Restorative Young Justice

I was intrigued by the news that Brian Michael Bendis was reviving DC Comics’s original Young Justice team, featured from 1998 to 2003. I didn’t pick up the comic books, however, because I was already confused enough by the publisher’s continuity changes in recent years. The alternate universes that got us to this reboot seemed even more tortuous.

I’ve now read the first collected volume of that series, Young Justice: Gemworld, and I’m just as confused as I anticipated.

Bendis has indeed restored the core of the original team: Tim Drake as Robin, Conner Kent as Superboy, Bart Allen as Impulse, and Cassie Sandsmark as Wonder Girl. In addition, he’s added three more girls, versions of established heroes/trademarks: Jinny Hex, Amethyst, and Teen Lantern (leaving out the original Young Justice’s Secret, Artemis Arrowette, and later members). Bendis has also established that the team has always been part of this DC universe’s history but wiped from memory by a bunch of hand-waving—the same hand-waving that brought those characters back together. But as for the story itself, it felt thin.

Of course, the original Young Justice series was far from deep. Launched by Todd Dezago and then taken over and scripted almost entirely by Peter David, it was a sitcom. It had catch phrases, laugh lines, villains and supporting characters whose names were based on puns. Sure, there were many moments of teen angst and very special episodes and all that. But fundamentally that series didn’t take itself too seriously. This team formed because a bunch of young superheroes liked hanging out, not because they had a crucial mission or psychological need. That’s why the unorthodox artwork of Todd Nauck worked.

Bendis has restored the group, but he hasn’t restored that tone. To be sure, these first issues are devoted to reintroducing and introducing the team through one breathless flashback after another. But I recall only two jokes fondly, one of them repeated and the other almost lost in small panels.

The new series doesn’t need to follow the same path, of course. So far, however, there just isn’t enough adolescent drama (as in Teen Titans at its best) or threats to this world (as in the intermediate, TV-spin-off Young Justice magazine) to make up for the loss.

Doing Justice to Young Justice

One of the most interesting aspects of the Young Justice television cartoon is how its creators have played off of, and played havoc with, all the continuities that DC had previously established. There’s a Justice League of America headed by Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the other household names, and a set of eager sidekicks organized into a somewhat rebellious junior team. Beyond that, we viewers can’t assume anything.

Supporting characters have familiar names (Mal Duncan! Rita Farr!), but it’s not clear they’ll follow the same paths as in the comics. Hero names (i.e., valuable corporate trademarks) like Artemis are assigned to characters with completely new backstories. The cartoon’s Beast Boy receives his powers as a green shapeshifter from another green shapeshifter, Miss Martian—a character invented about forty years after Beast Boy’s first appearance.

In some cases these changes are improvements. Last week Braden Lamb, one of the artists on the Adventure Time comic, pointed out to me that the cartoon’s Adam Strange has a much more logical background for a space adventurer than the comic-book version. In other cases, the changes allow new stories. Peter David wrote an episode using two characters he’d developed in the original Young Justice comic books, Secret and Harm, but aside from their relationship as sister and murderous brother nothing was the same.

Over the course of the season, it also became clear that Young Justice’s producers were playing the long game: setting up tensions, mysteries, and relationships to pay off a dozen episodes or more down the line.

Probably the most obvious example of that was the character of Miss Martian, the first girl to join the team. Fans complained that Miss Martian was a perky sitcom caricature, baking cookies for the boys and repeating the phrase “Hello, Megan!” whenever she did something the least bit dumb. They showed their displeasure by compiling videos of that catch phrase repeated for ten minutes or Hitler reacting angrily to it. And eventually it turned out those complaints were right. Miss Martian was acting like a sitcom caricature, and the producers had been planning that revelation all along.

In fact, the first season of Young Justice was basically all about adolescents desperate to hide embarrassing secrets: their pasts and identities, their weaknesses and habits. And over the last few episodes, the teens repeatedly learned that the people they were trying to fool (a) already knew, and/or (b) didn’t care. Even Dick Grayson, who was mostly in the already-knew camp (of course), had to learn that lesson when he went back to the Haly Circus “undercover” and expected no one to recognize him.

The second season of Young Justice has started fast with a five-year jump from where the first season ended. Nerdy little wise guy Dick has grown up into hunky Nightwing, and some version of Tim Drake has taken over the Robin role to show how nerdiness is done. Beast Boy is old enough to join the team. Superboy has mellowed, Miss Martian turned harsher, and new teens are on board.

And fans are complaining about the new mysteries. Where are the characters from season one who haven’t appeared yet? What’s the status of the romances from that year? What happened to the other Speedy? And so on.

Viewers seem to forget what made the first season compelling: the gradual development of the storylines, the nagging mysteries, the big reveals. Those turns in the overall plot have the power to entertain us only if the producers keep some secrets up their sleeves.

Mascot Beyond Rescue

The number of novels inspired by the death of the second Jason Todd (the Robin of the late 1980s) is very small. Peter David’s Mascot to the Rescue! is almost certainly the best of the batch. Which is not to say it’s a good novel, or even a good “chapter book” for young readers.

The premise of Mascot to the Rescue! is that a boy named Josh Miller has become convinced that his life parallels that of Mascot, the kid sidekick in his favorite comic book. When that magazine’s publisher announces that it will kill off Mascot because fans have voted against his old-fashioned chirpiness, Josh and his new friend Kelsey set out to convince the publisher or auteur to keep him alive.

Josh periodically goes into a mental zone where he pretends to be Mascot, which comes in handy when he must fight off paint-ballers, rabid dogs, and other obstacles that pop up to provide an action sequence. The book has occasional line drawings of these scenes from Colleen Doran, who’s drawn for Teen Titans, among others.

David is a fine comic-book writer, with particular experience writing Jason Todd’s successor as Robin in the Young Justice series. But many storytelling techniques that work on the comics page don’t work so well in a prose novel.

Mascot to the Rescue!‘s narrative point of view jumps around, particularly from Josh to Kelsey and back, often within scenes. The narration frequently tells us what different characters are thinking. That approach is out of favor with most modern prose novelists, and even by the standards of other times the result seems clunky. In a comic or movie script, it’s often useful for writers to spell out what characters are thinking, but in prose subtlety works better.

David’s plot relies heavily on coincidences. For example, there’s a holy fool in the form of a mentally disabled man who works for the comic-book publisher; he appears at just the right moment to take Josh and Kelsey to visit Stan Kirby, the creator of Mascot.

But many of the plot’s coincidences just don’t add up. Josh’s mother keeps him from spending any time on the internet, yet she maintains a daily blog about being a single mother. Stan Kirby refuses to send his work electronically and doesn’t event check his email, but he turns out to read Ms. Miller’s blog regularly.

Josh’s elementary-school principal and a social worker from child protection services are the book’s two cardboard baddies. As I’ve written before, it makes no sense for authors to create child-hating villains from people who’ve gone into professions where they have to work with children.

We know from nearly the start that Josh’s mom and Kelsey’s dad are supposed to get together. Their pairing is apparently so imperative that David gives the two characters few scenes together, so we never see the attraction. Similarly, Josh and Kelsey are paired off, each of the good guys gets his heroic moment, and modern comic-book publishing is saved.

But the biggest problem at the start of the book is that Josh really does seem troubled and delusional. His character is probably the novel’s biggest weakness. While many young superhero fans might be attracted to the idea of a real-life adventure that crosses into comic-book publishing, Josh’s character may be too close to what they don’t want to be like. He’s more pathetic than sympathetic.

Through the character of Stan Kirby, an acknowledged homage to his predecessors, David gets to voice some of comics creators’ big recent complaints about the business:

• “Fan” sites on the internet are relentlessly negative.
• Sales reward gore over heroism.
• There are no comics appropriate for kids.

Ironically, it was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creation of the Fantastic Four that introduced antiheroes into superhero comics and started the genre toward more complex, mature, and eventually dark storytelling.

That portrayal of comics fandom, however, doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the Jason Todd vote. There have been fans who dislike the cheerful young mascot type, going all the way back to the 1940s. (See Feiffer, Jules.) But the second Jason became unpopular because he didn’t fit that mold. Readers might be discomfited by Josh Miller, but a lot more of them would like to be Mascot.

Robin Tweets for the Week

I’m busy at a conference this weekend, so this weekly Robin consists of some links, most already shared on that Twitter feed.

First, in the thumbnail at left, artist Carly Monardo shares her vision of Robin as he’d look if designed and drawn by Edward Gorey. Her Batman may be even more Gorey than that. Each entry in Monardo’s blog is an attempt to draw an iconic character in an unfamiliar artistic style.

Comics Should Be Good! rightly featured Chuck Dixon and Jason Armstrong’s 1995 retelling of how Dick Grayson became Robin in Robin Annual, #4.

Comics Make No Sense demonstrates the dangers of fighting crime in the vicinity of a giant sewing machine, especially if you fall down a lot.

The Speed Force highlighted the moment in Young Justice, written by Peter David and drawn by Todd Nauck, when some of Tim Drake’s teammates realize just how much they resent him.

Finally, here’s an image of Robin as a member of The Breakfast Club, created by artist Cliff Chiang. (Despite being a “child of the ’80s” I’ve never watched more than five minutes of that movie or felt any desire to. So I can’t say if Robin makes sense in the Ally Sheedy position.)

Reason for Robin, #10

Yesterday I discussed the Spectre, DC Comics’s most powerful character—a godlike embodiment of vengeance. Today we see him discussing the nature of life with a little girl.

Okay, a little dead girl, or ghost, who was murdered by her brother and got the job of escorting souls to the afterlife. She was named Greta, and has been using the name Secret as a member of the Young Justice team of 1990s kid sidekicks and teen heroes. That team had its own quirky comic book, mostly written by Peter A. David and mostly drawn by Todd Nauck, from 1998 to 2003.

At this point in DC Universe history, the man inside the Spectre is Hal Jordan, the second Green Lantern. (Long story.) And he’s explaining life as he sees it.But then Secret has an idea for someone who’s even less evil than Harrison Ford. This exchange reflects how, in the Young Justice saga, Secret is working through a crush on Tim Drake as Robin. But it also expresses an important element of how the character of Robin functions in the DC Universe.

Reason for Robin, #10: Robin isn’t evil.

COMING UP: But aren’t all superheroes, by definition, not evil? And what about Jason and Damian?

Scans_Daily No More

Occasionally I've mentioned the LiveJournal group scans_daily as one of my sources of comic-book background knowledge, commentary, and unusual images.

That's no longer available. Last weekend LiveJournal suspended the group due to copyright complaints. This was big news in the comics-discussion community, with reports on the major news websites and various creators being quizzed about their opinions. Brigid Alvorsen provided a good overview of the situation and people's reactions.

The discussion largely boils down to two positions. On one side, scans_daily's defenders argue that it was an enthusiastic fan community, sharing samples of work members liked and disliked. The law allows folks to reproduce a limited amount of copyrighted material in the context of critical commentary.

What's more, those fans argue, comics creators and publishers should welcome such sharing because it publicizes new products. (This is, of course, the same argument people have made about sharing music without payment to its creators.)

The opposing view is that people on scans_daily were using "fair use" and anonymity as a mask for widespread copyright violations. Every Wednesday members uploaded pages and pages of the latest comics, revealing major twists in storylines. The group's guidelines about not scanning too much of any one magazine didn't keep large chunks from appearing, and entire stories from the "Golden Age."

And as for such a community's effect on the market, this view holds, the free availability of that material ultimately makes people less likely to buy it. One of the most vehement voices from this side was Kevin Church at Beaucoup Kevin.

But by the time that debate took place, scans_daily was shut down, its members scattered like refugees from Gotham at the start of the "No Man's Land" arc.
So was scans_daily a large-scale copyright violation, cheating comics copyright-holders? Or was it a community for perceptive, funny, and impassioned discussion of comic books? In my experience, it was both.

When I started looking into American comics again, after a gap of twenty years, scans_daily was one of the most helpful resources I found. It offered glimpses of both the latest developments and stories long out of print. About half the panels illustrating my weekly Robin posts are extracted from scans_daily scans. I learned to spot the icons of knowledgeable Robin fans and follow their postings. (Otherwise, I'd never have been able to use that "No Man's Land" metaphor.)

Furthermore, I bought comics because of what I saw on scans_daily, comics both new (such as Nightwing: Freefall and The Brave and the Bold, #15, which makes the case that Dick Grayson is the most trusted man in the DC Universe) and secondhand (Robin, #10; Impulse, #50; Superboy, #85; etc.). As soon as a member posted panels from Mouse Guard, I put in a request to my library.

At the same time, I was troubled by how often scans_daily postings included many pages from new magazines, frequently with no credits for the writers or artists. As for the critical commentary that excuses reproductions, some members did indeed offer insights on character development, graphic techniques, or creators' careers. There were lots of jokes. But too many of the remarks were of the order of "I hate Dan DiDio cuz he hates Blue Beetle," which makes no sense and hardly justifies scanning half of the latest Blue Beetle magazine.

Given that situation, I agree with the many observers who've said it was only a matter of time before scans_daily got shut down. The copyright doctrine of "fair use" is misty, but many postings were clearly beyond its bounds, and big web services like LiveJournal are antsy.

Some folks blamed comics scripter Peter David for complaining about one post, but he and Marvel Comics were perfectly within their rights to do so. Furthermore, just as my comics research made me appreciate scans_daily, so I'm grateful to David. His Young Justice of a decade ago offered a fun take on Tim Drake as Robin, and his book on comics scripting is a fine how-to guide.

The scans_daily shutdown has produced some interesting commentary. Leigh Walton at Picture Poetry raised the issue of gender:

A friend...grumbled today about the dismissive attitude of certain commenters (”oh well, it was full of bitching and slash anyway”), declaring that reaction to be part of a broader discomfort that many male fans have with the feminine form of fandom. In response, she more or less said “a man in S_D feels like a woman in a comic shop.” . . .

I remember being pretty shocked at the culture of S_D when I first discovered it years ago. It was a thriving community of fans interacting with superhero comics in an entirely different manner than I was used to. But it didn’t feel like “this is how they do it on the internet,” it felt like “this is how they do it when women are in charge.”

Which was the first time I realized that (a) scans_daily had women in charge, or (b) there's such a deep split within comics fandom. Lisa Fortuner at Robot 6 added more remarks while drawing a line between reasons for the shutdown itself and reasons for different fans' responses to it.
Another interesting reaction came from comics scripter Gail Simone, who herself came out of the female fan ranks:

I sympathize with any creators who felt their work was spoiled. I JUST this week had the ending of my latest issue of Wonder Woman spoiled.

Simone laments some comics-sharing on artistic rather than commercial grounds, because it can interfere with readers' enjoyment. I find that attitude very interesting. Even so, Simone makes clear, she's ready to live with spoilers in such communities as scans_daily if they're a reflection of reader enthusiasm.

Everybody acknowledges that LiveJournal's shutdown has simply pushed the same behavior elsewhere. Now there's a noscans_daily on LiveJournal for former members to keep up the conversation, and a reconstituted scans_daily on another service. (I haven't joined because I'm too busy right now to sign up for anything that includes the word "insane." It would be redundant.) And of course the internet contains torrents of files reproducing nearly every comic book ever published, hidden deeper than scans_daily was and thus not available to new fans.

Meanwhile, the comic-book publishers still face shrinking magazine sales, and the pitfalls and potential of new digital formats. How do they please established readers and cultivate new ones? Keep characters fresh yet familiar? Price material economically but profitably? No one knows which challenge to attack first. But scans_daily had its head up.

Repeated Robins

One of the visual techniques of comics that I find most interesting is a sequence of similar panels. I'll explain what I mean with help from--who else?--Robin the Boy Wonder.

It's relatively rare to find such repetitive images in modern picture books because that form has come to emphasize visual variety and richness, usually just one full-spread image at a time. The technique depends on the readers' eyes quickly comparing two juxtaposed images, which is harder with a page turn in between. There are exceptions to that rule, of course; Ellen Raskin was a master at producing meaning from repetitive illustration, spread to spread.

One version of this technique is to show several instants in one scene from the same angle, with the same framing and the same background. That directs our eyeballs to what changes from one image to the next, usually the characters in action. This sequence of panels featuring the current Robin, Tim Drake, comes from Robin Plus Fang, script by Chuck Dixon, art by Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning.

The changes in similar panels don't have to be so physical, though. Here's a sequence from the first Nightwing miniseries, collected in Ties That Bind, by Dennis O'Neil and Greg Land. Dick Grayson has decided to get out of the vigilante business. (I suspect that his hair was taking up a lot more of his time than he'd expected.) He's telling Batman what to do with his costume.
With each panel, Dick's face grows darker, and the Batman more distant. The similar but changing images convey the protagonist's mood.

Repetitive images can also focus our attention on one changing detail which might otherwise be lost, such as the grin that appears on "Batman's" face in the second panel below. That's all the clue that Nightwing needs, trained detective that he is.
That sequence is from JLA/The Titans: The Technis Imperative, by Devin Grayson and Phil Jimenez.

Repetitive images are also a tool for pacing. Seeing two similar panels, especially with no word balloons, tells us that time passes even when we don't see change. In the next sequence, Batman asks the third Robin, Jason Todd, to explain what happened to the rape suspect who was just with him on that balcony.
Batman's figure stays the same, so we sense he's waiting and waiting for an answer. These panels are from Batman, #424, script by Jim Starlin, art by Mark "Doc" Bright and Steve Mitchell.

Given how repetitive panels affect pacing, they can also be used for comic effect. After all, what's the key to comedy?





Timing. In the next sequence, the adult mentor of the teen-aged superhero group Young Justice orders Tim Drake as Robin and his speedy friend Impulse not to search for their missing comrade Secret.
This page comes from an uncollected issue of Young Justice, script by Peter David and drawing by Todd Nauck.

The brief, silent passage of time created by wordless panels in each of the last three examples is the equivalent of what screenwriters have come to call a beat. Such a silence can be hard to convey in prose, and The New Yorker has caught some lazy novelists instructing readers that characters "waited a beat" before they speak.

The visual dimension of comics makes it easy to convey that silent moment. Here's yet another example, from the current teen-superhero magazine to feature Robin, the third volume of The Teen Titans.
This deathless conversation was published in the volume Teen Titans/Outsiders: The Insiders. Scripted by Geoff Johns, penciled by Matthew Clark, inked by Art Thibert.

That last example also hints at something I don't like about how comics artists are applying this technique today. Many artists now work on computers ("penciled" and "inked" are just digital metaphors). That makes it awfully tempting to copy and paste an image from one panel to the next, especially when working under a tight deadline. The three-panel sequence of Nightwing and his hair far above is obviously hand-drawn, and the artists made many changes, large and subtle, from one panel to the next. But the two images of Robin above are identical down to the cross-hatched shadows and coloration.

A growing number of copy-and-paste jobs strike me as having been done without enough regard for the dramatic needs of the scene. This last example comes from Outsiders: Looking for Trouble, script by Judd Winick, art by Todd Raney and Scott Hanna. In these panels, it makes sense to draw the redhead the same because he's making a deadpan joke. His expression shouldn't change. But doing the same for Nightwing just looks like laziness. And using the same image for two panels with different characters talking apparently means that neither can be shown with his mouth open.
The only place I enjoy watching cardboard cutouts talk to each other like that is Wondermark.

“The Theme Is Your Spine”

Yesterday I quoted a remark by comics novelist Alan Moore on how a powerful plot works. In the same essay that passage came from, Writing for Comics, Moore also insisted: "A plot isn't the main point of the story or the story's main reason for existing. It is something that is there more to enhance the central idea of the story and the characters who will be involved in it."

And earlier, "A good starting point would perhaps be the aspect that lies at the very heart of any creative process: the idea. The idea is what the story is about; not the plot of the story, or the unfolding of events within that story, but what the story is essentially about."

That reminder is echoed in another book called Writing for Comics, by Peter David--another scripter who's achieved a great deal of respect in adventure comics, if not the outright adulation that Moore can inspire. Using different terminology, David offered similar advice:

Furthermore, you need to have a solid grasp of your theme. If ideas and conflict are the skeleton of your story, the theme is your spine. I define theme as that aspect of the human condition upon which your story offers commentary. Ideally everything that transpires in your story should somehow connect to your theme. It sounds simplistic, I know, but you must have a clear idea of your theme, and whence the conflict stems, before you embark upon telling your story. Without that, your story will be unfocused and vague.

While books about writing fiction in prose forms also discuss "the theme" or "the central idea," I rarely see such emphasis on that quality as a necessary early step in storytelling. Rather, many novelists argue that their themes develop as they write, and are in any event far more interesting to English teachers than to working writers. Novel-writing advice books often stress characters as the starting-point.

I think there are several reasons why these two writers put so much emphasis on theme in their advice to people wanting to enter the comics field.

• First, in the superhero comics where David and Moore did their most visible work, characters have often been defined by other writers decades before, and are owned by corporations rather than individual creators. David, for instance, is admired for writing a long, successful run of The Incredible Hulk, about a character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962. While it's important in writing such comics to understand the central characters, what drives them, and what they represent, the writer isn't called on so often to invent them. (I'll say more on Moore's use of established characters at some future point.)
• Moore and David also work in a field that requires stories to have action that can be illustrated. Commercial comics have long thrived on plot-driven stories with twist endings. In sum, anyone trying to write mainstream comics probably already knows that plots are required; that's where they'd start. They'd need help with remembering to think about why a plot matters. I also wonder if such plotting has always come easily to Moore and David--hence their success. Writers who are excellent at scene-setting, or character-building, or style, might need more of a push on plots and less on those aspects of storytelling.
  
• Perhaps most important, Moore and David have probably seen a lot of stories, both unpublished and published, that are all plot and action with no central idea or theme. ("What if Wolverine fought Superman? Wouldn't that be neat!" "Why would they fight? What would be that story's central idea? What would it say about the human condition?" "Um, I dunno. But wouldn't it be neat!") Moore and David might have emphasized this step for beginning writers not because it's the first thing they do when they write, but because it's what they see others not doing enough.
  

Allusions to Oz

This week I plan to bolster up the Oz side of "Oz and Ends" with a few postings on L. Frank Baum's century-old fantasy series and its cultural legacy.

As a fan of the books more than the now-better-known MGM movie, I'm always pleased to see allusions to Oz that reflect literary rather than cinematic knowledge. Sometimes it's not so clear, however. Carrie Hedges of the International Wizard of Oz Club board passed on this reference:

In a United States Supreme Court case, Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. Reed, 445 U.S. 935, 938, 100 S.Ct. 1329, 1331 (1980), Justice Rehnquist wrote in dissent: "Even if the Constitution required it, and it were possible for federal courts to do it, no equitable decree can fashion an 'Emerald City' where all races, ethnic groups, and persons of various income levels live side by side in a large metropolitan area."

It would be nice to believe that the Justice was alluding to the Emerald City under Princess Ozma, which is indeed home to a wide assortment of different types of people (straw, wooden, cotton, meat, fairy princess raised as mortal boy, immigrant Americans, etc., etc.). As Marc Berezin noted in an essay on Frankensteinia, even Dr. Frankenstein's creature might find the Emerald City to be a hospitable home.

However, I can't help but suspect that Rehnquist was merely using "Emerald City" as American shorthand for a city he believed never did and never could exist. He did, after all, get his political start by enforcing literacy tests on black and Latino voters in Arizona, and bought houses with racist restrictive covenants. The notion of an "Emerald City" of equality and tolerance would likely have struck him as a fantasy rather than a social goal. (Photo of Rehnquist in 1971 courtesy of the New York Times.)

On the other hand, writer Peter David offered a knowledgeable reference to the Oz series in his Writing for Comics handbook:

Why hadn't Lockjaw [a dog in the Fantastic Four comic] said a word in the past thirty-some years? Like Toto, who it turned out was perfectly capable of speech while in Oz, he just hadn't had all that much to say.

TOMORROW: The scene from Tik-Tok of Oz that David alluded to.