The Kidd-Millionaire Robin

The book designer and comic-book critic Chip Kidd recently published a Batman adventure subtitled Death by Design, with art by Dave Taylor. Impressive as that volume looks, it doesn’t feature Robin, so I haven’t sat down to read it.

Death by Design isn’t Kidd’s first Batman story, however. A few years back he scripted two adventures drawn by Tony Millionaire for DC’s self-parodying Bizarro Comics and Bizarro World collections. “The Bat-Man” reads and looks like an underground-comics version of the earliest, solo Batman adventures. A version of the Penguin hypnotizes Bruce Wayne’s fiancée, Julie Madison, as well as holding sway over a giant ape—things that a vampirical villain called the Monk did in Batman, #31-2.

Kidd and Millionaire’s “Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder” is a classic “Boy Hostage” story crossed with the high Gothic supernatural tone that dominated that first year of Batman tales. This time the villain is the Monk himself. Through completely unexplained means he kidnaps Robin’s consciousness, traps it in the body of a caged bird, and makes Robin’s body act evil. (See panel above.)

Back in 1939, Batman eliminated the Monk by shooting silver bullets into his coffin before Robin ever swung onto the scene. Once Dick Grayson appeared in April 1940, along with new chief editor Whitney Ellsworth, Batman’s guns and killing and the Gothic milieu all went away for decades. Kidd and Millionaire thus offer a taste of what the Dynamic Duo’s adventures might have been like if that hadn’t happened.

TOMORROW: When Batman went goth again.

A Real Example of Double Voting—But Does the GOP Care?

After the disputed presidential election of 2000, which produced an administration not ”deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” as the Declaration of Independence said, several American newspapers dug into how Florida had counted votes.

Among the details recounted in the New York Times was this:

To give overseas residents plenty of time to vote, Florida officials mail out both a preliminary version of the absentee ballot and then, after the primaries, a final version. Voters are instructed to send in both, but the preliminary ballot is discarded if the final ballot arrives in time to be counted.

Yet for 19 voters -- 15 of them Republican -- Duval County election officials counted both ballots. Officials said it was a mistake, the product of long hours and the intense pressure to count every possible ballot.

One of the double voters, Nicholas Challen, 40, a senior chief petty officer in the Navy who cast his second vote from Jacksonville [in Duval County] on Election Day, reacted with jubilation when told that both of his votes counted. He raised both arms as if he had just scored a touchdown and savored the two votes he had delivered to George W. Bush.

“Yes!” he said, beaming.

CPO Challen thus publicly acknowledged voting twice. And he celebrated the result.

The Times quoted other military voters saying they had voted after Election Day, taking advantage of the laxer rules set up for service members mailing ballots from overseas (which don’t always get postmarked).

Voter fraud is supposedly why several Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted stricter rules in this cycle. Yet those lawmakers never seem to bring up CPO Challen’s name. That’s because overseas ballots like his provided the winning margin for Bush in 2000, and because they believe that people with military ties are more likely to vote Republican. 

Republicans in Ohio and other states have therefore tried to make rules for military voters more lax than for all other citizens. This is part of a concerted effort that a Pennsylvania party leader acknowledged is designed to “allow Governor Romney to win.”

The Military Voter Lie

Last week Republican operatives, including Red State and Mitt Romney, criticized President Barack Obama for trying to restrict the ability of military members to vote in Ohio.

This was a lie. The Obama campaign team pointed out that it had asked a court to lift new restrictions on civilian voters so as to treat every citizen equally. (As we recall, the US Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore on a supposed basis of voter equality.) The Akron Beacon-Journal and other local newspapers agreed that the lawsuit said nothing about restricting military voters.

Within a day or two, Snopes branded the attack as False, as did Politifact Ohio and the Washington Post Fact Checker.

Even FOX News had to acknowledge, “While the lawsuit does not restrict the ability of military personnel to cast their ballots early, both sides know how volatile an issue this can be.” In other words, Republicans suffering from or exploiting OIP Derangement Syndrome could lie about the legal issue to whip up more hysteria. Indeed, a FOX News host repeated the falsehood days later.

In fact, the last Democratic Congress passed and President Obama signed the MOVE Act, making voting easier for active-duty service members. The US Justice Department has taken action against Texas to protect those rights. But facts don’t matter when one desperately wants to believe that this President is anti-military.

TOMORROW: One notable military voter.

“A book is whittled down from hope”

From Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker:

I don’t know how to write. Which is unfor­tu­nate, as I do it for a liv­ing. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writ­ers are asked, par­tic­u­lar­ly when we’ve got a book com­ing out, to write about writ­ing. To give inter­views and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recent­ly, stu­dents who want to know how to approach the pecu­liar occu­pa­tion of fic­tion writ­ing. I tell them at the begin­ning—I’ve got noth­ing for you. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.

I’ve writ­ten six books now, but instead of mak­ing it eas­i­er, it has com­pli­cat­ed mat­ters to the point of absur­di­ty. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the deci­sions I appear to have made—about plots and char­ac­ters and where to start and when to stop—are not deci­sions at all. They are com­pro­mis­es. A book is whit­tled down from hope…

Ridgway’s latest is Hawthorn and Child, but neither it nor the accompanying digital short story appear to be available in the US now. As you might be able to tell from the attitude of the preceding passage, he’s Irish.

The Power of Extraterrestrial Oz

Yesterday author Mary Robinette Kowal blogged about Dorothy Gale and Mars:

I just sold a story to RIPOFFs, which is an audio anthology edited by Gardner Dozois for Audible. . . . The idea of the anthology is that each story starts with the first line of a classic novel.  It’s sort of a punchcard punk homage to Ray Bradbury and L. Frank Baum. Here’s how mine opens.

And I swear to God, I didn’t know where Curiousity was landing.

The Lady Astronaut of Mars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. She went on to say that she’d met me, when I was working next door to their farm under the shadow of the rocket gantry for the First Mars Expedition.

Where did the Curiosity rover land? Coincidentally, in Gale Crater.

Now Gale Crater is actually named after Walter Frederick Gale, who…thought Mars had canals full of water. He was observing in the 19th century, so can be cut some slack for inadequate instruments but those canals gave rise to a whole slew of science fiction. Wells, Burroughs, Bradbury… Without the idea that maybe, maybe there was once civilization on Mars how many of them would have written those stories? Hard to tell, but the space between what Mr. Gale discovered and what they wrote is where Science Fiction lives. It lives in the possibilities present in the best science of the day.

Back in 1904, when L. Frank Baum’s newspaper syndicate was promoting his comic page Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz, a publicity mailing spoke of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and other visitors approaching Earth from outer space. It’s unclear whether Baum had any role in or say over that publicity, and in his Oz books he never claims that Oz is extraterrestrial. Nonetheless, it shows how a century ago such possibilities were in the air (or above it).

Television Hierarchies and Cliffhangers

I enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s essay in The New Yorker on what American television-watching has become, at least on the high end:

As viewers, we rely on hierarchies to govern our notion of television ambition: cable trumps network, drama is better than sitcom, adult is worthier than teen, realistic is more grownup than sci-fi, grim beats sunny, PBS documentary tops Bravo reality show, and “as good as Dickens” is superior to anything resembling a soap opera.

In particular, Nussbaum highlights the ongoing serial drama—a significant change from television shows a generation ago, when the basic situation in most television shows evolved as little as possible.

Sitcoms used to be, as the term implies, based on a rarely-changing situation. Miss Brooks never married, no matter how much she tried. Sgt. Bilko never got a promotion. Col. Hogan neither escaped nor won the war. Seinfeld was always about nothing.

Similarly, in dramas the basic premise remained the same. There was a detective squad, or a sheriff, or a hospital, and in sixty minutes it solved a problem and returned the world to the status quo ante. Dr. Richard Kimball was never caught until The Fugitive’s last episode. Sheriff Matt Dillon never married Miss Kitty.

Major changes came only when a show’s producers were forced by desperation or shifting casts. The medium fought against them—hence the two Darrens on Bewitched, the four sons on My Three Sons, the move of the entire cast of Laverne and Shirley to California all at once.

Today, however, many television fictions, and particularly those on the high end, are based on the possibilities of change. (Ironically, this was always the case in soap operas, a genre that Nussbaum notes we pooh-pooh.) In drama Hill Street Blues started to associate high-quality television with long-run character development and revelation. More recently we’ve watched The Sopranos, Lost, The Wire, and other drama play out in true serial form, each season a step beyond the last. Even a sitcom like The Office, based on the never-ending monotony of work, depicts great changes in the characters’ lives.

When shows don’t necessarily return to the status quo ante, that opens the door for cliffhangers, and Nussbaum meditates on the technique:

Narrowly defined, a cliffhanger is a climax cracked in half: the bomb ticks, the screen goes black. A lady wriggles on train tracks—will anyone save her? Italics on a black screen: “To be continued . . .” More broadly, it’s any strong dose of “What happens next?,” the question that hovers in the black space between episodes. In the digital age, that gap is an accordion: it might be a week or eight months; it may arrive at the end of an episode or as a season finale or in the second before a click on “next.”

Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying—when, as the cinema-studies scholar Scott Higgins puts it, “curiosity is converted into a commercial transaction.” They are sensational, in every sense of the word. Historically, there’s something suspect about a story told in this manner, the way it tugs the customer to the next ledge. Nobody likes needy.

But there is also something to celebrate about the cliffhanger, which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling.

Of course, having seen through such manipulation, I’m above it all. As long as Cartoon Network gets back to broadcasting more episodes of Young Justice soon.

Cermak’s Alternative Versions of the Dynamic Duo

I liked this depiction of the Dynamic Duo by Craig C. Cermak II. He portrayed Batman and Robin realistically, as in the mainstream comic books, but in the simple costumes designed for the Batman: The New Adventures television cartoon.

Last year Cermak and Ramon Villalobos shared a version of Batman and Robin as they appeared in DC Comics’ #1,000,000 issues from November 1998, posed as on Batman and Robin, #1, from 2009.

Such portrayals remind us that there have been many successful versions of the characters over the years. As long as they share the core qualities, fans can overlook differences in extraneous details. (Of course, there can be disagreement about what’s core and what’s extraneous.)

On Welfare Rules, Showing Flexibility

In May 2005, the Republican Governors Association wrote to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) to support a bill giving state governments more flexibility in instituting the 1996 “welfare reform” law. They highlighted the value of “State flexibility”:

The Senate bill provides states with the flexibility to manage their TANF programs and effectively serve low-income populations. Increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit, and the ability to coordinate state programs are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work.

The second signature on that letter came from Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Others on the letter included Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and other names still prominent on the American right.

That bill didn’t become law, but states continued to push for more autonomy without cuts in funding, as always. In August 2011 Utah asked the Department of Health and Human Services for “flexibility” and Nevada suggested “judicious use of waivers” on requirements of the original law. Both states had Republican governors.

The department responded this month by offering such waivers—though less flexibility than the Republican governors sought in 2005. The department stated that any deviations from the original requirements must be “intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals.” Assistant Secretary George Sheldon, recipient of the 2011 letters, stated:

Waivers that weaken or undercut welfare reform will not be approved. Waivers that seek to avoid time limits or other federal restrictions on when assistance may be provided will not be approved.

But of course that letter came from the administration of President Barack Obama, and a significant part of the Republican Party suffers from OIP Derangement Syndrome, meaning that they can’t be happy with anything that administration does.

So Romney spoke of “President Obama’s efforts to gut welfare reform.” Huckabee claimed the administration was changing rules “to make people dependent upon the government that they want to keep in power.”

And the governors weren’t the only Republican officials to reverse themselves. Back in 2005, Rep. Joe Camp (R-MI) co-sponsored a bill like the one those Republican governors supported. But in 2012, Camp called the waivers “a brazen and unwarranted unraveling of welfare reform.” In 2003, when he headed HHS, Tommy Thompson asked Congress to authorize “some key policy changes to increase State flexibility.” This month Thompson falsely claimed that the Obama administration planned to “waive the work requirement.”

I never take arguments for “states’ rights” very seriously. One of the champions of that idea in American politics, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, strongly supported increased federal power when he was in the executive branch. Nearly every other advocate of the idea was happy to use federal power to institute the policies that they liked instead of deferring to state governments. But the examples of hypocrisy in this post have the added gloss of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Both sides of this issue showed great flexibility, but in different ways. The Obama administration showed flexibility in its willingness to work with state governments and Republican office-holders. Republicans like Romney and Huckabee showed flexibility in their willingness to twist their own positions around completely in order to criticize the President.

What Wattle?

Years back, Daniel Pinkwater had an essay about listening to a slow-speaking public radio announcer (obviously Robert J. Lurtsema) announce an upcoming musical commission by “Dan…iel……Pink…”

And Pinkwater had a second of worry about some commitment he’d forgotten before hearing the announcer conclude, “…ham.”

I had somewhat the same feeling when I read that antipodean artist Ben Wood has a new picture book coming out with John Bell.

A while back I drafted Ben to illustrate a story for Oziana magazine, and enthusiastically shared news of his Oztober events last year. But I didn’t remember the Wattle Tree picture book. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what a wattle tree is.

I’ve since learned that a wattle tree is one of a number of types of acacia growing in Australia.

And Ben created The Wattle Tree with another John Bell, who also goes by John Gascoigne. Hachette’s page for the book says, “A former nanny, he has decided to return to higher education and is currently studying to complete BA at Sydney University.”

Ben is using his blog to document how the two of them created The Wattle Tree, starting with the sketchbook drawing that inspired it all.

Not to Be Overlooked

Yesterday I was walking around a scenic overlook off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles with some friends from college. I lifted a colorful page of newspaper off the ground, thinking I’d find a trash bin somewhere.

It turned out to be a page of Sunday funnies from the Los Angeles Times. Dated 21 July 1946.

Atop the first page is a Superman strip from the Sunday series titled “The Unhappiest Clown in the World.” At this time the newspaper strip was still credited to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, though it seems clear Shuster didn’t draw these panels. In another year the team would sue DC and lose their legal claim on the character for decades. Funny thing is, my friends and I had just been discussing Superman.

Below the Superman strip are sequential-art ads for Colgate (“It Cleans Your Breath While It Cleans Your Teeth!”) and Veto (“Colgate’s Amazing New Antiseptic Deodorant” endorsed by four registered nurses).

On the reverse side are the strips “Harold Teen” (hijinks of a lovelorn fellow at the beach), “Grin and Bear It” (a collection of single-image gags, including a kneeslapper about the postwar housing shortage), and “Napoleon” (about a big dog who’s read Aesop’s Fables). Finally there’s an one-color sequential-art ad for Alka-Seltzer as cold relief.

The page is in good condition, considering it had been lying on the ground in a scenic overlook for an unknown time. There’s some discoloration and a small tear. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it back home.