels House at 190 Salisbury Street, with refreshments and a dutch-treat dinner to follow. Contact Ann-Cathrine Rapp at AAS by Friday in order to attend.

Why do I post this on Tuesday, which I’ve reserved for stuff about Oz?

Because L. Frank Baum, born in 1856, and his brother Harry were participants in that “first teenage print culture.” In 1871 they wrote and printed a family newspaper called the Rose Lawn Home Journal, named after the family estate in upstate New York. It contained riddles, stories, poems, neighborhood news, and some advertisements for the family firm. (The photo above shows Frank in 1868 during his short career at a military academy.)

Frank went on to publish booklets about stamp-collecting and chicken-raising. Later in life, he used his printing skills to publish the weekly Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper and a book of his poetry called By the Candelabra’s Glare. For the latter, Baum asked W. W. Denslow to draw some decorative art, and their collaboration led in two years to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

What are the equivalent youth cultures today? One is, I suspect, the young folks who post videos on YouTube, commenting and favoriting back and forth. Networking is so much easier now.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

2011-12-12T20:24:00.001-05:00

I much enjoyed editor Andrew Karre’s essay “#yamatters” at Hunger Mountain:

I’ve made the joke several times that there are two sure-fire ways to drive traffic to a blog or newspaper website. Barely informed speculation about a new Apple product is the first. Second is a half-baked analysis of the state of YA literature (“Think of the children!”). Sometimes this joke gets laughs. . . .

More than any other tech company, Apple thrives on disruptive technology. Remember the music industry before the iPod and iTunes? Remember what your cell phone looked like and what you expected it to do in 2006? Remember netbooks? And the list goes on. In short, a disruptive technology is some device or system that, when it enters an established market, changes everything. . . .

I believe modern novels for young readers—particularly YA novels—are a disruption in children’s books and maybe in books in general.

And just imagine what sort of disruption there will be when those crazy kids can read their books on their iPhones!

What? . . . Really?! . . . Oh, my god, the disruption!

Novels for teens and younger readers are substantially less intermediated and substantially more anticipated in real time. For affluent audiences of avid young adult readers, teachers and librarians no longer act as gatekeepers. They are still there, but now they’re just one of dozens of avenues for discovery. Fifteen years ago, authors were abstractions; today, they’re friends on Facebook, and we stay up until midnight to buy their new books at the moment of release.

Additional evidence of this disruption is abundant: Look at children’s and teen sections in stores and libraries now and fifteen years ago. Look at the sizes of book advances and print runs. Bestselling adult authors are writing YA novels (or feeling the need to deny that they’d ever do so—it’s the same thing really). Etc, etc. YA has disrupted children’s books.

Of course, this disruption follows the disruption of the Harry Potter series, with each volume rewriting the rules of publishing. Remember when it took months for books to be published on both sides of the Atlantic, when there was no New York Times best-seller list for children’s books, when everyone knew that eight-year-olds couldn’t possibly read more than 160 pages? And the scary part is that it’s the same readers!

Robinson’s Visual Inspiration for Robin

2011-12-11T20:26:00.004-05:00

In further honor of the late Jerry Robinson, this weekly Robin quotes from his 2004-05 interview by Gary Groth for The Comics Journal on the character design for Robin:

We had a long list of about 30 names, and we kept adding others. The names are very important for the characters. Bill [Finger] was very specific about that, as well as Bob [Kane]. Most of the names, as I recall, were of mythological origin — Mercury and others. None of them sounded right to me, or to anybody, because we never agreed on any one.

My reservation was that I thought that it should be a name that evoked an image of a real kid. He didn’t have superpowers, nor did Batman. That was what distinguished it from Superman and the other superheroes. I thought the boy should be the same. And thinking of a more human name, I came up with Robin because the adventures of Robin Hood were boyhood favorites of mine.

I had been given a Robin Hood book illustrated by N. C. Wyeth — I think it was a 10th or 12th birthday present. It was a big, very handsome book for the time, very elaborate because it had full-color illustrations, maybe a dozen throughout the book. It was the full text with full-plate tip-ins. I remembered those because I had pored over them so many times as a kid.

I had a vision of Robin Hood just as Wyeth drew him in his costume, and that’s what I quickly sketched out when I suggested [the name] Robin, which they seemed to like, and then showed them the costume. And if you look at it, it’s Wyeth’s costume, from my memory, because I didn’t have the book to look at. But it is pretty accurate: the fake mail pants, the red vest, upon which I added the little “R” to correspond with Batman’s bat on his chest.

When I started to letter the strip, every legend I did started off with a little round drop-out white letter. So I thought of that for the vest.

Now in fact I don’t see many elements of the Robin costume in Wyeth’s paintings, particularly the one most often cited as inspiration: “Robin Meets Maid Marian,” shown at right above. Certainly the “fake mail pants” don’t show up many places before Detective Comics, #38.

But I think the title-page illustration at top, showing young Robin Hood learning to shoot, must have been in Robinson’s head. For one thing, it shows the hero as a boy wonder. And although the garments are quite different from what Robin would wear, the silhouette is rather similar: short boots with flared ankles, smooth legs from ankle to upper thigh, jerkin extending below the belt, puffed upper sleeves looking like short sleeves. And, of course, emblems on the chest.

Tolkien the Teacher

2011-12-09T14:50:00.001-05:00

Back in early 2010, I quoted reminiscences about J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, as collected by Leonard Marcus. Cooper said, “He was a wonderful lecturer,” but Jones said his lectures were “absolutely appalling.”

It looks like many more people shared Jones’s response. Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker about high fantasy for young readers begins:

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable.

“Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around.

“I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

Since Jones and Cooper were at Oxford at about the same time, and since Cooper can appreciate theatricality when she sees it, most likely she was remembering the more popular lectures of C. S. Lewis.

According to Philip Pullman, Tolkien left his stamp on the Oxford curriculum even after he had retired from teaching: “every undergraduate had to read and study—and suffer—Anglo-Saxon.”

Weekly Robin Extra: Farewell to Jerry Robinson

2011-12-08T12:31:00.007-05:00

Comics artist and advocate Jerry Robinson died this week at the age of eighty-nine. He was a teenager when Bob Kane hired him as an assistant in the summer of 1939. From inking and lettering he moved on to being the uncredited principal artist on some Batman comics before being hired away by the publisher.

At a signing in Boston earlier this year, I asked Robinson about the appearances of his and inker George Roussos’s names in early Batman pages—slipped onto shop signs and the like. Was that their way of “signing” the art alongside Kane? With a sly smile, Robinson said, “I probably signed Bob’s name more than he did!”

The photo above comes from Geoff Boucher’s 2009 profile of Robinson from the Los Angeles Times. Is it a sign of our values that lately Robinson has been celebrated more for co-creating the Joker than for co-creating Robin?

Looking for Evrob

2011-12-07T15:44:00.006-05:00

The detail above comes from one of the panels of the Marvel Comics adaptation of Ozma of Oz, drawn by Skottie Young. It shows the royal family of Ev soon after they’ve been disenchanted.

The big lunk in the lower left, with the single curly hair atop his dome, appears to be future king Evardo. At least that’s who is looking for cake in the royal pantry several pages later, as L. Frank Baum described.

However, an earlier page had the label “Evardo” on the smaller adolescent with the purple mantle and the even worse haircut. Either way, it’s quite a shift from John R. Neill’s portrait of a conventional young adolescent.

As in Baum’s novel, the prince we see most in this comic is Evring, the little prince whom Dorothy rescues. He’s also the most normal-looking of the boys that Young draws. Evring wears gloves on his spindly arms; since he’s not trained for manual labor like Tip in Young’s Marvelous Land of Oz art, the effect is to make him look more like a—gasp!—character in a cartoon.

Baum wrote that Evring is the baby of the family. I’m guessing that detail didn’t make it into Eric Shanower’s script because Young drew three other siblings as infants.

I’ve spent an abnormal amount of time thinking about the royal family of Ev because a few years back I wrote a story called “Evrob & the Nomes,” about one little prince’s second visit underground. It was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club in Oziana 2004; Sam A. Milazzo reviewed the story here.

That story required filling in more details about the royal family of Ev while staying close (in my mind) to those left by Baum and Neill. I liked the idea of the family as somewhat impoverished royals from the Edwardian period, wearing the medieval-style dress on the most formal occasions but early-twentieth-century military uniforms at other public events and early-twentieth-century bathing suits at the beach.

I kept Evring as the baby, but tried to show him through the next oldest boy’s eyes: as a mewling focus of resentment. I tried to paint King Evardo as an uptight adolescent stumbling his way through family responsibilities. The rest of the siblings were blank enough that I didn’t worry so much about being true to Baum.

One common element of the upper-class lifestyle of that time was domestic servants from colonized people: Indian and Chinese amahs, Southern mammies. So I gave the royal family of Ev an aged nanny from their country’s ethnic minority, the Wheelers.

In some ways I meant that story to upend readers’ assumptions about adventures in the Oz world, particularly Dorothy’s role in putting everything right. Like Young’s cartoons of the royal family of Ev, it’s an aggressively new look at an old tradition.

Our First Glimpse of Evardo XV

2011-12-06T23:58:00.001-05:00

The picture above, by John R. Neill, comes from the end of Ozma of Oz. It shows the dowager queen of Ev and her eldest son, the new King Evardo XV.

L. Frank Baum earlier described Evardo this way: “He was a grave and quiet youth, and would doubtless rule his people wisely and with justice.” He narrates this scene thusly:

Then the Queen took her eldest son out upon a balcony that overlooked the crowd of subjects gathered below, and said to them:

“Here is your future ruler, King Evardo Fifteenth. He is fifteen years of age, has fifteen silver buckles on his jacket and is the fifteenth Evardo to rule the land of Ev.”

The people shouted their approval fifteen times, and even the Wheelers, some of whom were present, loudly promised to obey the new King.

So the Queen placed a big crown of gold, set with rubies, upon Evardo’s head, and threw an ermine robe over his shoulders, and proclaimed him King; and he bowed gratefully to all his subjects and then went away to see if he could find any cake in the royal pantry.

He is fifteen, after all.

Baum has even less to say about most of the queen’s other children, aside from the youngest: Prince Evring, whom Dorothy rescues. The rest of the siblings are simply names: “The Princesses were named, Evanna, Evrose, Evella, Evirene and Evedna, while the Princes were Evrob, Evington, Evardo and Evroland.”

Baum derived the names of Evrob and Evedna from those of one son and his fiancée. Robert Baum was also inspiration for the young hero of Baum’s science-fiction novel The Master Key, and Edna Drucker was a family neighbor. They were in their early twenties when Ozma of Oz appeared, clearly older than the queen’s children.

As to other details of the Ev princes and princesses, especially as individuals, Baum’s book is basically silent.

TOMORROW: Filling in the gaps, one way or another.

“What it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today”

2011-12-05T16:04:00.000-05:00

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman provided a sharp analysis of the race for the Republican presidential nomination:

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.

Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts — but that doesn’t stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn’t stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama’s “massive defense cuts.”

Krugman concludes that Romney’s strategy is “to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base.” I’m not sure that Romney and his highly paid consultants expect Republican voters to believe what he says. Rather, the Romney team is presenting him as willing to say anything in order to attack President Obama.

Consider the Romney campaign’s much-criticized television commercial “quoting” President Obama. That ad was doubly deceptive. First, Obama never said about his own campaign, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What’s more, the President has never stopped talking about the economy. For months he’s been pressing the Republicans in Congress to do more of what mainstream economists recommend to improve it.

All that commercial shows is that Romney is willing to play dirty in attacking the President—which is what the Republican base is looking for. Those core voters aren’t really motivated by deficit reduction, or cutting government services and benefits (especially their own, as Krugman notes), or foreign policy.

Grass-roots Republicans today are fired up almost solely about attacking Obama. Romney’s ad shows them that despite his nice-guy manners he’s willing to play just as dirty as the crazier candidates. He’s ready to claim that Obama apologized for American foreign policy, threatens the free market, and never worked in the private sector. All those statements are lies, but Romney has to tell them to keep up with his rivals.

Panel One in Nightwings Seven

2011-12-04T21:49:00.001-05:00

Above is another example of a single comics panel showing Nightwing in several poses, instants apart. It appears in Nightwing: Freefall. And I don’t think this one works. I remember having to pause to figure out what was going on—precisely the wrong effect for a panel intended to convey swift, fluid action.

We’re supposed to read the lower panel as showing Nightwing swinging himself over the front of his glider and into the air, somersaulting, to land on a winged pursuer. Not only is that physically implausible, but the art requires reading this Grayson as flying to the left and into the background. Most examples of this comics technique show the multiplied figure moving to the right foreground, the direction we westerners read.

Sometimes coloring can make a single figure in such a panel stand out helpfully as the most recent. But a small, distant figure doesn’t become more prominent than the large, nearby figure simply by being bluer.

At Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa continues to explore this technique by featuring giant panels from Gianni de Luca’s Italian adaptations of William Shakespeare. De Luca’s scripts were originally created for the stage rather than the page, of course, giving him a lot of words to fit in.

As Rosa shows, De Luca created several full-page or full-spread panels showing the same two characters several times as they move through a scene, conversing. It’s striking how almost all the movement in these examples flows from right to left, and usually background to foreground.

One of the few exceptions to that pattern appears in this two-page panel from De Luca’s Romeo and Giulietta. Yet it’s notable how in the portion of the duel that moves toward the background the word balloons thin out, with only one character speaking. That lowers the possibility of us becoming confused about what to read next.

So do possibilities like these negate Devin Grayson’s advice to novice comics scripters to “Avoid multiple actions in one panel”? I still don’t think so. Because it’s one thing for practiced comics writer-illustrators like De Luca and Frank Miller (Rosa’s initial example) to use the multiple-figure technique. It’s another for a novice scripter to unwittingly stumble into it, as Grayson warned against.

A good analogy might be the “rule” not to stack panels on the left because we readers will have trouble deciding how to move from the upper left panel: to the right or down? Many guides for beginning comics writers include that prohibition.

Yet it’s not that hard to find comics artists stacking panels on the left, with composition and balloons leading the eye down and then to the next column. I’ve noted a successful example as well as an unsuccessful one in a successful comic. Today’s Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson breaks the “rule” delightfully, word balloons guiding our eyes.

But just because practiced comics creators know how to make something difficult work doesn’t mean that new creators shouldn’t be warned against trying it until they’ve learned more.

Coming to Americus

2011-12-03T09:09:00.001-05:00

I first sampled this story as the webcomic Save Apathea. In print form, the graphic novel by scripter M. K. Reed and artist Jonathan Hill is titled Americus. And what valuable lessons about life does it hold for its readers?

The one that came through most clearly for me was:

People with dark hair are good.

Any Americus character who appears for more than one scene and has inked-in hair is smarter, funnier, more tolerant, and more interesting than the average person. People with lighter hair, left uncolored in this black-and-white book, can be nice or nasty, but all the major nasty people have lighter hair. Only three minor characters with dark hair break this rule, two just by being boring.

Unfortunately, that simple dichotomy reflects the overall story, which follows a protest against a fantasy novel in the library of a small American town. The woman challenging the book is not only self-righteous, but also bigoted, duplicitous, tyrannical, violent, and—just to cap the stereotype—overweight.

The further away the story gets from that central conflict, the more true-to-life it seems. The main character’s social struggles as a high-school freshman, the horizons that literature and music can open up, the potential depths in some supporting characters—those details seem real and intriguing. In that respect, the title Americus plays to the book’s strengths: the portrait of a community is stronger than the battle to save the Apathea books in the fictional town library.

Useful Term: “Plumber’s Review”

2011-12-02T09:28:00.003-05:00

In my family we have the term “plumber’s review,” which is so useful that I’m surprised not to see it anywhere else. Perhaps we’ve got the wording wrong.

A “plumber’s review” is an assessment of a novel, or other work of art, based on one narrow concern. Say, a review of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island focused entirely on details of south Pacific navigation, or an analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover for its remarks on coal mining. In the academic world, it’s the comments from the professor miffed that you haven’t said more about the particular event or compound or poetic form that he or she happens to study.

An expert plumber’s perspective can be valuable, particularly on books about plumbing. Even a review of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire focused entirely on water-systems engineering might offer useful insights.

In fact, it would have been valuable to have a whaler’s review of Moby Dick back in 1851. Instead, we had to wait nearly a century until Howard P. Vincent’s The Trying-Out of Moby Dick studied where Herman Melville got his technical information and what detail in the novel has no support in any other source of the time (the blacksmith’s apron).

The best type of “plumber’s review” acknowledges its narrow focus and the fact that there are other, wider perspectives. It offers inside information that general readers wouldn’t know but can incorporate with other responses. The worst “plumber’s review” misses that point, as well as other big points—which can make them very entertaining.

This fall at MICE I got to hear a preview of the “plumber’s review” echoing through this SLJ roundtable discussion of M. K. Reed and Jonathan Hill’s Americus. One of the important supporting characters in that graphic novel, Charlotte, is a youth-services librarian. And librarians, folks of that profession wish to make clear, don’t behave like her!

Despite public assumptions, Charlotte wouldn’t be reading in the middle of the day—she wouldn’t have time! She wouldn’t keep a patron waiting until she’d finished her reading. Most important, she wouldn’t snap back at a person lodging a complaint about a book, or tell a teenager that the complainer was a “control freak.” As Eva Volin stated in the SLJ discussion, “I would have been in big, big trouble had I handled the first contact the way Charlotte did.”

And since that conflict over a library book defines Americus’s plot, it seems like a problem for the novel. Indeed, it might subvert the book’s appeal to a key constituency.

TOMORROW: More lessons from Americus.

Rediscovering The Lost Farm

2011-12-01T12:48:00.001-05:00

The Lost Farm by Jane Louise Curry is a really strange book. Especially by today’s standards, but also by the prevailing standards when it was published in 1974.

The cover painting is an accurate depiction of an important scene near the end of the story. You might think that young readers are supposed to identify with the blond boy. But no, the book’s central character is the little old bearded farmer, yelling at the boy to get off his lawn.

The Lost Farm begins with that character as a boy named Pete living in rural Pennsylvania in the 1920s. His ne’er-do-well junk-dealer father is about to yank him out of school so he can do more work around the farm. Curry thus sets up a clear conflict. She also describes the rural setting in poetic language at a length possible in the early 1970s but no longer.

The book takes a turn into fantasy as Pete discovers a village that’s been miniaturized, with a few mini-people trapped in it—including a spunky girl about his age. Pete promises to help her escape the man who’s done this to her town and restore her to her proper size. Another clear conflict, and the promise of some adventure.

Then the villain miniaturizes Pete’s farm, leaving him six inches tall. He’s stuck on that isolated landscape with his useless father, spunky grandmother, and livestock. The physics of all this are unclear, but Curry’s descriptions of the family’s new setting are once again vivid. And we have yet another conflict: never mind school, put aside the girl—how will Pete rescue himself?

Well, he doesn’t. His mule dies. His father dies. He builds a horseless carriage, but it doesn’t achieve anything. His grandmother dies. Pete grows old on the little lost farm, somehow surviving predatory wildlife, lack of supplies, winters, disease, and every other threat. Eventually he’s a lonely sexagenarian. Because that’s what kids want to read about.

In the end other people rescue Pete, including the boy on the cover, whom we’ve never seen before. It turns out that the spunky girl was restored to her natural size decades before. There’s a thin connection between her and Pete’s rescuers, but this plot resolution basically arrives as a deus ex machina. In sum, The Lost Farm breaks nearly every “rule” of creating a satisfying story for modern children. Or for this adult.

Kaliko Vision

2011-11-29T18:08:00.001-05:00

In L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, Roquat the Nome King is served by a Nome introduced this way:

Meantime the King ordered refreshments to be served to those waiting, and at his command a rudely shaped Nome entered, bearing a tray. This Nome was not unlike the others that Dorothy had seen, but he wore a heavy gold chain around his neck to show that he was the Chief Steward of the Nome King, and he assumed an air of much importance, and even told his majesty not to eat too much cake late at night, or he would be ill.

Later, thinking himself out of the hearing of the guests, the Chief Steward tells the king, “You are a fool to waste so much time upon these people” from Oz.

Baum next visited the Nomes in The Emerald City of Oz, and in that book stated that the king’s steward was named Kaliko. He’s “frightened” by his master, “trembling and white with fear.” Baum offers this exchange:

“Fetch my pipe!” yelled the King.

“Your pipe is already here, your Majesty,” replied Kaliko.

“Then get my tobacco!” roared the King.

“The tobacco is in your pipe, your Majesty,” returned the Steward.

“Then bring a live coal from the furnace!” commanded the King.

“The tobacco is lighted, and your Majesty is already smoking your pipe,” answered the Steward.

“Why, so I am!” said the King, who had forgotten this fact; “but you are very rude to remind me of it.”

“I am a lowborn, miserable villain,” declared the Chief Steward, humbly.

Obviously that exchange shows a interpersonal dynamic very different from the earlier one.

In Who’s Who in Oz, Jack Snow stated that Kaliko first appeared in Ozma—in other words, that he was the Chief Steward in that book as well as the later one. As a young reader, I adopted that interpretation without question. It suggests that the Nome King’s anger over losing his Magic Belt in the earlier book makes it much more dangerous to talk back to him in the later.

More recently, however, such Oz scholars as David Hulan convinced me that might be too much of an assumption. What if the Nome King got rid of the first Chief Steward between the two books? In that case, Kaliko didn’t change his behavior drastically; rather, he could be obsequious enough to manage the angry monarch. What happened to the earlier Chief Steward? Based on what the Nome King orders for some Nome army officers in Emerald City, it would be nothing good.

The Marvel Comics adaptation of Ozma of Oz comes down firmly on the first interpretation, with the Chief Steward being named “Kaliko.” Scripter Eric Shanower’s choice makes for a smaller, more unified cast of characters for the series, and there’s certainly tradition behind it.

Artist Skottie Young also makes an interesting choice in how he designed the Nomes. His Nome King looks much like John R. Neill’s, with a human face, hair, and beard; five-fingered hands; and a caricatured but recognizably humanoid body. In contrast, Young draws the rest of the Nomes as little imps, basically isosceles triangles with tiny limbs and snappish personalities. And Kaliko is among them, as the picture below shows.

Looking ahead, will we see this little Kaliko assuming the Nome Kingdom’s throne?

I Remember When Barney Frank Was in Worse Shape Than Me

2011-11-28T18:30:00.001-05:00

Barney Frank has represented me in the U.S. Congress since before I could vote. [Well, in some college years I voted in another state.] I was sorry to hear this morning that he won’t run again, and hope he enjoys the next stage of his career immensely.

In what must have been the early 1980s Frank, then in his first or second term, spoke at an assembly at my high school. I asked a question about the House’s freshmen, which he praised. About twenty years later, I visited his local office to talk about work-for-hire, copyright, and fair use issues for writers. In that meeting he praised my group for lining up cosponsors from both parties even as he was brusque in getting to business (“Justletmereadthis”).

I recall attending a 2002 meeting with voters in which Frank announced he’d have to leave early because Nancy Pelosi was about to be chosen House Minority Leader. That might have been the same meeting in which he jocularly chided the audience for not being honest about wanting favors from our representatives.

Frank always had a sharp wit, making him a national media figure. But he also mastered legislation and House procedure. In 2008 and 2010, Capitol Hill staffers named him one of the chamber’s “workhorses.” The return of the Republican majority in 2011 left him with little to do, a situation he suffered for several years and which he can’t have relished.

In 1987, Frank famously told the public he was gay. He wasn’t the first gay Congressman by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the first to voluntarily acknowledge his sexuality. (Wikipedia notes that a Republican Congressman who led the effort to censure Frank was Larry Craig. Who had the healthier approach to sexual matters?) Unfortunately, being gay and progressive made Frank a lightning rod for America’s far right.

One of the many Republican lies of recent years has been to complain that Frank helped to bring on the housing bubble by pushing for more home mortgages. That doesn’t make sense in terms of timing (the act in question passed decades before the Bush-Cheney recession began), numbers (homeowners with loans under that law were less likely to default than others), policy (Frank pushed for more rentals, not more mortgages), scope (similar problems occurred in other countries), or power (the Republicans controlled the House in the years when the bubble grew, not to mention the White House). People making that claim willfully ignore the mistakes and crimes of the mortgage industry, even as evidence of those problems piles up. As I said, it’s just one of many Republican lies.

It’s too bad we won’t have Barney Frank to kick those around anymore.

When Did Dick Grayson Become a “Ward”?

2011-11-27T22:53:00.002-05:00

Prompted by an Oz and Ends reader, I plan to devote the next few installments of the weekly Robin to explore the legalities of the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, and between Bruce and his subsequent crime-fighting partners.

Even people who’ve never read Batman comics have heard that Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne’s ward. I suspect that label was reinforced in our minds by the iconic performance of Burt Ward. But I digress.

When did the comics establish that relationship? It took a few months. Detective Comics, #38, which introduced the Sensational Character Find of 1940, referred to Robin as Batman’s “ally” and “aid” [sic].

That story famously showed the Dynamic Duo swearing an “undying oath” to fight crime together, and it stated that “months” of training followed. But there were no scenes of Dick leaving the circus, nothing about any surviving family, and no sight of the child-welfare authorities. Simpler times, at least in pulp fiction.

Batman, #1, featured Robin in three of its four stories, and also used the term “aid.” The magazine makes clear that Dick Grayson lives in Bruce Wayne’s home, and will continue to be Batman’s partner past the Zucco case, but offers no formal explanation.

Detective, #39, started spelling the word for Robin’s role “aide.” Detective, #40, included a scene featuring Dick, Bruce, and Bruce’s fiancée Julie, so it’s clear that people know that a teenager is living in Bruce’s home.

But not until Detective, #41, did anyone refer to Dick as Bruce’s “ward.” The term appeared in that issue because in its story Bruce enrolls Dick at a fancy boys’ school so he can investigate crime there. For the first time, Bruce acts in loco parentis, requiring a legal relationship (or at least the disguise of one).

The word “aide” returned in Batman, #2 (which also offered “protege”) and #3, and in Detective Comics, #43. All of the Batman stories of this time (including World’s Fair Comics 1940) provided new readers with at least a quick introduction of the main characters, but none explained why Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne live together. Not until the last story in Batman, #3, did the narration once again speak of “an idle playboy and his ward.”

COMING UP: Exploring the ramifications of Dick Grayson’s legal status.

One of the Book Fair Faithful

2011-11-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

I grew up with the New England Mobile Book Fair as one of my local bookstores. It was a store like no other. The company started as a wholesaler for book fairs, but, fueled by our local community’s firm opposition to buying anything at retail, became a superstore with everyday discounts years before Barnes & Noble and Borders started their battle to the death.

With its roots in wholesaling, New England Mobile never adopted some standard bookselling practices. Like shelving books by category rather than by publisher/distributor and, within those groupings, author name. Like shelving books on attractive shelves rather than rough plywood. Like offering a computer system geared to its stock rather than Bowker’s Books in Print. Like opening a café, even though it’s one of the best cookbook suppliers in the country.

Hey, I remember when a colleague from the publishing company went to work for the store and brought the revolutionary idea of maps and signs for customers.

The family that founded New England Mobile just sold it to a retired insurance executive named Tom Lyons, the Boston Globe reported today. And Lyons has big plans to turn it into…a bookstore.

Lyons wants to sponsor author events at the store, create a more family-friendly children’s section, and invite the area’s professors and professionals to give advice on what specialty books to sell. He must computerize the inventory.

And — this may sound like heresy to the Book Fair faithful — he plans to reorganize the volumes by genre instead of by publisher.

Those will be tremendous changes in an establishment that aesthetically owes more to used-book barns than any mall. Indeed, Lyons expects eventually to sell used books in addition to the huge stock of remainders. But getting from the current situation to that new model will be a seismic event.

Meanwhile, bookselling is undergoing plenty of general seismic events. The Globe article starts by quoting Lyons on loyalty to printed books: “Pretty much everybody I talk to loves books and reads books and wants their children to feel and put their hands on a book,” says Lyons. Which would bode well for the store’s prospects if he wasn’t, you know, a 66-year-old bibliophile. Of course his circle likes printed books.

My first piece of advice to Lyons would be to install an Espresso Book Machine. Then he could publish his novels, and serve our local community of thousands of other people who have unpublished novels. He could even offer that service at a nominal discount.

Greatest Insight Ever—A New Age of Overstatement?

2011-11-25T08:39:00.001-05:00

Back in 2008 I quoted Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker about an early-20th-century shift in prose style:

Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader. What had seemed charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn’t change in 1910, but English writing did.

Have we entered another age of overstatement? Increasingly common phrases like “Best [fill in the blank with something not all that special] ever!” and “[Rather innocuous annoyance] must die!” suggest that we have. Once again, writers expect readers to understand that they’re not being literal. Which of course brings us to the modern, overstating use of “literal.”

“The ever-amazing Jefferson Mays”

2011-11-23T09:02:00.000-05:00

Charles Isherwood’s review of Blood and Gifts, J. T. Rogers’s new play about Afghanistan in the 1980s, is positive all around, but singles out one member of the cast for particular praise:

the rather unimpressive first “gift” to the Afghan cause Warnock has come to offer: 100,000 rifles...inspires outrage in Afridi and snorts of scorn in Simon Craig (the ever-amazing Jefferson Mays), Warnock’s British counterpart, working for the British intelligence service MI6. . . .

I suspect Mr. Mays has been boning up on Greene and le Carré to prepare for his performance, so richly saturated is it in the sardonic humor and bruised humanity of the best depictions of cynical British operatives in those novelists’ work. Craig is always scrambling in late for meetings with the sweat of a hangover still upon him. He is also often hilarious in his bitter commentary on both the British government’s impecunious support for the cause and the moral morass that the Afghan conflict has become.

When he learns that major weaponry is to be channeled to Hekmatyar, Craig erupts in a typical burst of seething sarcasm, asking Afridi if the Afghans themselves have been consulted: “You know, ‘Hello Afghans! Would you mind terribly if we try and install a maniac to rule you and then sink your country into civil war?’”

Here’s an interview with Jeff Mays on this play from TheaterMania.

The Tin Woodman’s Head on My Mind

2011-11-22T09:18:00.001-05:00

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, W. W. Denslow gave the Tin Woodman a skull-shaped head.

Of course, the long nose and ears riveted on that dome, as well as the lively eyes, make it possible to overlook the resemblance most of the time. But the rounded cranium and hinged jaw are quite reminiscent of fleshless human anatomy.

John R. Neill followed Denslow’s model in his illustrations for Ozma of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. As in the series’s first book, the tin man’s head bulges out at the back.

However, in The Marvelous Land of Oz, published before those two titles, and in all the Oz books that followed them, Neill used a different character design, with a cylindrical head. The neck varied at first, but eventually settled on the vague sort of attachment Denslow has used.

In most of those books, when the Tin Woodman takes off his funnel cap, we see that the top of his head is a rounded dome. Neill used the same design for Captain Fyter, the tin emperor’s doppelgänger in The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918).

Toward the end of his career, starting with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz (1939), Neill made yet another variation: he drew the tin man’s head as flat on top, like a tin can. I suspect Neill was out of practice drawing his Tin Woodman; Ruth Plumly Thompson made little use of Baum’s more mature male characters.

I review this history to acknowledge that even within the Oz books there’s a significant variation in the Tin Woodman’s character design. On top of that, we have the costumes created for David Montgomery and Jack Haley, which have to allow a man to fit inside. Thus, people can imagine many things when they think of Nick Chopper.

Lots of comics artists like to depict the Tin Woodman as a robot. That’s doesn’t really fit his origin, in which he’s a living man whose body is gradually replaced with tin parts, and it leaves less room in the saga for Tik-Tok, an actual robot. But some artists just love drawing robots.

One example of that trend is David Hutchison in his Oz: The Manga series, as shown at right. His Tin Woodman’s head is a smokestack, and the robotic characterization extends to gear-shaped speech balloons.

Skottie Young avoided that temptation in helping to adapt the series for Marvel Comics. Indeed, his character design plays up the characters’ old-fashioned, rural beginning. (The man harvested wood, after all.) The tin mustache is reminiscent of L. Frank Baum himself.

And I have a hard time warming to the result. I think the problem for me is that as colored in a pale, tinny way, the mustache looks white. The character’s smooth round head and old-fashioned style reinforce that impression. As a result, this Tin Woodman always looks to me like an old man.

Based on Neill and Denslow’s art, and Baum’s writing, I think of Nick Chopper as a man in his twenties, preserved agelessly by being made into tin (and by living in Oz). Though the Tin Woodman has excellent and kind instincts, and matures somewhat over the series, he’s not old enough to have become wise. He makes mistakes and still regards his appearance with more than a little vanity.

I have trouble imagining the Tin Woodman as a Richard Farnsworth type, much as I admire that actor and some of the characters he’s played. Of course, it’s better than a robot.

Daredevil and the Family Circus

2011-11-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

A day after analyzing some big panels in which a single character appears multiple times, I read Tucker Stone’s Comixology interview with scripter Mark Waid highlighting this double-page spread designed by Marcos Martin for a recent issue of Daredevil.

Waid explained:

I said "look, I need the two of them in a street scene in the glory of all of New York". I used that Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali book as an example for him, that famous two-page spread that Neal Adams drew of the city. . . . It's an amazing drawing. And we needed something of that sensibility. And then I said I was sorry and that I would pay him back for it in the years to come. And you saw what he did. He turned an establishing shot into the Family Circus. And I mean that in a good way!

Stone notes that Martin did similar things in recent issues of Captain America and Spider-Man. I recall another example in Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, and Alecos Papadatos.

Waid refers to the well-known “dotted line” Sunday strips of Bil and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus. Those are different, however, usually showing the moving character only at the end while preserving his path across a landscape with a dotted line.

In many ways this multiple-figure image works like those I discussed yesterday (and not just because, technically speaking, it appears in a Daredevil comic). The action moves left to right, background to foreground, helping us English readers to arrange the moments in chronological order. Having a horizontal space to work with probably makes that easier. In addition, both approaches involve maintaining the same basic mood throughout the scene.

Notably, the individual vignettes on this spread are visually separated by areas without balloons or major characters. We can thus insert mental gutters between the moments. In contrast, the multiple figures in yesterday’s panels often overlapped each other, signaling how we should consider them as all part of a single quick series of movements.

(The panel above displays another way of “showing the invisible” for Daredevil, who’s blind but has enhanced senses and radar due to one of those convenient early-1960s accidents with radioactivity. The square boxes popping up around the scene communicate what he’s hearing, smelling, and otherwise sensing.)

Eleven Nightwings in One Panel

2011-11-20T08:39:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month Miguel Rosa at Comics Without Frontiers set himself to “find a panel that shows a character doing multiple actions.”

This was because Devin Grayson had advised novice comics scripters to be sure they ask artists to depict only one action per panel, something she had to learn early on. In that respect, comics panels are not like shots in a movie.

Rosa found two examples of multiple-action panels from Frank Miller’s Daredevil. Yet another appears in this month’s Nightwing, drawn by Eddy Barrows:

There are also plenty of examples in the Flash comics: a speedster moves so fast that he or she appears in several places at once (yet another form of “showing the invisible”). But the relative rarity of such panels supports Devin Grayson’s point, that generally comics scripts need to specify one moment per image.

Artists pull out the technique of showing one person several times in one big panel to portray that character’s exceptional speed (as with the Flashes) or exceptional grace (as with Nightwing and Daredevil). Those images achieve their power because they’re unusual, and break the expected rules.

Furthermore, those panels almost always show only the main character doing multiple actions, and that character has a single goal and mood throughout. It would be much harder for one image to comprehensibly show two characters reacting to each other multiple times, or changing goals or emotions as they move.

Occasionally artists use the technique symbolically, as in the lower example showing how Dick Grayson grew up. This particular image demands that readers already know that history, however.

To make such panels easier to interpret, as Rosa’s examples and the picture above show, colorists usually render most of the figures in lighter shades. Motion lines can also guide our eyes from one figure to another in the proper order.

(The larger point of Rosa’s post is about how motion lines are vanishing from recent American superhero comics, along with other “show the invisible” techniques. He complains that pencilers are acting as “nothing more than glorified illustrators” rather than using the form’s full potential.)

Eleanor Davis Shows the Invisible

2011-11-19T20:32:00.000-05:00

I can’t keep writing about how comics “show the invisible” without pointing to Eleanor Davis’s delight-filled The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook. It’s a wonderful compilation of such techniques deployed for lively storytelling, and I’ve been meaning to mention it for months.

On pages 49-56 alone, I spot the following:

speech balloons, including variations for shouting (two types), electronic communication, machine readouts, interrupted communication, and hysterical laughter, along with boldface italics within speeches for emphasis.
cutaway views.
sound effects.
titles incorporated into the page design.
thought balloons.
labels for objects, including one listing the contents of a refrigerator and another describing an important notebook.
“wafterons,” Mort Walker’s name for the squiggly lines rising like hot vapors to indicate aromas.
“dites,” Walker’s term for the straight lines cartoonists use to indicate a smooth surface.
inset picture of something that the characters within the scene have lost (well, it’s invisible to them at that moment).
diagrams of devices that a character is thinking of.
paths showing the panel reading order as panels are stacked on the left.
motion arrow and manga-style motion label (“FLIP!”) together.
filmstrip displaying a digital recording, along with caption explaining that this format “looks cooler.”

Finally, page 57 provides a symphony of visual tricks in only five panels: speech and thought and yelling balloons, cutaway view, explanatory labels, sound effects, an oversized intrusive narrative caption, and manga-style motion labels.

That plethora of techniques is appropriate for this story, which celebrates the secret knowledge of science. The visual language of comics is, after all, a code for savvy readers. And while there’s a lot happening on every page, there’s also a lot happening in the characters’ heads.

Interestingly, Davis rarely uses motion lines or variations on what Walker calls “emanata” to show strong emotion until the climactic pages of her book. Only then does she pull them out of the cartoonist’s toolbox to depict the faster action and higher stakes.

“The utter eradication of thought balloons”

2011-11-18T23:40:00.012-05:00

Once established (as discussed yesterday), thought balloons became a valuable way that comics creators could “show the invisible,” which I posit is a dimension that sets that form apart from other types of illustrations. That was especially useful when there was a contrast between a character’s thoughts and his actions or speech, as with Cerebus or Peter Parker.

Too often, however, comics creators used thought balloons to tell rather than show, especially for the benefit of young readers and those who had never, ever seen a comic before: “Oh, no! Once again my ring won’t work against anything yellow! I must think of something else before...” (I exaggerate, but only a little.)

In the early 1980s, artist David Lloyd and writer Alan Moore were discussing a new feature for the magazine Warrior in their native Britain. This was meant to be a more sophisticated adventure for adult readers, and its main character’s plans and motives were opaque. Moore wrote of that planning:

Dave was giving me his ideas as to how he actually wanted to approach the strip in terms of layout and execution. These included the absolute banning of sound effects, and, as an afterthought, the utter eradication of thought balloons into the bargain.

As a writer, this terrified me. I wasn’t so much bothered about the sound effects, but without thought balloons, how was I going to get over all the nuances of character that I needed to make the book satisfying on a literary level? All the same, there was something about the discipline of the idea that fascinated me, and while dropping off to sleep at night I’d find it nagging away somewhere in the recesses of my cerebral swamp.

A couple of days later I wrote back to Dave telling him...that not only would we do without thought balloons and sound effects but I was prepared to get rid of most of the caption boxes as well and just rely entirely on pictures and dialogue.

The result was V for Vendetta, and a more cinematic approach to comics storytelling. There may well be earlier examples of mainstream comics creators deliberately doing without so many of their standard narrative tools, but this approach was most influential. That’s because Moore, getting over his initial reluctance, embraced the approach and carried it with him to Watchmen.

Meanwhile, a bunch of American comics creators, including Marv Wolfman, John Byrne, and Frank Miller, were experimenting with first-person narration in captions instead of third-person narration. Those captions offered a space for internal monologue separate from thought balloons. The popularity of the results, particularly Miller’s Ronin and Dark Knight Returns, worked with Watchmen and V for Vendetta to make thought balloons seem unsophisticated. And soon they were utterly eradicated.

“Characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud”

2011-11-17T23:35:00.001-05:00

At a new blog called Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa traces the development of thought balloons in the first year of Superman and Spirit comics.

[Rosa started his blog to promote discussion of comics from outside the US, but a lot of the postings are on the standard American superhero stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.]

This posting complements my discussion of the same topic, which watched how thought balloons developed alongside whisper balloons since early on characters often seemed to be voicing asides to the audience.

Rosa writes:

I realized that one of the reasons why thought balloons were seldom used in those years was because the characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud, like in this panel from Action Comics #1. In many of these cases, thought balloons should have been used instead. Rather than speaking out loud, a thought balloon containing a line like, “The cops are coming; I better change to my civilian clothes!” would make more sense.

He also reprints a delightful Spirit panel which shows the hero trapped under water and saying out loud: “I...can’t... hold...my...breath... much...longer!”

Soon, however, the thought balloon became a standard part of American comics punctuation, avoiding such unrealistic moments. Because superhero comics had to be realistic.

TOMORROW: Who started the thought balloon’s hibernation over the last thirty years?

Cartoon Art Museum Has Gone to Oz

2011-11-15T08:51:00.001-05:00

Last week the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco opened an exhibit on Oz comics. It draws heavily on the collection of Peter Maresca, publisher of Sunday Press (which would be a small press except that its books are so big).

Early comics artists in the exhibit include Walt McDougall (working with L. Frank Baum), W. W. Denslow (competing with him), and John R. Neill (before becoming Baum’s main illustrator). More recent ones include Eric Shanower, Skottie Young, Anna-Maria Cool, and Ramona Fradon.

Among the pages on display is one Eric Shanower drew for Oz-Story magazine a while back, showing moments in the Oz series illustrated in the styles of different famous cartoonists.

I visited the Cartoon Art Museum on my last trip to San Francisco beyond the airport, and admired how much good stuff it displayed in a small space. Definitely worth a visit. [Hey, there’s Jerry Robinson!]

“Mine is full of slightly antiquated, pre-contemporary language”

2011-11-14T08:56:00.002-05:00

The British publishing magazine The Bookseller has run an interview with debut fantasy novelist James Treadwell (also Godson’s Dad). Although his book Advent features teens as central characters, Treadwell agrees that it’s not typical YA:

The central theme of magic in the real world is reminiscent of the classic fantasy series The Dark is Rising (a sequence of seven [sic] books first published in the late 1960s and 1970s), and it’s no surprise to hear Treadwell describe those books as “a huge part of my mental geography growing up—I loved them”.

Advent is for a slightly more sophisticated readership though, and Hodder is pitching at both the adult and older YA market. With the rise in the appeal of fantasy for a mainstream audience, Hodder is hoping for a Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-style crossover. . . .

Treadwell doesn’t think his former academic career—he was a Romanticist specialising in 18th and 19th-century writers—has had a direct influence on Advent, but he does acknowledge that spending so much of his adult life reading will have an effect on his own writing: “Any writer has an internal echo chamber, full of bits of phrases and words and language. Mine is full of slightly antiquated, pre-contemporary language, because that’s what I read for a long time.”

Treadwell says while he loved the idea of writing for teenagers when he started the novel, “I realised that these are not young adult sentences. My hand wouldn’t do it. I’m quite prolix. I write long sentences, I don’t write straightforward fast-moving plots . . . but I would love teenagers to read it, and I hope that they will.”

The great thing about the teen years, of course, is that book-lovers can read both well above and below their stated age range.

“One Robin will not be enough.”

2011-11-13T08:09:00.000-05:00

Batman: The Brave and the Bold, #13, issued this week, features six former and future Robins brought together by the convenient mystical powers of the Phantom Stranger. As with most of DC’s other semi-parodic superhero comics for young readers, it’s a simple, self-contained story that rests on and reinforces the archetypal characters.

In fact, the adventure stays simple to expand the space for interaction among the different Robins, their characters neatly summarized for us later in narrative captions. Batman is so archetypal that he’s actually back in Crime Alley witnessing a mugging (as in “To Kill a Legend,” Detective Comics, #500). And precisely because he’s Batman, he can ~~breathe in space~~ keep his sanity in a Lazarus Pit. Nightwing, ever optimistic, figures as much.

Scripter Sholly Fisch chooses to show Dick Grayson early in his Nightwing career, which makes him the obvious leader of the Robins and visually distinct from the rest. Penciler Rick Burchett differentiates the teens in red and green by picking up the important details of their canonical costumes. (In three panels, though, the colorist has mixed up the second Jason and Tim.)

Reading this magazine led me to two observations. First, regardless of DC co-publisher Dan DiDio’s public statements, the company’s creative people understand that Stephanie Brown was a Robin. Fisch’s script puts the denial of that obvious fact into the mouth of a ten-year-old boy, where it belongs.

Second, as I said about Tiny Titans, I’m puzzled by how young readers are supposed to respond to most of this comic’s references to the DC canon. I’m not talking about, say, the title spread’s homage to “Robin Dies at Dawn!”—that slips perfectly into this story without any rough edges sticking out.

But twice gags depend on knowing that Damian was once heir apparent to the head of the League of Assassins, a fact available in the regular Batman comics (the ones with people’s heads and faces getting chopped off) but not in this issue. At another point Carrie reels off some baffling slang, but the story never explains that she’s the Robin from furthest into the future(s).

As with Tiny Titans, such allusions left me feeling this comic isn’t really for kids. Its age label is just a screen that lets us older fans enjoy simple, archetypal stories.

Pingback

2011-11-12T09:35:00.006-05:00

The following review originally appeared at Slashdot. Later it was copied onto Amazon, as of this week 10,196 of 10,568 people found it helpful:

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting. . . .

What I’d really like to know is why the book was titled The Story about Ping instead of The Story of Ping.

Billion for the Guy?

2011-11-11T00:01:00.006-05:00

Over at Boston 1775, I’ve been tracing how a particular stylized depiction of Guy Fawkes has become an international symbol of political protest.

It’s a path that leads from a terrorist plot against the entire British government to festivals of patriotic misrule in the 1700s through boys’ sports in the 1800s and Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta comic to an internet meme and back into the political world. The journey started here.

Grand-dad the Mummy

2011-11-10T09:18:00.000-05:00

I admire people who donate their bodies for science, but Alan Billis is the first I know who donated his body for history. Or rather the scientific study of history.

A British cab driver who was diagnosed with a terminal lung cancer, Billis decided to answer a BBC call for someone to volunteer a body to mummify in the style of ancient Egypt. The BBC reported:

Mrs Billis took it all in her stride, explaining: “He just said, ‘I’ve just phoned someone up about being mummified’.

“I thought, ‘here we go again’. It’s just the sort of thing you would expect him to do.”

It looks like an anonymous Maryland donor did the same in 2001. But this time, in the style of the modern west, the process was filmed and broadcast on TV in Britain a week before Hallowe’en.

Finding Inspiration for Hellbound II

2011-11-09T08:25:00.003-05:00

Hellbound II is an anthology of independent horror comics being published by the Boston Comics Roundtable. It’s currently available in a “Limited Art Edition,” and later will appear as a conventional paperback. The deluxe version consists of two softcover volumes in a box, both covers and the box itself made from handmade paper with silkscreened cover art by Jesse Lonergan.

Andy Wong and I created a story in Hellbound II titled “RobMeBlind.com.” Here’s a bit from a joint interview by Steve Carsitano, one of a series with Hellbound II creators:

John, what inspired you to write this story?

At a BCR meeting, Andy Wong was chatting with a small group—Lindsay Moore, Carl Tsui, and me—about a website called StealMyStuff.com. That’s a real website which works a lot like the one in our story, connecting people’s Facebook updates about going out of town with their street addresses as a warning to manage your privacy settings. I joked about how that could lead to something worse. That evening I typed out a first draft of the script to send back to the little group. Andy said he wanted to draw it, which struck me as right and proper because he’d served the ball to begin with.

Andy, is that what drew you to this story?

I enjoyed the fact it spouted from a conversation I had with John. I wanted to try my hand at the horror genre, since I usually draw silly slice of life comedies. There was also this growing hunger to draw some crazy monster designs.

It looks like StealMyStuff.com is no longer active, but you can get the same idea from ICanStalkU.com. Or this New York Times article about the personal information embedded in some digital snapshots. Isn’t it wonderful how the modern world offers opportunities for chills that previous generations never knew?

The Influence of Scalawagons

2011-11-08T08:58:00.001-05:00

Scalawagons of Oz might well be John R. Neill’s most influential book. Not because it’s good. In fact, it’s the worst of the three or four Oz books Neill wrote. He was a talented illustrator, but had no apparent sense of narrative structure.

Among Neill’s other Oz books, The Wonder City of Oz was rewritten by a Reilly & Lee editor, and A Runaway in Oz was rewritten (with far more attention to the original story) by Eric Shanower.

Neill’s Lucky Bucky in Oz benefits from a conventional Oz-book narrative: An American child cast into fairyland by random disaster gathers companions and makes his adventurous way to the Emerald City. However, despite having such a simple plot laid out, Neill managed to make his timeline loop back on itself in an impossible way.

Even among that bunch, however, Scalawagons of Oz is the worst. Events happen randomly. Hardly any character is really likable. The storyline, such as it is, accumulates the tension of a sagging strand of chewing gum.

Furthermore, the book introduces mass-manufactured sentient automobiles into Oz, reason enough for some fans to reject the book. While L. Frank Baum established that Oz had electricity, and even some electrical communications systems (controlled by the elite), he made sure not to include modern transportation technology: no trains, steamboats, aeroplanes, or motorized runabouts. Having to travel by foot or Sawhorse guaranteed that people had adventures. Those cars called Scalawagons (Neill tried too hard on his puns) could have ruined life in Oz for readers. Therefore, none of Neill’s official successors as Oz authors, and few of his unofficial ones, have incorporated the Scalawagons into their stories.

So how is that book influential? Because, as David Maxine recently wrote at Hungry Tiger Talk, reading it pushed other authors into writing their own, better Oz books. The first was Rachel Cosgrove Payes, then a ~~housewife~~ biologist, who offered Reilly & Lee The Hidden Valley of Oz in 1951. About a decade later, she embarked on a long career writing other types of novels.

As the second example, David’s posting displays a copy of Scalawagons inscribed by three-time Newbery Honor winner Eloise Jarvis McGraw with these words:

This book…came into the possession of my daughter (and co-author) Lauren Lynn McGraw, who was reading it one day in 1962, looked up at me and said, ”We could write a better Oz book!” Whether we did or not is not for me to say, but we tried

The McGraws’ Merry Go Round in Oz (1963) was one of the best in the series, certainly by conventional measures of writing style.

Finally, a less worthy example of Scalawagons’ influence might be a curious story from Wow Comics, #48 (1946), which shows Mary Marvel fighting robots shaped like Oz characters. Alongside the easily recognized Scarecrow and Tin Woodman is a strange creature called the What-is-it. As David pointed out in reprinting this tale in Oz-Story, #2, that creature looks like the main villain in Scalawagons, published five years earlier and quite possibly still sitting unsold on a bookstore shelf.

Trying to Claim Fantasy Literature for Christianity

2011-11-07T08:46:00.000-05:00

Reviewing two fantasy novels in the Jewish Review of Books back in 2010, Michael Weingrad asked “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia.” However, he starts with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, which naturally points the discussion in a particular way. (We could do worse than ask whether there have been many Jewish dons at Oxford who felt secure enough to publish fantasy novels.)

Then Weingrad dismisses respected counterexamples by writing:

Haven’t modern Jewish writers, from Kafka and Bruno Schulz to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick, written about ghosts, demons, magic, and metamorphoses? But the supernatural does not itself define fantasy literature, which is a more specific genre. It emerged in Victorian England, and its origins are best understood as one of a number of cultural salvage projects that occurred in an era when modern materialism and Darwinism seemed to drive religious faith from the field.

No, that’s not what defines fantasy literature. It may be part of the definition of “high fantasy,” with its emphasis on magic-infused lands and epic battles between good and evil, but that’s only one part of the corpus. Weingrad tries to define fantasy as wholly separate from science fiction, where there are, he acknowledges, many Jewish authors. He also disregards all fantasy storytelling outside the prose form: no comics, no movies.

Weingrad’s critique immediately prompted replied from more knowledgeable critics like Farah Mendelsohn, Abigail Nussbaum, and Spencer Ackerman.

D. G. Myers just followed up with a Commentary essay titled “Fantasy Is a Genre of Christianity.” This is an even less tenable thesis, explored in less depth at less length. Myers can manage even that much only because he gets to define his terms: “The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm.”

There’s no “spirit realm” in, for example, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy the Pig, or E. B. White’s Stuart Little—only unseen corners of everyday life. Myers’s definition also excludes all fiction that provides a non-mystical explanation, however scientifically stretchy, for the unfamiliar.

Furthermore, the “spirit realm” is neither the creation nor the exclusive property of Christianity. It’s Platonist. The philosophical movement later labeled “Middle Platonism” infused early Christian theological writings, but its ideas are independent of that faith.

Robin Around the Web This Week

2011-11-06T08:33:00.007-05:00

At Comics Should Be Good!, Brian Cronin asked for reader suggestions of the Greatest Tim Drake Stories Ever. That evolved into the Greatest Robin/Red Robin Stories Ever.

Some patterns stood out:

Six of the top ten were written by Chuck Dixon.
Only two of those ten appeared in the last ten years. Most date from the early and mid-1990s.
Many crucial events in Tim Drake’s career (his mother’s death, meeting Spoiler, joining Young Justice, joining the Teen Titans, his father’s death, shift to Red Robin, deducing that Bruce Wayne was lost in time) don’t appear in any of these stories.

Cronin doesn’t include vote counts, and I may be projecting here, but the level of commentary on those posts makes me suspect fans had a hard time coming up with top ten lists. Yet the same website had another fan poll that placed Tim Drake as DC’s eight best character this year. (Dick Grayson, coming off a year in the batsuit, came in a solid #3.)

The character of Tim Drake, as a symbol and as a member of the shifting casts of people around Batman and/or of DC’s young heroes, may well be better and more beloved than individual stories about him.

Elsewhere, the artists at Comic Twart focused on Damian Wayne; the panel above comes from Evan Shaner. It looks like some contributors knew much more about the character going in than others. (“Gerads told me this is all that kid says.” “So apparently Damian Wayne is 10.”) The resulting exercise might therefore be less successful than it could have been.

The group’s tribute to Bucky Barnes seems more sure-footed. I especially like Tom Fowler’s mash-up of the finale of Dr. Strangelove with Baron Zemo’s rocket.

Brother, Can You Paradigm for the Tollbooth?

2011-11-05T10:28:00.002-05:00

With all the attention flowing to The Phantom Tollbooth on its fiftieth anniversary, I decided to do what Peter Sagal warned against: to reread the book as an adult.

The copy I found on my shelf was issued for the thirty-fifth anniversary, with a foreword by Maurice Sendak. I was surprised to find that my copy is also autographed by author Norton Juster and artist Jules Feiffer. I’ve met Juster once or twice, but never asked for his signature, and I’ve never met Feiffer. I guess I bought a copy they signed for Books of Wonder or another store, but I’d prefer to think of those autographs as a mysterious apparition.

Sagal’s warning and my own memory of first reading the novel (I vaguely liked it, didn’t love it) meant I wasn’t subject to crushing disappointment on rereading. Juster’s play with words and logic is clever throughout, but it’s a single note struck over and over.

The young hero Milo is quite a blank slate; feeling bored is hardly a galvanizing personality trait. At least he’s not a paragon, however. As in some other fantasies written for the same age range, the protagonist’s lack of a strong, distinct personality might make it easier for young readers to project themselves into his adventures.

I had long thought of The Phantom Tollbooth as a portal fantasy, but I was struck by how closely the book followed that standard map:

Milo goes through an unusual opening to a fantasy world. That portal’s a tollbooth, but it might as well be a mirror, a wardrobe, or a cyclone.
Milo’s status as a newcomer allows the characters of that world to explain it all for the benefit of the readers.
There’s something wrong in that world (Princesses Rhyme and Reason are missing), and Milo gets the mission to fix it. Because the fate of the world must always depend on an eleven-year-old who pops up out of nowhere.
Over the course of a journey, Milo accumulates companions (Tock, the Humbug), knowledge (so many valuable lessons about life), and tools (a stolen sound) that allow him to fulfill that mission. Whatever was wrong with that world is fixed, and the status quo ante is restored.
After a celebration, Milo returns to his own world, more mature and sure of himself than he began.

Next spring, I’ll talk on types of fantasy at SCBWI New England’s annual conference, and I’ll certainly use The Phantom Tollbooth as a paradigmatic example.

Synesthesia, the Phantom Phenomenon

2011-11-04T08:50:00.001-05:00

Leonard Marcus’s interviews for the new Annotated Phantom Tollbooth and the recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik bring out what seems to be new information on the source of author Norton Juster’s “nonsense”: it reflected how he actually saw the world as a child.

Juster told Gopnik:

“I had an ailment called synesthesia,” Juster explained, pronouncing the word carefully. “I could only do numbers by colors.” His mind—in a way that will be familiar to readers of the memoirs of that fellow-synesthete [Vladimir] Nabokov—made instant, inescapable associations between a number and a color. “I can still remember a few: 4 was blue, 7 was black, and so the only way I could do math was by associating colors.”

In the novel, at the Dictionopolis marketplace Milo nibbles on some letters, gaining the sensation of tastes. Later he conducts an orchestra that produces colors. And of course the whole book concretizes the abstract.

Some readers, such as Patricia Lynne Duffy in Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds and this article in LinguaPhile, had already recognized that Juster’s text described that mental phenomenon. But I don’t recall him speaking of his experience before.

The Phantom Tollbooth in Its Time

2011-11-03T15:11:00.002-05:00

In a New Yorker article about the fiftieth-anniversary editions of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Adam Gopnik wrote:

It’s a commonplace of scholarship to insist that children’s literature came of age when it began to break away from the authoritarian model of the moralizing allegory. Yet “The Phantom Tollbooth” is an old-fashioned moralizing allegory, with a symbolic point at every turn.

And that’s why the book can grate on adults like Peter Sagal.

The “coming of age” that Gopnik mentions occurred decades, perhaps a century, before Juster started writing. Such obvious “moralizing allegory” was long gone. Sure, there were still moralizing tales like Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947-), and William Pène du Bois was about to tackle the deadly sins (1966-). Even today, most people expect novels to leave children with a sense of hope and other subtle nudges in a right direction. But allegorical characters that spell out their valuable lessons about life without a wink—those were as old-fashioned as Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Phantom Tollbooth brought back the form, but its characters have less to say about morals than about intellect. Milo learns to see the world from different perspectives, not to jump to conclusions, and other rules of proper abstract thought. The book depicts using one’s intellect to be as important as much earlier allegories had urged readers to use their piety and/or moral sense.

A Wizard of Oz by Way of New Delhi

2011-11-01T08:46:00.001-05:00

Last week I picked up a copy of the Campfire Classics graphic adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This is one of a long list of public-domain stories brought to the US by Steerforth of New Hampshire and distributed by Random House.

Roland Mann, a veteran of Malibu Comics, is credited as “wordsmith.” Kevin (or K. L.) Jones is the credited “penciler.” All of the other names on the credits page are Indian.

[Comics publishers often print long lists of credits on a copyright page, including company executives with minimal involvement in that title. In contrast, a traditional children’s book usually doesn’t state its editor’s name anywhere. This is another of the curious cultural differences between the two industries.]

Campfire Classics are produced out of New Delhi. Back in 2010, Publishing Perspectives reported: “Among the advantages the company has is the ability to keep most of the work in-house. The company employs a bullpen of 20 full-time artists on staff to do with drawing and coloring.” As a result, a 76-page full-color Campfire book can retail for $9.99.

According to Mann, for the Classics series ”The goal is to stick very close to the original and get young readers visually interested in the work so that they might actually seek the original out.”

For him, that assignment meant reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the first time. His blog shows how he discovered the obvious big differences between the book and the famous MGM movie.

Still, that movie exerted a heavy influence on the visuals of this adaptation. Jones and the bullpen depict Dorothy as an adolescent with brown braids; for much of the book she wears a blue-and-white checked dress. (In the Emerald City she changes into one of the least flattering dresses I’ve ever seen, shown here.)

The Wicked Witch of the West has the green skin and long fingernails that Margaret Hamilton wore in the 1939 movie, but (aside from the scars over her missing eye) has a young and attractive face—a sign of Wicked’s influence.

Campfire is aiming for the American and British markets, to judge by the titles and topics in its catalogue. I rather hoped to find details that struck me as a markedly Indian interpretation of the legend, but didn’t spot any. The biggest departure from the traditional range of Wizard of Oz characterizations is, as this picture shows, the Winkies as little yellow goblins. The lettering is unimaginative, possibly designed to stick as closely as possible to what readers might find in prose books.

As the publisher requested, Mann’s script sticks close to the source material. It includes the Winged Monkeys’ flashback and the visit to the China Country, two episodes that adapters often leave out. It skips only the visit to the family just outside the Emerald City, which offers characterization but not much action.

Indeed, Mann clearly concentrates his limited space on action scenes. The travelers’ confrontation with the Kalidahs takes nearly three pages. There’s a spread and more on Nick Chopper’s transformation into the Tin Woodman through multiple axe accidents, starting with the picture of young Nick at the right.

In contrast, the Wizard gives out brains, a heart, and courage in only three panels covering half a page. Those moments help to define the thematic core of the novel, but the script zips us through them. Similarly, there’s little pause for Dorothy’s sorrow after the Wizard’s balloon flies away.

As a result, I enjoyed moments of this adaptation, and found some of the creators’ other choices interesting to contemplate, but I didn’t think the overall storytelling was emotionally involving or fully successful.

One of Jones’s upcoming titles for Campfire is a comics biography of Abraham Lincoln. Mann, in contrast, is a neo-Confederate, so I don’t think he’ll be working on that one.

How Picture Books (and Life) Used to Be

2011-10-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of the Albert Whitman blog, a page from Time to Eat: A Picture Book of Foods, by Mame Dentler and Frank Fenner, Jr., published in 1945:

Finishing New Teen Titans: Games a Bit Hastily?

2011-10-30T17:13:00.005-05:00

The last few weekly Robin installments have celebrated the art of George Pérez in New Teen Titans: Games. There are many more examples to enjoy.

Early in the book a series of panels of Dick Grayson using Central Park as his own steeplechase course for a workout, silhouettes interspersed with full-figure sketches. This visual effect returns as Nightwing and his adversary fight as silhouettes stomping on a scale model of New York.

Pérez and his inking and coloring colleagues drop the solid lines and strong colors of the ordinary settings to depict Azarath, Raven’s hellish home dimension. (See here for an early take on that page by colorist and collector Tom Smith.)

Despite being one of the DC graphic novel division’s premium new books, however, Games shows signs of hasty production. On one page (see above) a misplaced borderless white box cuts off characters’ feet. Presumably it was left over from some design program.

I spotted some panel lines incompletely erased, as in the example below. (Those panels also show how scripter Marv Wolfman, the editor, and the letterer made Nightwing’s speech appear before the villain’s even though it comes out of a later panel.)

The front- and backmatter are illustrated with images of the main characters cut out and enlarged from the pages in between. It’s possible that those images were inked digitally, and they were certainly colored and finished on a computer. That means they were created to be printed at a certain size, with an appropriate dots-per-inch measurement.

Rather than rescan and rework Pérez’s pencils at a higher resolution to make those big portraits look even more magnificent, the production team simply enlarged the images from the pages, resulting in jaggy lines. Beginner PhotoShop classes warn against doing that. Seeing the effect in a premium graphic novel makes the production look slapdash.

Feeling Close to My Remote

2011-10-29T20:15:00.000-05:00

I spent the day at the Southern New England SCBWI’s ENCORE session, featuring well-reviewed presentations from the past year.

Although I was opening speaker (on the topic of “Milestones in an Exciting Plot”), my biggest contribution to the day might have been my remote control for PowerPoint presentations. Novelists Erin Dionne, Karen Day, and Mark Peter Hughes all used it during their sessions. (Mary Lee Donovan of Candlewick, like a good old-fashioned children’s-book editor, used actual books as her props.)

For people who do presentations in various venues, I highly recommend a device like this. It works on either PCs or Macs, letting a presenter stand several yards from the computer or walk around during the presentation, instead of having to push buttons on a keyboard balanced nearby. There’s a laser pointer built in, and the Kensington version has a nice peanut-shaped design.

This isn’t a paid product placement; I paid for the little thing like a normal person. But owning one really has made presentations easier for me. I’m glad I brought it along today—and I didn’t even have PowerPoint in my session.

Children’s Literature Fellowships from the AAS

2011-10-28T11:25:00.000-05:00

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has announced two new short-term fellowships for the study of early American children’s literature:

The Justin G. Schiller Fellowship supports research by both doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars from any disciplinary perspective on the production, distribution, literary content, or historical context of American children’s books to 1876.

As a teenager, Schiller helped to found the International Wizard of Oz Club, and he went on to become a leading dealer in children’s books.

The Linda F. & Julian L. Lapides Fellowship supports research on printed and manuscript material produced in America through 1865 for (or by) children and youth. The Lapides Fellowship will support projects examining the creative, artistic, cultural, technological, or commercial aspects of American juvenile literature and ephemera produced between the Puritan Era and the Civil War. It is open to both postdoctoral scholars and graduate students at work on doctoral dissertations.

The deadlines for applying for either scholarship is 15 Jan 2012. See the AAS website for more details.

Here’s an example of printed material produced in early America by youth: printer’s apprentice Job Weeden’s plea for New Year’s tips in 1772.

Eloise et al.: “They were never children’s books”

2011-10-27T09:15:00.002-05:00

At Graphic Novel Reporter, of all places, illustrator Hilary Knight talked about how he co-created the Eloise books with song-and-dance woman Kay Thompson:

The Eloise character herself was totally Kay Thompson. She told me who this little girl was. Kay was not particularly visual, and when we worked together, she would talk to me and I would draw things. And that’s how we did all the books. We worked directly together, which is very unusual.

And the other thing that I keep talking about, because Kay was so adamant about it, is that they were never children’s books. They have become children’s books, but Kay never agreed that they were. It was sort of a joke in the beginning. There was a chain of bookstores called Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York, and Kay lived nearby at the Plaza. She used to go in and [see that the Eloise books] had been moved into the children’s section. She would march in and carry them to the front of the store and put them in the adult section. And then they’d just get moved back again.

It was the best thing, really, that happened to her because it was kind of a novelty adult book. It even says that it’s not a children’s book; it says that it’s a book for precocious adults in a banner across the top. She never wrote the books down to children. Of course, they look like children’s books and they were about someone who was getting away with something, so it appealed to kids, thank God.

That’s an interesting way to reconsider Eloise—as one of those adult books that look like picture books, but aren’t at all meant for the traditional picture-book readership. Certainly they weren’t created in the typical picture-book way, but that means nothing about the intended audience.

A Peek Inside Minimum Paige

2011-10-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

At Robot 6, local comics super-journalist Brigid Alverson interviewed Ryan Mita about the Minimum Paige comics anthology that he edited for the Harvard Book Store. It’s become the store’s top seller—no doubt because it’s not available anywhere else but the store’s print-on-demand book-making machine.

Ryan was, I think, the first person I met when I attended the Boston Comics Roundtable. Most folks there were interested in writing comics or drawing comics or both. Ryan said he was interested in marketing comics. And by assembling this anthology, he’s provided a platform for dozens of creators.

More than one hundred submissions came in, and among Ryan’s remarks in the interview is:

I think the biggest surprise was how professional all the artists were. Not a single submission came in after deadline. Not one. I remember having visions of artists calling at 5:01 asking for extensions, but it was silent, so I played with fonts instead.

Giving credit where it’s due, I must report that artist Alex Cormack handled the submission of our story, “Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie,” which leads off the collection. I might well have been on the phone at 5:01.

The Nine

2011-10-25T08:51:00.001-05:00

L. Frank Baum created the Nine Tiny Piglets in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and they’re now hopping about in the Marvel Comics adaptation of that book by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. The picture above is Young’s cover for one of those comic books.

Yesterday I stumbled across this verse about the piglets on my hard drive:

We piglets do not all agree.
Now three of us are saying, “No,”
While “Yes” declare another three,
And three aren’t sure which way to go.

We therefore caucus and discuss
The very best thing to be done,
What holds the most rewards for us,
And tally: four to four to one.

The argument turns fierce and hot
Until the vote is five to four.
At last we’re done! But we forgot
Exactly what we voted for.

Or maybe that’s in honor of the new Supreme Court session.

Weekly Robin Extra: More Pérez Panels

2011-10-24T13:12:00.000-05:00

Here’s another example of striking design from George Pérez in New Teen Titans: Games. Just before this sequence, the Titans have learned that there’s a bomb about to go off in New York City.

Pérez first creates a series of horizontal panels of Titans racing to the site of that bomb in their different ways: Joe Wilson in his circa-1988 car, Donna Troy gliding, Gar Logan flying as a hawk, Starfire blasting through the sky, and Vic Stone in the Titans jet. Each panel is slightly longer, extending further into the negative space above the jet, suggesting progress—but slow progress. Will they be on time?

At the bottom of the page is a series of six vertical images of the character Raven visiting her mother, an unusually untroubled moment for her. Like a movie director, Pérez pulls back from a close-up of Raven looking happy through a window into the house, and then moves forward into another close-up of her emblem, which also serves as her Titans radio. We realize that Raven, who could teleport instantly to the scene of the bomb, has not gotten the message.

Travis Lanham’s digital lettering of the alarm sound breaks horizontally across the bottom panels, growing bigger and darker. That line of letters reflects the horizontal, left-to-right movement of the Titans above. It’s impossible to resist turning that page to see what comes next.

Fight at the Guggenheim Museum

2011-10-23T23:59:00.000-05:00

Here’s a page from New Teen Titans: Games with visuals I found particularly striking. In this scene, George Pérez shows Joey (Jericho) Wilson fighting villains called Knight and Squire in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. At the top, the Knight knocks Joe over the rail of a balcony.

As Joe falls down the page, the Guggenheim’s tiers define the tiers of the panels, providing strong horizontal lines yet uniting the fall into a single image. The effect reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which in turn drew heavily from Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. Near the bottom, Joe grabs onto the rail of a lower balcony, and thus in a way grabs onto the top border of that panel to hold himself up.

Meanwhile, on the left, Pérez offers framed vignettes of the museum staff reacting to the fight, and at the bottom (within a differently styled frame to signal the difference) the Squire taunting them. The shapes and scale of those panels are reflected in the picture frames that Joe falls past on the right.

In the years when no one expected Games to come out, some of Pérez’s artwork circulated among fans. Titans Tower has posted a scan of the line art of this page, showing the bare design.

The finished page includes the contributions of Hi-Fi, the firm that provided digital coloring for Games. That process added not just colors but Joe’s shadows on the wall, and the images of famous nineteenth-century art in the frames, under glowing lamps.

Of course, that’s not the type of art that gets displayed in the Guggenheim. Modernist works, particularly Pop and Op Art, might even have worked better in this scene, playing off the medievalism of the villains and Jericho’s costume. But those works have more copyright protection. And the choice of Impressionism enhances the surreal contrast between this fight and the dignified placidity of its museum setting.

Ruth Berman’s Quest for Bradamant

2011-10-22T08:22:00.020-05:00

I’m pleased to post this interview with Ruth Berman, author of Bradamant’s Quest. This is a new novel about an old character, originally created in the late Middle Ages. Yet Bradamant is also the forerunner of the many female knights in fiction today, so this tale can speak to modern readers.

Bradamant’s Quest is set in a fantasy world that was immensely popular for centuries, but which we don’t visit much anymore: the “Matter of France,” or romances of Charlemagne. How did you decide to add to that saga? What does it offer that we don’t find in other great myths of the western world?

When I read the stories in the Incompleat Enchanter series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, many years back, their treatments of the worlds that Harold the I.E. visits made me interested in looking up and reading the books involved. That eventually led me to reading a translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and I thought Ariosto’s Bradamant was a fascinating character, sure of herself and resourceful in going after her true love (a warrior in the enemy army’s forces? — no reason to give up, is her feeling).

Bradamant gets treated rather poorly in modern stories, being presented as a too-big, beefy, well-meaning-but-clumsy type in deCamp/Pratt, and as a rigidly military fighting machine in Italo Calvino’s The Non-Existent Knight. I thought there ought to be more adventures for Bradamant as strong without being therefore laughable or unpleasant, and eventually decided to do something about that.

Oberon also makes an appearance in Bradamant’s Quest. I know he’s got roots in the Middle Ages, but has he played a role in Carolingian romances before? Would we recognize him from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or would he recognize himself)?

Oberon the Fairy King is a major character in the 12th century Huon of Bordeaux, Huon being one of Charlemagne’s knights. The 1534 translation of it into English is where Shakespeare got his Oberon. The name is equivalent to Auberon, which is equivalent to the German Alberich, meaning elf-lord, although Oberon would not recognize himself in the Alberich of the stories of the Volsung Saga/Ring of the Nibelungs. Huon’s Oberon is enough like Shakespeare’s to make them recognizable, for instance, in their power and in their inclination to befriend mortals, although Shakespare made important changes, such as introducing Titania and Robin Goodfellow into Oberon’s court.

The romance authors of medieval Europe freely added to each other’s work, as when Ariosto wrote Orlando Furioso to finish Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. These days, many people would call that plagiarism, or fanfiction (and which is more respectable?). What are your thoughts on this sort of collective fiction-making? Should we revise our ideas of originality and look at it differently today?

No one seems to object to modern Arthurian adventures. Jane Yolen likes to say that King-Arthur-and-his-knights make up one of the earliest shared-world settings, although by no means the earliest. Tennyson, when he was doing his retellings of stories from Greek mythology (and the same applies to his Arthurian adventures in his Idylls of the King) remarked in a letter to a friend that he did not like to re-tell a story if he thought it was simply a rechaufée, re-heated leftovers, but if he felt he had something to say that was more than could be found in the original, then he felt that his version was worth doing. And, as T.S. Eliot said: only bad poets borrow — good poets steal.

You’re a charter member of the Int’l Wizard of Oz Club, and you’ve been writing articles about fantasy literature and resurrecting lost stories for many years, as well as writing short stories. How does it feel to be publishing your first novel?

I’m delighted to have it in print. I remember some years back I was on a panel at a science-fiction convention about writing stories based on legends/myths. I tried to say something about Bradamant, and the moderator kept shutting me up, I think because she thought an unpublished novel could not be worth talking about. I take a good deal of satisfaction in thinking that now I can tell people about it, and if they think it sounds interesting, it’s possible for them to get it.

Bradamant’s Quest comes to us from FTL Publications of Minnesota, which offers a free peek at the first chapter.

Ness on Nesbit

2011-10-21T10:39:00.012-05:00

Gracious, I missed that Mari Ness at Tor was reviewing all the books by E. Nesbit!

I didn’t see a mention of how in her golden period Nesbit wrote for The Strand, so her books appeared first in that magazine in chunks and only later were collected. That helps to explain their episodic rhythm, especially in the early years.

Ness gets rather cutting on a time-travel novel that I haven’t been able to complete, Harding’s Luck:

Nesbit also choose[s] to make Dickie into a poor crippled orphan, and thus, Extremely Good, so Good that Dickie is willing to return to poverty and disability, giving up the pony, just to turn a homeless beggar and thief into a hardworking, honest man.

I’m not certain that any writer could have pulled this off; certainly Nesbit couldn’t. I can believe in Nesbit’s magical rings and wishes; I can certainly believe in her portraits of children who do thoroughly selfish and foolish things or spend more time thinking about food and fun than about being good. But not this. . . .

By 1907/1908, when Nesbit was planning and writing Harding’s Luck, she was well established as a popular, clever, children’s writer. But then, as more than occasionally now, “popular,” “clever,” and “children’s” did not add up, in the eyes of important (and generally male) critics, as “good” or “of literary merit.” . . . Nesbit, on personal, friendly terms with some of these literary critics, knew what they were looking for, and she was prepared to change her writing to meet it. Thus the serious tone of this book, and its often self-conscious “literary” feel.

That’s not a selling review, is it? The title of this illustration by H. R. Millar might sum up the tone that Ness disliked in the book: “It hurt, but Dickie liked it.”

I think Nesbit was much more comfortable writing about upper and upper-middle-class children, though they might (as in The Railway Children) be in danger of falling into genteel poverty. Poor Dickie might have made her nervous, in her good Fabian Socialist way, so he had to end up better than life.

Creating Value

2011-10-20T09:02:00.004-05:00

Of all Lemony Snicket’s comments on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the financial/political elite’s reaction to it (also ensconced on Neil Gaiman’s website), I thought this was the most incisive:

Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

When we start implicitly comparing mortgage barons to Count Olaf, they should know they’re in trouble.

Ormondroyd Lost and Found

2011-10-19T08:58:00.011-05:00

On Saturday morning, I finished reading Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top, which features as its narrator a Bay Area–author named Ormondroyd. However, that character doesn’t quite match the author described on the back jacket flap: no kids, no day job. That led me to wonder about the real man.

On Saturday afternoon, I opened an email from author Marc Tyler Nobleman reporting that he was about to post Ormondroyd’s first interview about his writing career, in two parts.

Now that’s service.

Actually, the interview didn’t answer my questions, and in fact raised others. But it was very interesting, including this exchange:

Did you ever consider a sequel to David and the Phoenix?

I not only considered it, I was fool enough to write it. Disaster! I threw away the whole book.

What was the sequel about? When did you write it? Did you save no copy?

Well, the Phoenix was irrevocably gone, so I substituted a gnome-like figure, and he and David set out on a quest, carried by a flying suitcase...but of course without the old Phoenix it was as useless as Gone with the Wind without Scarlett O'Hara. I can't remember when I committed this literary crime. No copy. My wastebasket is a receptacle of no return.

I think that reflects how the character of the Phoenix so dominated that book, and David was fairly blank. Any sequel would also have risked undercutting the first book’s theme of accepting the cycle of life and death. Ormondroyd did write a sequel to Time at the Top, once again featuring an author named Ormondroyd, and I may have to look that up now.

Uncle Henry’s Mortgage Crisis

2011-10-18T09:07:00.003-05:00

The second chapter of The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s fifth and, he thought, final Oz novel, starts with an echo of the first:

Dorothy Gale lived on a farm in Kansas, with her Aunt Em and her Uncle Henry. It was not a big farm, nor a very good one, because sometimes the rain did not come when the crops needed it, and then everything withered and dried up. Once a cyclone had carried away Uncle Henry’s house, so that he was obliged to build another; and as he was a poor man he had to mortgage his farm to get the money to pay for the new house. Then his health became bad and he was too feeble to work. The doctor ordered him to take a sea voyage and he went to Australia and took Dorothy with him. That cost a lot of money, too.

Uncle Henry grew poorer every year, and the crops raised on the farm only bought food for the family. Therefore the mortgage could not be paid. At last the banker who had loaned him the money said that if he did not pay on a certain day, his farm would be taken away from him.

This was, of course, before American society decided that it was both heartless and wasteful to let medical costs force people into bankruptcy. Now, of course, we’ve progressed to... Never mind.

In this book, published in 1910, Dorothy comes up with a solution to the family’s financial straits: occupy the Emerald City! Or at least move there. Baum explains that Oz under Princess Ozma has a very different economic system, as I quoted back here, which means there are no poor people.