Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Jenny Desmond Walters’s interview with Stephen Roxburgh of the children’s-book consultancy namelos, posted at Cynsations:

In your captivating and insightful paper “Word Buckets in Meatspace” posted on Scribd, you describe books as “word buckets” stating that a digital “word bucket” can be just as effective as a printed and bound “word bucket.” Why do you think some publishers, and especially some authors, seem to be so reticent to embrace ebooks?

For publishers, it’s a misguided attempt to protect a deteriorating business model.

For authors, it’s generational.

For those of us who have devoted our lives to books, printed books are objets d’art. They are the highest form of culture. They confer status. They define us. We revere them. No machine can ever have that cachet.

But the iconic value of codex form books is accidental. Strangely enough, youngsters are more focused on the essential value of content than the accidental value of form.

I’m sure some will wince at that assertion, but it’s true. We may not agree with kids’ assessment of the content, but that’s a different issue.

However, those of us who cling to our print books run the risk of sounding like Archie Bunker insisting that he can’t eat ice cream with anything other than his special World’s Fair spoon.

To which the kids would respond, “Who’s Archie Bunker? What’s so special about a World’s Fair?”

Roxburgh notes all the limitations of the printed book that we’ve gotten used to:

Artists didn’t choose to deal with prescribed trim sizes, gutters, bleeds, page turns, 32-pages, four-color reproduction, text blocks to accommodate black plate changes, etc. Those are limitations imposed by press sizes, color-separation and reproduction issues, and economic mandates. Now, the shackles are off! I can’t wait to see what is forthcoming.

One of the most interesting areas, I think, is whether stories must be consumed in a sequence determined by the author. Interactive media make it possible to give readers choices about what they see or read when. But is the gradual and sequential release of information a necessary part of storytelling?

Robin’s Regular

Last week I proposed the daring theory that Robin the Boy Wonder isn’t evil. And that this is a fundamental part of the character’s appeal and function within the DC Comics mythos—a “Reason for Robin.”

But aren’t all comic-book heroes not evil? Or if not all, isn’t goodness a very common trait in that crowd? Indeed, in the first four decades of DC superhero stories, not being evil doesn’t distinguish Robin from every other costumed crime-fighter we remember.

Of course, it’s still interesting to watch the definition of “not evil” change over those years. At top is the very last panel in Batman, #1, published in early 1940, almost immediately after the Boy Wonder’s debut. Usually that last panel promoted the next issue of Detective Comics, but here it promoted the values Robin stood for.

Or at least the values that writer Bill Finger could come up with on deadline. The alliterative emphasis on “being REGULAR!” and the acronym strike me as signs he was throwing down the first words he could think of. A couple more minutes of thought might have identified Bravery as more valuable to a hero than Brotherhood. And with World War 2 raging in Europe, there might have been a higher value than Nationalism. Then again, regularity means fitting in, not standing out.

Over a quarter-century later, Teen Titans, #3, brought us the panel at left. This magazine was DC’s attempt to claw back some of the youth market from Marvel by teaming up its teenaged sidekicks. Debuting in February 1966, Teen Titans reflected the New Frontier ethos of the preceding few years—and looks completely out of touch with the years to come.

In the magazine’s debut adventure, titled “The Beast-God of Xochatan!”, the US government sends the sidekicks to South America to guard the construction of a hydropower dam. Parachuting into the country (well, Wonder Girl points out that she can fly) as Peace Corps volunteers, the teen heroes find that the disturbances center on an ancient temple that the dam will flood. As the water rises, they see mysterious beasts emanate from the temple itself.

So what do Robin and his friends do, bearing in mind that they’re not evil—according to the values of that time?

• Find proof that the “god” producing those creatures is actually a real-estate speculator using special effects for his own greedy purposes.
• Convince the authorities that the mysterious beasts reflect the power of an ancient culture and environment that must be preserved.
• See that the ancient god and his creatures were just trying to protect their temple home, and let the monument be flooded anyway.

They take the third course. Because not being evil in 1966 meant spreading technological progress and American values around the globe.

By the end of that decade, Robin and the Titans team openly supported progressive causes. Like the early Superman, they tackled the challenge of urban renewal. After a difficult false start, the team included DC Comics’s first costumed black hero. Of course, they never completely embraced the counterculture, and the magazine never mentioned Speedy’s heroin addiction in Green Lantern. According to the larger American culture, Robin remained clearly “not evil.”

In fact, measured against the youth fashions of the day, Dick Grayson was definitely unround. Licensing deals meant he couldn’t grow his hair long or otherwise change his look drastically. He stayed in college throughout the 1970s. Robin was, we might even say, “regular.” And most other DC heroes were as well. But then came 1980.

COMING UP: Batman and Robin take different paths.

There’s No Place Like Pandora

A link at Bloggity-Blog-Blog sent me to Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Avatar in The New York Review of Books:

Even beyond the incoherence that mars Avatar and hopelessly confuses whatever it thinks its message may be, there is a larger flaw here—one that’s connected to [director James] Cameron’s ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity; one that also brings you back, in the end, to The Wizard of Oz…

If it’s right to see the movie as the culmination of Cameron’s lifelong progress toward embracing a dazzling, superior Otherness—in a word, toward Oz—what strikes you, in the end, is how radically it differs, in one significant detail, from its model. Like the 1939 classic, the 2009 film ends with a scene of awakening. . . . The final image of the redeemed and healed Jake waking up to his new Na’vi life is clearly meant, then, to be a triumphant rewriting of that sour acknowledgment.

But the implications of this awakening—in a character that Cameron himself described as an unconscious rewriting of The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy (“it was, in some ways, like Dorothy’s journey”)—are not only different from but opposite to the implications of Dorothy’s climactic wakening. When Dorothy wakes up, it’s to the drab, black-and-white reality of the gritty Kansas existence with which she had been so dissatisfied at the beginning of her remarkable journey into fantasy, into vibrant color; what she famously learns from that exposure to radical otherness is, in fact, that “there’s no place like home.” Which is to say, when she wakes up—equipped, to be sure (as she was not before) with all that she has learned from her remarkable odyssey, not the least of which is a strong new awareness of her own human abilities—she wakes up to the realities, and the responsibilities, of the human world she'd temporarily escaped from.

This is, of course, an entirely movie-centered understanding of The Wizard of Oz. In the books, once America no longer has anything for Dorothy Gale—the depressed farm economy having chewed up her family and spat them out—she moves the whole family to the Emerald City.

Real Sensations

New Scientist and Chemical and Engineering News have been joking about the boast on redesigned packages of Sensations potato crisps (reportedly Ireland’s most popular brand) that they’re “made with real ingredients.”

“Fears of imaginary ingredients were, apparently, unfounded,” said C&E News.

But look at that logo! The giant S contains a phoenix and a dragon. I’d want to be very sure there wasn’t magic mixed into those Thai Sweet Chili Flavour Crisps.

(Sensations available in North America through A Bit of Home, “Canada’s foremost purveyor of imported Irish and British goods.”)

What Makes Day-Glo Brothers Shine

Early this year I had the honor to be on the panel to judge the Cybils Award for Nonfiction Picture Book. The winner was The Day-Glo Brothers, written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Tony Persiani, which has also received other honors.

As Barton describes in an afterword, this book began when he read an obituary about Bob Switzer, one of the brothers who invented Day-Glo paint sixty years ago. Barton recognized how the Switzers’ history falls into a classic problem-quest-solution structure, which children can easily relate to.

Furthermore, that narrative involved colors, making it ideal for a picture book, one of the genres where our book industry expects books to be printed in full color and budgets accordingly. In fact, Charlesbridge printed The Day-Glo Brothers with Day-Glo inks. Tony Persiani’s illustrations start out in muted grays and pastels, and gradually become brighter—and brighter still.

One reason I thought The Day-Glo Brothers stood out even more from other good nonfiction picture books is that it’s the first popular book on its subject. It required original research from private sources and old articles. It had to explain unfamiliar science about “daylight fluorescence.”

(Though a printed book can go only so far, of course. Charlesbridge posted a video to demonstrate the science. Wish I had that capability when I was trying to explain interference patterns making the rainbow colors on bubbles in Soap Science.)

A lot of children’s nonfiction titles go over the same ground as books that have already been published for adults, sometimes rather recently. Often the authors have done their own research as well, as Tanya Lee Stone did for the Sibert-winning Almost Astronauts. (In that case, the adult forerunner is The Mercury 13, by Martha Ackmann, published in 2003.) Lots of children’s nonfiction focuses on topics that have already been written about a lot, in quite similar ways, as Dave Elzey recently discussed in regard to biography.

Of course, there’s still a lot of art and craft necessary to translate books for adults into stories that much younger readers can understand and relate to. One author can be inspired, even guided, by another yet reach different conclusions with different emphases. But when another book has been published, it’s simply easier for a busy children’s author to locate sources and even a narrative structure. And it’s a lot easier to convince publishers and libraries that ”there’s a worthwhile book here.”

So I give The Day-Glo Brothers extra points for being the first book about the Switzer brothers and their new kinds of paint. It affirms that the best children’s nonfiction depends on the same rigorous research as the best nonfiction for grown-ups.

Reason for Robin, #10

Yesterday I discussed the Spectre, DC Comics’s most powerful character—a godlike embodiment of vengeance. Today we see him discussing the nature of life with a little girl.

Okay, a little dead girl, or ghost, who was murdered by her brother and got the job of escorting souls to the afterlife. She was named Greta, and has been using the name Secret as a member of the Young Justice team of 1990s kid sidekicks and teen heroes. That team had its own quirky comic book, mostly written by Peter A. David and mostly drawn by Todd Nauck, from 1998 to 2003.

At this point in DC Universe history, the man inside the Spectre is Hal Jordan, the second Green Lantern. (Long story.) And he’s explaining life as he sees it.But then Secret has an idea for someone who’s even less evil than Harrison Ford. This exchange reflects how, in the Young Justice saga, Secret is working through a crush on Tim Drake as Robin. But it also expresses an important element of how the character of Robin functions in the DC Universe.

Reason for Robin, #10: Robin isn’t evil.

COMING UP: But aren’t all superheroes, by definition, not evil? And what about Jason and Damian?

Getting to Know the Spectre

If Superman grew from Jerry Siegel’s fantasy of how a near-sighted, Aspie nerd could beat up bullies, the Spectre was his fantasy of righting all the injustice in the world—and beat up bullies so bad they’d never walk again, or possibly even have legs.

Siegel created the Spectre in 1940, two years after the first issue of Action Comics introduced readers to Superman. Hard as it is to imagine, the Spectre was actually more powerful than the Man of Steel, and has stayed so, even as Superman’s strength grew to planet-moving levels.

In fact, the Spectre has so much power that he’s a plotting challenge. No force seems capable of standing up to him. In the Spectre story reprinted in Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, the hero investigates a tenement fire by interviewing a soul, seeping through a roof, flying, becoming invisible, paralyzing a man’s legs, turning flames to ice, growing gigantic, reading a man’s mind, and finally just willing the main villain to die. And he makes it look easy.

The thrill in these stories can’t come from worrying about the Spectre when he seems to be beaten. Instead, it lies in seeing what awesome new power he comes up with next. Among comic-book heroes, only Fletcher Hanks’s Stardust doled out more overpowering vengeance in every story, and Hanks was actually insane.

Comicvine lists the Spectre’s “usual” powers as:

• Intangibility
  
• Flight—fly at any speed
  
• Invisibility
  
• Teleportation
  
• Fear Projection—can project fear into the heart and souls of adversaries
  
• Inanimate Possession—inhabit and animate inanimate objects
  
• Illusion Casting—ability to project realistic illusions
  
• Magic Mastery—various mastery over virtually all forms of magic
  
• Discern Motivation—can sense the intentions of people
  
• Cosmic Awareness—knows many secrets of the universe
  
• Precognition—sometimes gets glimpses into the future
  
• Superhuman Strength
  
• Superhuman Stamina
  
• Superhuman Speed
  
• Invulnerability

And that just scratches the surface. In the Spectre’s case “Superhuman Strength” is more like “as strong as the gravitational pull of small stars.”

The Spectre uses all those powers for just one thing: vengeance. He’s so single-minded that in the 1980s DC’s writers decided that the Spectre is in fact the wrath of God. He feels no mercy, no compassion, and no limits. He plows through the world unstoppably, leaving the evildoers who catch his attention as quivering, half-human wrecks.

The magazine that featured most of the Spectre’s early adventures was called, naturally, More Fun.

TOMORROW: The Spectre’s judgment on Robin.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From the Institute for Children’s Literature web interview with Deborah Lynn Jacobs, author of Powers and Choices, on coming up with a plot:

I tend to think of a premise—a “what if?” Then, I imagine the kind of character who will suffer the most in this situation.

And, as Lester Dent said, “swat him with a fistful of trouble.”

An even more useful observation Jacobs makes is that “every person has their own creative process”:

I fill up two or three full sized notebooks, longhand, for each book—plot ideas, characterization stuff, what ifs and so on. I’ve tried sticky notes—didn’t work. Tried a white board—didn’t work. Tried index cards—REALLY didn’t work!

What matters is the manuscript you come out with, not how you got there.

From Codex to App

Last night at one of my writers’ groups we were all scrunched around a smartphone looking at the digital version of one member’s reissued picture book: Peterkin Meets a Star, by Emilie Boon (also available via iTunes).

Someone asked what we should call this form. It’s a smartphone “app,” and yet Emilie’s creation as author-illustrator is the content, not the software application that makes the pages flip or the sound. So should we call it a “book that runs on an app”?

Peterkin Meets a Star’s first published form was, technologically, a codex. That method of storing information, developed in the late Roman Empire, consists of thin pieces of material bound together along one side with pictures and symbols inked onto each flat surface. One takes in the information by flipping from one piece of material to the next.

The codex was a big improvement over the scroll, and has been so useful for such a long time that the form became synonymous with a ”book,” the term we also use for the information itself. But now we’re seeing the content of books made available in non-codex forms.

At first these new forms were made to resemble codices, as in how audiobooks on tape or CDs were packaged, and how the first electronic book readers are designed. But now books in audio and visual (and in Peterkin’s case, audiovisual) format are available with no physical existence at all above the molecular level. They’re no longer hardware, so the term “app” becomes a little more appropriate.

I suspect it will take a while for our terminology to settle down, and the result will depend on the habits we pick up as much as strict logic. (See the precedents of novel, cartoon, comic, graphic novel, reality show, etc.)

The First Time Superman Saw Robin

Yesterday I laid out the mystery of when Superman and Robin appeared in the same story for the first time—on the Superman radio show in 1945. Although the two characters and Batman were on all the covers of World’s Finest Comics and its forerunners, there was no story of Superman meeting the Dynamic Duo until years later.

But when exactly did it air? Some sources say 3 March, others 5 September. This weekly Robin extra offers an answer—and I think both those dates are wrong. Radio drama expert Jim Harmon’s detailed description of the show (quoted yesterday) ends with Batman having been turned into a wax figure, which points to the story “The Mystery of the Waxmen,” broadcast from 28 Feb to 15 Mar 1945, according to this episode guide. (Other websites suggest that story started on Monday, 26 Feb 1945, but cite no source.) Those episodes bracket the 3 March date Harmon gives, though that was a Saturday, when the show didn’t air.

Googling “The Mystery of the Waxmen,” I lucked out and found episodes dated 1 and 2 Mar 1945, the second and third installments, available for downloading from Old Radio World.

The 1 March episode starts with a description of a strangely dressed boy found unconscious in a drifting rowboat—in the previous episode. That’s the “our story so far” summary.

So the first appearance of Robin and Superman in the same story actually occurred on 28 February 1945. Their first conversation was on 1 March, and the first time Superman spots Batman (in a highly waxed state) was 2 March.

Alas, I haven’t found a source for the subsequent episodes, when Superman and Batman first converse. Those recordings appear not to have survived.

Listening to those episodes shows that the descriptions of the story that I quoted yesterday from E. Nelson Bridwell and Jim Harmon aren’t exact. Robin does make his entrance unconscious in a drifting rowboat. But the characters who go out to rescue him are Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson. Then the bad guys crash into them with a speedboat, and Superman rescues all three.

I rather liked the first episode, in which Superman recognizes the unconscious costumed boy as Robin before resuming his role as Clark Kent to summon medical help. He hides Robin’s costume to preserve his secret identity, but then Dick Grayson wakes up and insists on speaking only to Superman. Lois and Jimmy won’t leave Clark alone with the boy so he can explain, and… Well, trust me—as radio adventure shows go, it’s actually amusing.

Superman was played by Bud Collyer, Robin by Ronald Liss. And Batman…well, Batman makes no sound in these episodes, so no one played him.