Tom Lyle and the Robin Miniseries

In 1986 Tom Lyle, an aspiring comic-book artist in his thirties, went to a comics convention in Philadelphia. There he met Chuck Dixon, a young writer who was scripting Air Boy for Eclipse. Based on Lyle’s samples, Dixon got him the job of penciler on a related title, Sky Wolf. In a chat with Comics Interview magazine, Lyle credited that as “the event that triggered my career” in comics.

Lyle was recruited by DC Comics to draw Starman in 1988. After a couple of years, as he was wrapping up that assignment, Lyle asked Batman group editor Dennis O’Neil if he had any openings. O’Neil was planning a miniseries focusing the newly created Robin, Tim Drake.

“I’ve never been real thrilled with the Robins,” Lyle told his interviewer. “Dick Grayson, the original Robin, I couldn’t have given a flip about when I was a kid; it was like, ‘Get out of the way, kid, I want to see Batman.” But a job was a job.

O’Neil’s team wanted to make Robin into a martial-arts expert, so they needed a writer who understood the martial arts. Lyle suggested Dixon. He got the assignment and went on to be DC’s most productive writer of the decade. (On the occasion of his 40,000th comics page in 2017, Bleeding Cool noted Dixon wrote 106 issues of Robin, 89 issues of Detective Comics, 77 issues of Nightwing, 46 issues of Birds Of Prey, and 22 issues of Catwoman, to name a few.)

Dixon and Lyle’s first issue of the first Robin series carried a cover date of January 1991. The character of Tim Drake had been created by Marv Wolfman in issues drawn by George Pérez, Jim Aparo, and Norm Breyfogle, and his costume was designed by Neal Adams. But Dixon and Lyle’s portrayal fleshed him out by showing him on his own. Lyle was especially good at portraying Tim as a thirteen-year-old, lithe but not a powerhouse, the littlest guy in the fight who needed to think harder than anyone else to stay alive.

In the gritty, pouched, and overpumped 1990s, Robin was the equivalent of counterprogramming on broadcast television—standing out by doing something different. And it worked. According to Lyle, DC expected to sell about 200,000 copies of the first issue of the Robin miniseries. Instead, it sold three times that number.

DC asked the Dixon-Lyle team for a second miniseries about Tim Drake going up against the Joker, issued at the end of 1991. Then came a third, featuring the character the Huntress for an interesting contrast. That was the height of the speculative boom, and those magazines are festooned with holograms and other gimmicks.

Dixon and Lyle also collaborated on issues of Batman and Detective Comics showing Batman and Robin together. One of those magazines introduced Stephanie Brown as the Spoiler, who went on to become Tim Drake’s love interest, a fan favorite, and eventually Robin and Batgirl herself for limited periods. Lyle was also the artist for the first Robin Annual and the 1992 public service ad in which Tim decides to learn the facts about AIDS.

During that time, Lyle also plotted and penciled the early issues of The Comet for DC’s Impact imprint. In 1993 he started working for Marvel Comics on Spider-Man stories. That same year, DC launched the Robin monthly series with Dixon as regular scripter.

After another ten years or so, Lyle left monthly comics to become an art teacher at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Earlier this year he suffered an aneurysm, and last week he died, aged 66. Friends and fans have set up a Go Fund Me page for his family.

What the New Spider-Man Comes Home to

Back in 2014, it was widely reported that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a superhero movie crossed with a 1970s political thriller. That’s why the sight of Robert Redford, star of Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and Brubaker, in the film was so resonant.

In the same way, I think Spider-Man: Homecoming as a superhero movie crossed with a 1980s high-school romantic comedy. The sort of movie on which John Hughes made his name. The genre that such other talents as Cameron Crowe, Martha Coolidge, Amy Heckerling, and Savage Steve Holland contributed to.

In the midst of the usual superpowered action and angst, there are a lot of laughs about the culture of high school, as seen from the student perspective. Adults are either petty tyrants or ineffectual scolds (even Captain America). High-school rituals like the morning news bulletin, homecoming dance, and academic decathlon are both laughable and life-or-death important. Everyone else seems to be having more fun.

In many ways, the high school in Spider-Man: Homecoming is a welcome update to the schools in those earlier movies and in the original Spider-Man comics. Peter Parker attends a high school devoted to science and technology, so by older standards everyone’s already a nerd. His rival Flash Thompson isn’t the football captain; he just has a big mouth and sharp tongue. And the student body is very ethnically diverse.

Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn’t seem shy about its cinematic pedigree. The movie even includes a clip from Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an iconic example of the genre. The soundtrack features the Ramones, the English Beat, and A Flock of Seagulls. The homecoming dance has an ’80s theme, which would be exotic for characters born in this century but is nostalgic for some of this movie’s target audience.

My friend Dan Mazur has said that he used to enjoy Spider-Man comics and their common theme of “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” But eventually he noticed that almost every story came back to “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” And he began to think that comics should find more to say. [More on that here.]

That’s not the theme of this Spider-Man movie, however. It’s not an origin story, as in Amazing Fantasy, #15. We don’t see Peter Parker bit by the spider, we don’t see him try pro wrestling, we don’t see him ignore the burglar who kills his uncle. At no point does he really think about tossing everything away or just showing off, as Peter has occasionally done in the comics and previous movies.

Instead, when Spider-Man: Homecoming starts, Peter is already determined to take on great responsibilities as a costumed crimefighter. Indeed, he’s too eager. The major moment of character growth is actually stepping away from big, flashy responsibilities in favor of staying home. The Homecoming subtitle refers to how the story immediately follows from Captain America: Civil War, the high school dance, and Peter’s decision to focus on his own neighborhood.

The main theme of this Spider-Man is thus the same as those earlier high-school movies: stay true to yourself and your real friends, and you’ll get through this.

What Is Dick Grayson’s Core?

Kyle Higgins appears to be wrapping up his current work on the Dick Grayson character. The latest stories in Batman Beyond 2.0, including an upcoming chapter titled “The Final Fate of Dick Grayson,” have Alec Siegel’s name as co-writer, and Siegel’s the one signing the footnoted cross-references. (Wasn’t that once the editor’s prerogative?)

Therefore, even though Higgins is back on the Batman beat as one of the writers scripting the final stretch of Batman Eternal, and though he says he’ll likely return to Dick Grayson someday, his recent interview with Crave Online reads like a farewell retrospective:

Your work on Nightwing really expanded the character. Was everything in place from day one, or did it come as you wrote the story?

I had an idea from the start, but I learned so much along the way. I remember having a conversation with one of my best friends, who is an incredibly talented writer who works in TV and did some Gates Of Gotham with me [Ryan Parrot]. We said, when you boil Dick Grayson down, how do you describe him in a few sentences. What is his core? We did it as an exercise with Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, and boiled all them down to their central drive.

With Dick Grayson I couldn’t do it, I had a really hard time with it. I realized that was a problem. I know who the character is, but I can’t fully articulate why I love the character. It wasn’t until I settled on this idea that he grew up in a circus, so he’s all about catching people when they fall. That’s actually the final line of my final issue. I sat on that for over a year.

Dick seems more involved with the people he’s helping.

It’s about the empathy for who he saves. Every superhero, in one way or another, does it for the good of so-and-so, and they want to help people, but Dick Grayson more than all is about the people. He’ll save you from a mugger, tie your shoe and buy you a beer.

Dick and Bruce are very similar, but very different. Why?

Well, in a weird way one is more focused on his parents’ deaths, and the other is more focused on his parents’ lives. To me Dick and his Nightwing persona is more about spectacle than Batman. He’s sailing between buildings, it’s a performance and people can see him. He’ll operate in the daylight. It’s much more about the circus life and how he was brought up and the show. Nobody wants a brooding mopey Dick Grayson.

Another reason why the grim, one-eyed Dick Grayson in Batman Beyond 2.0 is a signal of a dystopic future.

Higgins continues to work on C.O.W.L., his story of a superhero labor politics in post-WW2 Chicago, for Image. We have yet to see the equivalent of Dick Grayson in those comics, but one did appear in Higggins’s student film, apparently set in the same world. And, to be frank, that character’s kind of mopey.

What Will “On Your Left” Mean?

In the discussion of the political implications of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Greg Carpenter at Sequart found a key in the movie’s strong opening scene. Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are jogging around the reflecting pool in Washington, the former (having been injected with the super-soldier serum) much faster than the latter:

Each time Rogers approaches Wilson, he gives the same cautionary warning: “On your left.” They are the first words spoken in the new film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and they lay the groundwork for much of the political perspective of the film. While this Captain America may sneak up on you—you’ll find him “on your left.”

Not everyone caught that, as Alyssa Rosenberg shows in the Washington Post:

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” returns time and time again to the idea that the biggest issue in national security is who controls the apparatus, rather than whether we should use certain technologies or techniques at all.

To be sure, there’s an inherent tension between the superhero narrative, or any hero narrative that focuses on an individual or small group of individuals, and spread-out popular power. As a result, some critics have trouble noting the moments built into superhero films that celebrate the crowd: the scenes in the first two Spider-Man movies in which groups of ordinary New Yorkers stand up to villains when Spider-Man is in trouble, for example.

In Winter Soldier, the conflict ends with the spy agency’s (unspecified) secrets being dumped out onto the internet. The directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, noted that as they were filming Edward Snowden released some secret files from the National Security Agency with the same idea. Of course, Wikileaks and Bradley/Chelsea Manning had done something similar already.

Granted, heroic narratives aren’t good at exploring the actual challenges of broad-based decision-making. Jonathan Stroud’s original Bartimaeus trilogy gets to that at the end of the third volume. George Lucas’s Star Wars films and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series declare the superiority of democracy over dictatorship, but they show actual politicking as pretty feckless. L. Frank Baum’s Oz and other magical kingdoms tend to settle for benevolent dictatorships. But the larger the fictional universe, the more stories bottom-up authority allows.

In an article for Business Insider, Jeff Gomez and one-time Robin/Red Robin scripter Fabian Nicieza analyzed how developments in Winter Soldier open up possibilities for Marvel’s overarching movie narrative:

Feige faced a daunting creative challenge for his thriving film series: while Nick Fury and SHIELD served as the perfect impetus for uniting a disparate band of dysfunctional superheroes [in The Avengers], now the filmmakers were stuck with global icons like Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man effectively bowing to a secret American military organization. That had to end, but the choice of making Captain America cut the umbilical cord? Genius. . . .

The result is the fall of SHIELD, and the vast U.S. military-industrial complex no longer stands as the leash-holder to Captain America and his superhero allies. Steve Rogers becomes apolitical, while still representing the world’s perception of American selflessness, justice, and heroism dating back to World War II.

Already the Agents of SHIELD television show is reflecting the new situation (not that I’ve watched it since the pilot). We’ll see if the next set of Marvel moviemakers can fulfill that promise.

Walter Mosley’s Childhood Favorites

Here’s Walter Mosley answering the New York Times Book Review’s question about his favorite childhood reading:

I know that as a working writer I should answer this question in such a way as to make me seem intelligent; maybe Twain or Dickens, even Hesse or Conrad. . . .

But the truth is that the most beloved and the most formative books of my childhood were comic books, specifically Marvel Comics. “Fantastic Four” and “Spider-Man,” “The Mighty Thor” and “The Invincible Iron Man”; later came “Daredevil” and many others. These combinations of art and writing presented to me the complexities of character and the pure joy of imagining adventure. They taught me about writing dialect and how a monster can also be a hero. They lauded science and fostered the understanding that the world was more complex than any one mind, or indeed the history of all human minds, could comprehend.

In 2005 Mosley got to show his love by spearheading a project to republish Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first Fantastic Four adventure at giant size, one panel per page.

Fast Food and the Caped Crusader

I recently read a study in Pediatric Obesity titled “What would Batman eat?: priming children to make healthier fast food choices.” Unfortunately, it left me with a lot of questions.

The study was small, involving only 22 children. (Interestingly, just six of those were non-Hispanic whites.) During weekly lunches at Burger King the researchers asked the kids, “Do you want apple fries or French fries with your lunch?”—“apple fries” being the chain’s term for apple slices.

At the outset only 9% of the kids chose the fruit. But when shown “12 photos of (6 admirable and 6 less admirable) real and fictional models” and asked what those folks would choose, the kids’ choice of apples went up to 45%. Not even half, but still a significant jump.

Alas, the study doesn’t list all the people in those photos. Two of the admirable figures were Batman and Spider-Man (spelled without the hyphen in the abstract). One of the “less admirable” figures was the Penguin—a villain whom Dick Grayson chuckled at in 1941 (see below) and who has only gotten more roly-poly and villainous since.

The other nine figures remain unknown. Did they include the Hulk, an embodiment of id with no regard for body issues—yet usually on the “admirable” side? What about Bouncing Boy of the Legion of Super Heroes, chubby and heroic? What about Stephen Hawking? What about a villain in excellent physical condition, like Deathstroke?

(One of the early Bruce Wayne’s brief attempts to be mature and parental. Within a few panels he was referring to the Penguin as “that fatty.” But then the man turned out to be a criminal, so it was okay to look down on him.)

The Color of Drama

Color is an element of comics I have very little handle on. I can spot broad patterns, like the contrasting worlds of brownish-red and blue-green in the Artemis Fowle adaptations. But more subtle color schemes need to be spelled out for me. (Spider-Man’s early villains were often green and purple because those contrast with his own red and blue—ohhh!)

I therefore latched onto this passage from Graphic Novel Reporter’s interview with Raina Telgemeier about Drama:

You worked with design studio Gurihiru to create a color scheme for this book that perfectly complements the tone of the story. Tell us a little bit about how you went about that.

Gurihiru (a two-women team, Kawano and Sasaki) is responsible for some of my favorite art and comics of the past half-decade or so. They illustrated the rebooted Marvel Power Pack series, and they’re working on the Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Lost Adventures with Gene Yang right now. They have a really soft, pleasing color palette, so I looked to them to help create the jewel-toned world of Callie’s universe, which I love.

In some cases, I had really clear ideas—the story is set in a specific part of California, where the weather and atmosphere are very distinctive. And because Gurihiru are Japanese and work through a translator, there were a few instances where they needed solid American references. Soda cans, the bookstore scene, things like that.

In the New York Times Book Review, Ada Calhoun praised that element of the art: “Telgemeier’s use of color, created with the design team Gurihiru, is eloquent; Callie’s amethyst-colored hair complements her suburb’s sky-blue skies and pistachio-green grass.”

Frankly I don’t see coloring the skies “sky-blue” to be that much of a stretch. But once the interview called it to my attention I could see how Telgemeier and Gurihiru had found a rich, luminous palette even as they stayed away from the stark primaries.

Cold Wind and the Limits of the Superhero Genre

Cold Wind is a short adventure comic written by Dan Mazur and drawn by Jesse Lonergan, independently published by Mazur’s Ninth Art Press.

I saw this story grow from a script that Dan shared with the Boston Comics Roundtable to its final form. Dan writes in screenplay format, not breaking his story into pages and panels. Often he draws his own art, so that’s obviously not a problem. In this case, he left it up to Jesse—who’s scripted his own Flower and Fade, Joe and Azat, and other tales—to divide the screenplay into images. Yet another approach to collaboration.

Dan’s told me a couple of times how he’s no longer a fan of superhero comics because of their repetitive themes. He reads one Spider-Man story, learns that “With great power comes great responsibility,” reads another story—and learns the same thing.

As former Marvel editor Jim Shooter has commented:

Comic books have become like opera. You go to see a particular performance of an old story, not a new story. How will this performer handle that familiar role...?

That familiarity is part of the appeal of a series, or a genre.

At the last roundtable meeting, Dan wondered aloud if Cold Wind is a superhero comic. I said it qualified, despite his ambivalence about the genre. It’s a pumped-up action story taking place against a fantastic landscape. Its characters are largely symbolic, and they work out the fate of the world through violence.

But Cold Wind reflects Dan Mazur’s take on the superhero genre, with the theme that things don’t change significantly. For all the adventure’s sound effects and fury, its surviving characters achieve only a short pleasure before the world spins on.

Cold Wind is on sale today at the MoCCA Festival, in the better Boston-area comics shops, and over the web.

“Just an amazingly good looking guy.”

Folks in the Boston Comics Roundtable alerted me to a new blog by Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics during the late 1970s and 1980s, when the company overtook DC not only in innovation but in sales. He began work in the industry at thirteen, scripting stories for DC’s Legion of Super Heroes.

After work at other companies, DC hired Shooter to script some new Legion stories in the past decade. Among the assignments was to take a stab at creating a new Superboy since the courts might assign the copyright of that character to the heirs of co-creator Jerry Siegel. (Long story.) Shooter shared his response in a posting titled “Super Lad.”

I’m among the many people who can’t keep the Legion straight, and I don’t care about the original Superboy. What interested me about Shooter’s posting is what he, as an industry vet, saw as the necessary essence of Superman. In other words, what DC had to retain for a “Super” character if they couldn’t use any of the character history that would become the intellectual property of the Siegel family:

If a Super were anything but a noble being with an iron will and tremendous self control, impervious to the failings bad writers nonetheless foisted upon him or her, the Super would have been a villain. Period. And all the rest of the heroes, all the world for that matter, would have had nothing on their minds, and nothing else worthy of devoting their efforts to than destroying the Super. Period. 
. . .

I see him as a genuine good guy. Someone who does the right thing, who has tremendous willpower and courage, who is smart and reasonable. Smart about using his powers, as he learns how. The nicest, best guy you ever met. NOBLE, in the best senses of the word. Not that he can't make mistakes, not that he doesn't have humanity--but he's the best of humankind, one of the few survivors of his particular kind, determined, therefore, to give a good account of himself. 



Elliot S! Maggin once wrote an imaginary story in which Kal-el did not become Superman. Since that didn't occur, he was chosen as the Green Lantern of his sector because he among all beings there had the greatest courage, greatest will and noblest spirit. Right on. That was ES!M's finest hour.


Fair enough. But comics are a visual as well as verbal medium. How would that character be embodied in art? Shooter wrote:

- A strong, young man's physique. NOT overbuilt, NOT Hercules. Strong-looking but slim. Like Ditko's early Spider-man. An ATTAINABLE build. He's Kryptonian. He doesn't have to be absurdly musclebound.



- Handsome. A really, really good looking guy. No lantern jaw, no jock sensibility. Just an amazingly good looking guy. 



- Haircut: timeless. A haircut that wouldn't look out of place in almost any era. I wouldn't mind something pretty close to Superman's. Nothing dated or trendy. No mullet, no crew cut, no high-and-tight, no long hair, no Pet Detective, no spike-y do, no dreads, no curls, no mop. Timeless.

In sum, a good superhero has to look good. Really good. Even if he’s not musclebound or lantern-jawed, he has to be “amazingly good looking.” Or, as critic Douglas Wolk put it in Reading Comics:

The default style of the superhero mainstream [is] designed to read clearly and to provoke the strongest possible somatic response. You’re supposed to react to it with your body before you think about it. Most of its characters, especially the heroic ones, are drawn to look as “sexy” as possible…

The result is that the most underrepresented group among superheroes isn’t women, or non-white ethnic groups, or sexual minorities—not that those people aren’t underrepresented relative to their proportion of the general public. It’s people who are plain or unattractive.

Male or female, young or old, whatever color or orientation, superheroes are almost all drawn as physically attractive people. The main alternative is physically attractive people who turn into wildly exaggerated monsters.

Comics readers have long pointed out how artists routinely draw female heroes with big busts and little costumes, but are there any female heroes who aren’t conventionally attractive to begin with? As for men:

• Are there any mainstream balding superheroes? Not hairless, like Steel or today’s Luke Cage—balding. Even the star of the new Captain America movie (who previously played the Human Torch) says “How horrible would it be if this superior man has male pattern baldness?” But unless you’re Firestorm, what does hair have to do with heroics? 
• Any potbellied guys besides Bouncing Boy, a third-string Legionnaire introduced for comic relief and later retired to the background? (Incidentally, also co-created by Jerry Siegel.) 
• Any men with receding chins? crooked noses? one droopy eye? 

This is, after all, a genre in which Peter Parker was created to represent nerdy guys.

Stan Lee’s Dialogues

Bleeding Cool just published a long transcript of Stan Lee’s deposition about the emergence of the Marvel superhero universe back in the early 1960s, as part of a lawsuit between Jack Kirby’s heirs and Disney/Marvel.

Most of Lee’s deposition consists of stories he’s told before, in much the same fashion. I saw no surprises about the “Marvel method” of comics storytelling, the creation of specific heroes, or Lee’s long personal respect for Kirby as an artist. That doesn’t change how in the 1960s comic-book creators all signed work-for-hire deals.

One of the issues in the lawsuit appears to be how much dialogue Kirby might have composed in the margins of his artwork. Here’s a pertinent exchange from Lee’s deposition about the notes on one surviving page of original art:

STAN LEE: Well, that’s Jack’s handwriting. That’s the way he wrote them. Yes.

Q. And could you tell us, for example, in this instance I see that there’s a dialogue that’s actually in the different blocks. Tell us who did that dialogue. How was the process done?

STAN LEE: Well, I wrote the dialogue and the captions, but Jack would give me notes. For example, in panel 4 of that page, the next to the last panel –

Q. Right.

STAN LEE: — Jack wrote what he suggested the dialogue might be. “I will rule. My years underground will end.” That was to let me know what he felt the fellow should be doing or saying.

So I wrote, “My conquest will be complete. I, the Mole Man, banished from my fellow men half a lifetime ago, will return at last as Master of the Earth.”

Yeah, that’s the way Stan wrote them. And I suspect the published version had more exclamation points.

A similar deposition with artist John Romita, Sr., addresses the same question. Romita would pencil possible Spider-Man dialogue for Lee, with the result:

He invariably would not use them, and I asked him once “why wouldn’t you use — why wouldn’t you let him” — he said something similar. He said, “because I can’t speak in somebody else’s vernacular.” He says, “when I am writing my characters, I am writing in Peter Parker’s personality and Aunt May’s personality and I write the captions in my personality. If I start putting your personality in there, I am going to confuse the reader.” So he used to — he told me — he invariably did not use anything that was in the margins that was cleverly suggested by the artists, because he said he did not want to stray from his normal approach.

He had a dialogue going with the reader. Saying “dear reader, this is your editor speaking right now.” He used to do that. It used to drive me crazy. I used to tell him “you are puncturing the illusion.” It’s like opening a door in the theater and letting the sunlight in and everybody realizes they are watching a movie now. I said “you are ruining” — he said, “it doesn’t matter. I am talking to my readers.”

I think Stan Lee took the idea of a snarky conversation between the comic company’s “bullpen” and its loyal readers from similar messages in the EC comics of the early 1950s. It was certainly a hallmark of the Marvel superheroes comics he co-created in the 1960s. And that dialogue never punctured the illusion. Rather, it drew readers into a fun-filled conspiracy to suspend disbelief.

Neal Adams and the New Fall Colors

Yesterday I showed the cover of DC Universe Illustrated by Neal Adams, vol. 1. That frantic artwork isn’t the only new material created for this volume. Adams’s studio also extensively reworked the interior pages starting from his line art. I’d read fans’ debates over what changed from the initial publication in magazine form, but the whole point of comics is that artwork conveys information that words can’t, so I went looking for some actual visual examples.

The following are panels from a larger selection posted by AussieStu at these two pages. First, a look at Ralph and Sue Dibny from Adams’s first superhero assignment. The coloring is obviously improved from an aesthetic point of view. Ralph’s face stands out better from Sue’s sweater, as do other details. The background looks more realistic. Sue’s hair isn’t cut off by the word balloon at top.

Most significantly, modern digital coloring allows for the characters’ faces and other curved surfaces to be “modeled” with shadows and a gradation of flesh tones. Previously, comic-book coloring was basically paint by numbers. The draftsmanship of the time was designed around the limits of the coloring method.

Though Adams wasn’t involved in coloring his drawings then, he had strong feelings about the process. He recalled badgering DC into expanding its palette, for example. So he no doubt was delighted to have the chance to use more sophisticated methods (and, it’s clear from comments on his website, to have DC pay for the new work).

However, sometimes those revisions have come at a cost. Here’s another example from the same book, in a tale of Clark Kent babysitting. The coloring pops more, and the curves of the little boy’s body are softer. But in these panels we can see a bigger change, starting with the word balloons.

Perhaps because the collection has a smaller trim size than the original magazines, perhaps because fanboys’ eyes are aging, Adams’s studio appears to have scanned the lettering and reproduced it slightly bigger, relative to the panel size. That produced new, clumsier line breaks and spacing and, with long speeches, larger balloons. In this panel, the top balloon is so big that it’s crowded Adams’s artwork off the bottom of the panel.

Here’s another comparison from that Clark Kent story. The new coloring is more dramatic. The new lettering is more horsy. There are other changes evident in the DC Universe Illustrated volume. Some sound effects have obviously been recreated digitally. One tale features dinosaurs, and their skin looks like the modern conception of those animals; I suspect the original publication rendered them quite differently, according to the 1960s science.

In sum, this collection doesn’t show Neal Adams’s work as it originally appeared, in the form that made his reputation as a leading comic-book artist. But apparently it shows his artwork as he’d prefer it to be preserved. Which is the definitive version? Well, we can have that debate about lots of artists and writers.

Here are more eye-opening examples of comics that have been recolored:

• from Spider-Man via Scans_Daily
• from Avant L’Incal via The Beat

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.

Chuck Dixon on Robin—and Spider-Man

From Joshua Lapin-Bertone's Batman Examiner, here's an interview with Chuck Dixon, the comics writer most closely associated with the character of Robin--at least in his modern forms. Dixon scripted the first Robin miniseries in 1991, the first hundred issues of the Robin magazine starting in 1993, and most issues of the Nightwing magazine starting in 1996.

As part of the Batman writing team, Dixon wrote other magazines as well and contributed to a number of landmark crossover events under editor Denny O'Neil. He also co-scripted the fine Robin: Year One miniseries with Scott Beatty. Dixon was excellent at keeping storylines strung out issue to issue--though, looking back, the drama wasn't always worth the suspense.

I've rearranged Lapin-Bertone's questions to make Dixon's comments more chronological.

Tim [Drake] was unique among the other Bat-characters in that he wasn't a total orphan at the time. Was there ever any pressure to kill off Jack Drake [Tim's father]?

All the time! I kept Jack alive for years past the point my editors wanted him dead. Their reasoning was always that Tim having a parent with all the limitations of that provided too many complications to Robin’s story. They saw that as a negative. I saw it as a positive.

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I used the first fifty issues of The Amazing Spider-Man as a dramatic template for Robin. Those stories got much of their suspense from the dangers Peter Parker faced if his identity were revealed.

For Tim Drake, the stakes were even higher. The reveal of his identity would have affected his family and also unraveled the secrets of the entire Bat organization. You don’t throw away solid gold like that.

And indeed, in a letter column early in the magazine's run, the editors acknowledged that they'd originally planned to kill off Tim's father, but kept finding it more interesting to keep around.

Any stories that you weren't able to tell (Batman, Nightwing, Birds [of Prey] or Robin) that you can reveal? Any stories that originally had a different ending but it went in another direction?

Nothing I can think of right now except that my plans leading to Robin 100 and beyond were pretty cool and I regret not being able to do that story. My plan was to have Tim quit as Robin and become the new Blue Beetle under Ted Kord’s [i.e., the old Blue Beetle's] guidance. Batman would pick Steph to take on Robin’s role. Tim would then be featured in a six-issue mini as Blue Beetle until events in the Batbooks would bring him back to the fold.

The idea coming out of this would be a BB ongoing in which Ted gets the idea to create what amounts to a Blue Beetle franchise. He creates what amounts to Blue Beetle Inc and has a representative in every DCU city. I was shot down on this one over and over. As soon as I left the title they did a kind of pale version of the story I had been proposing for more than a year.

Dixon might be referring to Robin, #101, which featured Stephanie Brown as Robin, but no Blue Beetle. That was an alternate universe, part of a crossover from Peter David's wackier Young Justice series. Years later, Bill Willingham proposed making Stephanie into Robin for real, since the editors had decided to kill her off anyway.

Which brings me to 2008, when DC rehired Dixon to write Robin, with part of his mandate to bring Stephanie back from the dead. Those issues are now collected in Robin: Violent Tendencies.

But then Dixon and the company had a sudden and dramatic parting of the ways. DC found a new writer for the magazine, even reworked some cover art to reflect the new stories. The company dove into the "Batman RIP" and "Battle for the Cowl" storylines being played out in comic shops now.

Had you stayed on the title, what were your plans for the book?

Well, I written about eight more scripts. There was a storyline with Steph’s dad and the return of some Robin villains in a new way and the introduction of several new bad guys. Much of this is hazy in my mind already. Lots of changes were made as I was writing and the direction of the book was being altered even as I was in the middle of a story arc.

I've seen a lot of speculation, even from former comics editor Valerie D'Orazio, that Dixon became upset because of DC's plans for Tim Drake--i.e., that the honchos were insisting the character go in a direction Dixon didn't like. Those theories never convinced me. Furthermore, in this interview Dixon doesn't speak of quitting in protest; he says that he was "let go."

Dixon strikes me as a superhero-book veteran, well aware he was hired to enhance a large corporation's intellectual property. All of his own comments about the break indicated that he was getting sick of working with a particular executive who made what he considered late, wishy-washy, and poorly communicated decisions. In most jobs, the biggest pain isn't the work but the people you work with.

As I noted above, Dixon had worked on many crossovers for DC; had he been brought into discussions on these latest, he could surely have contributed rather than writing eight scripts that turned out to be unusable.

In the final issue of Robin, Tim finally confronted the Obeah Man, killer of his mother [back in 1990]. I understand you had your own take on the story during your first run on the title but never got to tell it. What was it and why?

I never intended to have a story in which Tim resolved the Obeah Man story. I felt that would be the end of Tim’s story. Apparently, I was right.

The Robin magazine is in abeyance, and we last saw Tim Drake with a batarang impaled in his chest. But I suspect his story will continue.

Losing Sight of the Mission

From Wired magazine comes word of Eisenhower's military industrial complex morphing into what sounds like a military public relations complex:

A Defense Department project, supposedly designed to support U.S. troops, was used instead to channel millions of dollars to personal friends and allies of its chief. The "America Supports You," or ASY, program was led in a "questionable and unregulated manner," according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, obtained by Danger Room. At least $9.2 million was "inappropriately transferred" by the project's managers. . . .

"Instead of focusing on its primary mission of showcasing and communicating support to the troops and their families, the ASY program focus [turned to] building or soliciting support from the public," the Inspector General's report notes. In 2006 and 2007, for instance, more than $600,000 was spent ginning up support for America Supports You among schoolchildren. . . .

By mid-2007, allegations began to surface that the Pentagon official in charge of the program, Armed Forces Information Service chief Alison Barber, was improperly redirecting millions of dollars in public funds.

From fiscal years 2004 to 2007, the Inspector General's report notes, Barber funneled $8.8 million in contracts to the public relations firm Susan Davis International--to set up the myriad events, and to promote the ASY "brand." The work was incredibly lucrative; Davis' executives made as much as $312,821 to $662,691 per year. "Paying a public relations contractor annual salaries approaching three-quarters of a million dollars does not appear to be a cost-effective means to support the ASY program and the war fighter," the report observes.

But what made it even harder to stomach was that Davis was a friend of Barber's, and a well-known Republican operative, according to former Defense Department lawyer Diane Beaver.

The institution most hurt by this initiative appears to be Stars and Stripes, which is known for its independence but was used to park funds for public-relations efforts. Stars and Stripes itself noted:

Friday’s report comes on the heels of a separate audit released Thursday which found problems with the internal controls separating Defense Department public affairs activities from American Forces Information Service, Stripes’ now defunct parent organization.

That office was also under Barber's purview.

"Support the Troops" should mean supporting American soldiers--e.g., making the best use of their willingness to serve, not misleading them or giving them illegal orders, equipping them well, ensuring their care if wounded. As this report shows, this Pentagon office wasn't supporting American troops so much as supporting the idea of supporting the troops. And if $8 million went to a friend's public-relations firm instead of body armor or medical care? Well, stuff happens.

The photo above, from the US Department of Defense, shows Barber at a 2005 ceremony with Donald H. Rumsfeld, Rob Steffens of Marvel Comics, Peter Parker, and Steve Rogers.

Whatever a Spider Can

Coinciding with a cover story on the new Entertainment Weekly and much other publicity for the upcoming third movie, Marvel broke silence today about a reading of a stage musical version of Spider-Man this July.

According to Playbill, Glen Berger will write the book (Neil Jordan having dropped out), and Julie Taymor will direct. Music is due from Bono and the Edge ("You know we're the talented ones because we don't use our real names") of U2.

All I can say is whoever remains with this project must understand that Spider-Man is not musical comedy material.

Spider-Man is opera.