Going Online to Act Out Stereotypes?

From Jesse Singal’s interview with Ubisoft research engineer Nick Yee in the Boston Globe:

We start off by asking players what they thought men and women stereotypically prefer to do in these games, and...people, both men and women, strongly stereotype female players as preferring supportive roles in the game, that female players prefer to heal [rather than fight]....

We actually had access to “World of Warcraft”’s server data....We had thousands of players fill out surveys. We knew what their gender was in real life. We went and grabbed their data in “World of Warcraft,” and we found that that stereotype was false, that men and women actually heal about the same amount in “World of Warcraft.”

Where there was a finding was in the avatar gender. Female avatars heal more than male avatars, and the effect was entirely driven by gender-bending [playing a character of the opposite gender]. When men gender-bend, they play a female character, they heal more, and when women gender-bend, when they play a male character, they heal less. So, again, we have this notion of virtual worlds allowing us to transcend kind of our social categories and social norms in the real world. But what’s happening is that there’s a stereotype. It turns out to be false, but via play, we create this virtual world where women do appear to prefer to heal, where via play, this false stereotype becomes true.

Yee’s new book about videogames and virtual worlds is The Proteus Paradox.

A Charming Tik-Tok

This figurine is based on Tik-Tok in Return to Oz.

It was crafted by Alessio or Ale Buz, an Italian artist who works in polymer clay sculpture. It’s part of a small set of Oz figurines.

Alessio has molded similar figures of many other fantasy figures. His style seems to work particularly well with characters from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.

The Marathon Tradition Endures

I live about three blocks from the route of the Boston Marathon as the race winds through Boston’s suburbs toward the Back Bay. For many years every Marathon Day looked much like the photo above, with families lining both sides of Commonwealth Avenue to watch, cheer, and pass out cups of water or other replenishment.

Naturally, the kids clapping and holding out water would edge into the road, and every half hour or so a motorcycle cop would roll slowly along the gutter, herding everyone back. Early in the race people would wait for a break in the runners and then dash across to visit friends on the other side, sometimes getting stranded until the field thinned out again. Some parties brought multiple lawn chairs, campers, and spreads of food, either to eat or to sell to other spectators.

But that was before last year’s bombs.

Three days ago, we found that the whole of the race route through town had been marked off with orange plastic delineators, or “candlesticks” as a cousin told me the professionals call them. On the side of the street away from driveways, a cord had already been threaded through those plastic stakes. Clearly the public-safety officials were planning to keep everyone off the road.

Meanwhile, race organizers issued several strict warnings about this year’s event. No unauthorized runners. No running in costume. No march along the route by service people. No backpacks, coolers, or thick blanket rolls. All understandable regulations, but I feared the Marathon I enjoyed would disappear.

I’m pleased to say that even with cords strung on both sides of the road and signs warning that all coolers, backpacks, and other bags were subject to search, the atmosphere is much the same. Kids were still edging out into the road, just not as far. People still dashed from one side to the other, just not as often. There were plenty of lawn chairs, coolers, and unrolled blankets, as well as plenty of security officers. And at least one runner in a tutu.

Reworked Robins

This month DC unveiled its plans for the character of Dick Grayson after Forever Evil and Nightwing end. He’ll become a secret spy, out of contact with everyone but Bruce Wayne (and presumably not much in contact with him, either).

Of course, Agent Grayson will wear his initial in an emblem on his chest. These are still superhero comics, after all.

DC made that announcement with art of Dick looking remarkably like Tom Cruise in the first Mission: Impossible movie. Mikel Janin’s image will appear on the first issue of the new Grayson magazine, arriving this fall.

Grumpy Old Fan Tom Bondurant wrote:

DC has already undercut Dick’s grounding by fiddling with its overall superhero timeline [in the “New 52” continuity]. By pruning his Robin career (and the corresponding emotional attachment) dramatically, and possibly throwing out all of his Titans adventures, DC has left Dick with a set of skills and not a lot more. No wonder he’s turning to espionage.

DC had some professional spies in its previous continuities, some even created back in the 1950s when superhero stories had stalled out. But that’s an unclaimed area now, so it makes some sense to fill that narrative space with a character who brings his own following.

Only some sense, though. As fans immediately noted, the sight of Dick Grayson pointing a gun at the viewer on the cover of Grayson, #1, contradicts Batman’s anti-gun lessons; the fatal side of black-ops would make more sense for Jason Todd. And the surveillance-and-secrecy side would be a better fit for Tim Drake. Nevertheless, the plans have been established.

And remade. In January writer James Tynion IV revealed that he was working on Nightwing, #30, the last issue of the current volume of that magazine and (presumably) the transition to what comes next. But now the creative team on that issue will be the same who are working on Grayson: Tim Seeley and Tom King. Before previews and internet discussions, no one outside the publisher would have known anything about this. Now, of course, it’s a mini-scandal.

Bondurant also wrote that DC now “arguably has too many Robins.” As powerful as the story of a dead Robin has been, the company may be bringing all ex-Robins back. Peter J. Tomasi’s miniseries Robin Rises: Omega will grow out of Batman’s search for Damian. Meanwhile, Steve Snyder and his team are introducing a new roster of young assistants for Batman in Batman Eternal, including Blue Bird and Spoiler. Plus, Grant Morrison is working on a story crossing alternative universes. How long can that situation last?

What Will “On Your Left” Mean?

In the discussion of the political implications of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Greg Carpenter at Sequart found a key in the movie’s strong opening scene. Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are jogging around the reflecting pool in Washington, the former (having been injected with the super-soldier serum) much faster than the latter:

Each time Rogers approaches Wilson, he gives the same cautionary warning: “On your left.” They are the first words spoken in the new film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and they lay the groundwork for much of the political perspective of the film. While this Captain America may sneak up on you—you’ll find him “on your left.”

Not everyone caught that, as Alyssa Rosenberg shows in the Washington Post:

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” returns time and time again to the idea that the biggest issue in national security is who controls the apparatus, rather than whether we should use certain technologies or techniques at all.

To be sure, there’s an inherent tension between the superhero narrative, or any hero narrative that focuses on an individual or small group of individuals, and spread-out popular power. As a result, some critics have trouble noting the moments built into superhero films that celebrate the crowd: the scenes in the first two Spider-Man movies in which groups of ordinary New Yorkers stand up to villains when Spider-Man is in trouble, for example.

In Winter Soldier, the conflict ends with the spy agency’s (unspecified) secrets being dumped out onto the internet. The directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, noted that as they were filming Edward Snowden released some secret files from the National Security Agency with the same idea. Of course, Wikileaks and Bradley/Chelsea Manning had done something similar already.

Granted, heroic narratives aren’t good at exploring the actual challenges of broad-based decision-making. Jonathan Stroud’s original Bartimaeus trilogy gets to that at the end of the third volume. George Lucas’s Star Wars films and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series declare the superiority of democracy over dictatorship, but they show actual politicking as pretty feckless. L. Frank Baum’s Oz and other magical kingdoms tend to settle for benevolent dictatorships. But the larger the fictional universe, the more stories bottom-up authority allows.

In an article for Business Insider, Jeff Gomez and one-time Robin/Red Robin scripter Fabian Nicieza analyzed how developments in Winter Soldier open up possibilities for Marvel’s overarching movie narrative:

Feige faced a daunting creative challenge for his thriving film series: while Nick Fury and SHIELD served as the perfect impetus for uniting a disparate band of dysfunctional superheroes [in The Avengers], now the filmmakers were stuck with global icons like Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man effectively bowing to a secret American military organization. That had to end, but the choice of making Captain America cut the umbilical cord? Genius. . . .

The result is the fall of SHIELD, and the vast U.S. military-industrial complex no longer stands as the leash-holder to Captain America and his superhero allies. Steve Rogers becomes apolitical, while still representing the world’s perception of American selflessness, justice, and heroism dating back to World War II.

Already the Agents of SHIELD television show is reflecting the new situation (not that I’ve watched it since the pilot). We’ll see if the next set of Marvel moviemakers can fulfill that promise.

Captain America and the Threat of OIP Derangement Syndrome

As I noted yesterday, some right-wing media organizations responded to The Lego Movie with complaints that it was anti-business. (Others, to be sure, saw it as simply anti-government, and they were fine with that. Critics on the left saw it as about the danger to people of business and government intertwining, as they often warn. In fact, it’s about commercialism taking over entertainment.)

What about the other big superhero adventure of the spring, Captain America: The Winter Soldier? The directors of that film, Joe and Anthony Russo, said months ago that they were modeling it on the political thrillers of the 1970s, with a few over-the-top action sequences thrown in. They cast Robert Redford as a high official because his filmography includes Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. They even dressed him in a 1970s-style three-piece suit, and he still looks good.

Both Christian Toto at Breitbart on the right and Asawin Suebsaeng at Mother Jones on the left picked up on that anti-authority theme by saying the film wouldn’t be screened at the White House soon. Nor, they could have added on the same speculative grounds, in Congress, the FISA court, the Pentagon, or other pillars of the political center and the security establishment.

But John Nolte at the Breitbart site went off the deep end, calling the movie “a blatant $175 million ‘screw you’ to Barack Obama's surveillance state.” One might be concerned about Nolte watching a PG-13 movie without a parent since he doesn’t appear to remember anything earlier than six years ago. But his response is just a symptom of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

The big danger in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is that a government agency wants to launch worldwide preemptive strikes against what it sees as threats to America or democracy. Preemptive action was the core of the “Bush Doctrine,” which Nolte cheered on his old website, now left to drift into the aether.

The “surveillance state” that Nolte blames on President Obama was in fact built by the Bush-Cheney administration. Nolte really should know that because he’s written, for example, about the Washington Post’s coverage of the NSA’s PRISM program, which clearly stated that program was established in 2007. As soon as the Obama administration came into office in 2009, it started to reveal more about the programs it inherited and to put more limits on them.

The disclosures of Bradley/Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden show that there’s much more we the people have to know. Nolte offered notable praise for Glenn Greenwald for helping to share the Snowden files. Of course, that happened during the Obama administration.

Based on Nolte’s stated support for some of the most egregious Bush-Cheney policies, such as waterboarding, and his decision to become a right-wing media voice (at first pseudonymous, then openly) because he disliked opposition to the Iraq invasion, I can’t help but think that his position on security leaks would have been quite different under a right-wing President.

Likewise, if Captain America: The Winter Soldier had been released under an administration he supported, Nolte would have complained that it was Hollywood’s usual attack on anything good and conservative. That’s been his professional hobbyhorse for years.

In making the security state its major threat, Winter Soldier echoes a common theme of the American left—a theme the American right takes up only when it’s not in power.

TOMORROW: And does the movie really tackle that threat?

Some People Just Can’t Lego

When The Lego Movie came out this spring, it prompted debate about its political implications. Kyle Smith at the New York Post offered a round-up of different interpretations, including:

• Marxist (Vulture)
• anti-Marxist (Breitbart)
• anti-business (Fox Business News, a corporate cousin of the Post)
• pro-business (The Federalist)
• anti-consumerist (The Guardian)

The Economist noted that whatever its story might imply, “The film is also an hour-and-a-half-long commercial for costly toys made by a multinational corporation based in Denmark; a commercial, moreover, that people must pay to see.”

Almost alarmingly full of spectacle and movement, The Lego Movie offers us storytelling irony with sprinkles on top and let us eat it, too. It made fun of the clichés of “chosen one” plots, and it still showed the designated hero saving the day. It let us laugh at the notion of a made-up prophecy that must be true because it rhymes, and it let us believe wise words must be true because they come in the voice of Morgan Freeman. It offered a chance to laugh at cookie-cutter, feel-good pop culture, and it costarred Lego Batman.

The political “message” of the movie came in how its chief villain is Lord Business, who has also made himself President Business. Different critics emphasize different parts of his symbolic meaning, depending on how they feel about business or, at this historical moment, Presidents. In fact, he’s a plastic avatar of a suburban father who doesn’t have time to play with his son (though he does have time to play with his Legos). “Business” here has no economic or political import; it’s just what keeps Dad in the office.

The end of the movie assures us that it’s crucial to express yourself fully and flexibly, and spend time with your family, as long as you do that with lots of Legos. Lots and lots of Legos.

(I have to acknowledge here that I hardly ever played with Legos at home. We were a Tinkertoy family.)

Oz on Stage as “a full-on visual assault”

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the MGM Wizard of Oz has reached Clearwater, Florida, and the Tampa Bay Times’s critic Stephanie Hayes reviewed it thusly:

Since The Wizard of Oz story has been around more than 100 years, and on screen since 1939, everyone has been conditioned to accept that flying monkeys and yellow brick roads and emerald palaces and Ambien poppy fields and smallish people who dance in curly shoes and eat lollipops are totally regular. But they're not! This stuff is wonderfully weird even today and can withstand a modern polish.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Jeremy Sams' adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for the stage makes good use of the trippy, Cirque du Soleil elements of the narrative. This is a full-on visual assault designed by Robert Jones, in a good way, with pyrotechnics, animation, moving parts, rainbows, lights and glitter — so much glitter.

There’s also a local production of The Wiz.

What Captain America Missed Around the World

At one point in the Avengers movie, Captain America is excited to finally recognize one of the pop-culture references people are throwing around: “Flying Monkeys.”

You see, Captain America was trapped in ice at the end of World War 2 and thawed out only recently. When I was a lad, “only recently” meant the early 1960s, which was no longer that recent, but the basic conceit was established.

The new movie series allowed the corporate storytellers to move the date of Cap’s thawing up to the twenty-first century. Chris Evans plays him as a refugee from the 1940s trying to keep up with modern times. He knows the MGM Wizard of Oz but not much since.

The new Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie carries on that theme by showing how Cap keeps a to-look-up list consists of topics he’s missed and needs to look into. These include I Love Lucy, the Moon landing, the Berlin Wall’s rise and fall, and someone named Steve Jobs.

However, As Comics Alliance reported, a Reddit user collected screenshots from different versions of Captain America: The Winter Soldier from around the world, showing that Marvel/Disney tailored the hero’s to-look-up list for different audiences.

For Russian audiences what’s self-evidently important about the last seventy years are Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Vysotskiy, the USSR breakup, and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.

For South Koreans, it’s Dance Dance Revolution, Ji-Sung Park, Old Boy, and the 2002 World Cup in soccer.

For Mexicans, it’s the Chilean miners, Maradona’s “hand of God,” Shakira, and Neri Vela.

And so on. It would make an interesting social-studies lesson for teams to identify what all those variant items are, and why they’re as important to other culture as I Love Lucy is to ours. Every nation has a different perspective on space, it appears, and almost every nation but the US is mad about soccer.

Reacting to “Kids React to…”

I grew up with dial telephones. The family of my best friend in first grade had a “princess” phone with a smaller dial in the handset, but that was as exotic as home phones got. Touchtone phones were confined to offices.

In fact, I grew up in a town that once had an exchange named “Woodland,” so a lot of the local numbers I dialed started 969- or 965-. I spent many seconds of my school years waiting for the dial to rotate almost the whole way back—and I’m never getting those seconds back.

Since dial telephones were already established when I was a kid, they seem indeterminably old to me. Yes, my mother had stories about something called a “party line,” which was clearly ancient, but I can easily accept dial telephones as historic.

I could therefore enjoy the “Kids React to Rotary Phones” video easily. Though these twenty-first-century kids are baffled by the old technology, they’re also smart and lively and often able to figure out the implications of that device once the video makers explain it to their incredulous ears.

The kids display those same qualities in “Kids React to Walkmans”, but there’s a sharper edge for me. Because I remember when the Walkman was new. And cool. And, like all widely used new technology, a cause for tsk-tsking social concerns. Yes, I understand that they’ve long been superseded by, well, phones. But they’re not really old, are they?

Old Teen Titans for Old Fans

DC Comics made news a couple of weeks back by announcing the end of its Teen Titans series, and then last week by announcing the start of a new Teen Titans series. As to what was new—not that much. The team has had a small membership change, but nothing more significant than what happens regularly in superhero team stories.

Newsarama asked new writer Will Pfeifer, “As you start with a new #1 issue, what are your thoughts about relaunching the title? This team doesn't look that different from the last one — why the relaunch and new #1?”

To which the correct answer would be, “Why are you asking me? You know very well how editorially driven DC Comics is these days. You know that writers don’t decide on issue numbering. You know that for decades a #1 issue has been a way to sell extra copies and draw new attention to a title.”

But Pfeifer offers a game try by saying, “…that #1 lets the reader know that this isn’t just a continuation of the other series. Yes, the Titans are the same heroes, and no, we’re not going to kick things off with a year of origin stories, but we are heading in a new direction and exploring some new themes.”

Of course, he can’t say much about those new things because adventure comics depend on a series of surprises. And because they’re probably no different from the “new direction” at the end of any storyline and any writer’s tenure. One idea Pfeifer repeats a lot in this interview is that these Titans as teenagers are prone to overenthusiasm and mistakes. Will that resonate with teen readers and boost sales?

Former DC editor Janelle Asselin doesn’t think DC is even trying for that new audience. She unloaded on the cover for the new #1 issue, starting with how the image focuses one’s eyes on Wonder Girl’s breasts:

The problem is not that she's a teen girl with large breasts, because those certainly exist. The main problem is that this is not the natural chest of a large-breasted woman. Those are implants. On a teenaged superheroine. Natural breasts don't have that round shape (sorry, boys). . . .

A secondary problem is that no girl with breasts that large is going to wear a strapless top for anything, much less a career that involves a lot of physical activity. . . . we're one bounce away from a nipslip. On a teenager. In case you forgot that entirely relevant point.

Asselin also finds the cover to be lacking in visual coherence and perspective, full of distracting visual details from the paper airplane in the sky to the artist’s neon signature, and lacking the exciting action of previous Titans covers.

But the real lost opportunity in this relaunch, Asselin argues, is that DC’s aiming for an old audience instead of a new one.

You know who loves Teen Titans? People who enjoyed the early 2000s Teen Titans animated show, many of whom are female and many of whom are teenagers or young 20-somethings today. Market research could and does back this up. . . . Say a quarter of those fans actually tried a Teen Titans comic aimed at their demographic—you’re going to have a significantly higher number than the 26,000 copies Teen Titans is estimated to have sold in March. . . .

Virtually all of DC’s New 52 books appear to be aimed at the exact same demographic: Males 18-39. And this cover is made for that demographic. It shows that, once again, DC is relaunching a book with no thought to targeting wider demographics or a new audience. This is not a cover you run if you’re trying to appeal to teenagers, and it’s especially not going to appeal to teen girls.

That said, in one way DC is clearly pulling back from its ’90s-comics-inspired “New 52” revision and trying to appeal to the Titans’ TV audience: Gar Logan as Beast Boy is once again green and elfin, rather than red and badass.

Getting the Message on OIP Derangement Syndrome

This week’s study in OIP Derangement Syndrome is Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, one of three members of Congress running for the Republican nomination for that state’s Senate seat.

As Talking Points Memo reported, Kingston’s campaign released an ad featuring a Barack Obama impersonator supposedly leaving a voicemail for Kingston saying he doesn’t want the man in the Senate.

And here I thought we learned from Clint Eastwood in 2012 that having angry conversations with a wholly imaginary “President Obama” simply makes one look like a crazy person.

But the really crazy part is that in this Senate race Kingston is being attacked from the right.

Where Is Ukraine? My Kraine Was Here Just a Minute Ago.

Captcha and similar programs are designed to make commenters prove that they’re real people by interpreting type that’s hard for robots to read.

For a long time I’ve wished there was a similar service for discussions of events around the world, or US foreign policy toward particular countries. A person would need to locate the area under discussion on a map of the world with no labels. If you couldn’t identify Nigeria, or Kuwait, or Venezuela, you could still post your opinion, but that result would also appear so other people could judge how well founded your opinion was.

This week the Washington Post reported on a survey of Americans’ attitudes toward the difficult situation in Ukraine, correlated with their ability to locate Ukraine on a map. The findings:

…the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level.

Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.

There is a logical connection between believing that Ukraine is, say, on the border of Germany and believing that its stability is of great importance to the western alliance. But the first of those beliefs has no factual basis. And that lets us judge how well founded the second opinion is.

In fact, the map above shows a lot of people misplacing Ukraine on Eurasia moved it far to the east, indicating that more than a decade of looking at maps of Afghanistan and its neighbors has not actually sunk in.

Life in California

From novelist Mona Simpson’s essay in last Sunday’s New York Times:

Once, my mother had sent me to the landlord (who, this being Los Angeles, was the actor who’d played the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz”) to ask for an extension on our rent. I was a clean-looking high school girl; we thought he’d hesitate to turn me out onto the streets. The landlord’s wife opened the door wearing a floor-length silk housecoat. The aged Tin Man sat in an old robe at the kitchen counter. She asked me how I was doing in school. “Good,” I answered. “Well, that’s wonderful.” she said. “Just wonderful.”

Simpson’s parents were also the parents of Steve Jobs, whom they gave up for adoption before marrying. Thus, we can go from Jack Haley to Steve Jobs in only three moves.

Mickey Rooney in Oz

Mickey Rooney had the rare distinction of playing two roles in prominent dramatic adaptations of the Oz books.

In 1974 Rooney provided the voice of the Scarecrow in Journey Back to Oz, an animated feature based loosely on L. Frank Baum’s first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, with Dorothy thrown in. Dorothy’s voice was recorded by a young Liza Minnelli, daughter of one of Rooney’s frequent costars at MGM.

In 1998-99 Rooney played the Wizard in an arena-stage adaptation of the MGM Wizard of Oz, with the most prominent venue being Madison Square Garden in New York. His costars included Eartha Kitt as the Wicked Witch and Jessica Grove as Dorothy. Visually the older Rooney was a good match for W. W. Denslow’s drawings, but of course audiences wanted to see a Wizard who looked like Frank Kramer.

In the article announcing that production’s arrival in New York, Playbill magazine reported this anecdote:

MSG spokesperson Geoff Cohen relayed an amusing Rooney incident that occurred while the tour was in Chicago: “When Mickey takes off in the balloon at the end of the show, he’s in the basket, which is constructed with cables attached to the rim. Two guys on the floor hold the ropes to keep him from taking off. So Mickey’s supposed to lean forward and wave goodbye to everyone, and he says ‘I really don't know how this thing works’ and ‘You’re spoiling my exit!’ But this time, one of the floor guys held on to the ropes too long, so the basket flipped over, and Mickey was hanging upside down, holding onto the railing, twelve feet above the ground. It was a dangerous situation, but what did he do? Not only was he as cool as you could ask for a person to be, he looked up at the audience and said, ‘I guess I’m not leaving quite yet... You see I really don’t know how this thing works!’”

At the time Rooney was seventy-seven years old.

Mickey Rooney and The Black Stallion

The death of Mickey Rooney offers the opportunity to once again recommend The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard’s shining example of how to adapt a potboiler novel into a luminous film.

Rooney (then in his late fifties) played grizzled horse trainer Henry Dailey, and he was a big part of making Walter Farley’s formulaic horse-racing plot feel real. He could overact like no one else, especially in movies for kids. (Check out Pete’s Dragon from two years before and Odyssey of the Pacific from three years after.) But when Ballard asked Rooney to provide an understated, naturalistic performance, he did a terrific job.

As Bruce Coville noted on Facebook, The Black Stallion also offers a bookend with one of Rooney’s best films from his MGM stardom, in National Velvet. A still from the earlier film even appears in the later as a photo from his character’s past.

In the following years Rooney reprised the role as Dailey in a TV show, and his later filmography is dotted with other, lesser “Stallion” films. He needed to work, and he was fine with letting projects sag into formula if he got work. But when pushed, there was nothing Mickey Rooney couldn’t do.

Kyle Higgins’s Two Dick Graysons

In this recent interview with Newsrama, Kyle Higgins discussed the challenge of writing the character of Dick Grayson in two storylines.

One was the “in continuity” Nightwing title (about to be concluded, with a new magazine called Grayson coming this fall). The other was the possible-future, non-continuity, digital-first Batman Beyond, which grew out of DC’s 1990s TV cartoons.

Higgins replied:

But I differentiate between the two Dick Graysons. You know, the whole DC animated universe is a favorite of mine, and when I write Dick Grayson in Batman Beyond, I hear Loren Lester’s voice. But when I write him in the regular DC continuity, I don’t.

Lester was the voice actor who performed the role of Dick Grayson in Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995) and The New Batman Adventures (1997-1999).

That intrigued me, so I went looking and found that last year Higgins expanded on that topic to Comicosity as he started to write Batman Beyond:

They are completely separate people to me. The reason why is that the animated series version of Dick Grayson was always very different than the comic version of Nightwing. Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel’s stuff that I grew up on was definitely a bit lighter and quippier than the animated series version was. The animated series’ interpretation was a lot more brooding, a lot more “Batman.” That worked really well because you were transitioning from a light, jovial Robin to a few years later where Dick Grayson is a bit hardened. Loren Lester played the character a lot more even keel and darker — almost evolving into Batman. The comics went the other way with that.

Whenever I write Nightwing in the New 52, I’m writing him in a lot of ways closer to Loren’s portrayal of Robin in the animated series. Whereas in writing Dick Grayson in the Beyond book, I’m deliberately writing him more in line with Loren’s portrayal of Nightwing, if that makes sense. I try not to think about it too much, but when I write the New 52 Nightwing, I don’t always hear Loren’s voice for the character. When I write Dick Grayson for Batman Beyond, however, not a line goes on that page that Loren’s voice hasn’t influenced.

In Higgins’s Batman Beyond story, a middle-aged Dick Grayson takes over the role of mentor for Terry McGinnis, the latest teen-aged protégé to have friction with Bruce Wayne. Higgins said:

One of the things I find so interesting about Dick Grayson in this era and at this age is that Dick has already gone through a lot of the experiences that Terry is now going through—having a fallout with Bruce, working to get out from under Bruce’s shadow. The thing that is often very interesting to me is that while Bruce could always give crime-fighting advice to Terry, he couldn’t give Terry the advice of what it’s like working with Bruce. So now someone like Dick can actually empathize with Terry as to what he’s gone through.

And from a personality standpoint, even though Dick Grayson is a little more hardened over the years now, he still is a character who enjoyed what he did. His persona lends itself toward being a little more lighthearted, with a few more quips. He’s a bit looser than someone like Bruce is. That is very similar to how Terry operates. Terry has gotten more serious as the show and the book progressed, but at his core, he’s still a late teenager.

Batman Beyond, digital #16, is Higgins’s single-issue (or half-issue in print) story about Dick and Barbara Gordon talking out their relationship in that future. In the main DC universes, their on-and-off relationship has been fraught, but that’s nothing compared to the DC Animated Universe. In that continuity Barbara once had a romantic relationship with Bruce before marrying Sam Young, eventually Gotham’s District Attorney. Meanwhile, this Dick Grayson doesn’t seem to have any equivalent of Koriand‘r (Starfire) or his other girlfriends to distract him from pining over Barbara.

Whatever It Is, They’re Against It

This week Quinnipiac University released one of its regular polls of Americans’ views on political issues. As most people would expect, this survey showed a stark partisan divide on most issues.

Among the Republicans surveyed, 74% disapprove of the way President Barack Obama is “handling the situation with Russia and Ukraine.” Of course, since 93% of them disapprove of how he’s generally doing the job of President, Republicans actually think that’s one of the better aspects of the current administration.

Sixty percent of all Republicans think the President is not being “tough enough” on Russia. Yet the same group is almost evenly split on whether it’s more important for the US “to take a firm stand” (47%) or “not get too involved” (42%). And 84% of Republicans, a slightly higher portion than of Americans overall, are “very” or “somewhat concerned” that “the current situation in Ukraine will develop into a larger regional conflict that could lead to the U.S. military getting involved.”

How can the US be tougher, take a firm stand, but not get too involved and definitely not end up in a larger military conflict? That dilemma should puzzle anyone. The survey found 69% of Republicans agreeing on a measure: “imposing economic sanctions on Russia for its actions involving Ukraine.” That’s the approach that President Obama is taking, but of course 74% of those Republicans disapprove of how he’s doing that. The survey didn’t ask about any stronger measures, probably because no one—even in the Republican Party—has come up with any to advocate in a concerted way.

Sixty percent of Republicans agree that “inaction on the part of the administration when chemical weapons were used in Syria conveyed weakness to President Vladimir Putin thus emboldening him in Ukraine.” Of course, Republicans and many of their representatives in Congress did a sudden turnaround back in August 2013 and disapproved when President Obama proposed military action against Syria.

To be fair, President Obama isn’t the only thing that Republicans are at odds with themselves on. A clear majority—58%—disapprove of how the Republicans in Congress are handling their job.

“Book on the Charles” in Belmont through 17 May

The Belmont Galley of Art is featuring an exhibit of work by local children’s-book illustrator for the local children’s-book publisher Charlesbridge.

The Boston Globe reports:

“Books on the Charles – 25 years of Charlesbridge Picture Book Illustrators,” which [Rebecca] Richards cocurated along with Watertown artist Leslie Evans, celebrates 15 New England-based picture book artists who have created art for Charlesbridge Books, a children’s book publisher located in Watertown.

“I’ve always wanted to showcase original works from children’s books in a gallery setting, so people could admire the work for the fine art that it is,” Richards said. “I think this exhibit brings back that sense of fun and wonder we had as children visiting a world of imagination created by picture book illustrators.”

Among the artists featured are Alan Witschonke of Natick and Wayne Geehan of Acton. There will be an artists’ reception and book-signing on the afternoon of 13 April, and the exhibit will be up through 17 May.