Yeah, Goin’ Back

I’m not a fan of Bruce Springsteen. I admire his talent and work ethic, I enjoy some of his songs, and I can identify the big ones’ openings and choruses. But I don’t think I own any Springsteen albums, and I can’t find his name in my quirky iTunes library.

Given how many people absolutely adore Springsteen, that puts me closer to nineteenth-century Bushmen who died before he was born than to his real fans.

But I say that only to preface a strong recommendation for the episodes of Little Steven’s Underground Garage in which host Steve Van Zandt and Springsteen talk about their rock-and-roll influences, interspersed with music old and new. The last of the radio shows will be broadcast this weekend, and you can listen online to extended versions of all three conversations by registering at the show’s website.

Springsteen and Van Zandt met as teenagers in New Jersey, and have worked together in the E Street Band for decades. They reminisce and analyze their favorite 45s, telling stories about how Springsteen’s first guitar lessons didn’t take, and why they couldn’t get the distortion sound they heard on records (they still had their little amps set on 3).

Along the way we learn about the attraction of novelty songs, how to rip off an Animals intro without anyone noticing by changing it from minor key to major, and the subtle mysteries of Kinks chord changes.

And then there’s this counterfactual: if young Bruce and Stevie had heard any of the Beatles’ small-label American releases before “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” would they have had such an immediate reaction to that band?

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From British novelist Patrick Ness’s Guardian column on books to read when you’re supposedly too young for them:

I can’t possibly recommend some of the books that I and others read when we were teenagers. I mean, really, is Trainspotting in any way appropriate for a teenager? And what about the Jilly Coopers and the Jackie Collinses and, heaven help us, Flowers in the Attic? We older folks may have cherished, er, survived reading them at your age, but you’re too young, WAY too young, to read any of these books that are easily available at your local library. Listed alphabetically by author. So the Cs would be near the front and Ws near the back. But I couldn’t possibly recommend that.

I still haven’t read most of Ness’s list, but I read other “inappropriate” books as a young teenager, including The Great Gatsby (which I didn’t get) and Ulysses (which I really didn’t get). Their effects were much less harmful on me than the effects of being a young teenager.

This is the Past

From the Boston Globe I learned that Rizzoli has reissued M. Sasek’s This is… series of travel books for children, such as This is Paris, This is Greece, and the ahead-of-its-time This is the Way to the Moon. The latest is last month’s This is Washington, D.C.

Those eighteen books were published between 1959 and 1974, and I remember leafing through them at the tail end of that span. It wasn’t just the exotic locales that stuck with me, but also Sasek’s style of art and design. Even then the books seemed to come out of the Old World and out of the past, without the fresh vibrancy of, say, Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World, which was published in the middle of that same era.

The Globe states, “some facts in the reissued editions have been updated,” but Rizzoli’s catalogue copy for This is Hong Kong (where a lot has changed since 1969) describes those updates “appearing on a ‘This is . . . Today’ page at the back of the book.”

And of course the illustrations can’t easily be altered. Sasek’s art still has a Catch Me If You Can vibe, from when Americans dressed up to travel instead of dressing down. I look at these reissues, and think if they must be selling on the basis of adult nostalgia and artistic appreciation rather than child curiosity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) That would certainly explain the The is London tea towel.

Look Upward Robin!

From the daily Batman and Robin strip of the 1940s, back when a superhero comic being gritty meant it contained actual grit.

But to show that some things don’t change over more than sixty years, note the pride beneath Batman’s disapproving scowl* in panel three. * phrase borrowed from Nightwing, #138, published in 2007.

Eisner Nomination Season

Nominations for the Eisner Awards for achievements in the comics form are out, and some were particularly pleasing to me:

Best Publication for Kids

• Amelia Rules!: True Things (Adults Don’t Want Kids to Know), by Jimmy Gownley (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster)

Best Publication for Teens

• Smile, by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic Graphix)
• Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, by G. Neri and Randy DuBurke (Lee & Low) (review here)
  

Best Humor Publication

• Prime Baby, by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)

Best Digital Comic

• Max Overacts, by Caanan Grall, http://occasionalcomics.com

Best Adaptation from Another Work

• The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books

• Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, edited by Art Spiegelman [and in-house editor Christopher Carduff] (The Library of America)

Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team

• Skottie Young, The Marvelous Land of Oz (Marvel)

Best Coloring

• Jimmy Gownley, Amelia Rules!: True Things (Adults Don’t Want Kids to Know), Amelia Rules!: The Tweenage Guide to Not Being Unpopular, by Jimmy Gownley (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster)
• Hilary Sycamore, City of Spies, etc. (First Second)

Best Lettering

• Jimmy Gownley, Amelia Rules!: True Things (Adults Don’t Want Kids to Know), Amelia Rules!: The Tweenage Guide to Not Being Unpopular, by Jimmy Gownley (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster)
• Todd Klein, Fables, etc.
  

Best Comics-Related Book

• Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau, by Brian Walker (Yale University Press) (review here)

I Am Appalled

After several years, DC Comics has resumed publishing letters from readers in its comic books. Originally printing reader letters was a way to include enough prose in each magazine to qualify for favorable mailing rates. Along with getting the content for free, publishers enjoyed the bonus benefits of consumer feedback and a chance to foster brand loyalty.

Today comics fans use the internet to express their opinions (usually negative or rhapsodic, with little middle ground), so DC can’t lack for feedback. But the company had another economic motive for bringing back letter pages: it simultaneously shrank each regular installment of its stories from 22 pages to 20 to limit costs.

Having invited letters, the company must now deal with twerps like this guy, published in Marvel’s What If?, #20, in 1980: If only this kid knew that in just another quarter-century he’d have a computer and be able to share such opinions with the whole world.

I found this issue of What If? earlier this year in my grandmother’s extensive archive of Stuff Received from Her Children and Grandchildren. I, or more likely my mother, must have sent her the copy back in the Carter administration.

I don’t remember writing this letter. I don’t remember reading the stories that left me “appalled,” and am a little taken aback by my vehemence. I also don’t recall the story in the issue that contained the letter, though the phrase “Kree-Skrull War” still sets off a couple of neurons at the back of my brain.

That said, I stand by my review. What If? was extra-thick and extra-pricey (60¢! Rising to 75¢!). Its extra pages let storytellers explore an alternative path for one of Marvel’s heroes over the comics-universe equivalent of years. Splitting those pages among three short stories wasted that potential. And these particular stories also failed the magazine’s promise of identifying key turning-points; as Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery says of the three featured heroes, “none of them had origins I could readily recall, and [scripter Steven] Grant doesn’t tell you what’s changed exactly.”

With my current professional experience and cynicism, I now wonder if What If?, #17, was a quickly-assembled fill-in issue, or perhaps an attempt to bring three of Marvel’s third-tier heroes to a wider audience. In any event, it clearly lacked the heft of the Kree-Skrull War.

Like

Adam Gopnik’s fantasy fiction hasn’t won me over, but I adore his nonfiction writing on kids. Here’s a passage from the father of two in the 4 April issue of The New Yorker:

When one eleven-year-old girl says to another eleven-year-old girl, “So then, like, the teacher got all, like, all of you, I guess, are, like, going to have to do a, like, I don’t know, a makeup test. So! Like, yeah,” she means:

“The teacher, becoming heated”—that’s why she “got, like,” rather than “said, like”—“announced, in effect, that many of us (I suppose, at a first approximation, all) will, at some point in, as it were, the near future, have to take what actually amounts to, when all is said and done, a secondary makeup test. I have indignant feelings about this—as who among us would not?—but I recognize their essential futility.”

That must be one of the ten greatest sentences ever to appear in that august magazine.

Hammer Time

This week Heritage Auction Galleries is offering sketches, finished line art, paintings, and signed books from the estate of illustrator Garth Williams. Up for sale are Williams’s pictures for Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and a couple of other books, one of which involved lots of bunnies.

Next week Sotheby’s will offer artwork from the collection of Kendra and Allan Daniel. The artists represented include W. W. Denslow, Frank Ver Beck, Fanny Y. Cory, E. H. Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Jessie Willcox Smith, William Pène du Bois, Dr. Seuss, Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff, Ludwig Bemelmans, Johnny Gruelle, Lois Lenski, Eleanor Parke Custis, Tasha Tudor, Maurice Sendak, and many others. Plus some more bunnies.

Among those items is a John R. Neill illustration of Betsy Bobbin and Hank the Mule from Tik-Tok of Oz. It’s described as an ink drawing, but the gents at Hungry Tiger Press have said that Neill usually colored photostats rather than originals. But I’d accept it as a gift either way.

The Original Daily Batman

Yes, Dick, we discern the irony in your current situation.

This panel is from the first Batman and Robin daily comic strip, which ran in North American newspapers from 1943 to 1946. Each week brought two independent storylines, one in black and white Monday through Saturday and another in color jumping from one Sunday to the next. Although some tales from the strip were reconfigured for the magazines, most of these comics never reappeared until DC and Kitchen Sink Press started to assemble the complete run in four volumes in 1990.

The daily Batman and Robin strips are notable for being Bob Kane’s last sustained work on the most famous characters he co-created (and for a long time took full credit for). Even with diligent practice and Charles Paris’s inking, Kane was only fair at drawing realistic scenes (much less the super-realistic rendering of superheroes). Note, for instance, the background of this landscape. Kane managed to have the shadows extending from the house, the barn and shack, and the farm equipment in three different directions.

It’s no mystery why Kane chose to concentrate on the comic strip instead of the comic books. Newspapers were more established and prestigious than cheap magazines. In addition, if more papers picked up a strip, a creator could receive more money without having to do more work—and Kane was all about taking money for as little work as possible. In contrast, DC paid a flat rate for comic-book pages regardless of how many copies they sold.

For similar reasons, Gerard Jones wrote in Men of Tomorrow, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster concentrated on the Superman comic strip launched in 1939 and let other artists produce the magazines. That strip ran continuously until 1966, nearly twenty years after Siegel and Shuster quit. (Then a new Batman strip fueled by the TV show took over the slot.)

The Robin of the daily strip functions exactly like the character in the comic books. He’s someone for Batman the detective to talk to and to withhold information from; he gets held hostage or trips at inopportune times. And he expresses emotion more openly than Batman—which could strain Kane’s drawing skills.

Indeed, some of Kane’s portrayals of Robin go beyond awkward to downright creepy. This wasn’t such a problem in drawing Bruce Wayne/Batman, whose handsome stolidity produced a limited set of facial expressions. Kane could kept using his favorite stock poses—face straight on, for example.

When storylines required, say, slinky women, DC gave the assignment to other artists. But for ordinary crime cases, Kane’s artwork served just fine, with a Dick Tracy vibe. And one humorous storyline, built around the wartime housing shortage, even ended with the Dynamic Duo doing a “plop take” out of the last panel as if they were “bigfoot” comics characters.

Indeed, Kane seems to have been a comedic cartoonist at heart. He started out drawing funny comics like Hiram Hick, Ginger Snapp, and Peter Pupp, his first character to have a young sidekick. After giving up Batman (but not credit), Kane developed a couple of TV cartoons, Courageous Cat and Cool McCool. Those projects were a better fit for his natural style and talents.

Justice Squeezes Slow, But It Squeezes Exceeding Tight

Back in 2007, I did the math on Jacqueline Davies’s The Lemonade War, and found that the young character who came out best by far in that fictional portrait of business was Scott, the one who stole whatever cash was lying around when no one was looking.

That posting concluded:

It’s a realistic picture of how the world works too often, in the elementary-school years or in business, but who wants the real world in middle-grade? I demand a sequel! Something like Scott Gets Crushed Like a Bike Helmet Under the Tire of Life.

Next month will bring Jackie’s sequel, The Lemonade Crime. Houghton Mifflin says:

Following the laws of our legal system, Evan and Jessie’s fourth-grade class concocts a courtroom on the playground, putting Scott Spencer, alleged thief, on trial. They create a legitimate courtroom—with a judge, witnesses, a jury of their peers—and surprising consequences.

According to an advance review at Goodreads, the theft involves $208 from the lemonade stand. I calculated that Scott came out $213 ahead, but that might include other revenue; I’d have to recheck my figures. Will Scott turn out to have an alibi? Or just an excuse?