“She couldn’t climb down, Jim”

L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz contains this dialogue between Dorothy Gale and the old horse Jim about Dorothy’s pet kitten:

“Why, where’s Eureka?” cried Dorothy, suddenly.

They all looked around, but the kitten was no place to be seen.

“She’s gone out for a walk,” said Jim, gruffly.

“Where? On the roof?” asked the girl.

“No; she just dug her claws into the wood and climbed down the sides of this house to the ground.”

“She couldn’t climb down, Jim,” said Dorothy. “To climb means to go up.”

“Who said so?” demanded the horse.

“My school-teacher said so; and she knows a lot, Jim.”

“To ‘climb down’ is sometimes used as a figure of speech,” remarked the Wizard.

“Well, this was a figure of a cat,” said Jim, “and she went down, anyhow, whether she climbed or crept.”

I used the Google Ngram Viewer to test how often people writing in English used “climb/climbed/climbing down” over time.

The results show uses of “climb down” in various forms were relatively rare when Baum went to school. There was a marked ascent in the 1880s and ’90s, followed by a temporary turndown halfway through the next decade—precisely when Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz was published.

As a control, use of the verb “climb” in the same three forms rose steadily over most of the same period, with a much less pronounced dip (mostly for the “climbed” form) in the first decade of the 1900s.

That pattern seems consistent with “climb down” becoming popular in Baum’s adulthood, and thus coming to people’s attention as a “modern” usage even though there had been examples for decades earlier.

TOMORROW: And then there was a pushback.

There, I Fixed It: Tim in Batman, #0

This month’s Batman, #0, contains a story scripted by James Tynion IV and drawn by Andy Clarke which shows the new DC Universe’s Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake before they came Bruce Wayne’s sidekicks.

Some readers complained that the story makes young Jason a killer or a legal accessory to murder. His distinct symbolic value remains having been the Robin on the moral edge, so that doesn’t seem like such a big change to me.

I agree with another set of complaints about that story, however: that Tim Drake comes across as arrogant. He boasts that he’s “the best student in the school,” and tells his antagonist, “you made it ridiculously easy,” and, “how stupid does a man have to be…?” Perhaps this is a new characterization of Tim as intellectually snobbish. Stories about him overcoming that flaw could be interesting, though I think they’d undermine some of his appeal for readers. (Shall we see what Teen Titans, #0, brings?) [ADDENDUM: It brings significant new information that undercuts the basis of this posting.]

But I also found the dialogue on Tim’s two pages to be heavy-handed and wordy, with revelations in odd places and occasional vagueness. So I did a rewrite reflecting my understanding of Tim’s character and the scene’s important revelations while sticking to letterer Patrick Brosseau’s balloons.

My lettering is in the Smack Attack font by Nate Peikos of Blambot. Click on the thumbnails below for full-page images.

Re-Forming a New Form of Reform

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider highlighted a marvelous piece of empty rhetoric from this year’s Presidential race.

It comes from a position paper issued by the Romney-Ryan campaign. One section on page 6 reads, in total:

End “Too-Big-To-Fail” And Reform Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac: The Romney-Ryan plan will completely end “too-big-to-fail” by reforming the GSEs. The four years since taxpayers took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, spending $140 billion in the process, is too long to wait for reform. Rather than just talk about reform, a Romney-Ryan Administration will protect taxpayers from additional risk in the future by reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and provide a long-term, sustainable solution for the future of housing finance reform in our country.

That’s six uses of the word “reform” in three sentences and a headline. But not one specific detail about what that “reform” might be or how the Romney-Ryan program would differ from what President Obama has already done. It’s almost as if the campaign believes that if it repeats a buzzword often enough, their voters will believe they know what it means.

Talking Out of Both Sides of His Mouth

This week as part of his extended attempt to change the subject, please, Mitt Romney told a Sarasota rally:

We face a Washington that’s broken, that can’t get the job done. The president today threw in the white flag of surrender again. He said he can’t change Washington from inside, he can only change it from outside.

Back in 2007, while he was running for President against Sen. John McCain, Romney said:

I don’t think you change Washington from the inside. I think you change it from the outside.

Not only had Romney repudiated his own words, he had (as so often) quoted Barack Obama selectively. The President’s entire statement was:

I’ve learned some lessons. Most important is you can’t change Washington from inside, only from the outside. That’s how some of our biggest accomplishments like health care got done—mobilizing the American people.

Obviously he was talking about a success, not a surrender.

This could count as simply another example of Romney reversing himself completely over the years in an attempt to please a different audience. But since it also involves a erecting a double standard in order to criticize the President, it meets the definition of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Another Relic from the Typewriter Age?

At StackExchange, Paul Stanley wrote about what’s become the American standard for business letters, reports, memos, many magazines, and a lot of the other things we read—but not most books. And that’s the 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper.

Stanley starts with the given that for readers “the optimum line length is broadly somewhere between 60 characters and 75 characters.” That apparently has to do with how much we can take in, how easily our eyes can find the start of the next line, and so on.

As it happens, we have ended up with paper sizes that were never designed or adapted for printing with 10-12 point proportionally spaced type. They were designed for handwriting (which is usually much bigger) or for typewriters. Typewriters produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving ... around 65 to 78 characters: in other words something pretty close to ideal.

But if you type in a standard proportionally spaced font (worse, in Times -- which is rather condensed because it was designed to be used in narrow columns) at 12 point, you will get about 90 to 100 characters in the line.

Thus, like non-curly quotation marks, the double hyphen in place of an em-dash (as in Stanley's posting), and the double space after a period, our “letter size” page was based on working within the limitations of a typewriter in the early 1900s.

Stanley goes on to discuss various ways text designers can produce more easily read text on that standard sheet.

Note, however, that at the bottom of that page commenter Alfe says that the limit of 60-75 characters is itself a cultural norm, not a scientifically validated fact.

The Goal

From Judith Matloff”s article “Fighting Words” at the Columbia Journalism Review discusses the problem with common martial euphemisms:

My 11-year-old son was astounded to hear that “friendly fire” was not friendly at all. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he nearly spat when he learned the definition: killing fellow troops by accident. “I thought it meant you shot at but didn’t hurt someone. Why don’t they just say it’s like a home goal?”

Incidentally, “home goal” appears to be a recent, perhaps egg-corned version of “own goal,” the venerable soccer term for putting the ball into one’s own net. Though far less popular on the web than its predecessor, “home goal” has started to appear in newspaper headlines.

Allegro non Toto

Some puns work better than others.

This is from an ad for the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation training, celebrating its 40th year. It deserves points for trying.

Upcoming Events in Boston Teen Lit

On Tuesday, 18 September, Boston GLOW is sponsoring two panel discussions on the theme of “Fight Like a Girl” at Hosteling International, 19 Stuart Street in Boston.

The middle-grade panel (ages 8-12) starting at 5:00 P.M. will feature authors Linda Mullaly Hunt, Padma Venkatraman, Erin Dionne, Jennifer Carson, and Ellen Booraem. The YA panel (ages 12+) follows at 7:00, and will include Terry Farish, Gina Damico, A.J. Paquette, Diana Renn, and Susan Carlton.

Boston GLOW is “a nonprofit aimed at fostering leadership skills among girls and women.” Its poster for the event is here.

The Boston Teen Author Festival is being organized by Emerson College’s publishing-program undergraduates with support from the Boston Book Festival. It is scheduled to take place on Sunday, 28 October, from 1:00 to 6:00 P.M., at the Bill Bordy Theatre of Emerson College, 216 Tremont Street in Boston.

Authors scheduled to attend are A.C. Gaughen, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Caitlin Kittredge, Daniel Waters, Diana Renn, Erin Dionne, Huntley Fitzpatrick, Jack Ferraiolo, Karsten Knight, Laurie Stolarz, Leigh Fallon, Marissa Doyle, Steven Goldman, Susan Carlton, and Wendy Wunder.

Dark Horse Stumbles?

There’s only one reason that Dark House Books reprinted It Rhymes with Lust, script credited to Drake Waller and art to Matt Baker and Ray Osrin: it’s one of the first American attempts to publish a novel-length story in comics form. In other words, it’s a candidate for being the earliest graphic novel.

But you couldn’t tell that from the reprint. Nowhere on or inside the book is the date of its original publication in 1950; instead, the date on the copyright page in 2007, when Arnold Drake wrote the afterword. Nowhere does the book state that its author is a pseudonym for Drake and Leslie Waller. Indeed, Drake’s afterword doesn’t even make clear that what it calls “that first story” is the same volume one is holding.

Nowhere on or inside the book is a statement—even a single sell line—about the book’s significance in comics history. Instead, Dark Horse has carefully recreated the front and back covers of the original, with all the breathless, melodramatic text. In combination with a 2007 copyright date, the result looks like a parody or a nostalgic attempt to recreate comic noir.

Given that the market for stories about family dysfunction and corruption in post-WW2 mining towns is probably small, I think Dark Horse missed a bet in how they packaged this book. They found space on the copyright page for a list of publishing personnel (something one rarely sees from mainstream American publishers), yet nowhere said, “This book is a piece of comics history, and here’s why…”

I guess the company thought its target readers would find the book in comics shops and recognize its significance from Wikipedia. And some people might say those assumptions reflect a larger problem with the American comics industry.

The All-Too-Successful Career of Cassandra Cain

This chart is based on sales figures that Comics Chronicle back-calculated from reports by the Diamond distributor. It shows the relative performance of Batgirl (in black) and Robin (in red).

The protagonist of Batgirl in this period, as I’ve been discussing, was Cassandra Cain. She was a teen-aged protégée of Batman, dealing with issues of identity, values, and heritage, so her coming-of-age story was parallel to that of Tim Drake as Robin. But she was a new character, especially fresh since she was female and of Asian extraction.

When Batgirl launched in 2000, the magazine outsold the much older Robin by about 50%. Then its sales started to slide—as the industry has come to expect for all its titles. The sales of Robin could slide, too. The January 2002 rise for both magazines came during a crossover. The big jump in Robin sales in 2004 was when DC got a case of the Stephs. But the long-term trend is clear: while Robin bobbed along, Batgirl gradually ran out of its original gas.

And what was that fuel? I submit that it was the main character’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts. When Cass Cain’s story started, she was suffering the effects of a horrendous upbringing as a child assassin: she couldn’t read, could barely speak, and was haunted by her past deeds. Those burdens drove her quest for justice and made it much harder. They balanced out and humanized her preternatural martial-arts skills.

But then Cass Cain learned to read speak. She temporarily lost her powerful ability to read body language in fights, forcing her to recognize the trade-offs in her life—but she overcame that problem, too. Cass confronted and defeated her father, the nasty assassin David Cain. She confronted and defeated her mother, the slightly less nasty killer Lady Shiva. She overcame her feelings of guilt. She built friendships with other crime-fighters. In sum, Cass resolved all her main Foundational Conflicts.

And that left little fuel for future stories. To be sure, there were other factors—most importantly, the original creative team of writer Kelley Puckett and artist Damion Scott moved on. But other characters have survived such changes.

The fundamental problem was that Cass Cain won. Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake never resolved their Foundational Conflicts that way in the main storylines. Clark Kent and Dick Grayson did resolve theirs, in Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and the Batman stories of 2010-11, respectively—but those storylines led immediately into reboots that restored the characters’ original Foundational Conflicts. In a series, the problem with a happy ending is that it’s an ending.

DC ended the Batgirl magazine with its Infinite Crisis reboot. I suspect that the company editors set out to restore Cass Cain’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflict by taking her back to her roots as an assassin. By editorial mandate, she reappeared as the villain in a Robin storyline.

Cass’s characterization in the resulting issues is almost unrecognizable—once non-verbal, she now filled panels with expository dialogue. Once almost suicidally committed to justice, she was now a supervillain. Far from restoring Cassandra Cain as an interesting badass, that story and subsequent, more creatively successful appearances alienated her old fans and brought in few new ones.

Bruce Wayne’s death led to a reshuffling of the team he had assembled, with a new Batgirl. Cass Cain simply disappeared for a while. Eventually DC portrayed her fighting crime back in Asia, still linked to the Batman team through Tim Drake but comfortable working on her own. She had traveled farther than any of Batman’s male protégés and come of age. But as a protagonist, as opposed to a supporting character, she had nowhere else to go—not without a new Foundational Conflict.

And in DC’s latest universe, Cass Cain hasn’t yet appeared at all.