“Growing Up When the Time Comes”

From A. S. Byatt’s review of Maria Tatar’s The Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood for the Guardian:

Perhaps Tatar’s most original contribution to thought about children’s stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children’s books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes.

A particularly telling chapter is called “The Great Humbug”. It discusses The Wizard of Oz and what Dorothy learns from discovering that the great magician is in fact only a timid illusionist who makes an emerald city by handing out green spectacles. Dorothy ends the story by saying that she wants to go home to Kansas and Aunt Em – thus making herself alive in the real world.

Of course, Dorothy returns to Oz four more times in L. Frank Baum’s series, and eventually goes there to live, never growing up. But by that time, she’s helped the country become truly magical, not just illusive. She’s helped the humbug Wizard become a real one. And she’s even helped her aunt and uncle find a new home when the bank is about to foreclose on the farm.

Dorothy remains, Baum assures us, an ordinary little girl of the sort who still has “a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity.” But we readers know she’s also grown up as much as she needs to.

Weekly Robin: Election Week Extra

Every day in October, Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good! offered his readers a poll on a different question about American superhero comics. Here’s the complete list of questions.

About a third of the way through the month he asked, “Who’s Your Favorite Robin?” That question received 2,280 responses, more than any other poll in the month and about 20% higher than the next most popular that week. And not one of those votes was mine; I knew I couldn’t decide.

(The next biggest responses for the month, also above 2,000, were to “Who[m] do you prefer Cyclops [of the X-Men] with?” and “Who is the top Spider-Man villain, besides Norman Osborn?”)

And the results were:

46% Tim Drake
31% Dick Grayson
12% Damian Wayne
6% Carrie Kelly
2.4% Stephanie Brown
1.8% Jason Todd

Not listed as options were several minor but distinct versions of Robin who have all appeared in more than one DC story: the first Jason Todd, the Earth-2 Dick Grayson, the imaginary Bruce Wayne, Jr., the Teen Titans Go! Robin, and the Tiny Titans Robin.

When Robin Grows Up, version 1: Owlman!

I’m finally getting back to exploring the implications of “Reason for Robin, #9: Robin is still a kid.” Indeed, within the DC Comics universe, Robin (whichever character is in the costume) represents youth and its potential. But can a symbol of youth grow up?

For decades successful growing up for Robin was portrayed in imaginary or alternative-history stories of Dick Grayson becoming Batman after his mentor’s retirement or death. In all of these scenarios, new boys take on the role, and representational function, of Robin. The exemplary image above comes from the cover of Batman, #119, published in 1958. DC is playing out yet another variation on that scenario now.

In the 1980s the success of the New Teen Titans magazine prompted the publisher to imagine a different way for Dick to mature successfully: he found a new identity as Nightwing. Once again, another boy became Robin.

Indeed, Dick’s maturation was so successful, and Bruce Wayne’s character has since been portrayed as so arrested in some ways, that there’s ongoing debate among fans and within the comics about whether Dick should remain Batman or resume being Nightwing when Bruce inevitably returns.

Even more revealing about the importance of what Robin symbolizes, I think, are the company’s portrayals of Dick aging unsuccessfully. Scripter Bill Finger explored this idea in 1957 with a story called “The Grown-Up Boy Wonder!”

At the start of that adventure, a box Superman has brought back from outer space gives Dick an accidental dose of “maturing gas.” “Golly!” he says the next morning. “During the night I’ve grown—grown as big as a man!”

Dick’s costume no longer fits; symbolically, he can longer fulfill the Robin role. He proposes becoming a second Batman, and the first—the preternaturally well-adjusted hero of the 1950s—nixes that idea. “But when Batman leaves,” a caption tells us, “Dick reacts like an impulsive youngster…”

Dick dons an owl costume and makes his debut as Owlman! This costume has short pants, just like the Robin outfit; symbolically, he’s still a boy. Dick’s not used to his new weight, and still has a tendency to fall down and get captured. As Batman rescues him, just like so many times before, Dick says ruefully, “I’ve got a lot of growing up to do before I can be a real man!”

Owlman’s career ends when the extraterrestrial gas wears off. Dick has learned a valuable lesson about not trying to grow up too soon, as the story’s final panel shows. Note that he’s once again dressed in the bright Robin colors. All is well in the DC Universe.

NEXT WEEK: Dick Grayson matures unsuccessfully—on another planet.

Comics That Go Both Ways

I’d like to find a comics page spread that starts with two characters talking in the upper left, then separating. The reader can follow one character across the spread and then down to the lower right, or follow the other down the page and across to the lower right.

Either way, each character has an individual experience before rejoining the other, and only the reader knows what’s happened to both. It’s quite possible Chris Ware has done something like this already, and I just haven’t had the eyesight and patience to enjoy it. If I can’t find an example, I may have to write one.

While waiting, I keep my eyes open for comics pages that play with our idea of panel order. There’s one in Chris Giarrusso’s new G-Man: Learning to Fly collection, which you can find by going to his “Comic Bits” page and selecting strip 28.

A more algorithmic approach to the same issue appears on Jason Shiga’s “April Fooled” poster, originally created for Nickelodeon magazine.

And Sunday Press has collected Gustave Verbeek’s Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo comics from 1903-05. Each illustration serves its story twice, once when viewed right-side-up and differently when viewed upside-down. I saw a selection of these Sunday strips in Art Out of Time (reviewed here), and, while I don’t think the concept ever got past the novelty stage, I’m still amazed Verbeek was able to keep up the gimmick as long as he did.

Proof: The Power and Pitfalls of Self-Marketing

I was looking back at posts I never finished writing, and found one inspired by a December 2007 story on fantasy author Troy (Tompkins) CLE in a local section of the New York Times. The article’s opening hook was how CLE had created a fictional publicist for a press release for his self-published fantasy novel.

A similar press release dated May 2007 and preserved on the Hip Hop Cosign explains how CLE wasn’t just his own publicist, he was also the book’s original publisher:

When Troy couldn’t find an agent or major publisher for his novel, he published it himself with the help of David Finn, co-founder of the worldwide corporate PR firm, Ruder & Finn, and then created a fictitious publicist to get the word out.

Though that raises a question: If the co-founder of a “worldwide corporate PR firm” (which actually prefers to be called “Ruder Finn”) is helping to publish your book, why do you have to create a publicist? Isn’t that the one type of expert you already have behind you?

That same May 2007 release says of the book:

Combining the best and hottest elements of fantasy, science fiction, hip-hop, video gaming, Nascar and Anime, “The Marvelous Effect” has been likened to a “Black Harry Potter,” for the outrageous adventures, over the top sci fi gadgets and memorable characters Troy has created, as well as the passion it elicits from the hundreds of high schools [sic] students in some of the toughest neighborhoods who’ve attended Troy’s readings.

So CLE’s fictional publicist didn’t lack audacity.

After the Times story, some publishing pros criticized CLE’s tactic. MediaBistro’s Galleycat countered by asking, “Is Having An Imaginary Publicist So Wrong?”

Even asking that question seems quaint now that publishing staffs have been decimated and publicity efforts outsourced. Worldwide media conglomerates are asking first-time authors what they can do on their own to push book sales.

Furthermore, CLE’s method worked. His press release about a reading caught the attention of someone at Simon & Schuster. The company saw enough potential in the Marvelous World series to republish the first book, The Marvelous Effect, and this month is bringing out the second, Olivion’s Favorites. (So this posting isn’t two years late, after all.)

I see two downsides to marketing one’s book through a fake publicist or the story of one, however. The first is that it makes natural cynics like me even more suspicious of any claims. Just who was likening The Marvelous Effect to a “Black Harry Potter”? Did Simon & Schuster really offer “a six-figure advance” for CLE’s book rights? Beyond cross-cultural name-dropping, what exactly is a hybrid of hip-hop, anime, and NASCAR?

And the second pitfall is that publicity can draw attention to a book for the wrong reasons. There are two ways to promote a novel: the story in it, and the story of it. The second can bring attention (CLE was on Tavis Smiley’s talk show and PBS’s Now) and initial sales, but only the latter can please readers and lead to lasting sales.

As I’ve written before, the story of Harry Potter (impoverished single mother finds magical riches!) produced the book’s first spate of publicity in Britain, and dovetailed surprisingly well with the story in Harry Potter (impoverished orphaned boy finds magic and riches!). If the book hadn’t delivered, however, J. K. Rowling’s life story would have been a flash in the British tabloid pan.

I’m not seeing the same overlap between how CLE steered himself to publication and what I read of his hero, Louis Proof, who sets out to win a radio-car race in a junkyard and ends up in a coma. (The fact that the opening chapter is all circumstance and no character doesn’t help.)

And as for the series’s potential as a “Black Harry Potter,” the first book’s jacket showed African-American characters. Its paperback and the second book have abstract science-fiction images on the front.

Designing Superheroes for Fun and Profit

Today I’m highlighting two sites devoted to the important enterprise of superhero design.

I was delighted to find a pointer to The Superest, an ongoing game of rock-paper-scissors with superheroes. Start anywhere (such as that link above), and move down to see who that hero has been designed to vanquish, up to see who was invented to beat that hero.

Thus, for example, the Cord Marshal, with power over extension cords, can defeat General Contractor, but he falls to Midwife, “snipping cords of all shapes and sizes.” And she in turn meets her match in… Well, you’ll have to explore. It really is the Superest.

In addition, months back the Graphic Novel Reporter offered a link to The Hero Factory, a site that allows visitors to design their own superhero by plugging in variables about gender, hair, facial features, uniform colors, weapons, and so on.

The site doesn’t offer a choice of body shape. Which may, with superheroes, be the whole point.

“Scarcely Anything in It to Please the Eye”

Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos alerted me that the Times of London website had unearthed the paper’s review of MGM’s Wizard of Oz, in connection with some behind-the-scenes footage. It’s apparent that the Times critic didn’t appreciate the art direction:

It is presumably to the credit of Hollywood that it can afford to deploy a whole army of dwarfs for the illustration of a single incident in a simple fairy story; this innumerable band of midgets reduces to insignificance the collection of the Gonzagas or, if it comes to that, of Philip IV of Spain.

The rest of the spectacle is equally lavish; there are extraordinary vistas of artificial scenery, many amusing tricks and devices of the cinema, witches who fly in a very natural fashion, puffs of scarlet smoke, and a horse which changes its colour from brilliant purple to orange.

In fact the ingenuous fairy story from which the film is adapted, the story of a little girl who wanders in a strange country in the company of stranger creatures to look for a wizard to send her home, is quite overlaid by the fantastic elaboration of the setting.

The only drawback to the spectacle is that there is scarcely anything in it to please the eye; although many of the conjuring tricks will certainly arouse one’s curiosity the scenery and dresses are designed with no more taste than is commonly used in the decoration of a night-club.

The film is, no doubt, a triumph of technical dexterity and especially of skill in colour photography, but what is the use of making a hollyhock out of cellophane, painting it an ugly colour, and then photographing it with complete accuracy?

A portion of the same column not shown on that page introduces The Wizard of Oz as “a lavish American fairy-story told, for the most part, in technicolour,” in contrast to two other new movies described as “British and characteristic.” Which seems to have aroused some resentment.

Though, to be fair, the movie arrived in London in January 1940, the middle of the “phoney war” as the British anxiously anticipated a fight with Nazi Germany. That may not have been the best time for Hollywood to show off its dwarfs and cellophane.

(Lobby card image above courtesy of Conway’s Vintage Treasures.)

“Dorothy is American.”

The major impetus for me becoming fond of the Oz books was a second-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, in which I played the lead Munchkin and the Winged Monkey who grabbed Toto.

For Grace Lin, author of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, the Wizard production came in third grade. And it didn’t produce such happy memories for her. As described in a recent profile in School Library Journal:

An awakening of sorts occurred when her elementary school put on a production of The Wizard of Oz and, like all the other girls, Lin endlessly practiced for her audition in the playground, singing “Over the Rainbow.”

Her career in musical theater was cut short in the third grade when a classmate said, “You can’t be Dorothy. Dorothy’s not Chinese. Dorothy is American.”

Her friend had called her Chinese. “But I did not feel Chinese. I spoke English, I watched Little House on the Prairie, learned American history, and read books about girls named Betsy and boys named Billy. But I had black hair and slanted eyes, I ate white rice at home with chopsticks, and I got red envelopes for my birthday. Did I belong anywhere?”

When the teacher called her name to try out for the play, Lin passed, saying that at the time she didn’t feel so much “angry, as stupid.”

I can imagine that happening among the kids at my school. Children in the early elementary grades are mighty rigid about the “right” way to do things. But would Grace’s teacher—in the early 1980s in upstate New York—have reinforced the idea that Dorothy as an American couldn’t be a Chinese-American, or corrected it?

Look, Do You Want Me to Tell the Story or Not?

Intrusive narrators are old hat, especially since they’ve been reintroduced into children’s literature by Lemony Snicket. But I was tickled at how over a century ago Carlos Collodi opened The Adventures of Pinocchio with an intrusive audience:

Centuries ago there lived—

“A king!” my little readers will say immediately.

No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

Which reminds me that Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, which I featured back in May, is now available in paperback.

The Most Important Comic-Book Movie Ever?

Earlier this year Kevin Feige, production president at Marvel Studios, said that the 1997 movie Batman & Robin “may be the most important comic-book movie ever made.”

Although Feige made that remark back in June, as paraphrased by The Geek Files, it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention until late October, when Geoff Boucher quoted him in a Los Angeles Times article.

Feige wasn’t praising Batman & Robin. In fact, he said about that movie:

It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy.

Feige isn’t paid to praise the competition, but we can also acknowledge Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, as well as less successful but thoughtful adaptations like Superman Returns.

The problem wasn’t that Batman and Robin was bad, as far as Hollywood was concerned. The problem was that it made so little money, compared to its costs and to the preceding Batman titles: “only” $107 million in the US, less than 60% of the take of its immediate successor (not adjusted for inflation). It also seemed to poison the well for any new Batman movie, at least for a few years, thus breaking one of Warner Bros.’s summer franchises.

Director Joel Schumacher went back to making small- and medium-budget movies. Screenwriter-producer Akiva Goldsman had to “beg” producer Brian Grazer for the assignment of adopting A Beautiful Mind for the screen, according to the LA Times article.

Of course, it was logical for Grazer to ask whether a specialist in adapting bestselling thrillers (particularly by John Grisham) was the best choice to dramatize the life story of a schizophrenic mathematician, but Goldsman’s experience as the child of psychiatrists running a group home had prepared him for that challenge.

Goldsman won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, and then went back to working on popcorn movies. He’s even planning a return to superhero stories through Marvel. But, as the profile indicates, with a different approach:

“What got lost in Batman & Robin is the emotions aren’t real,” Goldsman said, picking his words carefully. “The worst thing to do with a serious comic book is to make it a cartoon. I’m still answering for that movie with some people.”

Now I’ve never seen Batman & Robin all the way through—just enough on television to confirm that I don’t want to see more. I did go to the theaters to watch Tim Burton’s Batman and then Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which brought Dick Grayson into that version of the story. And I didn’t think either of them got the tone of the Batman and Robin legend right. They felt fairly campy and emotionally false from the start.

So I don’t blame Goldsman or Schumacher for Batman & Robin. I blame the American moviegoers who paid nearly $600 million to watch the preceding three movies. Given that track record, of course the studio was going to serve up more of the same until we got tired of it. And in 1997, we finally did.