Balloonacy at the B.C.R.

This evening the Boston Comics Roundtable did an activity I invented called Balloonacy. It didn’t pan out exactly as I’d imagined since we’d talked so long about how to make the group more active that there wasn’t as much time left for an actual activity. But I think it was fun and productive for those involved.

I started by drawing the classic ellipsoid balloon with a short pointy tail and the letters “B.C.R.” inside. I posited that that’s the comics equivalent of a sentence with a period at the end. It’s a straightforward statement.

Then I challenged folks to draw balloons in which the lettering, punctuation or other marks inside the balloon, balloon shape, tail shape, or some other visual detail would give the letters “B.C.R.” a different meaning and perhaps sound.

The group then drew (in no particular order):

• classic thought balloon.
• dotted whisper balloon.
• balloon with four tails, for four (or more) people speaking simultaneously.
• balloon with nine tails over a cityscape to signal a chorus of millions.
• collage of balloons all saying the same thing.
• fancy letters for ornate speech.
• The Yellow Kid with a message on his nightshirt.
• balloon shaped like a luscious pair of lips.
• burst balloon for shouting.
• scroll-shaped balloon with blackletter/Gothic letters for a town crier.
• three connected balloons each containing one letter for a single, slow, deliberate speaker.
• three separate balloons each containing one letter pointing to a single depressed figure.
• three separated balloons each containing one letter with tails pointing different places to denote three speakers.
• balloon with tail going off the page to an off-panel speaker.
• block letters and block balloon for a carnival barker.
• two forms of white letters dropped out of a black balloon, one with the wavery white border that Todd Klein gave to Dream in Sandman. (We also looked at his Delirium balloons.)
• wavery letters for a spooky voice.
• icicle-dripping balloon for disdain.
• two variations of rebuses spelling out “B.C.R.,” one assigned to a mime.
• balloon with a long, meandering tail suitable for a character who talks and talks without getting to the point.
• balloon containing musical notes as well as letters for singing.
• letters strung out on an undulating musical staff for more singing.
• wavery-bordered balloon with its tail dropping off the bottom of the page where the speaker is collapsing in a faint.
• two balloons, one overlapping the other to show an interruption.
• balloon blocked by the side of a panel as something interrupts.
• vertical balloon containing Japanese kanji sounding approximately like “B.C.R.” 
• huge letters from a loud character flattening other characters.
• tiny, lowercase letters within a big balloon for quiet speech.
• two examples of giant block letters crowding the edges of their balloon.
• square block letters in a squarish balloon for a real square.
• letters drawn within concentric radio waves spreading from an antenna.
• jagged-edged balloon and with a lightning-bolt tail to denote electronic communication.
• big block letters with small exclamation points instead of periods—verging on a sound effect!
• round balloon with no tail for a disembodied or off-panel speaker.
• squarish balloon and lettering for a robot.
• balloon with its tail ending in a starburst against a window—a recent way of showing that someone is speaking inside that building.
• various typographical symbols before the letters to indicate profanity.
• chevrons on either side of the letters and an asterisked footnote to indicate speech in a foreign language (or, some people thought, HTML).
• tailless thought balloon broken up with breath marks to denote psychic communication.
• a long, boring speech wallpapered on the back of a panel.

We also came up with three balloons that not everyone agreed on how to interpret.

• thought balloon with a pointed tail instead of the trail of puffs that thought balloons usually have. Could this indicate thinking aloud?
• three numbered boxes each containing one letter. I didn’t catch the discussion on that one.
• balloon butted up against the edge of a panel. That usually means the same thing as a balloon fully inside a panel—it doesn’t seem to reflect anything more than the available space and the preference of the editor and letterer who place that balloon. But perhaps it could have storytelling significance. Say, one dominant character’s speech balloons are always in the center of a panel and another’s are always crowded to one side.
• word balloon in the shape of a real helium balloon with a knot at the bottom. What might this symbolize?

And that was just balloons. We haven’t yet talked about other ways comics show the invisible.

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?

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?

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.