Where to Find the Essex County Wax Museum

As a Halloween treat I offer an online pointer to “The Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie,” a four-page comics story scripted by me and brought to life by Alex Cormack, with an editing assist from Jesse Lonergan.

This story appears in Minimum Paige, a comics anthology published by the Harvard Book Store a couple of years back. It’s also collected in Alex’s new art book.

The Editorial Wee

The New York Times obituary for Sid Yudain, rounder of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, contained an anecdote that seems like it should be in a children’s book—except that no child today would understand it.

Yudain was the seventh of eight children growing up in Connecticut in the 1920s and ’30s.

“For some reason or other, we were all spirited kids, but we didn’t have real fights,” Mr. Yudain recalled in an interview with Roll Call in 2005. “When we got mad at each other, we published these newspapers. We had a little Remington portable typewriter — I guess it was one of the first ones that came out, and we all learned how to use it, even when we were really small — and we published these newspapers, writing editorials against each other instead of staging fists or rocks or something.”

Typewriters? Household newspapers? Why go to all that trouble when you can use the internet to tell the whole world about your yucky sibling?

Games Acknowledgements Play

At the end of Fantasy Baseball, author Alan Gratz thanks a number of writing colleagues (including Laurel Snyder) for their support, and a number of literary estates, including those of Brian Jacques, Madeleine L’Engle, and the still-quite-alive Ingrid Law, for permitting him to use characters under copyright.

Also among the latter group is: “the estate of Ruth Spencer-Davies for letting me borrow the inimitable Nanny Mae and her feline companion Mrs. P.”

There was no Ruth Spencer-Davies.

Nanny Mae shares some characteristics with P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins and perhaps Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda (better known as the cinematic Nanny McPhee). But, whether pushed by copyright requirements or not, she appears to be Gratz’s own creation.

The conceit of Fantasy Baseball is a boy caught in a realm of make-believe characters. We readers have to believe that Nanny Mae is such a character, from a series we’ve never read or perhaps one we’ve forgotten. And the line in the acknowledgements serves that fictional purpose.

I’m running this on a Tuesday because Dorothy Gale is a major character in Fantasy Baseball, founder of the team Alex Metcalf finds himself playing for. Other characters from the Oz books also appear, including Scraps, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead. The threat underlying the plot is that those characters will be forgotten in our culture and disappear from the playing field.

But if Nanny Mae lives on with no other evidence for her existence on the web, then surely Jack Pumpkinhead will, too.

Greatest “Between Good and Awesome”

Back in April, Brian Gardes at the Stumptown Literary Review provided a very nice review of The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology:

As with most anthologies there were some stories which were more successful than others. However, under the careful eye of editors Dan Mazur and Jesse Lonergan, these variations in quality fluctuate between good and awesome. . . .

While it is often a risk to purchase an anthology, I cannot recommend The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology enough. It has a solid creative line up, great production values (twenty color pages in a small press book?!?!), and an enjoyable read from cover to cover!

Braden Lamb and I collaborated on one story in that collection, “The Greatest Spy of All Time.” Braden and his wife, Shelli Paroline, won Eisner Awards this summer for their work on Adventure Time, so I can’t argue that this publication was the highlight of the past twelve months for him, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Ninth Art Press’s next comics anthology will be about subcultures; here’s the call for submissions.

Hop to It, Chum

This is Joey, a dwarf Siamese rabbit with big dreams, photographed by Robyn Beck in Long Beach in October 2012.

Prescription for OIP Derangement Syndrome

As President Barack Obama’s administration fixes the new federal health-insurance website, it’s valuable to compare responses to that endeavor with responses to the last administration’s big foray into health benefits: Medicare Part D.

The Washington Post described how that law was enacted for President George W. Bush in 2003: “During the vote, which was of unprecedented length, the House Republican leadership cajoled, berated and twisted arms, barely controlling a conservative revolt…” A June 2004 article in the Millbank Quarterly noted that was “by far the longest known roll-call vote in the history of the House.” Majority Leader Tom DeLay promised a favor to one reluctant Republican which later brought him a public admonition from the Ethics Committee. In the end that bill passed in the House 220-215 with members of both political parties on both sides.

Almost immediately the law’s price tag changed, as the Washington Post reported in 2005:

Beginning with his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush pledged to keep the total cost of the drug benefit to $400 billion over 10 years. An estimate by the Congressional Budget Office was close to Bush’s figure.

But shortly after Bush signed the program into law in December 2003, the White House revised its projection to $534 billion, but it never offered a detailed breakdown of that estimate.

Last March, Richard S. Foster, Medicare's chief actuary for nearly a decade, said administration officials threatened to fire him if he disclosed his belief in 2003 that the drug package would cost $500 billion to $600 billion. . . .

As recently as September, Medicare chief Mark B. McClellan said the new drug package would cost $534 billion over 10 years. Last night, he acknowledged that the cumulative cost of the program between 2006 and 2015 will reach $1.2 trillion, but he cited several major savings and offsets that he said will reduce the federal government's bottom-line cost to $720 billion.

Medicare Part D was a big contributor to the budget deficits that the Bush-Cheney administration left to its successor. (In contrast, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Affordable Care Act would save the federal government money over ten years because it would make our use of health care more efficient.)

When Medicare Part D finally went into effect on 1 Jan 2006, there were lots of problems. On 18 January, the Washington Post reported on “tens of thousands of elderly and disabled Americans, their pharmacists, and governors struggling to resolve myriad start-up problems.” In particular, the paper had already said, the “online interactive tool…pitched as a high-tech way to help the 43 million Medicare beneficiaries sort through all the drug coverage choices” had run into troubles and missed deadlines.

Meanwhile, Tom DeLay left office under an ethical cloud. His replacement as House Majority Leader in early February 2006 was John Boehner. That Ohio representative had voted for Medicare Part D but had not been part of the party leadership at the time and therefore bore limited responsibility for the law.

On 6 Feb 2006, five weeks after Medicare recipients were supposed to start enrolling, Boehner went on the friendly confines of FOX News Sunday and criticized one aspect of the program: “The implementation has been horrendous. We’ve made it far more complicated than it should be. . . . I think the implementation side continues to need to be improved.” The interviewer then turned to Boehner’s interest in “meat and potato issues” and his “perpetual tan.”

Talking Points Memo also quoted Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) as saying, “This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. . . . Rather than trying to scare and confuse seniors, I would hope that we can work together as we go through the implementation phase to find out what is wrong with the program and if we can make some changes to fix it, let us do it and let us do it on a bipartisan basis." That was on 15 Feb 2006, six weeks after the enrollment started.

And Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Georgia) said in the same forum: “Like most significant programs, the new benefit has not gone without a few isolated glitches and unexpected problems. But I believe that if there is anything wrong with the plan, most of it has been fixed and that that hasn't can be fixed over time.”

As late as 6 Apr 2006, more than three months after enrollment opened, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pennsylvania) insisted: “Any time something is new, there is going to be some glitches.”

None of those congressmen demanded that the entire law be repealed, defunded, or seriously delayed. None called for the resignation of Cabinet secretaries. None referred to the program as a horrible threat to the federal budget or individual freedom. None voted to shut down the government as it started or urged their states not to cooperate with it. And while many Democratic elected officials didn’t like aspects of Medicare Part D and the way it was passed, they didn’t do those things, either. The double standard apparent in the responses is a hallmark of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Before “New Media Day” Gets Old

SCBWI New England’s “New Media Day” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art made clear that publishing has entered a period of hybridization, combining both print and digital books published both by companies and by authors.

Despite all the stories and insights, though, my biggest takeaway was that the website Scribd.com likes to be pronounced with a short I.

Here I am with Mary Jane Begin, Gail Gauthier, and Emilie Boon, who were on a panel I moderated, and (second from left) artist Ruth Sanderson.

I can’t see why people keep asking me to moderate panels; I’m really quite shy and retiring.

Remember When Oz Was on TV Only Once a Year?

Deadline has passed on the news of another television series based in some small way on the Oz mythos:

Lifetime has put in development Red Brick Road, from the Wolper Organization, Vertigo Entertainment and Warner Horizon. Written by Tim Schlattman (Dexter) based on an concept by artist Rob Prior and executive produced by Roy Lee and Adrian Askarieh, Red Brick Road is described as an edgy, Game Of Thrones take on the world of Wizard Of Oz.

In the classic 1939 feature, when Dorothy set off for the Emerald City, she followed the Yellow Brick Road. But among the yellow bricks at Dorothy’s feet, there was also a swirl of red bricks. They’ve been there the whole time in plain sight. Unnoticed. Unexplored. Which raises the question — just where do they go? Red Brick Road will answer that by following Dorothy down that fateful path, taking her to the oldest, darkest and most dangerous parts of Oz to find what became of her friends who all have gone missing.

Actually, the red bricks were just the negative space around the yellow bricks, but they’ve been intriguing fans of the movie since the video era began.

As Deadline notes, TV networks have bought four other Oz-themed projects recently, including:

• “NBC’s drama Emerald City, a dark reimagining of the classic tale of Oz in the vein of Game Of Thrones”—there’s that comparison again.
• “CBS’ Dorothy, a medical soap” noted back here.
• “the CW’s Dorothy Must Die, a revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s classic based on the upcoming young adult novel by Danielle Paige.”
• “Syfy’s miniseries Warriors Of Oz from director Timur Bekmambetov, a fantasy-action reimagining of the classic story.”

Note how all claim both to be rooted in the beloved public-domain property and to offer a completely new, usually darker take on it. Odds are that most of these shows will never be broadcast as series, but some may end up competing against one another.

Battling for Space

On Saturday a bunch of us were standing around the Million Year Picnic comics store looking at my newly purchased copy of Paul Pope’s Battling Boy, volume 1. (Okay, one of us was Jeff Smith.)

We were struck by the book’s size: 6 inches wide by 8.5 tall. That’s what publisher First Second has chosen as its “typical trim size.” (This spring the company tried 7 by 9 inches for the first time on a book for younger readers, more like a picture book.)

We weren’t convinced that size was ideal for Battling Boy. It’s an epic story of, basically, a godling come to Earth to fight huge monsters. Pope’s draftsmanship combines small details and messy chaos. Likewise, his lettering is too full of energy to be crisp. Those pages might have much more impact at a larger size.

But there is hope. According to this interview with Bleeding Cool, Pope and First Second are planning “a black and white oversized artists edition” for his 1990s THB comic, and:

We might even do this with Battling Boy depending on how the popularity is. My drawings are huge and a lot of the artists I meet in the industry give me the only complaint I’ve heard about Battling Boy which is that they wish it was black and white like THB where they can really see the line work.

Until then, maybe one quality that makes Battling Boy a comic for kids is that their eyes can get more out of it than us readers on the aging side.

More on Nightwing, #93

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the controversy over Nightwing, #93 (published in 2004), and how Wikipedia’s one-sentence description of that comic book’s script was rewritten in 2010 to say the opposite of what it originally said.

Another source in assessing that situation was Birds of Prey scripter Gail Simone’s conversation with Nightwing scripter Devin Grayson in The Pulse website in June 2004, while the storyline was playing out. I found the text of the relevant exchange, copied before the interview disappeared from the web. Here it is for the record:

THE PULSE: Another reason this year has been hard for Nightwing is the breakup of his relationship with a very smart redhead whose book I happen to write [i.e., Barbara Gordon]. Dick’s obviously a physical character, especially lately, and I think you and other writers have clearly established that he’s not a loner. Without giving too much away, the ending of #93 had rather a shocking event in Dick’s love/sex life. Was this a one-time thing, a moment of weakness and disorientation, or is Tarantula something more to Dick?

GRAYSON: That particular moment was actually not consensual. Dick’s body sometimes has a mind and life of its own, and in this case, his heart was very clear (as were his words) about not wanting to be engaged that way at that time. But Catalina [a.k.a. Tarantula] overwhelms him to some extent, both physically and emotionally. He feels responsible now for, essentially, the destruction of her soul, and as of issue 93 (and this continues into 94), he’s not yet sure how to redeem her or himself, so she’s really got an odd kind of control over him while he tries to catch his breath and figure that out. She’s crystal clear about what she wants to be doing and how she wants him to factor into it – utterly undaunted by recent events – and Dick is, at this point, basically being dragged around behind her (this actually becomes literal in 94). Through a combination of shock and moral anguish, Dick has, to some extent, surrendered to her will. And in that particular situation, the sex itself was practically allegorical. I don’t mean it didn’t really happen, but rather that it was a final physical manifestation of an emotional violation that went much deeper.

Two months later Devin Grayson had the Q&A with fans in which she referred back to this conversation: “For the record, I’ve never used the word ‘rape,’ I just said it was nonconsensual (I know, aren’t writers frustrating? *smiles*).”

Curiously, in an exchange on the Legions of Gotham message board dated June 2004 (though at one point I recorded it as having occurred in January 2005), Devin Grayson was explicit:

from aneurysm: Theres been alot of online debate about what actually happened at the end of Nightwing #93. Was Dick raped? Was it consensual? Did they actually do anything other than a bit of dry humping? Everyone seems to be debating this and coming up with crazy explanations (the weirdest I've heard is that Tarantula drugged Dick!).

Devin Grayson: Okay, let’s see if I can clear this up while still retaining some necessary vagueness. The facts: if you’re over seventeen, that was way more than dry-humping. If you’re a younger reader, well, they were just being friendly. ;-) There were no drugs involved beyond the very potent chemical cocktails of pheromones with which we all come naturally equipped. The act was not consensual – Dick did not want to be touched, as he stated, and physical intimacy – especially with Catalina – was the last thing in his head or heart. He was, essentially, raped, though I think in an emotional and spiritual sense even more than in the physical sense. He almost certainly has the power to best Tarantula physically, but she definitely overwhelms him in other ways.

I think it’s significant that Devin Grayson said she had to maintain “some necessary vagueness” and attributed her frustrating coyness in the other Q&A to being a writer. Those phrases are why I read her combination of statements as signs of a storyteller trying to balance between giving readers the information they need to interpret her narrative and not spelling out that story before it concluded (several issues and one Batman crossover later).

The result was clumsy and, especially in combination with the delayed conclusion, frustrating and even infuriating for fans. Devin Grayson herself expressed regrets in a mid-2005 Q&A:

What made you come up with the idea to have Nightwing being raped in Nightwing #93?

What happened between him and Catalina on that rooftop was a physical manifestation of a much deeper marginalization of power. In hindsight, I regret it — not because it was controversial, but because readers have paid more attention to that moment than to the one that truly shattered Dick — the moment when he stood by passively in the face of someone’s murder. That was a far worse subjugation of everything he stands for than the subsequent physical violation.

At that point the story of Dick and Catalina’s relationship had ended—though Dick would continue working out his feelings about the murder in hard-to-follow ways over another year of issues.