Illustrating Picture Books versus Drawing Comics

Toward the end of his conversation with Skottie Young on the Stuff Said podcast, artist Gregg Schigiel asks about Young’s experience illustrating his first picture book, Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman. (A lot of Schigiel’s interviews seem to be digging for career counseling, but that’s another story.)

Young sounds almost amazed as he reports how much easier illustrating a picture book was compared to drawing a comic. Jef Czekaj said the same thing on a panel I moderated a while back. I wouldn’t be surprised if other artists who’ve worked in both fields feel the same way. That’s not to say picture-book illustration is easy; but relatively it seems to be a more pleasant experience.

For one thing, picture books don’t require so many pictures. A 32-page picture book might require 20 separate images, which could fill as few as four pages of standard comics. True, those images have to be bigger and more detailed so that they reward multiple readings. On the other hand, they don’t have to be so tightly squeezed together on a page with captions and word balloons impinging on them.

More important, however, is how picture-book publishers treat artists. Editors and art directors choose an artist based on his or her past work and reputation, and they see their job as assisting the writer’s and artist’s visions come to fruition, not to move the corporation’s larger story along. They don’t try to exercise so much editorial control. They set more generous deadlines.

Schigiel’s book experience has come with licensed titles (i.e., those that are part of a corporation’s larger story). So he starts out asking Young what his Art Director told him. But Art Directors for picture books are far more hands-off than people with the same title in other parts of publishing. Young found himself surprised at how few “notes” he received back on his sketches.

The biggest difference between the mainstream book business and other forms of publishing is visible on the covers. On a book, the author’s and illustrator’s names are almost always the biggest; on Fortunately, the Milk, Gaiman’s name is huge, Young’s rather small. But the publisher’s name is usually smallest of all, slipped onto the bottom of the spine and the back. In a comic book or other magazine, the magazine’s name is the biggest; its employees are in charge, and its intellectual property and reputation is what mainly drives the sales.

Spotting a Familiar Name

A few months back there were a lot of pictures of Damian Wayne with Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but I don’t recall having seen this one in my feeds. (Of course, there were a lot.)

This picture comes from Luciano Vecchio, an artist from Argentina. I first saw his work when I was editing the International Wizard of Oz Club’s Oziana fiction magazine, and art director Marcus Mébès recruited him to illustrate some stories. When I contacted him directly a while later, Luciano told me he’d gotten too busy with paying jobs to do more volunteer fan work, and I told him that was the best news an aspiring professional artist could share.

I ran across Luciano’s name in the second collection of comics spun off the Young Justice TV show. He drew a couple of issues of that magazine, as well as cartoon-style comics about the Avengers and Green Lantern. Earlier work includes the Sentinels, about a second-generation superhero team, from Drumfish. Here’s Luciano’s Deviant Art page.

Starting soon, Luciano will be the regular artist on the new Beware the Batman! magazine written by Ivan Cohen, which DC promoted this spring with a free preview comic scripted by Scott Beatty.

Becoming an Author in the Worst Way

On Monday I attended an event at the Cambridge Public Library kicking off World Book Night, a European tradition that’s being promoted here. It involves applying for the privilege of giving away forty copies of a book to people who don’t read much. And somehow it’s connected to the date when Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died, except not really.

The event featured a panel of three local authors whose novels had been selected for this year’s World Book Night program:

• Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice.
• Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of The Language of Flowers.
• Neil Gaiman, coauthor of Good Omens.

The moderator began the session by asking the authors what books they wish they had written. The answers were, respectively, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Lord of the Rings. But Gaiman’s answer came with a story, of course—a story about the nature of storytelling.

I see parts of this story on the web, so I know Gaiman has told it before. He might have adapted it for a character, as his memories of reading about fire hydrants and pizzas in America ended up in the mouth of John Constantine in The Books of Magic. But in any event, the full tale was new to me, so I’m sharing it.

Around the age of twelve, little Neil Gaiman desperately wanted to be the author of The Lord of the Rings. Not to write The Lord of the Rings, since that seemed like an unimaginable amount of work and J. R. R. Tolkien had already written it. Nor to write a new book that could stand beside The Lord of the Rings, since that was obviously impossible. Rather, he wanted to be able to hold himself up in the world as author of The Lord of the Rings itself.

So little Neil thought about the most likely way to achieve this goal. He decided to carry his copy of The Lord of the Rings with him at all times in case a trans-dimensional rift opened up and shifted him into another reality like our own in every way but one—it would have no Lord of the Rings.

Little Neil knew he couldn’t simply submit his paperback copy of the book to a publisher in that world; they would ask all sorts of questions about foreign rights. But he could, he decided, convince an adult to type out all of The Lord of Rings, put his name on the front page, and submit that manuscript to a publisher. And surely the firm would recognize the amazing value of this story by newcomer Neil Gaiman, and in that reality he would be forever and after author of The Lord of the Rings.

But then little Neil spotted a loose end that could jeopardize the whole plan: the typist would know that he hadn’t actually written the book. And he saw no way around that danger but to kill the typist.

At that point, Gaiman acknowledged, his younger self faltered on this ingenious plan. Even being author of The Lord of the Rings didn’t seem worth murdering another person. For a while he continued to carry around the book to be ready for the right trans-dimensional rift, but eventually he turned to other ways of becoming an author.

Advent Under the Influence—of Magic?

In formulating my questions for James Treadwell, author of a new fantasy trilogy that begins with Advent, I worked from my own perspective on storytelling. I tend to plan out plots, though there are plenty of surprises in the composition process.

James’s answers make clear how he takes a different approach to storytelling, with less planning and thus more surprises. Or is that just British modesty? In any case, the conversation continues…

Advent draws on three enduring legends of western civilization: ancient Troy, King Arthur’s court, and Dr. Faust. (Plus mermaids.) Marlowe already linked numbers 1 and 3, but you take that combination in a different direction. How did you decide to braid those threads together?

You know what I’m going to say about the word “decide,” don’t you?

In all honesty, though, this is a difficult question to answer. (I’m sure that makes it a particularly good question.) Advent grew out of a few seeds — scenes, moments, glimpses of a character or two, an idea. The idea, very roughly speaking, was: magic. I think the notion of magic occurred to me in two ways. Firstly: what would it be like if something impossible happened? (This was very much tied up with my initial impressions of the character of Gavin.)

Secondly — and in one form or another this has informed a lot of fantasy writing, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the John Crowley sequence that begins with Aegypt — what’s the difference between a world with magic and a world from which it’s absent, and how do you get from one to another?

So I began to think about a time when there was magic. And once I was doing that, I was probably always going to end up in the territory of legends. It’s murky in there, though, and I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know — for example — that the character associated with the Faust legend was who he is until after he’d made his first appearance.

Who and what have been your biggest storytelling influences?

I don’t think anyone can say who their influences are. I used to be an academic literary critic, and academic literary critics will tell you that influence is something writers suffer unwillingly and/or unwitttingly. (The critic Harold Bloom puns on “influenza,” which seems about right.)

Observant readers may gather some hints from the answers above, though...

SATURDAY: Wrestling with points of view.

What Doesn’t Happen in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

Back in July 2008, when DC Comics started to promote its upcoming storyline about Bruce Wayne’s death, one of the company’s big projects was a two-issue story by Neil Gaiman, with art by Andy Kubert. Dates on Kubert’s sketches indicate he started working on character designs just the month before, and the issues appeared in print in early 2009.

Those special (i.e., heavily promoted) issues of Batman and Detective have now been collected with Gaiman’s older Batman-related tales in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? The collection was nominated for a Hugo Award.

Gaiman writes in his foreword to Whatever Happened…?, not for the first time, about his childhood love for Batman, starting with the TV show and flowering with American comic books. Born in 1960, he was at elementary-school age for the TV show, and entered adolescence as Batman became serious again. Gaiman was in his later teens when DC published “Where Were You on the Night Batman Was Killed?” (discussed yesterday), and I think he must have read that storyline.

“Where Were You…?” and Whatever Happened…? have a great deal in common. In both series, Gotham is buzzing with rumors that Batman is dead. In both, a coterie of villains and other characters gather to tell stories about how he died. Gaiman adds Alfred, Bat-Girl, and other allies to the Catwoman, Riddler, Joker, and other villains in the earlier series.

Naturally, there are differences. “Where Were You…?” takes the form of a coroner’s inquest. Whatever Happened…? is a surreal funeral, with Bruce Wayne’s spirit apparently watching and narrating; the story soon takes off into a mystical dimension. But fundamentally both comics are a series of conflicting, competing tales of Batman’s death. One is unabashedly schlocky entertainment, and the other is supposed to be a meditation about the power of stories and the evolution of a mythic character.

However, Gaiman was working with only two issues and today’s “decompressed” storytelling style. As a result, I don’t think his version develops much narrative momentum. The best character moments occur early on, outside the funeral, as an alley waif tries to park villains’ cars. But we never see the end of that story, so the moments don’t add up to anything.

Similarly, the different characters’ versions of Batman’s death don’t braid together. Each narrative thread floats free, not tied to anything else. Bruce Wayne ends up leaving and conversing with his mother. This might have meant more to me if I’d cared for Goodnight Moon, the book that provides the literary backdrop for the final panels. (As I’ve said before, I always preferred The Runaway Bunny.)

Andy Kubert’s artwork in Whatever Happened…? is frequently stunning. In addition to magnificent panels in his own style, Gaiman had him pack in visual references to other eras of Batman history. Even so, the issues don’t seem to offer enough space to develop all the team’s ideas. Why, for instance, are there two Jokers in the funeral crowd?

Finally, the treatment of Robins is perfunctory, almost obligatory. In one panel, Dick Grayson welcomes people to Batman’s funeral, apparently blowing the whole secret-identity thing. On another page, he appears as the Robin of the mid-1960s—mask tied around his whole head, rather than magically stuck to his eyes—and laments Batman’s passing. Damian Wayne appears silently in two images, and Tim Drake silently (but acknowledged with one caption) in two more. Betty Kane, the original Bat-Girl, actually gets more characterization, and once again I thought that vignette was cut off before it could develop.

To my surprise, I found The Strange Deaths of Batman collection more entertaining.

Derivative Works

The latest New York Times bestseller list for hardcover comics includes adaptations of the Book of Genesis (#1), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (#2), and Pride and Prejudice (#5). The seven “original” books are all about Batman and the Joker (four titles), the X-Men (two), and Green Lantern (one)—additions to superhero sagas that have been running for decades.

That leaves all the original comics stories on the paperback bestseller list. Even there, however, there are two more Batman titles, Bill Willingham’s mashup of traditional fairy tales and the modern world in Fables, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, originally inspired by the Charlton superheroes.

The number of adaptations and sequels reflects yet another difference I’ve noticed separating prose literature from similar books in comics form: the comics world is more respectful toward derivative works. Publishers Weekly just ran a whole story about adaptations of literary classics into comics form, along with a list of recent and upcoming titles.

Thus, in the comics world, people praise Jon J. Muth’s adaptation of Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang's screenplay for M as a graphic novel, and it is quite striking. Critics don’t respect prose “novelizations” of movies the same way—even novelizations that do a good job of storytelling.

Artist P. Craig Russell just adapted Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters into comics form. No one seemed to ask what’s significant about adapting a story written just ten years ago and published with many illustrations into a graphic novel. Rather, the review site IGN praised it as “as faithful an adaptation as one could ever hope for.”

In contrast, when novelists with literary ambitions rewrite older stories or obviously build on them, they usually present themselves as not just adapting the material for a new form or audience, but reworking it to make a new statement. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre. Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar is a feminist version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (which in turn had traveled to the same territory as Jules Verne’s Deux Ans de Vacances, but dystopically).

Occasionally a literary novelist will build on popular culture, but almost always with post-modern distance and irony, as in Donald Barthelme’s fanfiction. Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World brings Hergé’s cartoon hero together with characters from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in a postmodernist mashup. It’s not just a Tintin story, we readers must understand; it’s about a Tintin story. In contrast, Isabel Allende wrote a sincere swashbuckler in Zorro (2005)—and has her literary reputation recovered, even though that book got good reviews?

TOMORROW: So what?

Marks of Irony and Sarcasm

At the recent gathering of children’s-book bloggers in Washington, I understand that mention was made of my past reports on humanity’s long quest to typographically signal sarcasm or irony. Though the internet has exacerbated this need, I’ve noted that some English writers discussed it 200 years ago. And I once suggested that the backslant could work as italics does, except by signaling reversal instead of emphasis.

Alas, adding a backslant style to every font and getting the new versions installed on every computer would be a lot of work, and we’d still have to teach people what the new letterforms mean. The same problems stymie the invention of new punctuation, such as Choz Cunningham’s 2006 proposal at Typophile of a mark called “the snark,” which looks like an exclamation point that’s given up and laid down.

People have therefore sought to popularize sarcastic uses of punctuation marks that are already on the standard English keyboards but of little use. For example, at my latter posting, an anonymous commenter replied:

We need to use the TILDE!
it works perfectly
~i'm so smart~
and we don't use it for anything but decoration anyway

However, a peek behind the tilde entry on Wikipedia shows that this usage is still evolving. The first suggestion that anyone was using the tilde to indicate irony appeared there in February 2008, and that contributor suggested it should appear at the end of a sentence, not around a statement.

A much older suggestion, through Wikipedia, starts with the seventeenth-century English printer Henry Denham’s mark to signal a rhetorical question:

How do you like them apples؟

Denham called this a percontation mark. It soon fell into abeyance.

In 1899, The Bookman’s “Literary Paris” columnist Adolphe Cohn reported to his American readers:

A new writer, who is much talked of just now, is M. Alcanter de Brahm. He has published a book, L’Ostensoir des Ironies, intended to demonstrate that the reader of modern books has to be told when the author intends to be ironical and when not, and he therefore advocates the creation of a new punctuation mark, the point d’ironie.

The new writer was actually an anagrammatic pseudonym of a minor French poet named Marcel Bernhardt. He suggested using a question mark reversed in some way. Wikipedia states it was a horizontal reversal producing a variation on the backwards question mark above. Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) says Bernhardt/de Brahm suggested using the upside-down question mark from Spanish—

So we can see what a splash the idea made¿

Only one language seems to have a typographic signal of reverse meaning already in widespread use, and I learned of it through a familiar but unexpected source. Back in 2005, Neil Gaiman wrote on his blog:

(If I say “in my copious spare time”, can we all agree that it should be read as if someone had actually invented the sarcasm mark as a unit of punctuation, and that “in my copious spare time” can be assumed to be inside sarcasm marks?)

And then this month he added:

The last time I posted here about the lack of sarcasm marks in punctuation, people wrote in to tell me that there are Ethiopian languages that actually have a written sarcasm mark, intended to show the world that the person writing means the opposite of what he says. So if anyone is translating this blog into Ethiopian, you’ll need to put sarcasm marks around that bit of yesterday's post.

Language Log has also taken note of that punctuation mark, which is known as Temherte Slaq. It reports, “The Unicode representation of the punctuation mark is evidently under debate among Ethiopian scholars.”

And what is the crux of that debate? A paper titled “A Roadmap to the Extension of the Ethiopic Writing System Standard Under Unicode and ISO-10646,” by Asteraye Tsigie, Berhanu Beyene, Daniel Aberra, and Daniel Yacob, states:

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1, Temherte Slaq differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaq will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte Slaq is also important in children’s literature and in poetic use. Debate is needed among Ethiopian scholars to determine if inverted exclamation mark is acceptable.

In other words, even though experts agree the Temherte Slaq is “graphically indistinguishable” from a punctuation mark already in use, some insist it deserves its own unique coding.

And that wouldn’t delay the worldwide adoption of the Temherte Slaq at all¡

Removed from Its Mythological Context

I loved Kristopher Reisz’s recollection of shopping for a comic book about 1991 and getting more than he bargained for:

Before I wade in, though, I should explain that there are actually two Sandmen in the comic book world. One Sandman’s real name is William Baker. He is a man made of sand. A supervillan with all the powers of sand is pretty much as useless as he sounds, except to point out the kinds of goofy stories I was enthralled with.

Coincidentally, that Sandman is showing up in this week’s Spider-Man newspaper comic strip.

I’ll resist the fanboy temptation to point out that there was another Sandman in American comics before either of the two Reisz mentions, a “Golden Age” hero with a gas mask and a gas gun. Nope, you won’t hear that from me.

Anyway, when I was thirteen, William Baker briefly turned good and had his own mini-series. That was the book I went into the comic shop to buy. By some divine accident, though, I walked out with a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman instead.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman has thousands of names. He is the god of dreams and the source for every story ever told. He has existed almost since the dawn of time. He has near-infinite powers but serious problems with his siblings, the personifications of destiny, death destruction, desire, despair and delirium.

To sum it up: I was in over my head. . . .

When my mom found Sandman, she sort of freaked. Censoring didn’t come naturally to her. She gave me Twain, Kipling, and Vonnegut, but the pictures disturbed her, for instance this naked and blood-drenched Maenad kissing Orpheus’ severed head, which removed from its mythological context, is pretty twisted.

For that picture from Sandman Special, #1, and the rest of the story, check out Guys Lit Wire.

The Danger of Blank Pages in Comics

So in The Dream Hunters Neil Gaiman wrote a fictional tale of japanoiserie, and then a secondary fictional tale of finding the first in a book of Japanese folklore, only to find that people accepted the second tale as true and the first, thus, as authentic.

So what lessons can we take from that story behind the story-behind-the-story of The Dream Hunters? Aside from the general gullibility of crowds (myself included at first).

Gaiman himself saw the size of the afterword’s typeface and other design elements as critical to how it was interpreted:

...the afterword was printed in small official-looking type.

Which somehow made it no longer part of the story, and nobody ever doubted that I was telling the truth about this being an old Japanese folktale...

It’s true that the afterword is set at an eye-strainingly small size. But would readers have reacted differently if the same text had appeared on a double-page spread with, say, a photo of Gaiman in his study, examining some unidentified antique volume? Would that really have seemed like part of the story rather than part of the publishing apparatus (acknowledgments, credits, and so on)?

What I find more interesting is the reason Gaiman wrote that afterword at all:

I got a worried call from [editor] Jenny Lee, saying that the book was going to run short and could I do anything to fill a few pages at the end.

Most book publishers don’t get worried about “a few pages at the end” with nothing on them. Novels and other prose books usually have a couple of blanks at the front and back, and sometimes more in between. Indeed, starting every chapter on a right-hand page (recto), thus leaving some of the facing left-hand pages (versos) blank, is one way to pad out a short manuscript.

Of course book publishers don’t want to pay for more paper than they have to, nor to run so many blank pages together that readers notice. There are tricks to avoid those problems:

• optional pages, such as half-titles (which display the book’s title, but not the author’s name or publisher’s colophon).
• moving the author’s dedication to the copyright page, or giving it a page on its own with a blank following.
• including an author bio inside the book, or leaving it out.
• a section title page and blank before the notes, index, or other backmatter.
• the ever-popular note on typography!

If, after all available tricks, a book over 100 pages long still has two or three blanks at the front or back, a traditional prose publisher doesn’t sweat it.

Comics publishing must be different. The Dream Hunters came in at 128 pages, every spread illustrated in full color on glossy paper. But apparently readers would have felt cheated if the volume had contained only 125 pages with content. Comics readers seem to expect every page of a volume to hold words or art.

And indeed, I’ve seen complaints about collected editions that include a black page inserted between chapters to ensure two-page spreads fall appropriately. Some readers prefer images reprinted from elsewhere in the book to any sort of blank. Which is how we, and Gaiman, got into this mess.

Dreaming Down a Hunt

Yesterday I offered a lengthy quotation from Neil Gaiman’s afterword to The Dream Hunters, explaining how he had come to rewrite a Japanese folktale into a Sandman volume for DC Comics.

Or had he? In Prince of Stories, an admiring book about Gaiman by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette, the now-Newbery-winning author explained the story behind that story-behind-the-story:

So Amano was illustrating Dream Hunters and I got a worried call from [editor] Jenny Lee, saying that the book was going to run short and could I do anything to fill a few pages at the end. So I wrote an afterword, about how this really was an old Japanese folktale, and [I] expected it to be treated with as much respect as my claims on the box of the first Sandman statue, that [artist] Kelly Jones and [sculptor] Randy Bowen and I had been allowed into the vaults beneath the British Museum to copy it.

And then it turned out that we didn’t have the pages to fill after all, and the afterword was printed in small official-looking type.

Which somehow made it no longer part of the story, and nobody ever doubted that I was telling the truth about this being an old Japanese folktale which happened to have Morpheus, a raven, and even Cain and Abel in it.

So in The Dream Hunters, Gaiman wasn’t rewriting a Japanese folktale at all. But he was hitching a ride on outsider images of Japanese culture—was that cultural appropriation and misrepresentation? To complicate matters, Gaiman’s secondhand and ersatz Japanese images were then turned into graphics by the actual Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano.

Perhaps in describing “the Rev. B. W. Ashton’s Fairy Tales of Old Japan” Gaiman really appropriated an aspect of stereotypical British culture: the earnest Victorian clergyman engaged in amateur scholarship, creating leather-bound books that no one will read for decades.

Complicating matters further, on 25 Dec 2007 Gaiman was presented with the news that someone had written on Wikipedia that he’d borrowed elements of the tale from from Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, which he’d never read.

TOMORROW: What this strange tale really tells us.

Hunting Down a Dream

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the launch of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman magazine [the twentieth is upon us now], DC Comics invited him to pen a new volume. He came up with a prose story titled The Dream Hunters, illustrated in color on every spread by Yoshitaka Amano.

The Dream Hunters is set in a mythological Japan, and at the back of the book Gaiman’s one-page, small-type afterword describes how he developed the story:

[For another project] I read all the books I could lay my hands upon that dealt with Japanese history and mythology, and it was in the Rev. B. W. Ashton’s Fairy Tales of Old Japan that I encountered the tale that Mr. Ashton called “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming” and was struck by the similarities—some of them almost disquieting, between the Japanese tale and my own Sandman series. . . .

I asked Mr. Amano and his sterling lieutenants, Ann Yamamoto and Maya Shioya, to see if they could find me any other versions of the story in English translation.

The version they found for me (in photocopy form) is from one of Y. T. Ozaki’s collections of Japanese tales, a strange version in which the King of Dreams is a shadowy figure, barely mentioned, who appears to be some sort of dragon, and in which the central character is the Onmyoji, the Master of Yin-Yang. (I am indebted to this work for much of Chapter Three, and some of the final chapter.) They also found me a Buddhist text in which the tale is alluded to, and in which the old man upon the road is explicitly identified as Binzuru Harada.

For the rest, I am indebted to the good reverend. As I write this I have my copy of Fairy Tales of Old Japan on the table in front of me. The leather binding is flaking and discoloured, the pages are ragged, spotted, and slightly water-stained. I felt strangely honoured to realize that, despite the battered condition of the book, I was still the first person ever to read it: many of the book’s pages were still uncut. At first I cut them open with a letter-opened, then realized that they separated more easily if I simply parted them with my fingers.

I haave tried to amplify, to expand and to retell the story as best I could, while taking as few liberties as possible. Most elements of the old story were close enough to their Sandman analogues that I would not have dared to put them in, had they not been there already. . . . students of folklore must simply find it in their hearts to forgive me for, at one stroke of my pen and my heart, changing Ashton’s Hototogisu bird into a raven.

In my efforts to retell the story I made a number of errors (and in several cases, I discovered I had compounded several of Ashton’s errors). Steve Alpert, from Studio Ghibli, was kind enough to catch and correct some of these. . . . Other, I am sure, remain in the text, for the sharp-eyed to discover.

With the requisite apology for “errors,” Gaiman is apparently comfortable with appropriating a Japanese folktale with religious overtones and not only rewriting it, but changing its characters to better match the intellectual property of DC Comics. That raven comes from Gaiman’s Sandman series. A pair of men not named in the story are obviously Cain and Abel from the House of Mystery and House of Secrets comics, whom Gaiman had further developed in Sandman.

TOMORROW: Or is that really what happened?

“Two Kinds of Fantastic Fiction”?

In a foreword for the second collection of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, Clive Barker wrote:

May we open this celebration of the work in your hand by defining two kinds of fantastic fiction? One, the kind most often seen in horror novels and movies, offers up a reality that resembles our own, then postulates a second invading reality, which has to be accommodated or exiled by the status quo it is attempting to overtake.

Sometimes, as in any exorcism movie--and most horror movies are that, by other names--the alien thorn is successfully removed from the suppurating flank of the real. On other occasions the visitor becomes part of the fabric of “everyday” life. Superman is, after all, an alien lifeform. He’s simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

The second kind of fantastique is far more delirious. In these narratives, the whole world is haunted and mysterious. There is no solid status quo, only a series of relative realities, personal to each of the characters, any or all of whom are frail, and subject to eruptions from other states and conditions.

One of the finest writers in this second mode is Edgar Allen Poe, in whose fevered stories landscape, character--even architecture--become a function of the tormented, sexual anxious psyche of the author; in which anything is possible because the tales occur within the teller’s skull.

Is it perhaps freedom from critical and academic scrutiny that has made the medium of the comic book so rich an earth in which to nurture this second kind of fiction?

Barker goes on to praise Gaiman’s comics for achieving the latter effect, which is also what his own stories are known for.

I took a moment to consider Barker’s dichotomy and realized that I could think of at least three other types of fantastic fiction:

• Our reality coexists with another, where fantastic or supernatural rules apply, but the two realms are largely separate. Often these stories are narratives of journey and return, as in Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or The Phantom Tollbooth.
• Much of the setting seems like our reality, but there are magical elements. Unlike the situation in Barker’s first group, however, those supernatural elements are not part of “a second invading reality” to be rooted out, but a recognized part of life, as in the world of Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci or James and the Giant Peach.
• The entire story takes place in another reality quite unlike our own, where magic or other forces apply, but that reality is as firmly grounded and consistent for the characters as this reality is to us. Examples include high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings.

And perhaps more as well.

I suspect Barker’s vision was narrowed by his experience writing horror, seeking to create “fantastic fiction” at its most frightening rather than exploring other emotional goals. But this was back in 1990, and since then he's stretched in many other approaches to fantastic fiction.

Neil Gaiman on Robin (well, a little—but not enough for Sunday)

DC Comics persuaded Neil Gaiman to write the script for a two-part Batman story called "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" Wired interviewed Gaiman about his inspiration:

When I was 5, I was in a car with my dad and he mentioned that there was this Batman TV show in America about a man who dressed up in a costume and fought crime. The only bat I ever knew was a cricket bat, so what I thought he looked like was rather odd, based on that.

Months later, the series hit the U.K., and I remember watching and being affected by it. Really worrying, genuinely worrying, on a deep primal level, "Will he be OK?" That is the way it was with every deathtrap. If I missed the end of an episode, I’d get my friends to tell me he was OK.

Because of the Batman TV show, my dad picked up Smash! comics for me, which reprinted a Batman cartoon strip, which were much more about continuity than the television program. Those were my gateway drugs into Batman. . . .

I wanted my comic to contain all of that, from the story to the art. I wanted it to have that love in there. I wanted to write the last Batman with honor and love. . . . The joy of this Batman story is that there were 70 years of Batman and I wanted to try and talk about all of it.

And as for working with artist Andy Kubert:

I kept asking Andy to do things that are impossible, and because no one told him they were impossible, he did them. Normally someone asks him to draw three panels, but doesn’t ask him to draw those three panels in the style of Brian Bolland or Jerry Robinson. I loved the fact that I could ask Andy for Robin when he’s 17, off to college and still wearing the costume, the Speedo and everything, which looks kind of stupid. But I still want it to be moving. And he did it.

DC will release Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? in a hardcover volume with his other Gotham City stories this July.

(Pointer from Batman Obviously.)

The High Cost of Relettering

Like movie studios and music companies, comic-book publishers reissue their most popular material in "boxed sets" with a little extra material and a much bigger price. DC Comics has a series it calls Absolute, as in Watchmen: The Absolute Edition and the Absolute Sandman series. The comics' pages are reproduced larger than originally printed, on better paper, with extras.

The reissue process required extra work for one spin-off from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Absolute Death. (Death is the Sandman's sister, and just the cutest thing.) As letterer Todd Klein explained on his blog: "Neil and the DC staffers involved felt the lettering on these issues reproduced so badly when enlarged it was worth having me redo it."

So like a movie being remastered or an album being remixed, the Death: The High Cost of Living miniseries is being spruced up with the latest technology. While relettering the whole story on his computer, Klein has improved line breaks, reshaped a balloon that had been rendered asymmetric, and made other small changes.

This project also required Klein to create a new variant font:

In his script, Neil directed: “The Eremite’s lettering style should be just a little smaller and skinnier than normal: try and give the impression that he always talks very, very quietly.” To get that, I made the letterforms very narrow, with thin strokes. Unfortunately, some of them were just beyond the limits of the printing process, and not helped by poor pencil clean-ups before being photostatted by DC.

Now, the rest of the issues used standard Klein lettering, for which I’ve long had computer fonts, but this style is one I’ve never needed to do on the computer until now. So, yesterday I spent about eight hours making new fonts: TKondensed in Roman, Italic and Bold Italic faces.

The result is supposed to be an improved book--but at the same time unnoticeably so.

“All We Had Was Supercar.”

Back here I quoted Neil Gaiman's childhood impressions of America from comic books, particularly pizza, fire hydrants, and superheroes. At the time I didn't realize that he'd put those observations into the mouth of the Alan Moore-created character John Constantine.

Here are the relevant panels from The Books of Magic, this portion illustrated by Scott Hampton.

And here's information on Supercar.

“What It Is That I’ve Done, What It Is That I Do”

Here are some of Neil Gaiman's thought-provoking remarks about his storytelling and writing process from Roger Sutton's interview of the recent Newbery Medalist for the School Library Journal:

I was in Bologna a few years ago, in 2003, listening to a speech being given at the university about my work. It was an incredibly perceptive speech by a Bolognese professor of children’s literature. What fascinated me and troubled and worried me was I thought that I was so clever. I thought that everything I did was so different. And in this speech, the lady was talking about what it is that I’ve done, what it is that I do. And I realized with a sort of horrible sinking feeling that she was describing my next two books. . . . And it was a really major sinking feeling. It was like, Oh, my God. I’m actually doing the same thing over and over. . . .

The Graveyard Book was the longest in gestation of anything I’ve done. And it also was kind of the book that I was working towards writing for a very long time. It began in 1986, maybe early ’87. . . . I was a working journalist at this point. I’d written a few short stories. And I wrote an attempted first page and then read what I’d written and thought, You know, I’m not good enough for this. This is a really good idea, and it’s much better than I am as a writer. I will put it aside until I’m good enough. And once, maybe twice after that in the intervening years, I would go back and try writing a bit more. I’d definitely given up on it by 1989. . . .

Somewhere in 2004, after I’d finished writing Anansi Boys, it occurred to me that technically I was no longer getting better in terms of, you know, just the sheer skill of putting a sentence together, the ability to say whatever it was that I wanted to say. Whether I was any good or not, I didn’t know. But I was definitely no longer seeing the kinds of year-to-year improvement that I had previously been aware of. I was now going, “OK, this is basically whoever I am.” And I no longer had any excuse for putting off writing the story.

I had a notebook with the words, “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” That was definitely going to be the first line. I had begun and given up on the opening many times, and suddenly I thought, I can start in the middle. So I did.

Whole interview here.

Every Bit as Strange

In Arie Kaplan's Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!, the profile/interview of Neil Gaiman includes an rumination on growing up in Britain reading American comic books. Gaiman told Kaplan those magazine were like "postcards from Oz."

He elaborated:

There were all these cultural assumptions that were being made that meant nothing, and thus were really, really, really cool. For example, I remember to this day a comic in which Superman has gone into some kind of alternate universe. Perry White's now a pizza chef and Superman is staring at him, x-ray vision or whatever, staring through a wall. And Perry White is throwing something round and sort of doughy into the air, and he's tossing the pizza dough.

There were no pizzas in England in 1967. And they really didn't turn up until 1979-1980. So, pizza was something that you simply didn't see, and the idea of somebody tossing dough and wearing a funny hat was every bit as strange as the idea of somebody using their x-ray vision to look through a wall and see this thing.

There were no fire hydrants in England. So [in Superman] there are all these fire hydrants everywhere, and I was never able to quite figure out what a fire hydrant--what are they? They squirt water and no fire comes out of them, and what's the deal with them? Everything was as unlikely as everything else.

This passage came back to me toward the end of Gaiman's Coraline, when the young heroine's modern British parents welcome her home with a dinner of...homemade pizza.

Of course, it's a British misundersanding of American pizza, with pineapple.

Fantastic Newberys

It was a good year for fantasy novels at the Newbery awards. The gold medal went to The Graveyard Book, written by Neil Gaiman.

In addition, Newbery Honors went to The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, and Savvy by Ingrid Law. (As well as to two historical novels with political overtones: The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle, and After Tupac & D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson.)

Two of those three fantasy novels were illustrated: The Graveyard Book by Dave McKean, decades after he started collaborating with Gaiman on the Sandman comics, and The Underneath by David Small. One of the happy results of the stunning success of the Harry Potter novels, I think, is the return of illustration to children's novels, particularly fantasies.

Gaiman on Milne on Grahame

With the twentieth anniversary of The Sandman comics, new novels coming out, an upcoming gig on the last days of Batman, and a movie adaptation of Coraline under way, Neil Gaiman is on a roll. But this 2001 interview with the online magazine January shows he has a keen sense of how popular authors can be forgotten:

1930. Probably the most prominent English essayist was A. A. Milne: the editor of Punch, famed for his comedic essays, and a man with several plays running in the West End concurrently. A man who had bestselling books with titles like The Daily Round and hilarious collections of essays and sketches. One of the funniest writers of his generation and an accomplished playwright.

I did an Amazon search several months ago just out of interest to see just what of his was actually in print. And it listed 700 books: all of which, as I went down page after page, were variant editions of the two Winnie the Pooh books and the two books of comic verse for children that he wrote. And that's all that we have left of A. A. Milne, and he's in better shape than most of his contemporaries whose names we do not remember at all. . . .

There's one other thing we remember [Milne] for. His attempt to revive something forgotten which, again, worked brilliantly. To the point now where we didn't even know that it ever was forgotten. He wrote Toad of Toad Hall as a stage play, because he loved--and was furious that it had been forgotten--The Wind in the Willows.

And Kenneth Grahame's book came out [in 1908] and was a huge dud. Kenneth Grahame's other two books--Dream Days [1898] and The Golden Age [1895]--now completely forgotten. Portraits of sort of being a child in early Edwardian, Victorian days--were seized on and loved by the Edwardians as these beautiful, sentimental portraits of childhood. These were Grahame's bestselling books.

And The Wind in the Willows was a dud: it was completely forgotten to the point where A.A. Milne wound up writing an essay in the 1920s saying: Let me tell you about one of the best books in the world, and you have never heard of it. It was called The Wind in the Willows, and [Milne] went on and did Toad of Toad Hall, the theatrical adaptation, which then revived the book to the point where it's now considered one of the great children's classics.

Actually, I own Grahame's Dream Days and The Golden Age, with Maxfield Parrish illustrations. Gaiman is right that the text hasn't survived as well. The same sentimentality plays better with water rats and moles.

A Comics Reading and Reading Comics

Today in New York, Neil Gaiman will appear at a reading of his Sandman comics on the occasion of their twentieth anniversary. The event benefits the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. No, I'm not going to be there, and most likely neither are you since it's a reservations-only event.

I bring this up because it touches on a topic that teachers and parents are probably facing more and more as stories in comics form become accepted as literature.

How, one might ask, does one do a public reading of a comics story? "Okay, we turn the page, and up in this corner we see Jodie looking kind of nervous, and she says, 'What do you mean?' And then the next panel we see--you guys in back might want to come a little closer--we see the whole group from above, and..."

The Sandman event is a dramatic reading, featuring voice actors. And that approach might offer some guidance about how teachers and parents can share graphic novels with children. Because traditional reading-aloud doesn't work well without a narrative voice. The words in comics are more like a script than like a prose story.

The Graphic Classroom has suggested a couple of ways of sharing comics with a whole classroom, including a projector and assigning parts to different students. (This blog also recommends Tiny Titans, featuring a version of Robin. Just in case you thought I'd miss that.)

Comics in the Classroom takes a different approach, finding some comics more suited to the classroom than others:

There are three criteria I judge a book on when bringing into my classroom (honestly, I'll take any appropriate book that I can get my hands on, but only certain ones get the spotlight). The criteria are: Is it visually appealing, is it well written, and can it be read out loud to a group of children? The first two apply to comics, but the third isn't really fair. The Pigeon books [by Mo Willems] are fine for read-a-louds, because there is very little use of panels and the word balloons seem to be written with whole class readings in mind, but the other books in this discussion seem to be written more for the one on one, small group read.

Jim Trelease of The Read-Aloud Handbook has recommended the Tintin books for reading aloud with one or two children at a time ("Because of the size of the pictures"). Hergé's graphics are clear, and his adventures active. I imagine some young readers might like to be responsible for reading certain parts or sound effects while an adult handles the rest of the cast.