“Let’s blow their little minds.”

From Michael Chabon’s keynote speech at the 2004 Eisner Awards, about what comics for kids should be:

Let’s blow their little minds. A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.

Of course, it helps if those little minds are twelve years old.

Full text of Chabon’s speech at The Comics Cube.

Chabon Feeling Torn on Twain

At The Atlantic, novelist Michael Chabon clocks in on the new, worst-epithets-free edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As he notes, he’s criticized that volume for all the applaudable reasons.

Yet when reading Twain aloud to his own kids, Chabon found himself changing the text just like Prof. Alan Gribben:

Reading Tom Sawyer occupied the entire summer, and during that time I don't remember wrestling at all with the question of what to say, out loud, with my actual lips and tongue, when my eyes arrived at that strange little word. A cursory search of Google Books suggests that it makes a total of only 10 appearances in the entire book, which is, after all, not told by a backcountry boy in his own dialect but narrated, with a great deal of mock-decorum, in the third person. Ten is probably fairly close to the number of times that I have said "nigger" in my life, never once without some kind of ironizing or sterilizing quotation marks of tone fitted carefully around it, and, somewhat humiliatingly given the choice made by Professor Gribben of Auburn, which I heartily and firmly, piling on, condemn for its cowardice, mealy-mouthedness, and all-consuming fallaciousness, I recall that in those fleeting spots where I encountered the word I would substitute, without missing a beat or losing any literal meaning, "slave." It was no big thing. The kids had no idea that a switcheroo had been run on them.

But then comes Huckleberry Finn, because the kids want to hear more about those characters (and Tom Sawyer Abroad is, let’s face it, no substitute).

Chabon faced this awkward situation in a most comfortable setting: with his own kids well before their teens, in a bohemian-bourgeois coastal bedroom, without listeners who might be personally affected by the epithets. (Okay, there’s at least one more comfortable setting to consider the matter: my own, right now, with no big-eyed kids looking up at me and wondering why I haven’t started reading.)

Would the Chabon family stick with Huck Finn as Twain depicted him? Or would they find, like Prof. Gribben, some open compromise with the work? Read the rest of Chabon’s essay for the resolution they found. But don’t miss:

"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."

The NewSouth edition of Twain has already dealt with that issue.

Chabon’s essay reminded me of a story I heard about fifteen years ago at a PEN New England forum from an author whose name I’ve tried and failed to recall. Her mother was Native American, her father European-American, and one of her favorite bedtime readalouds was Peter Pan. Her father insisted that she not read that book on her own; she had to wait until he could read it aloud—the book was that special.

Only after this author had grown did she realize that her father was silently editing J. M. Barrie’s passages about the Indians to sand down the offensive stereotypes.

(Photo above courtesy of Judy Baxter, via Flicker under a Creative Commons license.)

The Fantasies of Asperger Fiction

Among Oz readers and in other fantasy fandoms, I've met readers who acknowledge having some of the traits of Asperger syndrome, or even formal diagnoses of it. Indeed, I suspect that some fantasy literature might even hold special appeal to people with those conditions.

To begin with, fantasy literature involves figuring out how an unusual world or hidden aspect of this world works, often as an outsider. Many series end in societies that welcome people of diverse types, as in the Emerald City under Princess Ozma. Both qualities might appeal to smart readers who've found that they think differently from most of the people around them.

Another possible attraction of fantasy series is their sprawling level of detail: books, characters, locales, fictional histories, and adaptations into other media--all for a highly detail-oriented person to enjoy mastering. If those universes weren't so sprawling, they might be less appealing.

As much as fantasy novels can appeal to people with Asperger syndrome, I haven't been pleased with how the ones I've read actually portray the condition. We don't fully understand Asperger's, and fantasy lets authors explore such mysteries by connecting them to otherworldly forces and dimensions. Unfortunately, that approach risks obscuring the fact that autism/Asperger's is a way of being human in this world.

Diane Duane's A Wizard Alone brings on a new "young wizard" named Darryl McAllister, who's been diagnosed as autistic. Kit, one of the protagonists from So You Want to Be a Wizard, sets out to help him.

However, Darryl's autism is atypical: he suddenly developed the condition at age eight. And the resolution of his story is (***SPOILER***) even more atypical. Magical events allow Darryl simply to "ditch" his autism and recover fully, to the surprise of his parents and teachers. Plus, he gets to stay magical.

Thor Wignutt in Summerland has no formal diagnosis, but I immediately thought of "Aspie" kids when I read Michael Chabon's description of the character. Thor first appears speaking and acting like an android, a sign of how out of place he feels. He's one of the three children who travel to a fantasy dimension, but we never get into his head the way we do with the other two.

Eventually it turns out (***SPOILER***) that Thor is a changeling, which both explains his condition and leads to him making his home in that other place. (It's actually occurred to a number of people that autism might be the root of myths about changelings.)

One last possible example: some parents of children with Asperger's have interpreted Charles Wallace Murray in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, and perhaps even Meg Murray herself, as fitting along the autism spectrum. Again, Madeleine L'Engle portrayed Charles Wallace's unusual behavior as connected to larger forces in the universe.

The first two of these fantasy novels treat the autistic characters' conditions--whether explicitly stated as on the spectrum or not--as problems to be solved rather than as conditions of life for some people. All hint that the root of the characters' difficulties, and any remedies, come from out of this world. Does modern fantasy literature treat other chronic conditions the same way?

No Escape

One of the major themes in Michael Chabon's sprawling Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is how most early American comic-book creators didn't control the copyrights of the characters and stories they created, and thus never made big money.

Like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (described in Marc Tyler Nobleman's Boys of Steel), Chabon's fictional Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay co-create a popular comic-book superhero. But their Escapist never wins them royalties, a big share of the radio and movie revenue, or job security. 

(The novel has a lot more going on than that, including flight from the Third Reich, Greenwich Village bohemianism, stage magic and escape acts, closeted homosexuality, WW2, the Empire State Building, and Levittown. We even see Chabon's interest in polar regions, which resurfaces in Summerland and The Yiddish Policeman's Union.)

The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay became so popular in comic-book circles that it inspired its own sequels in comics form. One set of follow-up consists of the comic-book adventures of the Escapist as supposedly told by Kavalier and Clay. I haven't read those books, and note only that they show the comics world's unabashed happiness with adaptations and spin-offs of other people's work, an enterprise that the world of literary fiction tends to look down on (unless, of course, it's an exercise in postmodernism).

Another Kavalier and Clay comics spin-off was written by ace scripter Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by a team of top artists, primarily Steve Rolston, Philip Bond, Jason Shawn Alexander, and Eduardo Barreto. It shows three young people setting out to update the character of the Escapist for the 21st century, eventually losing the rights to a corporation subtly named Omnigrip. Chabon added a short story about a meeting between Clay and a young version of Vaughan outside a comics convention in the 1970s. All that material has been collected into a single volume called The Escapists.

Given the copyright theme of both the original novel and that Escapists follow-up, I was struck by this notice in the back of the latter book: "Introduction, text, and illustrations © 2007 Michael Chabon."

What American Fantasies Say about American Indians

Yesterday I described how three American fantasy novels published over the last fifteen years have, in somewhat different ways, linked Native Americans and magical races. Those books are:

• City of Light, City of Dark, by Avi and Brian Floca
  
• Summerland, by Michael Chabon
• Twilight and its sequels, by Stephenie Meyer

The latter two books include young Americans of indigenous descent among their secondary protagonists. (The first includes a young Latino character as a primary protagonist, and we can discuss how much indigenous ancestry is part of the Latin American heritage.)

Naturally, since those books are fantasies, the Native American characters are caught up in magical experiences along with those of European or other ancestries. However, it strikes me as notable that these books don't just link individuals to secret knowledge, powers, or experience. They link entire groups.

The Quileute in Twilight have made a pact with neighboring vampires, and many of them turn out to be werewolves. The mythical Kurbs in City of Light, City of Dark have, as a whole, sold Manhattan to European settlers. Summerland includes an individual young protagonist of Salish descent, but in this respect I'm thinking of the Indian-like ferrishers, an entire race of magical little people.

Furthermore, while all fantasies have to be governed by rules, these books seem to go further than most in presenting their conflicts as based on age-old agreements or treaties. The Kurbs require a yearly tribute. Summerland involves contracts around baseball games. In Twilight, as I wrote above, there's a "treaty" between the Quileute and the vampires. Evidently, the thought on Native Americans brings up the thought of such age-old contracts.

Incorporating Indian characters or traditions helps to establish a fantasy as American rather than stuck within those dominant British and other European traditions; Chabon has spoken explicitly about that goal in writing Summerland, which also includes the heroes of traditional American folklore (and fakelore), as well as a whole lot more.

In that regard, I think Native American supernatural traditions are as ripe for picking as those from other cultures. However, authors have to be aware that their readers, unfamiliar with the nuances of other cultures, might not be able to distinguish fictional traditions from real ones, or entertaining stories from sacred ones.

Most problematic to me is how these depictions of Native Americans as, in different ways, linked to the supernatural might color readers' impressions of today's Native Americans. Do American Indians really have ancient connections to magic (like Meyer's Quileute)? Are they, despite historical disfranchisement and poverty, secretly powerful and demanding (like Avi's Kurbs)? In such stories, do Native Americans end up seeming as real as the other human characters, or do they come across as a set of fairy-tale creatures (like Chabon's ferrishers)?

Native Americans in Some Recent American Fantasies

City of Light, City of Dark is a hybrid of middle-grade novel and middle-grade comic with words by Avi and art by Brian Floca. Published by Richard Jackson/Orchard in 1993, it was probably a few years ahead of the market. (Compare how the current cover art at left is divided into panels while the first edition's cover offered no hint of the comics form to be found inside.)

Summerland by Michael Chabon, published in 2002, is a doorstop children's fantasy that combines baseball, dirigibles, interdimensional travel, changelings, and a mephistophelean trickster legend into a big stew (which could have been simmered down a bit more).

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is the novel that started the current boiling-hot series for teens, about vampires and the girls who love them too much. I haven't read it, so I'm going by what Debbie Reese has had to say.

What do these three disparate fantasies for young readers have in common? They all in different ways portray Native American nations as connected to ancient, magical races, knowledge, and/or power.

City of Light, City of Dark's prologue describes creatures named "Kurbs," who

owned an Island as well as the sky above it. . . . Years ago, when People first came to the Kurbs' Island, they wanted to build themselves a City there. First, however, they had to ask permission of the Kurbs.

Since the island is obviously Manhattan, that puts the the Kurbs in the place of the Manahatta group of Lenape who made the famous deal with Peter Minuit in 1626. Except that the Kurbs have their own dimension and remain powerful enough to demand a yearly tribute.

Summerland alludes or makes use of Native American traditions in at least four different ways. The main villain is the trickster Coyote in Southwestern Native American (and Norse) myths, and other supernatural characters come from Native American legends.

Secondary protagonist Jennifer T. Rideout and her family are Salish Indians. Yet Jennifer seems to derive much of her non-baseball-related knowledge from an ersatz Indian source, as Michael Chabon told Salon:

There's this bit about this defunct quasi-Boy Scout organization called the Braves of the Wa-He-Ta. There's this official tribe handbook that Jennifer T. is given, and it comes in handy. . . . Even though it was written by a guy named Irving Posner in Pittsburgh in 1926 or whatever.

Obviously, Chabon is here playing with how mainstream American culture has occasionally claimed the value or "authenticity" of indigenous traditions without necessarily reflecting those traditions.

Summerland also introduces a race called ferishers, which is an old European term for fairies. They're small, magical, ancient, and demanding--like those fairies. But the text also links them to the original inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. They're described on Wikipedia as "small Indian looking people," and at Baseball Almanac as the "small American Indian-like ferishers." Reviewer Stephen E. Abbott says the ferishers live in "an alternate dimension governed by Native American mythology and the rules and regs of baseball," though that understates the elements of other mythologies in this smorgasbord.

Finally, Twilight includes characters from the Quileute people of Washington. In this fictional world, many of the Quileute, including secondary protagonist Jacob, are werewolves, and they've made an uneasy truce with nearby vampires.

I suspect folks might be able to offer other examples of recent American fantasy stories linking Native American groups and the magical world.

TOMORROW: Thoughts on the meanings of this pattern.

A Guy Who Really Knows Where His Towel Is

The day after Oz and Ends's weekly Robin segment entered upon the tough question of superhero garments, the 10 March issue of The New Yorker appeared, bearing novelist Michael Chabon's reflections on the same topic. He even makes one of the same points I did: "Robin’s gaudy uniform hints at the murder of his circus-acrobat parents." So I can't resist the urge to assert some primacy by commenting on Chabon's remarks.

He begins by recalling a difficult moment in his religious-school lessons in "Jewish Ethics":

The one time I felt my soul to be in danger was the Sunday Mr. Spector raised the ethical problem of escapism, particularly as it was experienced in the form of comic books. That day, we started off with a fine story about a boy who loved Superman so much that he tied a red towel around his neck, climbed up to the roof of his house, and, with a cry of “Up, up, and away,” leaped to his death. There was known to have been such a boy, Mr. Spector informed us--at least one verifiable boy, so enraptured and so betrayed by the false dream of Superman that it killed him.

This story made a brief appearance in Frederic Wertham's influential 1954 anti-comic book manifesto, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham summarized (without identifying details) an article that Time had run on 22 Jan 1951: "I Almost Did Fly." According to the news magazine, however, the caped hero who tempted six-year-old Dickie Bonham to his doom was not Superman but Mighty Mouse. That mouse had appeared in animated cartoons before entering comic books, but neither the magazine nor the doctor dared to suggest to Americans that movies were inherently harmful.

Chabon's main point is:

like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, an impossible object. It cannot exist.

Exhibit A in his argument is folks who attend comic-book conventions in cosplay mode. Even fans who dress up successfully can't replicate the eye-popping perfection of illustrations, and it's best to stay away from the other end of the cosplay spectrum. (What did I just tell you?)

But Chabon stumbles when, seeking to arrive at the skin-tight unitard or even the naked muscular form as the essence of superhero costuming, he tries to dismiss the cape by dropping one anomalous, self-parodying example:

Capes have been an object of scorn among discerning superheroes at least since 1974, when Captain America, having abandoned his old career in protest over Watergate, briefly took on the nom de guerre Nomad, dressed himself in a piratical ensemble of midnight blue and gold, and brought his first exploit as a stateless hero to an inglorious end by tripping over his own flowing cloak.

Captain America had no experience dealing with a cape, of course. If Chabon wanted a fair consideration of what "discerning superheroes" think of capes, he should have asked one who wears the garment what the essence of a hero's costume is.

In fact, even though not all superheroes wear capes, the garment is so closely associated with them that in much of the superhero universe cops and cynics use "capes" as a term for all costumed heroes. In our world, Dickie Bonham certainly understood where superpowers could be found. Even Chabon's final anecdote involves a towel tied around the neck at one end.

The very fact that capes make no sense is why they (along with muscle-displaying tights or bare skin, to be sure) are the essence of superhero costuming. FDR aside, they were past fashionable when Superman showed up in one in 1938--ensuring that he had a special, out-of-this-world look. They're highly impractical, as The Incredibles discussed. Even when comic-book creators try to provide a reason for a cape, as in Batman's cheiropterous disguise, we all know the real reason for one is simply that a cape looks cool in the artwork. Real capes never drape or flutter the same way, alas. But a superhero costume is symbolic from the start; "it cannot exist," as Chabon says, but it's not really supposed to.

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.

Chabon Legs It Out in Summerland

Both Michael Chabon's Summerland and Adam Gopnik's The King in the Window are fantasies written by established authors for adults and published by Miramax Books. Both are about boys who must rescue their fathers from being hollowed out by their work--psychologically in Gopnik's book, both psychologically and literally in Chabon's.

I found The King in the Window to be needlessly long and complicated, hobbled by an internal lack of logic, and too enamored with its own ideas. And for quite a while I worried that Summerland would sink into the same morass.

The book is 500 pages long, and the first hundred pages are a slow wind-up. Four different characters summon Ethan and his father to the fantasy world, where each is, in different ways, the Chosen One. (Later we learn that there was yet another messenger years before, a pixie with ideas of ballooning.)

Some logical glitches arise from a surfeit of Neat Ideas. For example, we watch the miniature ferishers communicate with their oracular clam using a scroll covered with mysterious letters. Yet when protagonist Ethan picks up a ferisher guidebook to playing catcher, it's written in English.

Giants have kept the smaller creatures of the fantasy world in fear for ages. But on page 427, a character named Cutbelly reveals that he can "scamper" into another dimension and return through a most terrible giant, killing her. Why did none of the many characters who can "scamper" do this to giants before?

And, as I wrote before, I don't understand the resolution of the book's cosmic conflict or how that fits with its stated themes.

Nevertheless, despite its stumbles right out of the box, Summerland gains traction and becomes a solid literary adventure, its heart and imagination lightening its weight. I thought the story took hold when Chabon turned from using wimpy, self-doubting Ethan as his only point-of-view character and started to follow his teammate Jennifer T. Rideout as well. She has fresher worries; more important, she tackles her problems, which Ethan must first learn how to do before he can really be a hero.

The narrative voice also comes into its own, turning more intrusive and even self-referential after sixty pages. It tells us, "This this were a work of fiction, the author would now be obliged to have Ethan waste a few moments wondering if he had dreamed the events of the past few hours."

Finally, I like Chabon's style. Page 6 mentions "a Rodrigo Buendía baseball card." That surname is, of course, an allusion to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Chabon eventually brings Buendía himself into the story, an aging, sore-kneed power hitter who needs the same magic as Ethan and Jennifer T. That could be a cheap literary/baseball stunt, but it works.

Home Runs Are Fascist

Saying Michael Chabon’s Summerland has a baseball background is like saying the Harry Potter books take place in and around a school. Baseball suffuses the novel, providing its setting, its metaphors, and its values.

On page 248, Chabon strongly suggests that the designated hitter is an invention of Satan. (I figure any rule that puts David Ortiz in the lineup is just fine.) Page 222 hints that Roberto Clemente is a hero on par with those "poisoned by the blood of centaurs."

Toward the end of its long playing season, Summerland offers this lesson for the young protagonists, and apparently for us all:

They noticed that there was more to baseball than hitting the ball as hard as you could, than waving your glove in the general direction of the ball and hoping for the best. They took pitches, turned double plays, and hit the cutoff man, and instead of trying to cream it every time they got up, they just did their best to advance the runner.

In particular, the novel is the story of young Ethan learning to appreciate, love, and play the game in the important position of catcher.

However, Chabon doesn't show us Ethan Feld learning to read batters' proclivities and calling pitches, watching for a runner on first steal to second, calling for an outfield shift. His big play in the field is holding onto the ball in a collision at home plate, which requires dedication and brute force rather than thought and teamwork.

From the start, Ethan struggles at the plate, having the unproductive tendency to close his eyes while swinging. Later he carves a bat from the piece of the original tree (don't ask), but a bulge in the grip blisters his hands. And there's no hint he can hit for power.

But Ethan doesn't get around those problems by learning to bunt like Scooter Rizzuto or poking drives into the opposite field where they ain't. Instead, at the climactic moment of the book he hits a home run.

And it's not just any home run. I'd thought the end of The Natural--the movie directed by Barry Levinson, not the novel by Bernard Malamud--presented the apotheosis of the four-bagger, with stadium lights exploding in a ludicrous shower of slow-motion sparks. Summerland goes beyond even that.

Ethan's home run literally tears a hole in the sky. And somehow that leads to the antagonist's defeat. Don't ask me how--I've read that passage three times now, and I still can't figure out exactly what's supposed to happen. I suppose I should call this a ****SPOILER****, but I can't give away what I don't know. All I can say is that the ball not only flies into left field, but the whole scene seems to come out of left field. The game ends. And how does that approach advance the runner?

Mysteries of the Summerland Cover

One of the biggest surprises of Michael Chabon's Summerland for me was the cover art.

The book is about a boy whose father is a dirigible designer, and as he sets off on his adventure the hero has the family car attached to the family's backup dirigible. There's also a heavy baseball theme, including enthusiastic miniature players with some connection to Native Americans.

All of which certainly explains why artist William Joyce and the Reel FX design shop centered the cover image on a small car hanging below a blimp, carrying a man and a boy and some little men in old-fashioned baseball uniforms with feathers in their caps. This image appears to be part photo collage, part painting.

But the book says many times that the family car is a rusty orange Swedish station wagon, not a yellow miniature convertible. The book says many times that the father is plump and bearded. The little ballplayers are supposed to have faces like playing cards. The father, son, and those little people are never all in the car together, at least not without several other characters.

Young readers supposedly care about such details--about making sure the color of the main characters' hair matches what the book says, and so on. "Your students may be fascinated when you show them books with inaccurate or misleading covers," Leigh Ann Jones wrote in School Library Journal in June. This article is about getting students to look past covers they don't like, with the lesson that covers may--amazing!--not accurately reflect the books they decorate. Clearly the students' fascination would arise from seeing something unaccountably wrong.

Perhaps the only people who care more about making the details match are authors.

Yet Summerland's cover art obviously doesn't match the book it covers. What's the story behind that art? Obviously, William Joyce is a very big name in children's books--big enough for Miramax's page for Summerland to include a bio for him, though he was involved only with the cover art. (Brandon Oldenburg of Reel FX provided the interior illustrations.)

Did Joyce receive no more than a brief memo on the image Miramax wanted for the cover? ("It's a book about a kid and a dad, and there's this blimp, with a car hanging from it...") How much work did Joyce do, compared to Reel FX? (The artist and firm have also worked together on Aimesworth Amusements and a short movie called "Man in the Moon.") Did Miramax decide to run with whatever came in because the artist was, after all, William Joyce? How did Chabon feel?

And do kids notice? Do they really care?