Ducking Stereotypes in Abadazad

As I've discussed before, the Abadazad series of graphic novels/novel novels plays off the the Oz books and other series from decades past. One of the nifty ways its creators re-imagine those forebears is that "Little Martha," the heroine of the fictive original books about Abadazad (i.e., the equivalent of Dorothy Gale), was in fact African-American. But of course a black child wasn't marketable a hundred years ago (unless reduced to a comic stereotype, like Sambo, Epaminondas, or Herman in Penrod).

On an Oz discussion list, I once speculated on what might have happened if L. Frank Baum and John R. Neill had portrayed Betsy Bobbin, heroine of Tik-Tok of Oz, as black. As it is, she's simply a stand-in for Dorothy; her thin personality in that book fades to nothing after she reaches the Emerald City. But if Betsy were black, the book might have won a new audience in the 1960s and 1970s when librarians and teachers sought out stories with non-white protagonists--a new audience just as the Oz books started to fade from public consciousness behind the bright rainbow of the MGM movie. But of course Baum and his publishers couldn't have seriously imagined such a protagonist in 1914. The creators of Abadazad can.

At the same time, their characterization of Little Martha strikes me as dangling on the edge of a modern stereotype. Unless Martha Vaughn develops well beyond what I see in the first volume, she's a print example of that modern movie cliché, the "magical Negro."

I quote from Wikipedia (and promise I didn't make up this text there in order to quote it here):

When he first encounters the (invariably white) protagonist, the magical negro often appears as someone uneducated and in a low station of life, such as a janitor or prisoner. The black character is depicted as wiser and spiritually deeper than the protagonist, and the magical negro is often used as a plot device to help the protagonist get out of trouble, and to help the white character recognize his own faults and overcome them.

Other explorations of this narrative trope are available from Noel Wood, Rita Kempley, Spike Lee, and Audrey Colombe.

Obviously, the character in Abadazad doesn't serve a white male--excuse me, White Male, as most "magical Negroes" in movies do. But Martha is a crucial supernatural helper for the story's young white heroine; she provides Kate the magic necessary to reach Abadazad, and guides the girl there. Martha does appear first as someone in a lower station: an addled elderly neighbor ("totally senile," as the Abadazad website expresses Kate's thoughts). She's obviously going to help Kate recognize her faults and overcome her problems.

But it's not clear why Little Martha is doing any of that. I think that's the main giveaway of a "magical Negro" or similar sacrificial characters: they don't have motivations or desires of their own. Why besides wise altruism does Little Martha help Kate, and what will happen if their interests diverge?

Font Fantasies and Typewriter Realism

In keeping with its combination of pictures and words, comics and novelistic narration, reminiscences and diary entries, Abadazad uses a variety of fonts--but in rather odd ways.

Most of the book's novelistic (as opposed to graphic-novelistic) pages appear in a font called CG Whisper. It sits somewhere between an ordinary sans-serif book font and a handwriting font, apparently to signal that we're reading Kate's diary.

Every so often we see pages supposedly from the original Abadazad books by Franklin O. Davies in a more traditional serif font, though the leading is much bigger than in one of the real models for that fictional series, Reilly & Britton's Oz books.

And then there are three pages at the front and back of the first volume, plus the back cover, set in a typewriter font. Not a common Courier, but a typeface with variations among letters as if they had been set down by steel keys hitting a cloth ribbon permeated with a gradually decreasing supply of ink. (Of course, there are no typos on this page, and the typeface includes an em-dash instead of two hyphens.)

I call this design touch "Typewriter Realism": it creates a page that looks much like it's been typed on an old machine. It's supposed to add authenticity to printed page--in this case, to make those three pages look like Kate has typed them out to introduce her diary. Of course, I chose a similar look for Oz and Ends. And the Class of 2k7 uses the same idea sonically at the end of their trailer.

But that allusion may be outdated, and thus decreasingly realistic. Manuscripts haven't needed to look like typed for years. Some aspiring writers assure others that manuscripts must be in Courier font. But at least fifteen years ago I was editing books in Times Roman and other standard proportional fonts, and my only complaint came when there was no digital file. Indeed, as The Rejecter recently noted, Courier is harder to read than older, proportional fonts. Typewriter style wasn't an improvement over the style developed for lead type; it was a collection of compromises necessitated by technology, and we're now free of those limitations.

In particular, does Typewriter Realism hold much meaning for young readers today? Kate is fourteen years old. Where did she even get a manual typewriter? How did she learn how to use it? (I don't mean keyboarding, which even preschoolers pick up. I mean more esoteric knowledge we've been able to set aside, like how to know when you're approaching the bottom of a page or how to make an exclamation mark out of an apostrophe and a period.)

Adult writers and illustrators and designers and editors may infer some authenticity from a page that looks like it rolled out of a typewriter, but does that appearance mean anything special to Abadazad's target readers?

Making Excuses for Abadazad

J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog launched Abadazad as a comic book, and then turned it into a hybrid of novel and graphic novel--small trim size and paper-over-board covers, like the Lemony Snicket series, but full-color printing and a variety of page designs inside.

That shift seems to have prompted the DeMatteis and Ploog to explain how all the book's elements came together. A somewhat hysterical note to readers from the narrator (well, she's fourteen, so of course she's hysterical) says:

...things are going to get a LOT strange. Like with the pictures. I'm not talking about the old photos I've taped into the book...y'know, the ones of me with my brother or mother or Gramma Esther. I'm talking about those OTHER pictures. THE ONES NOBODY EVER TOOK. THE ONES THAT JUST APPEARED THERE LIKE MAGIC.

You think THAT'S STRANGE? Wait.

You're gonna see--REALLY SEE--a lot of the things that happened to me. Kind of like watching a TV show or a movie of my life jumping across the pages. And not JUST the stuff that happened to me. Every once in a while you're gonna see stuff that happened when I WASN'T EVEN AROUND.

In other words, Abadazad is going to tell its story as comic books have been doing for decades. Comics always include pictures, of course. They also commonly shift scenes, like movies, to reveal things that their heroes don't know. Thought balloons let comics creators reveal the thinking of several characters at once (not that they always use that technique). Folks who read comics are so used to those conventions that we don't really notice them.

Of course, novelists could do the same things, too, and many have done so. But since Henry James or so, our fiction has become more and more narrow in point of view. That trend is especially strong when it comes to stories narrated by one character--we readers are never supposed to read anything that the narrator doesn't know. It's possible for a narrator to remark on things he or she learned later, but that shifts what I call the perspective of the story and might give away upcoming events.

I doubt Abadazad's apologia is really necessary. It just isn't that "STRANGE" for young readers to find pictures on a page, or to see comic books revealing what the villain is up to. And the claims raise as many questions as they answer. Why, for instance, do the "photos" Kate has pasted into her diary appear in exactly the same style as those magically appearing "drawings"? Why does her diary never describe the events we see in the magically appearing comics pages? If they're independent narratives, they should overlap. Those questions wouldn't occur to most comics readers without the authors' attempts to explain the hybrid form.

If characters and story are compelling enough, I think, most readers accept the form(s) in which they come to us. And if we see more comics/novel hybrids like Abadazad and Agent Boo, then readers will get even more used to that form's conventions and possibilities.

A Bad Adolescence and Abadazad

At the outset of the first volume of J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog's Abadazad (in book form, not comic form), our heroine and usual narrator Kate describes herself as a "FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MALCONTENT." Which seems fair.

Kate's grumpy. She's grumpy about the disappearance of her little brother, Matt, five years before. She's grumpy about her father leaving the family twelve years before. She's grumpy about her mother for what the storytellers suggest are the signs of bipolar disorder. She's grumpy about going to a psychotherapist. She's grumpy about going to school. She's grumpy at herself for letting Matt disappear. And she's even occasionally grumpy at Matt for having been a sickly-sweet child.

What does Kate like? She used to like the Abadazad books, though now she's mostly grumpy about them not being true (she thinks). She likes her diary, though she's a bit grumpy about having to call it that. She likes a rock band called the Thrashing Plague, which apparently reflects her grumpiness, but I don't recall her ever listening to music. She likes sitting in her closet--'nuff said.

But does Kate like writing? Does she like sports? The movies? Cell phones? Chinese food? Jon Stewart? The color purple? We never know. The Abadazad website includes toggles for games, computer wallpaper, and a text-messaging club, but there's no sign that Kate herself would take any pleasure in such things.

I had many moody moments in my teens, to be sure, but neither I nor any of my friends were quite so grumpy as Kate. I have no doubt that some people go through early adolescence more grumpily than others. But I suspect the real appeal of this common portrait of a teenager is that it lets readers vicariously experience their own desires to be grumpy to all people all the time. It's like having a super power, or being outside parental control. However, the result, to my tastes, is a flat and unappealing protagonist. I wouldn't have spent much time with Kate when I was a teenager, and I'm not sure I want to spent much time with her now.

Which is okay, since Kate obviously wouldn't enjoy spending time with me.

Iz Abadazad a new Oz?

Monica Edinger, award-winning teacher at the Dalton School in New York, asked me through the Child_Lit listserv about the fantasy series Abadazad, by writer J. M. DeMatteis, illustrator Mike Ploog, and colorist Nick Bell [no relation].

Abadazad was first a line of comic books, now a shorter series of longer graphic novels from Hyperion, the publishing wing of Disney. Monica wrote, "I read the first one and it struck me as playing off the whole Oz phenomena in some very interesting ways." Her three major points of similarity:

1. Kate's diary with a typical snarky teen voice to it. But with stuff like, "You've heard of Abadazad, right? I mean .... duh...who hasn't.....But, just in case you're totally clueless: The first book, Little Martha, was written in 1898 by this guy named Franklin O. Davies...Davies wrote, I dunno, nineteen or twenty Abadazad books that were all published between 1898 and 1942....Well, I think you get the idea. After Franklin O. died, his daughter P.J. Davies wrote fifteen more...."

That bit of fictional publishing history certainly could be inspired by the Oz series--as well as the Stratemeyer Syndicate that generated the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, which was taken over by the founder's daughters. Three of L. Frank Baum's four sons tried to write stories in his mode, but none was successful or stuck it out for more than a title or two. But Ruth Plumly Thompson, who did take over the official series and wrote, "I dunno, nineteen or twenty" books, was bothered throughout her career by rumors that she was Baum's niece or some other relation. (They never met.)

2. A comic which, along with the diary, is the story of Kate going into Abadazad looking for her missing little brother.

To my eyes, this plot-starter makes the Abadazad stories different from the Oz stories in a mighty significant way. Rescuing a little sibling is the starter for other going-into-a-strange-land stories, from A Wrinkle in Time to Labyrinth (which Ploog worked on as a storyboard artist), but the child-protagonists who have adventures in Oz are remarkably sibling-free. Not until Number Nine and Twink and Tom in the 1940s do those children have any siblings at all, much less siblings who need rescuing. Dorothy, Tip, Inga, etc.--they're all only children.

3. Pages from an actual Abadazad book with bits like, "You are a very bad man!" Little Martha exclaimed. "Indeed I am," sneered the Lanky Man, incredibly pleased with himself.

And again that seems like a parodic echo of an exchange from Baum's Wizard of Oz that was plucked whole into the MGM movie:

"I think you are a very bad man," said Dorothy.

"Oh, no, my dear; I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard, I must admit."

To Monica's points, I can add some graphic similarities, such as this big head of a man with a fringe of hair.

Now it might be that we view all "child goes to fairyland" stories through the lens of our favorite examples of that genre. Kevenn T. Smith, an illustrator in last year's issue of Oziana, and pioneer Oz blogger Eric Gjovaag noted echoes of Oz in the Abadazad comics back in 2004 on the Oz Club bulletin board. But in the same year, All Ages wrote of Abadazad as "in the vein of Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe." (All Ages also anguished that something would be lost in the shift from comic pages to hardcover.)

To that point, it seems significant that Monica calls herself a "Carrollian," and isn't claiming to see Alice here. She wrote, "I found it quite fun and intriguing. I thought they would be of particular interest to Oz folks just as we Carrollians are always interested in parodies of Wonderland." So how about it, folks? What do people think of Abadazad in comparison with the Oz books? On its own? And does the shift to the new book format make it more or less reminiscent of Oz as the comics?