Comics and Non-Comics, Manuscript and Script

In June I featured COMICS WEEK, with every posting about comic books or comics in other forms. In September I launched NON-COMICS WEEK, about books that have something to do with comics, but aren't comics. But today Oz and Ends starts something totally new: COMICS AND NON-COMICS WEEK!

Which is to say, I'm going to post thoughts on what makes comics different from other illustrated books. Some of these differences have to do with form, and thus may be inherent to the different storytelling media. Some involve the way that the different types of books are created, and thus may be more related to organizational cultures and traditions than the artistic forms. I base these comments on analysis rather than much experience with creating either of those types of books, so I welcome comments and rebuttals from people in the fields.

My first observation began several years ago when I drafted a comics script about Button-Bright and submitted it to the world's leading Oz comics creator. (What the heck?) I hadn't found any books about writing comics scripts, so I followed the only rules for to-be-illustrated manuscripts that I knew: the rules for picture books.

Those rules are:

• The author writes the text on the page and nothing else.
• Not even page breaks. The artist (working with the editor) decides where those fall.
  
• No, you may not describe the action or the setting.
• All right, if a visual detail is absolutely crucial to the editor and artist understanding a story, you can include it as a note in your manuscript.
• You as author do not give ideas directly to the artist. In fact, you should not even be in contact with the artist until the book is done.

In one of my writing groups, an author had sold a picture-book manuscript about canoeing on the Charles River with her son. When it was published, the artist had decided to portray the mother and child as Native American. That's how that picture-book publishing works. Editors explain that this is necessary to give the artist enough creative input.

I've heard some experienced authors speak of exceptions to the rules. Stephen Krensky has noted in his manuscript what image should go on the wordless last page of a picture book. Joanna Cole and Robie Harris both insisted that they had to work closely with their illustrators--Bruce Degen and Michael Emberley, respectively--given the nature of the Magic School Bus and It's [Sensible Information about the Human Body] series. But those authors know that they're exceptional. They were all established, and two even had in-house editorial experience, before they broke the rules above. Newcomers don't have the same freedom.

So back to my Button-Bright comic. I carefully wrote out a manuscript that included only the words that would appear on the page, with the barest possible description of the action. No breakdown by pages or panels, no descriptions of characters, no commentary on mood. I had ideas on all those things, but was scrupulous about keeping them to myself.

The artist sent back a polite note gently telling me that's not how comics scripts work. Over the past year I've gotten around to looking at Dennis O'Neil's DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics and several other books that include scripts, either in full or as part of the DVD-like extras that DC and Marvel include in their "graphic novel" editions.

And sure enough, though there are many styles to creating a comics script, the writer has the freedom and responsibility to break the action down into pages and panels, to describe characters' actions and emotions, often even to suggest the shapes of panels and viewpoints from which they should be drawn. Paradoxically, even though a comics artist creates many more drawings per story than a picture-book artist, he or she is expected to have less control over the interaction of art and text.

Sometimes this can cause anxiety. In the extras added to Identity Crisis, penciller Rags Morales recalls complaining to his wife that Brad Meltzer's script was too detailed and controlling, that he couldn't do the job. But gradually Morales realized what Meltzer had in mind, and how all those details would add up. To be sure, the same material and interviews highlight places where Morales suggested changes from Meltzer's instructions which both agree were better. But clearly the scripter was deeply involved in creating the visuals of this book.

Among other award-winning comics scripters, Neil Gaiman's texts are casually conversational:

Well, hi Kelley, Malcolm, Todd, Steve, Tom, Karen...

Here we are at the third part of Season of Mists. We last saw the Sandman watching Lucifer walking away into the mists, having been given the key to Hell. This episode begins a few hours later.

Now, the last issue was pretty low on characters - it was basically just Lucifer and the Sandman, with a couple of cameos. This issue has a cast of thousands. Well, hundreds. Well, lots.

Alan Moore's seem erudite and freakishly detailed:

FIRSTLY, SINCE I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE HOW THESE GRAPHIC NOVELS ARE SET OUT, MIGHT I SUGGEST THAT IF THERE ARE END-PAPERS OF ANY KIND THEY MIGHT BE DESIGNED SO AS TO FLOW INTO AND OUT OF THE FIRST AND LAST PANELS OF THE STORY. SINCE BOTH THE FIRST AND LAST PANELS CONTAIN A SIMPLE CLOSE-UP IMAGE OF THE SURFACE OF A PUDDLE RIPPLED BY RAIN, THEN MAYBE A SIMPLE ENLARGEMENT OF A BLACK AND WHITE RIPPLE EFFECT TO THE POINT WHERE IT BECOMES HUGE AND ABSTRACT WOULD BE IN ORDER?

All I can say to picture-book authors is: Do not try this! If your manuscript includes chatty commentary for your editorial and illustration team or detailed suggestions about the endpapers, for goodness' sake, you will brand yourself as the worst type of control freak: the type who doesn't know what the heck she's doing.

Someone Called. I Don't Know. Someone.

Back in June, I declared COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends. Now, after months of preparation, I'm declaring this will be NON-COMICS WEEK. Which is to say, for the next few days I'll post about things that have something to do with comics, but aren't comics.

And what do I mean by "comics"? I'm largely adopting Scott McCloud's definition in Understanding Comics and Making Comics, while recognizing its limitations. (Indeed, I recommend reading Dylan Horrocks's fond critique of McCloud's approach, "Inventing Comics.")

McCloud's definition requires a sequence of images and thus excludes single-panel cartoons, even though those share a lot of visual language and history with comics. So I'll start NON-COMICS WEEK with one of my favorite single-panel New Yorker cartoons of recent years. It fortuitously appears on the cover of The New Yorker Book of Kids Cartoons, so I can share it here without any copyright guilt.


The little boy with the model airplane is telling the phone in some annoyance, "Uh-huh. . . Uh-huh. . . Uh-huh. . . YES, I'm writing it down!"

Comics, Children's Books, and the Self-Publishing Stigma

This installment of COMICS AND NON-COMICS WEEK turns away from form and back to a behind-the-scenes aspect of the two types of publication.

I quote Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics:

Self-publishing is a mark of mediocrity in the prose book world, but it's easy enough to do in comics--since there's only one distributor of note--that it's not just an acceptable first step but, in more than a few cases, a long-term career path.

And Michael R. Lavin at the University of Buffalo:

Unlike the book publishing community, the comic book industry accepts self-publishing as a respectable outlet for creative effort. Experienced, talented comic book professionals often publish their own work as a means of realizing their artistic vision without editorial interference from mainstream publishers. Most self-published comics are created using the same professional, high-quality production standards as titles from major publishers. Many have enjoyed long-lived commercial success and/or critical acclaim. In fact, some of the most original, exciting, and groundbreaking comics in today's marketplace result from self-publishing activity.

Self-publishing is a "mark of mediocrity" for non-comics only because so many mediocre books have been published by that route. I'm not sure why the situation would be different for comics, especially since that field offers plenty of egregious examples of self-publishing. But, as this column from The Book Standard notes, some of the field's best work also came to us by that route (including today's featured book cover, from the Bone series by Jeff Smith).

Wolk suggests that the dominance of Diamond Comics Distributors is a crucial difference, opening the playing field for all comics publishers. Maybe the cheap price of comic books (as opposed to paperback collections) makes it easier for customers to take a chance on a new title that looks promising. Maybe there's a better word-of-mouth network; fanboys do talk. Or maybe the nature of comics themselves, with their plethora of art, means that a quick look can distinguish the good from the mediocre.

The Back of The Man in the Ceiling

NON-COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends continues with thoughts on novels about creating comics--more specifically, creating adventure comics of the sort that dominate the field in America.

As comics have achieved more literary respect, so respectable fiction has opened up to stories about the crafting those comics. The leading example in literary fiction is Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, the year after it was published. Can you imagine an American novel published in the 1950s through the 1980s that treated the creation of a superhero comic called The Escapist as a serious enterprise? Showing an author or artist toiling in that field would more likely have signaled creative frustration or a fall.

I think the real start of this trend was Jules Feiffer's The Man in the Ceiling, published for young readers in 1993 and put on some of that year's "best" lists. It's about a boy named Jimmy trying to create comics for popularity and self-respect, against a backdrop of his uncle's efforts to write a Broadway musical and ordinary family life.

Feiffer had already written about the comics he drew as a boy in The Great Comic Book Heroes. I think there's a fair amount of autobiography in this first novel. As I wrote earlier, The Man in the Ceiling doesn't have the period detail to set it in the 1930s and ’40s, when Feiffer grew up, but neither does it quite feel like it's taking place in the 1990s. One of the giveaways is the type of comic book Jimmy creates; his stories seem to reflect the anything-goes period when superheroes were still new rather than the continuity-, celebrity-, and event-driven business of the last two decades.

In addition to treating comics as a respectable hobby for a young fellow, The Man in the Ceiling also took a step forward in integrating text and illustration in a middle-grade novel. Now we see a lot more of that: Ruth McNally Barshaw's Ellie McDoodle, Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Greg Fishbone's Penguins of Doom are all very recent examples.

How tightly are words and pictures integrated in The Man in the Ceiling? Here are the novel's last words:

Jimmy dug his head deep into Uncle Lester's shoulder, forcing him to bring his right arm up to get a better hold. His right hand grasped a sheet of paper that Mother had not noticed before. Uncle Lester gripped it tight, as if it meant the world to him. Mother tried to see what was on it, but couldn't, so she moved quietly and swiftly down the steps to get a better look.

See for yourself, it's the last page of this book.

You then turn the page and see--well, I'm not going to spoil it. But I will say that this ending doesn't translate well to an audiobook. I had to go back to the library for a print edition in order to understand what was going on.

"And Here’s a Site for a Detail”

Last month Newsarama ran an interview with Peter J. Tomasi, the current writer of the Nightwing comic book. (And Nightwing is...? Anyone? The lady in the back? Yes! He's Dick Grayson, the original Robin, all grown up and fighting crime on his own. Which makes this another weekly Robin posting.)

Within that interview was a link for downloading part of Tomasi's script for Nightwing #140 in MS Word form, provided to the eager public to illustrate his method of writing action scenes.

I found that script interesting for a number of reasons. Like many others from experienced comics writers, it addresses the artist--in this case, Rags Morales--directly in a conversational tone. I haven't seen that in any other type of script or manuscript besides comics.

As with other comics scripts I've seen, the level of detail that Tomasi put into his action descriptions is striking. I'm used to the required minimalism of children's picture-book manuscripts, and the comics business's approach appeals to the control-freak in me.

But what really seemed new to me was Tomasi's use of weblinks to provide Morales with reference images and information.

PAGE 13

panel 1
Inside the Cloisters, FIVE THIEVES DRESSED COMPLETELY IN BLACK, decked out in hi-tech thief gear, infrared goggles hang from their neck or are atop their head, and cool-ass looking P90 submachine guns (website: http://www.fnherstal.com/html/Index.htm).

They are in a chapel where two tombs/effigys lie in the middle of the stone floor. Also, there's a hole in the stone floor where they entered and we can see a cylindrical hi-tech type of digger laying next to the hole (Rags, call me about this). There's a beautiful stained glass window that the moonlight streams through, and a large wooden chandelier with UNLIT candles. Here's a place for you to go to see a shot of the chapel: http://www.mrfs.net/trips/2001/New_York_City/Upper_Manhattan/gothic_chapel.jpg

And here's a site for a detail of the stained glass:
www.metmuseum.org/explore/Mirror/187.htm

Also Rags, Google the: Tomb of Jean D'Alluye and look at images, cause that's one of the tombs I'd like you to make sure we see since it's the reason they're there.

panel 2
Closer on our Thieves, as they take great care and struggle to try and open the tomb of Jean D'Alluye. Two of the thieves are using a small, handheld laser to cut around the sealed stone lid as the others stand guard with weapons ready.

panel 3
Overhead shot as our thieves are successful, we see them opening the tomb lid to reveal the skeletal remains of Jean D'Alluye, laid out just like the tomb cover bas relief carving, with his crusader shield and sword.

panel 4
Another angle now, moments have passed and they have already removed the skeleton and are now in the process of carefully zipping up the sturdy black body bag that it's now in. They are unaware that in the background, TWO SMALL BALL-LIKE DEVICES with Nightwing's symbol on it, have been tossed up from the hole and are at the moment in mid-air ready to go...

Decades ago, Batman co-creator Bill Finger was famous for clipping articles and photos to his typewritten scripts for artists to rely on. With web addresses and the dominance of Microsoft software, such sources can now be embedded in the scripts themselves.

Back at the start of Oz and Ends's first COMICS AND NON-COMICS WEEK, comics artist David Lee Ingersoll commented:

I'd say that the best script is the one that gives the artist everything he/she needs to do the job well. Sometimes that means providing reference material for the artist if the artist has been asked to draw something obscure. (The internet has made this a lot less necessary. Yay internet!)

I'm not sure whether David was thinking of URL-rich scripts like this one or being able to use the internet when he had to do his own research. Tomasi might be unusually sensitive to artists' needs since he was editor of Nightwing and other magazines for over a decade before returning to writing; he therefore probably heard every artist's complaint about scripts, and every excuse there is for the art (or script) not to be delivered on time.

Good Punctuation Is Essential, Robin.

Some Oz and Readers might have assumed (or hoped) that PUNCTUATION WEEK would mean skipping a weekly Robin installment. But comics have punctuation, too.

In fact, popular American comics have developed their own system of punctuation and typography, related to but not conforming to the standards for prose. Worries about capitalization go away when most sentences are rendered ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Comics punctuation allows writers and letterers to do some things that standard prose styles don't allow. Using boldface for emphasis, for example. Larger letters for more emphasis. Boldface and larger letters for even more emphasis!

The shapes, sizes, and layouts of speech balloons function as a form punctuation--that topic could be a posting in itself. In fact, earlier this month I discussed how David Hutchison came to use balloon shapes and fonts to distinguish his characters in Oz: The Manga. So today I'll just mention a few miscellaneous quirks of comics punctuation.

The panel on the right shows a rather unusual use of punctuation in a superhero comic dating from the "Golden Age" or early "Silver Age." Indeed, that usage probably shows up in this panel only because it was created in 1943, when the standard style was still being developed. Can you spot the detail?

It's a period. The first two sentences of the surgeon's speech end with periods. By the late 1940s, as far as I can tell, that punctuation had all but disappeared from DC Comics.

Instead, most remarks in speech balloons became exclamations! Everything was dramatic! Even the most mundane remarks!

And if a speech really didn't call for an exclamation point or question mark...then it ended with an ellipsis--or two hyphens... (Or three hyphens, or one, or four dots--all shown in these 1940s panels.)

One sign that American comic books were maturing in the 1980s was that they welcomed back periods.

And what about those two hyphens? It's almost impossible to find an em dash in superhero comics of the 1950s and '60s. But those comics were usually hand-lettered (mechanical type was cheaper, but awkward and less expressive). Letterers could easily have drawn a long dash; they weren't bound by typewriter conventions. But two hyphens must have appeared on the typewritten scripts, and thus two hyphens went into the speech balloons.

As time passed, the two-hyphen style became the comics standard. According to the Dark Horse Comics style sheet printed in Peter David's Writing for Comics, double dashes have multiple uses but "long dashes and semi-colons are not used in comics punctuation. Colons are used only on rare occasions." How long will that last?

On the left, Nightwing demonstrates another form of punctuation found in comics of all kinds (not just superhero adventures): the combination of question mark and exclamation point.

The two punctuation marks almost always appear in that order, though I've seen such variations as ?!? and ?!?!?!

This punctuation usually signals a combination of puzzlement and alarm. In prose, it's possible to convey those emotions through words outside the dialogue:

• "Who?" Dick yelled.
• "Who?" Dick asked loudly.
• "Who?" Dick said with a combination of puzzlement and alarm.

But comics don't have those options; they have to convey how characters speak graphically. Hence the double punctuation.

Another combination of question mark and exclamation point is the interrobang. As World Wide Words relates, the advertising executive Martin Spekter invented this mark in 1962. He wanted it to signal a rhetorical question: "Have you ever seen such bargains‽" Enough type designers have liked the idea (or, more probably, the name "interrobang") that Unicode reserves space for this mark and its Spanish inverse.

Nevertheless, neither the interrobang nor the juxtaposition of question mark and exclamation point fits in standard prose. They belong only in the most informal or experimental writing. To include them in a book manuscript is to risk being perceived as someone who hasn't read enough books to pick up the rules.

(All that said, the interrobang is on my short list of non-standard punctuation most likely to become standard in the next few decades, if people ever agree on what it signals.)

Finally, comics creators are now in a transition from lettering by hand to inserting digital text into digital art files. The hand-lettered aesthetic is still dominant, so even people who letter on computers use fonts that look like handwriting. (John Norton and Kevin Cannon offer tips on creating a font that looks like your handwriting.) Scott McCloud uses a font based on his writing in his comics, for example, while Eric Shanower still letters by hand--at least as of a year ago.

Given that trend, I suspect we'll see more of the symbol that appears in the following image from the recent Robin collection Days of Fire and Madness. You see the little box after the first period? It's not really punctuation. Rather, the text included a character which that font could not render, so the computer substituted a "missing character" glyph. And no editor caught it, either in the original magazine or this collected edition.

Looking for the Great American Superhero Novel

A few days ago, toward the start of NON-COMICS WEEK, I posited that the increasing respect for comics in our culture has opened the door for "literary" novels about comics creators, both children and adults. Another, less high-falutin' result of the same trend is more prose novels about superheroes. Not just characters with special powers, like Harry Potter, but characters whose fantastic powers and worlds are based on American superhero traditions.

In American literary publishing for adults, we have Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) as the most prominent example. For kids, the trend seems to be largely confined to mass-market series, such as Dan Greenburg's Maximum Boy and Greg Trine's Melvin Beederman, Superhero.

Which brings me to William Boniface's Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy series, starting with The Hero Revealed. Boniface is actually Jon Anderson, who worked at Penguin and now heads Running Press. He comes by his superhero knowledge honestly: he was once buyer of graphic novels for Barnes & Noble.

For more background, see this video interview at First Book. And according to an interview with Anderson's hometown paper, the Argus Leader:

"Ordinary Boy" was written during a four-month period when Anderson devoted himself to his story full time. He sold the manuscript to the first publishing house he approached. But the whole process screeched to a halt with the arrival of a movie about another superhero family. "'The Incredibles' has been haunting me," Anderson says.

In spite of being written nearly two years before "The Incredibles" took center stage, HarperCollins decided to delay the release of "Ordinary Boy" so as not to appear to be riding the coattails of the hit animated movie. Even now, as Ordinary Boy takes his turn in the spotlight, "Incredibles" comparisons persist.

(That article is no longer on the Argus Leader website; I pulled it from a Google cache.)

That worry about "riding the coattails" seems to be missing the point of all of today's superhero books, movies (e.g., Sky High), and TV shows (e.g., Heroes), not to mention the current state of superhero comics publishing. It's all self-referential. Everyone is chasing each other's coattails. Readers are expected to spot cross-references and allusions. So let's hear no more about the genre being derivative; that's the point.

The Hero Revealed exemplifies a number of trends in recent superhero novels for kids. It takes place in a world with a plethora, a veritable surfeit, of superpowered criminals and crime-stoppers; these books tend to be inspired by the DC and Marvel "universes" rather than individual hero legends. The protagonist is a growing member of that society; in The Hero Revealed, Ordinary Boy is special because he doesn't appear to have any powers.

The genre emphasizes comedy, finding it in the awkward disadvantages of superpowers. These books usually have a lot of illustrations in an energetic, humorous style. The Ordinary Boy series is part of the subcategory--maybe half of the genre--that plays off the marketing of superheroes to kids.

The Hero Revealed is on the long side--almost 300 pages. But it's not terribly tight. On pages 132-3, for instance, OB spends five paragraphs reviewing the mystery and his feelings about it for us readers. And then he tells his parents exactly the same things in one big paragraph on page 134.

The book starts slowly, with 30 pages before "an enormous muffled explosion" inaugurates something like a plot. Up to then, Boniface has simply filled us in on Superopolis society with a maps, trading card-like character profiles, and backstory. It's possible to be too self-referential.

One big, old-fashioned flaw in this book, not shared by all others in the genre: as in the earliest versions of Superfriends, each group has a token female. The main crime-fighting organization, the League of Ultimate Goodness, includes one woman, and her sole job is to make the leader feel good about himself. (I'm not making that up.) Does Ordinary Boy's club do any better? No, they, too, have only one female member.

TOMORROW: A superhero novel from a female point of view.

(Publishers who are looking to get into the superhero novel genre should ask Greg Fishbone for a look at his How to Be a Superhero manuscript.)

Elsewhere in the Virtual World

While I indulge my inner fanboy during COMICS AND NON-COMICS WEEK, some folks might enjoy these links:

• Elizabeth (Fuse #8) Bird interviews fantasy-clan matriarch Jane Yolen.
• Sam Riddleburger is on the nose about Lloyd Alexander's plots. See also Jason Fisher's response.
• Stephanie (Yarn Harlot) Pearl-McPhee's nephew Hank (he of the pointy "Star Wars fighting guys") and daughter Sam try to make Martha Stewart's cookies.

So far all the commenters on the question of comics versus picture books have been male. Hmmmm.

Don't Let the Robin Drive the Car

The first superhero comics collection I remember reading was a copy of Batman: From the '30s to the '70s, published in 1971. I think it was in the library of the college where my father taught, and I would have been in early elementary school. Naturally, this collection included a lot of stories about Batman's sidekick Robin, starting with the 1940 adventure in which young Dick Grayson began fighting crime and going through the 1969 tale that showed Dick leaving Wayne Manor for college.

I didn't buy or read comic books until a few years later, and then I focused on Marvel titles--Batman and Robin were trademarks of that company's rival, DC. But the last series that I bought on a monthly basis, the only one I still checked out during my own first years at college, was the Marv Wolfman/George Pérez Teen Titans. That group of young superheroes was led by none other than Dick Grayson, though toward the end of my run he'd taken a new costume and identity as Nightwing.

Robin, the Boy Wonder, was thus at the alpha and omega of my experience with superhero comics. So when I decided to look at that genre again this year, I figured I could do worse than investigate them through that character. He's been around in American culture for two-thirds of a century. Other young characters have now assisted Batman under the name Robin. And the whole batch have, it turns out, gone through some interesting changes and interpretations.

At first I imagined a week's worth of musings on Robin, but then I realized I had more. Enough to turn this into a comics blog, of which there are plenty already, and to turn off some children's-literature fans (one of whom I've already heard from this COMICS AND NON-COMICS fortnight).

So instead of bunching the Robin posts together and letting the Boy Wonder drive this blog, I'm inaugurating an almost-regular series I'll call "the weekly Robin."

You've been warned.

(The dramatic image above, anonymously drawn by Dick Sprang, comes from the cover of Batman magazine, issue #20, Dec 1943/Jan 1944.)

A Girl's Guide to the Superhero Life

NON-COMICS WEEK (and a day) at Oz and Ends comes to a close with a look at a superhero genre novel aimed at girls. Zoe Quinn's Caped 6th Grader series starts with Happy Birthday, Hero! I've already discussed two types of anachronisms in this book, but today I'm comparing this book's approach to the superhero life with that in similar novels about boys, such as William Boniface's The Hero Revealed.

Both books take place in a world of full of superheroes, with families passing down extraordinary powers. Kids collect comic books and other artifacts about grown-up heroes. (The Hero Revealed explores the marketing of such artifacts while Happy Birthday, Hero! has more fun at the mall: among the earring stores its protagonist visits are the Piercing Post, Hoop De-Doo's, Pierce-sonal Preference, The Stud Farm, and Lobe-and-Be-Holed.)

Both books have big, energetic illustrations, and Happy Birthday, Hero! also uses big type for sound effects, as in comics. I can't tell whether readers are meant to see a reference to straightening the Tower of Pisa as an allusion to Superman III, but clearly its readers are supposed to know the traditions of superhero comics.

When it comes to superheroing, Happy Birthday, Hero! puts a lot more emphasis on secrecy than The Hero Revealed. After Zoe hears that she's developing superpowers, she doesn't immediately try them out. (Think of "Will" in the critically lambasted Dark Is Rising movie, asking "Merriman" if he'll now be able to fly; a lot of fans of the book have criticized that moment in previews, but it's exactly what an American boy would do.)

Instead, Zoe wonders, "Is everything going to have to change?" The big drama for her is the secrecy of swearing to follow the superhero code, particularly keeping the secret from her mother. Overall, her view of superheroing emphasizes the emotional side:

But as far as I was concerned, the thing that made her [Lightning Girl] truly heroic was the fact that she never pretended she wasn't scared.

I don't think that concern shows up in any of the boy-superhero books.

In fact, while I criticized The Hero Revealed for putting only one token female on its superhero teams, I found Happy Birthday, Hero! to be even more colored by gender stereotypes. And by "colored," let me start by pointing out this is the pinkest book I've read in a long time. Beyond that:

• Zoe's first sign of trouble from her encroaching powers is when she can't get her ears pierced.
• On page 64, she uses her new powers to choose an outfit for school.
• Page 97 brings Zoe her first crime to thwart: a robbery in a jewelry store.

And here's the moment that shows how superpowers can be so embarrassing:

Feeling brave, I decided to try one of the cute gestures Emily's magazines were always recommending: I tilted my chin and gave my hair a little toss.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a superpowered turbo hair toss, and the sweeping motion of my flowing locks created a gust of wind that toppled the prop table.

By the end of the book, Zoe hasn't gone far in her superhero career; this is just the first in a series, and it's slim. But she has discovered that other girls made unauthorized alterations to a costume for a school play. Oh, the villainy!

Maybe those details sprang out at me more forcefully because I'm a former boy rather than a former girl, or because they stand out in the superhero genre, which has traditionally been dominated by a masculine sensibility. But I think this is probably an example of mass-market fiction playing off society's dominant attitudes rather than daring to challenge them.

Reader Response to Robin Removal—Really?

DC Comics’s decision to invite Batman fans to vote via 900-number calls on whether Jason Todd lived or died got a lot of attention within the comics industry, much of it unfavorable.

The fact that fans voted for Jason to die and DC was going through with it got attention outside the industry, particularly a 10 Nov 1988 New York Times article headlined “Holy Bomb Blast! The Real Robin Fights On!”

Reporter Georgia Dullea’s unfamiliarity with her subject surfaced in her repeated reference to Frank Miller’s portrayal of Batman as “The Black Knight.” For quotations, she relied on people within the comics industry.

Sylvia Lamar at the Forbidden Planet store explained fans’ preferences: “Dick Grayson they liked, but Jason Todd was not as popular.” Don Thompson of the Comic Buyer’s Guide criticized the telephone poll itself: “It smacks of the Roman arena, with thumbs up and thumbs down.”

Dullea dug up the requisite voices on either side of the Jason Todd debate. Here’s the pro-Robin statement:

“I voted 10 times to save Robin, and I’ve got the $5 phone bill to prove it,” said Robert Ingersoll, a 36-year-old assistant public defender in Cleveland. “If I had known the margin would be only 72 votes, I would have voted 73 more times.”

Bob Ingersoll wasn’t just any public defender who happened to like Robin. He was writing a column on legal issues in superhero stories for the Comic Buyer’s Guide. Eventually he got into scripting comics himself, and also cowrote the prose novel Captain America: Liberty’s Torch. A year ago, Cuyahoga County basically bought out Ingersoll’s contract to lower its budget. He’s active on cowriter Tony Isabella’s website, but hasn’t resumed his “The Law Is a Ass” column, even as a cranky blog like this one.

On the anti-Robin side was “Rick Schindler of White Plains, who voted to ‘waste’ the Boy Wonder,” but also suspected that Jason would come back from the dead. Is this the same Rick Schindler who wrote for HBO, TV Guide, and now Todayshow.com? If so, the Times reporter interviewed no one outside the popular-culture media.

Finding non-professional opinions of Jason Todd from the late 1980s isn’t easy since that was well before the web made everyone’s opinions available everywhere. Last week I quoted one letter published in Batman, #424, criticizing the character. For the Times comics editor Dennis O’Neil cited others that called Jason a “twerp,” a “wimp,” and a “vindictive, vengeful little brat.”

Other coverage of this controversy in such papers as the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and St. Petersburg Times used those same quotations, leading me to suspect they were written off the Times article, not additional reporting. Which leads to the question: what did comics readers from outside the industry say about Jason Todd’s death in 1988?

COMING UP: Two letters from young readers.

Polite Swearing in the Modern Style

While I was in the midst of the last PUNCTUATION WEEK, Dave Elzey offered some punctual thoughts of his own at Fomagrams. He addressed how to render graphic words graphically--or, rather, how to have comics characters curse in a way that makes their anger more apparent than their word choice. (Get Fuzzy here shows Satchel Pooch taking that to an extreme.)

At one point, prose writers substituted dashes and asterisks for just enough letters to hide offensive from a naive six-year-old. But in comics, which render speech more graphically than ordinary prose, artists found a more expressive approach, which Dave calls "substitute profanity."

There are two elements necessary to create the appropriate substitute profanity, length and symbol. Length is merely how many letter characters are being replaced in the original word with symbols. . . .

Now, as for symbols, the only proper ones available are “caps lock numbers,” those symbols you get when using the caps lock on the number keys. The exception is the exclamation point, a common feature above the 1 on modern computer keyboards that replaced the cent symbol. . . .

There are two reasons to avoid punctuation [including parentheses]. First, you want to reserve them to actually punctuate the profanity in question. Second, adding punctuation in the middle of a word only confuses the reader.

Similarly, Dave recommends against letting letters and numbers slip into such swear words. I don't know how he feels about other mathematical symbols, such as +. Are they closer to punctuation or to the non-letter symbols?

The modern computer keyboard, especially the Macintosh, provides several more options than the typewriter, such as §, £, ®, ∑, and ø. I particularly like the dagger used for footnotes when asterisks just won't do: †. Not only is it an unusual typographical symbol, but it conveys the anger often expressed by cursing.

Dave notes that not only did comics come up with this form of expression, but comics letterers have more options available to them.

As a final note, comic books have a wider set of characters to choose from because they employ symbols not found on the keyboard. The inward spiral, for example, or sometimes a simple smudge.

Comics creators also have the option of word balloons in the shapes of thunderclouds or icicles.

However, landmark comics creator Frank Miller chose to go outside that system recently. In his current magazine, All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, Miller has insisted that the profanity in his script be placed in the characters' word balloons, then blacked out.

But $%£#!, the blacking in the latest issue wasn't as powerful as the words, and they showed through. DC just had to recall its copies, and Newsarama reported:

As with “error” and “recall” issues of titles before..., the request to destroy copies had very minor--if any--effect on the book making it into the retail stream. While larger chains, and retailers who have close relationships with DC may have found it politically appropriate to destroy (or “disappear”) their copies..., nearly 200 copies have made their way to eBay, with low bids starting at $15.00, and currently, showing a high bid of $102.50.

For Robin fans, I should make clear that the Boy Wonder doesn't use any of that profanity. Not even Frank Miller's Robin.

An Unknown Comics Adventure in Oz

Last week as The Wiz was about to air on television, Mark Evanier unspooled his story about being hired to script an adaptation of the 1978 movie version for DC Comics.

It’s most interesting, like a lot of the stories on Evanier’s website, for the backstage look at how comics companies work. (Which is to say, barely.) There are also some nicely crafted lines:

• “Not far enough before the film's scheduled premiere, someone at or around DC Comics got the idea to publish a slick magazine which would be part comic book, part souvenir book for lovers of the movie. This was some time before anyone knew there wouldn't be a lot of lovers of that movie.”
• “I had to sign all sorts of non-disclosure agreements that I would not divulge what I saw to anyone and as I recall, they didn't specify any time limit. I mean, I was supposed to write all these authorized articles about what was in the movie and here I was signing vows that I would never in a million years divulge to anyone what was in the movie. So I may be violating those agreements right now.”
• “I forget what they were going to charge for it but it struck me as a bit too pricey. It also struck me as not my problem.”
• “By far, most of my time went into going up to Universal to see a more-complete version of the movie and then to see an even-more-complete version. I saw it three times but I never saw the final release cut. I felt that the film got better as the holes were filled in…which is not to say I thought it ever got to be really good. The merits it did have were (a) a few of the actors’ performances and (b) some truly dazzling dance numbers. And of course, it did dawn on me that our adaptation would contain neither.”

For the stories of which artist should work on this project, how the 1976 Copyright Act affected things, why no one has ever heard of this comic, and how its obscurity might have helped Evanier and artist Dan Spiegle’s careers, check out Evanier’s recollection.

Happy Holidays from Highlights

This week H-Net’s American Studies discussion site published Patrick Cox’s article “What's Wrong with Christmas in Highlights for Children?” While certainly not saying this was a Bad Thing, Cox noted a significant change in how the magazine has presented Christmas to young readers:

Santa Claus, arguably the most prominent figure in wondrous childhood, has been almost entirely absent from the pages of Highlights over the past 30 years. Santa used to appear multiple times in every December issue in stories and images, as did elves and flying reindeer, since the magazine was founded in 1946. Other Christmas-y pages in December Highlights issues of Chistmases past included short non-fiction pieces on, for example, the history of Christmas trees or Christmas celebrations in other countries, and short fiction about children at Christmas who typically learn valuable lessons about giving and kindness. Recurring characters The Timbertoes and The Bear Family celebrated christmas. Overt Christianity was also prominent in the early years of the magazine all year round and the December issues always included bible stories, sheet music of religious carols, and images of the nativity and angels.

Jesus and Santa both appear less and less frequently in Highlights beginning in the 1950’s. By the 1990’s, Highlights is beginning to look a lot less like Christmas. Santa and Jesus are both almost completely absent, as are the decorations, the bright colors, the piles of gift wrapped presents. They’re replaced by pleas to keep Christmas simple, emphasizing time with family and friends, giving to charities, and making presents by hand. Several pages are given to instructions on making homemade presents and homemade decorations. . . .

The children in Highlights are very often white, as I suspect most of their readers are, and main characters in stories and comics in the magazine are most often male, never queer, and pretty much always comfortably middle class. But at Christmas, their anti-consumerist pragmatism is surprisingly non-conformist.

But what should we expect from a magazine so un-American that it includes no advertising?

(Above: Goofus and Gallant do Christmas, courtesy of Envisioning the American Dream.)

“He needs someone like Dick Grayson”

The death of the second Jason Todd and retelling of how Dick Grayson became Robin led to a flurry of reader letters in 1989 discussing what those events had meant to Batman, and what Batman himself meant. Here’s a selection.

Steven Milunovich, Batman, #436:

Most of the world thinks of Batman and Robin as inseparable, yet the creators of the comics can’t make the two concepts compatible. It does seem inconsistent to have Batman the avenger trailed by a teenager in bright red and yellow. But from Robin’s inception until his departure in the early 1970’s the team was a tremendous success, inspiring many copies.

So what of the present rendition of Batman? When Batman becomes a crazed loner, the entire supporting cast suffers. Is there no room for a lighter side in a man driven to fight crime because of the murder of his parents?

Michael Leon, Batman, #440:

In Batman’s current state of mind, he needs someone like Dick Grayson to alleviate his anger and his melancholy. Batman losing Jason Todd can be likened to when Dick Grayson left. It was like losing your own son twice. Batman becomes an embittered loner without a companion. He needs someone to keep him under control.

Malcolm Bourne, Batman, #440:

[Bruce Wayne’s] lack of reaction to Jason’s death could destroy him. We all need to grieve, and a failure to do so is catastrophic, emotionally and psychologically, for the grieving person. Maybe Dick can heal the rift and, at the same time, help Bruce through this difficult time. But first Bruce must acknowledge these differences.

(Another letter from Bourne appeared in issue #442, guessing that a new character would provide help.)

John Brindley, Batman, #440:

I’m a counselor at Sky Ranch for Boys in South Dakota, a home for troubled boys. . . . Many could identify with Jason’s juvenile problems. There’s a popular consensus that they would like to see Dick Grayson return as Robin someday. For now the boys prefer Batman alone as they are, always haunted by memories and past mistakes, yet continually striving to find peace in their lives and someone to share their future with.

Other letters also suggested that Bruce and Dick team up more regularly, but only this one said Dick should return to the Robin costume.

In fact, that prospect left most vocal fans anxious, as expressed by Leif Vanderwall, Detective Comics, #605:

I heard that Dick Grayson was going to join Batman again (after “Year Three”) and possibly change his name from Nightwing back to Robin. I don’t mind Dick Grayson joining forces with his old mentor from time to time but I think he is too old to be Batman’s “little boy.” I think he’s good where he is right now, being Nightwing and being the leader of the Titans.

That letter was actually printed twice, the second time in Detective, #607, probably because Assistant Editors got their signals crossed as one took over from another. The editorial reply in the earlier issue was non-committal. The second told Vanderwall and the rest of the readership that “Dick Grayson will not change his name from Nightwing back to Robin to join Batman again. He thinks it’s good where he is right now, too.”

At the same time DC was reassuring Nightwing fans, it was also trying to keep some mystery alive. The house advertisement for the “A Lonely Place of Dying” storyline showed Dick Grayson as Nightwing holding the old Robin uniform and looking sad. The copy read:

Batman is destroying himself. Can Nightwing help? Will he?

Of course, everyone knew Dick Grayson would try to help because he’s, you know, Dick Grayson. But how far was he willing to go?

As I noted last week, the “Year Three” recounting of how Dick Grayson saw his parents murdered at the circus also introduced a four-year-old fan in the audience. Which leads to the last letter…

Christopher Scott, Batman, #440:

I really like the way “Batman: Year Three” is going. I can’t know this for sure, of course, but from where I sit, it looks like by the end of this 4-part tale we’ll be seeing young Timmy in the yellow cape at the big guy’s side. I hope I’m right. Batman has been through a lot and taking on a new partner might be good for him.

The editorial reply to that letter said it had “been censored due to Christopher’s almost spilling the beans.” But because of what issue #442’s letter column called “a production error,” that speculation ran unedited at the start of a new storyline titled “A Lonely Place of Dying.” The only detail Scott got wrong was being three issues too early.

COMING UP: Young Timmy in the yellow cape.