Robin, the Littlest Guy in the Fight

A month ago I quoted Jules Feiffer's explanation of why he hated Robin, the Boy Wonder:

One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better. . . . He had the build of a middleweight, the legs of a wrestler. He was obviously an "A" student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd--God, how I hated him.

In this passage, Feiffer seems to have been imagining Robin sauntering into his schoolyard in the Bronx. And of course the comic-book character would stand out from all the other young teenaged boys. He was a paragon of American youth.

But that's not the context in which comic books usually showed Robin, of course. Instead, readers saw him accompanying Batman on crime-fighting patrols. And in that context Robin wasn't the "center of every circle, the one picked for greatness." He was always the littlest guy in the fight. He was repeatedly getting beat up, screwing up, or feeling clueless. In perhaps one in every twenty stories Robin got a chance to shine and save the day.

Among DC's major comic-book heroes, Superman and Wonder Woman can do practically anything. The Flash, Green Lantern, and many others have superhuman powers. Batman has none, but he's the scariest, smartest guy around, as well as immensely rich. Robin is just a sharp, athletic kid with neat toys and guts.

(Yes, Robin has the advantage of being friends with the scariest, smartest guy around, but that means having to live with the scariest guy around and to measure up to the smartest guy around. Those tensions were only implicit in the first decades of Batman comics, but have became abiding pressures for the Robin characters in the last quarter-century.)

Feiffer had trouble identifying with Robin because he was about the same age as the character and knew that he hadn't developed the Boy Wonder's athletic or detective skills. But for other readers, Robin's youth and lack of powers have made him more compelling. He has to struggle with what comes easily to older, more powerful superheroes. He makes mistakes and loses fights (the little guy must have suffered more concussions than an NFL lineman). He learns and keeps plugging.

Which of course makes Robin's triumphs--those one in twenty Batman stories, his adventures on his own or with fellow teenagers--all the more improbable, and all the more satisfying.

Cybils 2007 Science Fiction and Fantasy Finalists

The second annual Cybils Award season has started! Earlier this week the blogging organizers of these children's-book awards announced the first sets of finalists. Soon more will be revealed.

Unlike last year, I'm not involved in the Science Fiction and Fantasy category, but here's a link to lists of all those finalists. This year there are two shortlists of five instead of one because there will be two awards, one for teens and one for younger readers.

Teen/Young Adult

• Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale
• Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
• Northlander, by Meg Burden
• Repossessed, by A. M. Jenkins
• Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey

Elementary/Middle Grade

• The Chaos King, by Laura Ruby
• Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst
• The Land of the Silver Apples, by Nancy Farmer
• Skulduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy
• The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex

Why Hero Has Trouble Taking Off

Yesterday I wrote that Perry Moore's debut novel Hero suffers from "much too much going on." That seems particularly evident in the book's opening. As Thom Creed starts telling his story of coming out as a superhero and a young gay man, he introduces many (though by no means all) of the book's themes and plotlines through a meandering, ultimately confusing, series of descriptions, flashbacks, and backstory hints and explanations.

Starting in the book's first paragraph, we read about:

• Thom looking back on all the experiences in the novel ("I never thought I'd have a story worth telling...").
• Thom playing a high school basketball game in which he's scored 22 points.
• Thom's father's past as a costumed hero.
• His father's meetings with people who recognized him after he retired.
• His father's encounter at some point with a wife beater.
• A basketball game four years before.
• The night Thom's mother "disappeared for good."
• The other basketball team's past legal transgressions.
• Earlier in the current game.
• Thom's growth spurt in fifth and sixth grade.
• Thom's first epileptic seizures.

And that's the first five pages. On page 6 the narrator says, "Let me backtrack for a second." Then we hear about:

• Thom's father choosing where to buy a house and raise a child.
• "Last summer," when Thom found a crack pipe in his yard.
• A break-in at the house after Thom has had knee surgery.
• When Thom's dad saved the country from "telepathic starfish-shaped aliens."
• Thom signing up to work as a tutor at the community center.
• Thom reading The Lorax to a group of kids at the center.
• Thom being reassigned to another job at the center the following week, and meeting someone he recognizes at the basketball game.
• Thom having trouble making friends in school because of his father's notoriety.

And back to the basketball game again.

Pages 19 through 28 portray a bench-clearing brawl, a terrible injury, the first manifestation of Thom's superpower, the approach of an epileptic seizure, a last-second victory, someone calling Thom "that gay guy," his father realizing that he really is gay, a superhero flyover, and a woman slapping Thom's dad for some unexplained deed he'd done as a hero.

And then comes chapter 2.

I fear that's asking too much of readers: too many facts to remember, too many conflicts to follow, too many problems to care about. Many readers are intellectually capable of tracking all those issues, but the real challenge for an author is getting readers to buy in emotionally. We need good reasons to care about the protagonist, but too many reasons dilute and divert our attention.

Writing the first chapter of a novel, I think, is like launching an airplane. You don't want to be weaving back and forth across the runway and going back to the terminal to pick up more stuff. You want full power and forward momentum.

I've found myself struggling with that challenge in some of my own writing projects, and I see it in other people's manuscripts, too. The first chapter has so much backstory, so many themes and characters and situations to establish, that it never gathers much momentum. Flashbacks are a particular temptation and trouble. Some of the solutions:

• Take some ideas out of book 1 and save them for book 2. (In this case, we really don't need the Lorax scene.)
• Find a different starting-point, one where the most important information grows naturally from the scene.
• Move some flashbacks into the present or into later chapters, after the story has started moving. (Why not combine the abusive husband and the slapping wife?)
  
• Splice instead of knotting. Use a single detail or episode to introduce two or more themes or facts instead of creating new details for each. (Thom's healing could attract more attention, and lead directly into the gaybaiting.)
  

Of course, if it were that easy, I'd never have this problem.

Still Looking for the Great American Superhero Novel

Perry Moore's Hero is a novel for teens set in a world of superheroes. I've written before about this genre of prose books inspired by comic books, but all the other published titles I've read are simple, semi-parodic, mass-market entertainment (not that there's anything wrong with that).

In portraying a world teeming with costumed crimefighters and villains, the heroes marketed and licensed, Hero is very like all those other books. But it alone has a complex story and thematic depth. It has rounded characters. It makes a statement.

In particular, Moore takes the standard superhero motifs of developing powers, secret identities, deadly enemies, and overdeveloped musculature, and finds new significance for them all. Hero is the story of one teenager--whose parents were heroes and who happens to be gaining unusual powers himself--coming out as gay.

Hero is a real novel. I just wish it were a really good novel instead of a fair first one. Unfortunately, Hero has a lot of holes and rough spots, mainly the result of much too much going on. And here I must warn of ***SPOILERS***.

Alongside his sexual awakening, narrator Thom Creed must deal with his demanding father, his father's controversial past as a hero, his epilepsy which develops into his healing power, his basketball team, his volunteer job, his part-time job, tryouts for the League of leading superheroes, his team of fellow League probationers and their problems, assorted minor supervillains, societal homophobia, the reappearance of his long-departed mother, and a threat to the entire planet.

A lot of things get lost along the way. We never see Thom's emotional response to passing the League tryouts. One quality that attracts him to another guy is how nicely that young man treats his little brother, but the little brother simply disappears by the book's end.

I felt I'd missed some important scenes. When a rival basketball player identifies Thom as "that gay guy" near the start of the book, does he know something--or is he just being nasty? At one of the book's important junctures, Thom decides to out himself in a most public manner, but we never see the other characters' immediate reactions.

Other things get repeated. Three times (pp. 84, 130, 283) Thom prepares to run away from home, and three times he halts and turns around, twice without an external impetus to change his mind. Two different characters put their fingers to their temples for dramatic effect (pp. 122, 162).

Most limiting, Hero depends on readers' knowledge of the major American superhero myths, particularly the DC continuity. There are roman à clef versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Captain America, and others. The League is obviously the analogue of DC's Justice League of America.

To follow the plot, readers have to assume that the nuances of the DC continuity apply in this world as well. In particular, we must accept that particles of an extraterrestrial superhero's destroyed home planet are the only things that hero is vulnerable to. After all, that's the way kryptonite works on Superman, right? But Hero never establishes that as a fact in its universe until it becomes crucial to the plot--on page 408 of a 428-page book.

The Real Star of The Golden Compass?

All along, my main question about the Golden Compass movie was whether it would get Iorek Byrnison right. Would the studio be able to find just the right polar bear to play the part?

Fortunately, New Line studio also saw the polar bears as crucial to the movie. It found an ursine actor named Ian McKellen for the part--I hadn't even known there were polar bears in the British Isles. He turned in a fine performance, making Iorek The Golden Compass's equivalent of Aslan in Narnia, as the Shortpacked webcomic knows.

Iorek's scenes could have been even more effective, though. I recognized dialogue and action from the book in the scene that introduced him, but it still seemed surprisingly inert for one that involves a half-drunk polar bear smashing apart a building.

I went back to reread that part of The Golden Compass, and realized how heavily condensed it had been. Two long scenes were compressed into one, many details were removed (e.g., Iorek has to retrieve his armor from the local priest, for the first time we feel Lyra and her daemon Pan separating), and we never see Lyra restraining Iorek's killing instincts. Philip Pullman's narrative voice disappears, too, of course.

Such compression is necessary for a movie, of course, but in this case the result felt slower, not faster. Which leads me to quote Eoin O'Faolain at Screenhead criticism about The Golden Compass's drab pacing and repetitive plot twists:

Weitz’s utter lack of...ability to generate excitement through a sense of adventure is disappointingly evident throughout the entire movie. The film uses the old “hero is about to be killed but at the last second is saved by an ally” device four times in a row, making the action scenes rather bland. Characters appear and disappear in the movie having little valid reason to be there (while the witches are important in the books, they acted as a mere deus ex machina in the film).

(I believe that should be "deae ex machina.")

O'Faolain also criticizes Weitz for not being able to muster any "visual panache," but there I disagree: as a series of still pictures, The Golden Compass looked mighty good. But in its dialogue and in how those pictures move from one to another, in how new elements enter scenes, it felt a little too draggy and familiar. For example, I could have done with about half the number of golden-hued special-effects shots of what Lyra sees in her alethiometer.

The first time the movie sprang to life for me was Iorek's duel with another armored polar bear. That might have been because at long last there was no leaden dialogue explaining everything. Alas, we never got to see the bears' catapult attack on an airship, which appears in the book's final chapters; I've been waiting to see that scene for years now.

Instead, The Golden Compass's action climax is a long battle on an icescape--a scene with a fine cinematic antecedents, from Alexander Nevsky to The Empire Strikes Back. But here the movie's visual acuity failed. It's important to light such a battle so the audience can see what's happening. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of dim men in fur coats swinging at each other.

A Dull Adaptation, and There Wasn't Enough of It

There's an old joke about people complaining that the food at a resort is almost inedible, and what's more, the servings are too small. The Golden Compass movie fits that model. It was disappointingly shallow and pedestrian, but probably could have been exciting and rich if there had only been more of it.

The cast was well chosen and the scenes' visuals, with one exception (which I'll discuss tomorrow), are handsome, and I could have spent much more time in those settings. The dialogue, however, leaps so desperately from one expository moment to another that there's little room for character development.

New York magazine's comparison of two early scripts for The Golden Compass with each other and the final film traces what could have been:

Like many fans, we'd always assumed that [Tom] Stoppard's draft must have been a work of genius, and that his replacement by [Chris] Weitz surely doomed the project. Much to our surprise, upon reading the screenplays, we're wrong. Had Stoppard's screenplay been filmed, the movie would have been ponderous, a bit dull, and far too long. Weitz's original script was actually great and makes us sad about the movie that could have been. . . .

Weitz's early draft, though still long — 156 pages and likely three hours of running time — is sharper, funnier, and more streamlined than Stoppard's. It's also more exciting, more coherent, and significantly better than the final product. . . . Why was this all cut? Presumably, to keep the film to two hours. . . . In the end it was that decision more than any other that doomed The Golden Compass to mediocrity.

Most notably, of course, both early screenplays contain the end of the book, the crucial sequence cut from the movie entirely so that its ending would remain uplifting.

Chris Kohler at Wired agreed that, "Many of the problems with Golden Compass can be blamed squarely on the film's run time."

Rope of Silicon has posted a link to some footage cut from the end of the movie but included in the videogame. Stills from the same scene show up in picture-book adaptations of the movie, so the cut must have come relatively late. Obviously Weitz filmed something like the book's ending, but in concurrence with New Line studio cut those final scenes to make the movie shorter and less downbeat.

IMDB.com confirms something I’d suspected: those final scenes might show up at the start of a Subtle Knife movie, should one be made from the second book in Philip Pullman's trilogy. There the footage would serve as a bridge from Lyra's adventure to the new story (which starts with a different protagonist), and establish the stakes in the new plot. But will that movie now be made, given The Golden Compass's lackluster domestic earnings? The all-important worldwide box office figures will say.

“Alec Baldwin Has Never Been Funnier”

A few years ago, I recall, television ads for a Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends DVD were quoting this critic's gush: "Alec Baldwin has never been funnier!"

That became one of my favorite deadpan quotations. For one thing, the common perception that Baldwin is unremittingly intense and serious makes the line seem like the epitome of faint praise, as in "Ken Burns's most exciting action sequences!" or "The best tacos in Maine!"

Yet on another level the quotation offered even more delicious irony because Alec Baldwin really is funny. I don't know about his performance as Mr. Conductor, though this dad gave him a really good review. But I chortled at Baldwin's early performance in Miami Blues, in which he played a sociopath and was funny. He's delivered comedy through many characters, from his early movie Beetle Juice to many appearances on Saturday Night Live.

For years Baldwin was a character actor trapped in a leading man's body, and he worked against his looks mainly by playing dark, as in Glengarry Glen Ross. Now he's spread out a bit, and the industry is asking for more of his range. He did fine supporting work in The Depahted. And the sitcom 30 Rock has given Baldwin great lines to deliver, the space for his comedic talents, and a mildly growing audience.

Which brings me to a highlight of the past year's cultural news. Lots of folks probably remember how, in the midst of Baldwin's long court battle with ex-wife Kim Basinger over child custody, a gossip website got a recording of him lambasting their daughter for missing a scheduled phone call. Several end-of-year gossip round-ups recall Baldwin's behavior for anyone who's forgotten.

But nobody seems to be mentioning how after a week of nationwide criticism Baldwin went on The View and announced that he was going to give up acting to spend more time “to devote myself to the cause of parental alienation." He spoke of lobbying for new laws and finishing a book on divorce that would come out in September. He left his long-time agents, and asked to be released from his 30 Rock contract. Disaster loomed on all sides.

And then Baldwin changed his mind. He went back to his agents. He went back to 30 Rock, filming some magnificent scenes for this season. He went back to court with Basinger, where they remain.

And America collectively decided to forget about Baldwin's announcement that he was leaving show biz. We appear to have come to a tacit culture-wide agreement never to mention that moment again. Because we don't want Baldwin to stop performing and get serious, not now. We can't afford that.

Because Alec Baldwin has never been funnier.

Dick Grayson Gives a Book Talk

These panels from Batman comic books published over twenty years apart show that Dick Grayson (alias the first Robin, the Boy Wonder) had good reading habits, to the extent of not worrying about good reading posture.


But what exactly did he read? This weekly Robin offers practical advice to young detectives in training by borrowing panels from Flash Plus (1997), script by Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn, art by Eduardo Barreto and Gerry Fernandez.

For the uninitiated, the shaggy fellow in black and blue is Dick Grayson, now all grown up and fighting crime under the name Nightwing. The man in red is the Flash, who at this point is also Dick's oldest and best friend in the superhero game: Wally West, the former Kid Flash. They've gone on vacation to New Orleans and found themselves in a hotel across the street from an unusual murder scene.


Once again, those endorsements from one of the DC Universe's greatest detectives are:

• The Thinking Machine stories by Jacques Futrelle, the best mystery writer ever to go down with the Titanic. (Many digital texts available at that website.)
  
• The Encyclopedia Brown stories by Donald J. Sobol, maybe.
• Not the Hardy Boys.

[ADDENDUM: Tim Drake gives a book talk.]

Pullman Pulls for the Omniscient Narrator

Today's Guardian newspaper offers a column by Philip Pullman about the power of narrative voice. He seems to suggest that the style of narration distinguishes a “story” from the “literature” that expresses it by establishing tone, perspective, and characters’ interior lives. In particular, Pullman addresses the different tools available to moviemakers and novelists. He concludes:

And despite the profound and unsettling discoveries of modernism and post-modernism, and everything they show us about the unreliability of the narrator and the fallacy of omniscience, some of us still, when we read, are happy to accept that the narrative voice has the right to comment on a character, whether tartly or sympathetically, and the ability to go into that character's mind and tell us what's going on there. Do we ever stop to wonder how extraordinary it is that a disembodied voice can seem to tell us what is happening in someone's mind?

That narrative voice, with those mysterious powers, is the reason I write novels. I'm intoxicated by it.

I think Pullman's approach to narration is, if not actually idiosyncratic, quite uncommon these days. For many years before Lemony Snicket, most fiction writers tended to write either in the voice of a character or in a disembodied, unintrusive storytelling voice that closely followed the main characters(s). Snicket's success spawned a bunch of other snarky narrators, but few writers let their narrators intrude in other tones.

Pullman doesn't play by those rules. In a 2005 New Yorker profile, Laura Miller reported:

Pullman is a partisan of the third-person omniscient narrator, which he thinks of as a character in itself—a disembodied “sprite.” This ringmaster of many a nineteenth-century novel can, as he told me, ”go anywhere and do anything and see anything, and is both male and female, both old and young, wise and foolish, cynical and credulous, all these contradictory things at once. The narrative voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.”

Pullman's narrative focus is also unusual these days in turning on a dime, entering a scene by following one character and leaving with another we've never tracked before.

But are such techniques unique to “literature”? I think equivalents exist in many other forms of storytelling, including cinema. In fact, Pullman’s description of a “disembodied voice...tell[ing] us what is happening in someone's mind” is clearly inspired by movie voiceovers. A purely literary way of describing an omniscient narrator might be “a never-identified historian recounting people’s thoughts.” It’s still an intoxicating, mysterious power, of course.

Looking Back at Looking Ahead

Today's Pullman posting prompted me to go back to some earlier posts and update their labels, which in turn made me reread my first remarks on the prospect of a Golden Compass movie, back in July 2006. I commented on three big challenges for the film:

• high special-effects budget
• resistance from people sensitive about any criticism of churches, even fictional ones
• how the first book ends on a cliffhanger, making it hard to give moviegoers the satisfying ending we've come to expect

Hmmm.