Reason for Robin, #4, continued

As I discussed in the weekly Robin of a fortnight ago, adding Dick Grayson/Robin the Boy Wonder to Batman's stories gave Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, and the comic's other early writers a broader emotional palette to work with.

Mid-century ideals of American manhood constricted how much Bruce Wayne/Batman could emote. He could be momentarily puzzled, but not flummoxed. Proud, but not gloating. Regretful, but not tearful. Joking, but not straining for a pun. Robin, as a youngster, could show those "weaknesses," and in doing so raise the emotional timbre of the comic books.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, Batman had the emotional range expected of a male paragon. He was usually happy, occasionally angry, and never out of control for long. Robin handled the extremes, and also expressed aspects of his mentor's private life that Batman wouldn't say out loud. The Batman TV show of the mid-1960s mirrored this dynamic, with Adam West performing to a different tempo from Burt Ward and everyone else in the cast.

Then came DC's Crisis in 1985-86, followed by the death of the second Jason Todd as Robin in 1988. In the same decade, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns showed the artistic and commercial appeal of a Batman who wasn't just out to scare criminals, but was just plain scary. Michael Keaton picked up on that personality in the 1989 movie blockbuster. And that produced a darker emotional dynamic for the Dynamic Duo.

This image is from DC's online introduction to the character of Dick Grayson (art by George Pérez, words by Mark Waid). The "laughing young daredevil" matches how Robin was introduced back in 1940. But note also the unsmiling visage of his mentor, in contrast to his 1940 grin. This was the new face of Batman.

Since 1990 or so, Batman hasn't just been heroically stoic. He's psychologically shut down and closed off. He has terrible social skills, though Bruce Wayne can be suavely charming if he puts his mind to it. Batman has trouble expressing his feelings to even his closest companions. For all his physical and intellectual development, the modern Batman/Bruce Wayne is emotionally stunted.

Today's Batman stories use this character in different ways. The TV cartoons and the magazines based on them (the "DC Animated Universe," or DCAU) are the lightest in tone. They play the emotional contrast between Batman and the rest of the world for laughs.

Other Batman stories follow the old dynamic: Robin shows the emotions that Batman can't, as in the panel to the right, from the Knightfall story of the early 1990s. But now it's no longer admirable for Batman to keep his feelings bottled up. Instead, the biggest ongoing challenge for Dick Grayson and the current Robin, Tim Drake, as traced in their soon-to-end solo magazines, has been to avoid becoming as grim as their mentor.

At the most extreme, several story arcs in the last fifteen years have shown Batman/Bruce Wayne on the verge of madness. Or even beyond it, as in the current "Batman RIP" arc that's made headlines around the world (just as DC Comics had hoped).

And what do the comic books repeatedly say has forced Batman to maintain his sanity? Having Robin at his side. Caring for young Dick Grayson, responding to his emotions, has supposedly helped Bruce Wayne since his third year of fighting crime. Tim Drake took up the mantle of Robin precisely because he saw Batman going crazy without a Boy Wonder. When Batman has shut himself down, as in the Bruce Wayne: Murderer arc, Dick and Tim challenge him to reconnect with the people around him.
In sum, DC's writers have taken the emotional contrast between Batman and Robin established in the comic's first three decades, a contrast largely driven by the gender stereotypes of the time, and have developed deeper meaning from it.

“Customized Classic Children’s Books”

A firm called SharedBook is offering “customized classic children's books” through its website and retailing partners, most notably Tattered Cover in Denver. Folks can have a photo and short note printed on a page at the front of a book, and that copy will be shipped out to your beloved child. Who will love this so much more than if you, say, wrote the same note inside the book in your own handwriting.

According to Bookselling This Week, users can also add their chosen photo to the back cover, and on certain titles “users can customize entire sections of their book with personal memories and photos.” I just wasn’t able to find any of those titles or options.

The titles available now are mostly “classics”--i.e., in the public domain, or work-for-hire titles from Golden. But there are also three Beverly Cleary books, a Star Wars novel, and the recent Bad Dog, Marley! Another notable option is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Scott McKowen's illustrations, originally commissioned by Sterling.

I remember an early version of this "personalized book" concept from my childhood: full-color picture books with rudimentary stories into which a computer could drop the name of a birthday child and personal facts. "Did you know that Cindy shares her birthday with Ralph Bunche? Perhaps the two of them will celebrate together by skateboarding." The type was as good as computer-printer technology of the time allowed, which meant the result didn't look like a real book; it looked like a book someone had typed in.

Unfortunately, SharedBook doesn't go as far as I'd hoped when I first saw “customized classic children's books.” You can personalize only that one page. But you can't improve the final act of Huckleberry Finn, write yourself into Oz alongside Dorothy, or give a name to The Poky Little Puppy.

The Synoptic Gospel

Earlier this year I helped a friend polish the synopsis of his first novel for a literary agent. That got me thinking about synopses, a singular literary genre with a very small audience but a great deal of potential value locked up inside. Of course, the full manuscript still has to deliver, but a good synopsis really is worth all the effort it requires.

I think a strong synopsis can do three important things for an author:

• crystallize what your book's really about, which is more than a little useful when revising.
  
• show an agent or editor how your novel has a plot to excite and eventually satisfy readers through the requisite mix of surprises, emotional tugs, and logical connections.
• show those publishing pros that you understand how your plot works, leading them to think that you might just be able to do that again.

Editorial Anonymous has tackled the synoptic topic by inviting people to try synopsizing a well-known, published book for practice, and then submitting the result for feedback. EA's guidelines reminded prospective entrants:

Don't forget to include:

• What makes it all appealing. If you've summarized everything except the reason readers will be drawn through the plot, you've failed.
• The ending. I don't care if it's a surprise. Tell me how it fricking ends.

The world breathlessly awaits the results.

Meanwhile, for more examples to learn from, there's Miss Snark's Crapometer-synopsis thread. Evil Editor's Face-Lifts are more focused on query letters, but also offer useful advice on expressing the essence of a story. Cynthea Liu takes a more formulaic approach to synopses, seemingly based on the five-paragraph essay, but that's okay; as a genre, synopses are all about content, not form.

Getting Ready for the Party

It seemed a little unfair that Sotheby’s estimate for this E. H. Shepard illustration of Piglet is only £7,000-9,000 when pictures of Pooh and others are £20,000-70,000. Yes, Piglet's small, but is that a fair determinant of his value?

Then I realized from the auction’s catalog that this is actually a sketch that Shepard created in 1958, based on his earlier, published drawing. And that’s probably the reason for the lower price. Sotheby's estimates for Shepard drawings not connected to Winnie the Pooh at all are even less, though still in the four figures.

Incidentally, the malls will be so crowded tomorrow. Why not shop for me online? I'm only trying to make it easier for you.

Lasting Legacy

News from Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, via Playbill:

A "Grand Reopening Celebration" will be held Feb. 11 during which filmmaker George Lucas will receive the Lincoln Medal in honor of his accomplishments, which "exemplify the character and lasting legacy of President Abraham Lincoln."

Lucas/Lincoln. Lincoln/Lucas. Hmmm. Well, they both:

• have beards.
• championed the Old Republic.
• created a multimillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate.
  

Oh wait, only one of them did that last thing. And the other one led the fight against a rebel alliance and didn't create Jar Jar Binks. So I'm having a little trouble seeing the resemblance.

I suspect that one important point of similarity between Lincoln and Lucas is that they both were willing to go to Ford's Theatre. So awkward to give a medal to someone who won't be there to receive it.

British and American Favorites

Charles Bayless at Through the Magic Door has correlated two newspaper articles on readers’ favorite childhood books: one article from Britain and one from America. This produced four different lists because some respondents had named books or series, and some had named authors.

Bayless summarizes the overlap:

There are four titles that show up on both the UK and the US lists: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Charlotte's Web. There are also four cross-over authors: Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, Enid Blyton and Isaac Asimov.

While that's "two quintessentially American and two quintessentially English authors," as Bayless says, Seuss and Asimov are the only American authors on the British list. A Greek and a Dane rank fairly high, but everyone else is British. In contrast, the American list has Dahl at #2, Verne, Blyton, Montgomery, Milne, and Christie.

Among titles, the American list includes five books from authors outside the USA, plus two by British expatriates writing stories set in their homeland (Burnett's Secret Garden and Lofting's Doctor Doolittle). Charlotte's Web is the only American title to appear on the British list, and it's at the bottom.

Thus, for the generations of readers who responded to these polls, British children's literature was still disproportionately popular in America, and American literature secondary in Britain.

I Guess That Lady Can Have Her Trademark Back

A few weeks back, DC Comics announced it was folding its Minx imprint of graphic novels for teenage girls. Why, it seems like less than two years since DC issued the first books from this imprint--and indeed it was.

I collected a couple of responses from bloggers and other industry observers on Minx's end. Then I saw some more, and then some more, and they kept coming. Finally I found Good Comics for Kids' round-up of opinions, and decided to start by simply pointing to that.

So my first conclusion is that if the Internet is for porn, as Trekkie Monster declared in Avenue Q, and Wikipedia is for cataloging Japanese trading-card characters, then the blogosphere is for discussing comic books.

The de-Minxing reaction that struck me hardest at first came from former Borders employee Shannon Smith. While some observers said the books hadn't received enough marketing, Smith insisted that wasn't the problem.

I was an inventory manager at Borders during the time Minx was being hyped and when it rolled out and I can tell you lack of marketing was not an issue. It was the most marketed venture I saw during my 7 years with Borders other than the monthly marketing rolled out by manga publishers. (DC and Marvel don’t touch in a year the displays, shelve talkers, flyers, book marks, etc. etc. that manga publishers dump on bookstores in a week). . . .

As soon as the first boxes came in and I saw that the thin little books would be shelved in graphic novels I knew it was going to fail. The books are small YA format and are totally lost in the GN section. Plus, they just can’t compete with manga.

I tried. I created end caps for them but they were in the wrong part of the store. Could I have put them in YA? Sure. But it would have gone against the shelving code on the sticker and would have conflicted with the title look up computers so, no, not really an option.

Smith felt that the Minx titles needed to go among YA prose books, not on the comics shelf, and that Borders would have moved the books there if Random House had asked.

On the other hand, Valerie D'Orazio at Occasional Superheroine wrote:

As of two weeks ago, I saw Minx titles kept in the "teen novel" section of Barnes and Noble--some distance, perhaps a whole floor or two, away from the graphic novel section. Would there be that crossover readership from the teen novel crowd?

If that was a typical B&N, then the Minx books did get a shot in YA lit. And D'Orazio was wondering if they failed by being too far from the comics.

I guess I'd put myself in the group that suspects Minx died because of mediocre product. I liked The Re-Gifters, but wasn't bowled over by the line's flagship, The Plain Janes, and even less impressed by Clubbing--so guess which two of those titles were getting sequels? In addition, DC pulled the plug remarkably fast, which might indicate unrealistic expectations going in.

The winner in all this? I'd say Andrea Grant, who was publishing comics about a heroine she called Minx (and making appearances as that character) back when DC launched its imprint. There was a small legal contretemps. Now she's posting self-congratulatory comments, and I guess no one deserves them more.

Weakly Robin

I launched the weekly Robin series on 17 Nov 2007, meaning there have been a full year of Oz and Ends postings on that weighty pop-culture topic. Seems longer, doesn't it?

So this week the weekly Robin is taking a rest. But you might find something of interest at Boston 1775, which has been discussing Revolutionary War comics.

Queen Zixi Rides Again

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has a tendency to sway far afield of its nominal topic. (Which reminds me, I might need to update that descriptive line above, mightn't I?) This month, that blog featured many nice scans of the illustrations for L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, drawn by Frederick Richardson in 1905. Click on the pictures there for bigger views.

That site spells Richardson's first name without the final K, and gives his dates as 1855-1934. Most other websites say he lived from 1862 to 1937, and I'm inclined to believe them.

Richardson was commissioned to illustrate Baum's story by St. Nicholas magazine, the most prestigious American periodical for children. The novel was then called The Magic Cloak, and indeed its action revolves around a magic cloak.

But that title didn't sound so much like Baum's most famous fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz. So when the Century company republished the text and illustrations in book form, it chose a title focused on the ruler of a two-letter country. No matter that most of the story takes place in Noland, not Ix, or that Queen Zixi is the story's antagonist for a significant spell.

Queen Zixi is one of Baum's best fairy tales, perhaps because the St. Nicholas editors demanded his best work. Though episodic (it was originally a serial, after all), it's well structured and thematically unified. The young protagonists are a bit bland, but the supporting characters' humor is delightful.

Thanks to Fuse #8 for the pointer to that site. Here are some more Richardson illustration links:

• I'm Learning to Share shares images from a school reader.
• Nursery Rhymes Online shows some beautiful colored pages for different rhymes.
• Google Books archived The Queen's Museum, by Frank Stockton, published in 1906.
• The Children's Library offers views of East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon from 1912.

“But I Have to Drop the Name ‘Bud’ in There!”

"Otherwise, how will everyone know that we're dear, dear friends?"

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviewed Calvin Trillin's book of verse about the recent US election with rhymes of her own:

There once was a poet named Bud Trillin,
Who cast George Bush as his villain.
He sounded like a new Ogden Nash,
Writing doggerel with real panache,
Chronicling the reign of Bush Two,
And Rove’s quest to wipe out the blue.

Which illustrates my primary rule for writing verse: rhyme is easy, rhythm is hard.

My secondary rule is that you shouldn't write verse at all if you can't understand rule #1.