Hop to It, Chum

This is Joey, a dwarf Siamese rabbit with big dreams, photographed by Robyn Beck in Long Beach in October 2012.

Where to Find the Runaway Bunny

Fuse #8’s catalogue of public children’s-literature statuary in the US alerted me to the Runaway Bunny statue outside the Westerly Public Library in Rhode Island. The bronze figure, by Connecticut sculptor Joan Binney Ross, was installed in 1998.

Earlier this summer the sculpture was vandalized, painted with “vulgar graffiti and the letters ‘KKK’,” as the Providence Journal reported, based on now-unavailable story from the Westerly Sun. Depending on the grammatical connection between the vulgarity and the initials, that could have been either a pro-KKK or anti-KKK message.

The library and park staff had difficulty removing the paint, so they contacted Ross, who recommended a cleaner. The AP reported that the bunny was restored to its original condition.

The Stonington-Mystic Patch carried an image of the vandalized bunny. Noting that similar graffitti had been painted elsewhere in the area, it asked readers if they recognized the “tag,” but there don’t appear to have been any breakthroughs. That site also posted a video of the cleanup.

Some of those articles referred to Margaret Wise Brown, author of The Runaway Bunny, but none named the book’s artist and designer of the original bunny, Clement Hurd.

Now That’s Just Wrong

Harry Bliss’s daily cartoon for Monday.

“You do Batman stuff all the time.”

As long as I was talking about Ty Templeton’s Batman work, it seemed like a good time to share his autobiographical “Bun Toons” webcomic about being a father of teenagers.

Click through to see what impresses Templeton’s kids even more than dinner with the Governor-General of Canada.

Suburb Reverting to Nature?

Early this month, a coyote bit the dog of one of my writing-group friends, Karen Day. This was, the local newspaper reported, one of more than fifty recent coyote sightings in town.

In addition, our suburb’s police killed a black bear that was hanging in a tree over the highway. Wild turkeys are walking the roads—twenty roosted in my side yard a couple of years ago. I routinely see rabbits on the sidewalks.

Indeed, there are so many rabbits in the suburbs close to Boston that Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters has invested in a artificial coyote (as shown above) to scare them away from the plantings. It doesn’t seem to be working; the site’s Facebook page featured a photo of a rabbit sitting happily beside the coyote figure. But perhaps the coyote that bit Karen’s dog will make its way there.

I grew up in this area, and the only wild mammals I remember seeing are raccoons, squirrels, and chipmunks. I saw ducks and geese down at the ponds but no turkeys. I was a kid; I would’ve gotten all excited about bunnies, and my parents would certainly have taken note of coyotes and bears.

What’s changed? One possibility is that we’re simply seeing the result of population cycles among those species. Another is that decades of environmental improvements have made this neighborhood more hospitable to turkeys, rabbits, and other wildlife, and the predators have followed. And then there’s the opposite explanation: that more development further out from the city has driven those animals out of their previous homes into ours.

When Fanfiction Took Over British Children’s Publishing

The Horn Book just published Caroline Fraser’s excoriation of how Penguin has recently exploited Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit with an aggressive copyright claim, broad product licensing, spin-off titles, and, most recently, commissioning sequels from actress and writer Emma Thompson.

British publishing seems to be crazy about such latter-day sequels lately. Such books have always been with us, of course, but the latest wave is distinguished by a couple of features:

• Many of the intellectual properties involved are still under copyright, meaning the new books were authorized or commissioned by the companies or trusts controlling those properties.
• The authors of those latter-day books aren’t work-for-hire hacks or even solid writers without a recent hit (like David Benedictus, author of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) but well-known authors who could get reasonably well paid for their own original work.

Thus we have Oscar-winner Thompson writing about rabbits (though not, as Sutton says, with the zoological precision of Potter). Penguin can thus benefit from the Peter Rabbit brand name and good will, Thompson’s celebrity, and the now-increasingly-common media story of a new sequel to a beloved classic.

Likewise, we have Carnegie Medal winner Geraldine McCaughrean writing an authorized sequel to Peter Pan, and competing in the marketplace with the not-originally-authorized American titles from Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Dame Jacqueline Wilson was commissioned to extend E. Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy. Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion penned a sequel to Treasure Island.

In other worlds, it appears the British children’s literature establishment has turned to fanfiction.

First Glimpse of Barsoom

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom books and I have never had a close encounter. But they were clearly significant to artist Ty Templeton, which he’s been exploring in his Bun Toons series and commentary. In 1975, at the age of twelve, young Templeton came across a John Carter comic book and quickly discovered its appeal.

Cybils for 2011

The Cybils Award shortlists for 2011 have been announced, representing blogging volunteers’ judgments of what children’s books offer the best combination of quality and kid appeal.

There’s a new category this year of Book Apps. Nominees include three brand names established for decades (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pat the Bunny, and The Monster at the End of This Book) and what look like four originals:

• Be Confident in Who You Are
• Bobo Explores Light
• Hildegard Sings
• The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Horace Lessmore

It’s notable that two of the three adaptations are of picture books that were interactive before electronics, and the third plays with the reality of its world. It’s also notable that the originals lean toward the didactic. I’ll probably try some of these out now that iHave an iPad.

Cute Couples

Yesterday Anita Silvey’s Book-a-Day Almanac spotlighted The Rabbits’ Wedding by Garth Williams:

Published first in 1958, The Rabbits’ Wedding features black and white rabbit protagonists. The artist most likely chose these colors to help delineate the two characters in a limited-color book, but adults interpreted this lovely romp in the forest as an endorsement of interracial marriage.

As Leonard Marcus recounts the controversy in Minders of Make-Believe, the Montgomery Home News condemned the book, then Alabama politicians rallied against the book and spoke out against the director of the Alabama Public Library Service Division, Emily Reed.

Showing how much things have changed, the most frequently challenged book in America last year was And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, a picture book about two male penguins who raise a chick together. Adults interpret that true story as an endorsement of same-sex marriage.

Some people just don’t like seeing certain cute little animals happy together.

Biggest Role Yet

So what do Robin the Boy Wonder and the White Rabbit have in common?

Both characters have been played by Kamran Darabi-Ford, the young British actor cast as Dick Grayson in the Batman Live arena show now touring Britain.

He’s also played “the fey Simon in Cameron Jack’s exciting and successful production of Lord of the Flies,” and “an acrobatic Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC Fringe Festival.”

Comic of the Week

Here are a few panels from Jon White’s comics-form rendering of the Presidential Campaign Press Release of the Month.

Click on the image or here for the full picture.

The cocktail-party-going, gun-toting, falsehood-firing sheep are of course the Mixed Metaphor of the Year.

About to Crack the Big Easter Case

Tim Drake never overlooks possibilities. He is, after all, pound for pound the best detective in the DC Universe.

Of course, there’s always pressure from some quarters to be more gritty.

Hammer Time

This week Heritage Auction Galleries is offering sketches, finished line art, paintings, and signed books from the estate of illustrator Garth Williams. Up for sale are Williams’s pictures for Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and a couple of other books, one of which involved lots of bunnies.

Next week Sotheby’s will offer artwork from the collection of Kendra and Allan Daniel. The artists represented include W. W. Denslow, Frank Ver Beck, Fanny Y. Cory, E. H. Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Jessie Willcox Smith, William Pène du Bois, Dr. Seuss, Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff, Ludwig Bemelmans, Johnny Gruelle, Lois Lenski, Eleanor Parke Custis, Tasha Tudor, Maurice Sendak, and many others. Plus some more bunnies.

Among those items is a John R. Neill illustration of Betsy Bobbin and Hank the Mule from Tik-Tok of Oz. It’s described as an ink drawing, but the gents at Hungry Tiger Press have said that Neill usually colored photostats rather than originals. But I’d accept it as a gift either way.

Behind the Illusioniste

Last night I saw The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s animated adaptation of an unproduced Jacques Tati screenplay. It’s visually gorgeous. I was blown away by how well the movie rendered Edinburgh, and even the train ride north to that city. (It turns out a lot of the movie was made in Edinburgh.)

But the rest of the movie didn’t work for me at all. In several sequences I felt Tati would have come up with funnier and longer visual gags on the set. Even worse, the story suffered from gaping holes in the characters’ motivations. I didn’t dislike this Illusionist as much as The New Yorker, which complained about “cloying sentimentality”; many movies have cloyed more. But this one has nothing but sentiment to drive it because the characters’ emotions and desires don’t add up.

The Illusionist shows a French stage magician going to London to find work, then to a village in northern Scotland. A teen-aged chambermaid attaches herself to him, and they travel together to the Scottish capital, where he finds work in a music hall. They share rooms in a theatrical rooming-house for a while—all in a strictly father-daughter way. [SPOILER DEAD AHEAD] At the end of the movie, she becomes interested in a handsome young lug, and the older man sadly slips back to France.

It’s never really clear why the magician, scraping for cash, decides to keep buying clothes for the girl. As for her, she’s obviously more interested in the glamor of Edinburgh than in mopping floors in her little village—perhaps too obviously. Some summaries I’ve read say that she believes he’s a real magician, but she keeps pointing out clothes in shop windows, so she knows darn well where they come from.

There are moments in the middle of the movie where it looks like the girl is making the denizens of the theatrical boarding-house into one big happy artificial family—one possible dénouement. But that falls apart, shown particularly in the fate of a ventriloquist. Then the young lug comes along, with no link to anything else, and everyone goes their separate ways, even the magician’s rabbit.

I kept feeling like the scenario was dancing around a relationship that would make the main characters’ actions make sense. I could think of two possibilities:

• The magician has somehow lost a daughter of his own. Taking care of the poor chambermaid fills that hole in him, but, like other fathers, he eventually has to let her go.
• The magician and the girl are actually a sexual couple, but when the magician realizes they’re just using each other, he moves on. That scenario would bring a frisson of illicit sex, but it’s a French movie, after all.

I came home to Google for some story-behind-the-story, and discovered what the movie was missing. And, yes, there was illicit sex involved.

Apparently Chomet received Tati’s script from the trust that controls his copyrights, having had some brief correspondence with the comedian’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff before she died. He interpreted the script as Tati’s expression of love for Sophie, and also felt it expressed his love for his own daughter. Believing that Tati planned to play the lead, Chomet patterned his protagonist after the comedian, and dedicated the movie to Sophie Tatischeff.

However, it turned out (and Chomet probably learned of this while he had already started making the film he envisioned) that Tati also had an older daughter. He got her mother pregnant during WW2, then paid her off and ignored the child as she grew up. That mother came from Prague; Tati set his script in Czechoslovakia. If the comedian wasn’t imagining reconnecting with his abandoned daughter as he wrote this script in the 1950s, he could only have been in very deep denial.

The Telegraph revealed that backstory, and the Guardian filled out details. (By coincidence, that daughter settled in the north of England, rather close to Edinburgh.) Roger Ebert published a lengthy letter from one of the oldest daughter’s sons in his Chicago Sun-Times blog. However, I don’t recall seeing anything about that history in the New York Times or other periodicals I read before seeing The Illusionist.

The grandson also described elements of the script that aren’t in the version I saw:

…the young girl attracts the attention of a handsome young man who exposes the conjurer's magic as fraudulent, nothing more than cheap tricks, illusions created to entertain an audience. Unable to hold onto her affections once his charade has been exposed the script concludes with the conjurer disappearing off into the sunset free of his deceit having as he always known he would lost the affections of the young girl to youth and the vibrancy of the city once she was able to see beyond his theatrics.

If the original screenplay contained a scene about the young lug exposing the magician’s tricks, that was dropped from this production. It would have tied the fellow into the plot, though also made him less sympathetic (and thus interfered with the story’s sentiment).

I suspect Tati stopped working on this film, near the peak of his career, because what he’d put into it wasn’t coming together, and what he’d left out were the secrets he couldn’t afford to dig up.

The Versatile Chris Wormell

I’m very fond of Chris Wormell’s picture book George and the Dragon, which I discussed back here.

But I’m even more impressed by this British illustrator after seeing Seven Impossible Things’ wonderful interview and sampling of his work in other media. The same guy who created this bunny also painted the cover above. And that’s a wood engraving. By the same guy. Really.

A Visit to Sidekick City Elementary

DC Comics is awash in Robins now: three characters who once held that role, one currently doing so, and a Red Robin halfway in between. But of all the Robins around, by far the cutest is the one in Tiny Titans.

For two years DC has published that magazine as part of its kids’ line. Its stories—comedic anecdotes and sketches, really—are “out of continuity,” and thus don’t apply to the official DC Universe, nor the DC Animated Universe(s) modeled after the company’s TV cartoons.

Tiny Titans portrays the heroes of the original Teen Titans as young kids at the Sidekick Elementary School. Their adult mentors are rarely seen grown-ups, and the next generation of teen heroes pop in as preschoolers. The magazine, created mostly by Art Baltazar, clearly owes some debt to the “Mini Marvels” back-up stories that Chris Giarrusso produced for the competition starting in 2001.

But DC Comics published a story about the Titans as toddlers even before that, in 1992’s “Teen Titans $ell-Out $pecial.” That magazine showed the superhero team raising money by licensing their likenesses for a TV cartoon, along the lines of Muppet Babies or Animaniacs. The result is Teeny Titans; all the heroes are infant versions of themselves, in a daycare run by their main villain, Deathstroke. Within the story, the team is aghast at the results and backs out of the deal.

Now, in Tiny Titans, the characters are in an elementary school, and Deathstroke is their principal. DC went back to an idea originally presented as laughably awful and did it for real. It’s a weird business.Tiny Titans has a large cast, but Robin is front and center, as the picture above shows. He’s appeared on eighteen of the first twenty-four covers, usually in a position of prominence. But this Robin doesn’t function like the Robin(s) in standard Titans stories.

As I discussed back here, on the usual Titans teams Robin is the leader, the smart one, the Badass Normal. He’s the one all the other heroes look up to, even though he has no special powers. This applies to Dick Grayson, the original Robin; to Tim Drake, the longest-running successor; and to the Robin in the animated Teen Titans.

In contrast, the Tiny Titans Robin is the stories’ Charlie Brown figure: struggling, put-upon, worried, and not particularly talented. Issue #8 is headlined “Report Card Pickup!” and the kids are comparing grades. “I got a C!” says this Robin with a satisfied smile.

Meanwhile, back in 1943, Batman, #18, featured the story “Robin Studies His Lessons!” in which Bruce Wayne forbids Dick from fighting crime at night until he gets his average back up to an A. It turns out Dick’s report card got mixed up with another boy’s, and he was pulling down A’s all along—of course.

In both cases, Robin is the normal kid with whom young readers are supposed to identify most closely (“Reason for Robin, #3"). But in the comedic Tiny Titans world, that identification takes the form of sympathy rather than admiration. Do little kids like that?

Well, I’m not so sure that Tiny Titans is really for little kids. A whole lot of its jokes depend on a fairly deep knowledge of the DC Universe. Take these panels from Robin’s birthday party. If you view that scene as a comics fanboy, you have the fun of recognizing that Robin’s friends have given him the second Nightwing costume and the outfit of the grown-up Robin of Earth Two. Subsequent panels show Robin opening other costumes from Robin history, then trying them on—a series of inside jokes. Oh, the ribaldry!

Meanwhile, I can’t help imagining actual eight-year-olds looking at these panels and wondering, “Why are Robin’s friends all giving him clothes? What kind of birthday presents are those? And why is Daddy chuckling, and hogging the comic book he said was for me?”

The costume sequence extends to this cover showing Robin in the original Nightwing costume on the light-up floor of a Saturday Night Fever disco. Which we Titans fans of thirty years’ standing can happily explain:

“See, that was the costume the grown-up Robin started to wear in 1984, and it had a high collar and an open chest, so when fashions changed after a few years people started to call it ‘the disco collar costume.’ And a disco was place where people went to dance, and there was this movie called—Hey, come back inside! I’m trying to show you how to enjoy your comic book!”

The Plot in The Storm in the Barn

Though I recognize the historical research that Matt Phelan put into The Storm in the Barn, I don’t see it as a historical novel because ultimately it turns not on what happened or could have happened in the past, but on something that physically could not have happened. So what do I think of it as a fantasy?

As a fantasy narrative, I think The Storm in the Barn offers a powerful but ultimately distorted picture of a historical period (anachronistic Oz quotation aside). But I don’t think its plot holds together in fantastic terms. And that’s a big reason why for me the supernatural dimension doesn’t make up for the story’s break away from history.

First, the villain is flat, even by the standards of abstract personifications. I never got a clear idea about why the storm is refusing to rain. He wants to preserve himself from dissolution, yet he’s spending his extra days of existence hiding out in a deserted barn. Maybe the storm’s got a really good book he wants to finish or something, but in this case personifying the Dust Bowl drought as a character doesn’t illuminate the historic event or add depth to the story.

More important, I don’t see how Jack’s triumph over the storm resolves his problem as the book’s first half lays it out. Those pages show us older boys teasing Jack, the community excluding him from events like the rabbit-clubbing festival (which turns out to be less fun than it sounds), and his father not letting him help fix farm machinery. His only friends are his sisters and a chatty drugstore owner.

That character, as I recall, ties Jack’s problems to the drought: because there are no crops growing, Jack has no chance to do farmwork that proves his competence, and he’s therefore stuck in the role of a little kid.

[Extra credit question for 9th-grade social studies: As an allegory, how does this relate to the New Deal’s emphasis on making jobs for unemployed Americans through the NRA, CCC, and other programs?]

By defeating the storm in the barn, the book shows us, Jack not only brings rain; he also proves his value. But his problem was a social one—how other people perceived him. And the story offers no reason for people to perceive Jack differently after the rain returns. No one knows about his fight with the storm. Jack’s little sister is the only other local who saw the storm, and she already looks up to him. There’s no clue that any adult would even believe in a personified storm, and thus in Jack’s heroism.

Compare this resolution to, say, Rowan of Rin, by Emily Rodda. That fantasy also involves a community endangered by a drought, an environmental problem embodied in the fantastic form of a cranky dragon.

A small group undertakes a quest to fix the problem, and circumstances force them to take along a timid boy whom people don’t think much of. Over the course of the adventure, however, young Rowan surprises himself and his companions by revealing a spine of steel. Ultimately he alone fixes the problem and ends the drought. And everyone sees what Rowan does.

Serious Comics and Talking Animals

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is showing up on a number of “year’s best” lists, but my feelings on its magical plot machinations match those expressed by Jessica Bruder in the New York Times Book Review:

Jack finds himself face to face with the Storm King, an evil spirit who withheld the rain to win power. . . . Jack finally wins a climactic battle on top of a windmill, and it starts to rain. He’s saved everyone. Unless you go with a possibility suggested earlier in the book: Jack has “dust dementia” and has imagined the whole thing. Either way, the fight doesn’t feel all that redemptive.

Both this book and David Small’s Stitches allude to classic works of Victorian children’s literature, and that’s another way that the latter seems much stronger to me.

In The Storm in the Barn, Jack’s sister reads descriptions of a desert from L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. As I noted earlier, Phelan found those passages through Wikipedia, and his quotes are anachronistic—the kids’ mother couldn’t find the phrase “Deadly Desert” in that book because it didn’t appear till a later one. That’s just a symptom of how that literary allusion feels nailed on rather than organic to the story.

In contrast, David Small’s use of Alice in Wonderland in Stitches has clearly grown from his own childhood love of that book. Allusions are integrated throughout the story. First he shows himself as a young boy playing as Alice, getting to escape “to a land of talking animals, singing flowers and dancing teapots.”

Later, Alice’s nightmarish shrinking and growing informs one of the adolescent David’s recurring nightmares (shown through stat panels) as he struggles to escape from a confining house.

Finally, the White Rabbit comes on the scene as a therapist who provides the book’s breakthrough—without, of course, ever losing track of the time. It turns out David was in the nonsense world all along. Unlike The Storm in the Barn, Small’s Stitches is about sorting out the real nightmares from the fantastic ones, not mixing them up.

When You Emerge

Andy Hartzell's Fox Bunny Funny, published last year by Top Shelf, is another graphic novel that challenges traditional markers of reading age. It's wordless. It's about funny animals--or at least looks like it fits into the cartoon genre called "funny animal."

But it's about major issues that usually come up in adolescence and early adulthood. And there's more than a little cartoon violence and blood-letting, as this preview shows.

The book follows a fox growing up in a society divided between foxes and the bunnies they prey on. All along, he's secretly attracted to bunny society, and in fact wishes to be a bunny.

A blurb on the book from Leroy Douresseaux says the book "challenges the reader to think about himself, but also about his relationship to his own group and others." A blurb from Tom Knechtel says it "speaks powerfully about our insistent need to belong." And the front flap states: "What happens when a secret desire puts you at odds with your society? . . . When you emerge, you'll find yourself gazing at our own fragmenting society with new eyes."

While I admire the attempt to tell and market a story to as wide an audience as possible, I don't think Fox Bunny Funny really applies to all questions of group identity and being at odds with society.

The central character is a fox who starts by dressing up as a bunny in front of his mirror; his mother sees him and gets upset. On the book's final pages, that fox undergoes surgery to turn into the bunny that was inside all along. There's a glimpse of a secret fox-bunny hybrid community, but the larger society of foxes remains the same.

This isn't an allegory for growing up in a minority ethnic group (which would put the whole family in the same situation). Or having unusual political or religious ideas (a situation not affected by surgery). It's not about reforming society.

Fox Bunny Funny works for me only as an allegory about an individual's non-normative gender and/or sexuality, with the foxes embodying both a homophobic society and a stereotypical masculinity. And the solution, at least for the book's protagonist, is surgery and life in a separate community.

Real, Soft Fur to Pat

Here's a sample of advertising copy from Simon & Schuster, circa 1940:

“Oliver Wiswell is a wonderful book--but it won't squeak if you press it, the way Pat the Bunny will. For Whom the Bell Tolls is magnificent--but it hasn't any bunny in it--not with real, soft fur to pat, anyway.”

At the time, Dorothy Kunhardt's tactile book for tots was new on the shelves, costing only a dollar. Soon World War 2 forced Kunhardt and her publisher to re-engineer some pages, removing the rubber squeaker and then the metal mirror. Only the latter went back into subsequent printings.

I learned this history from the Pat the Bunny exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art this past weekend. The exhibit runs through next weekend only.

Curiously enough, Sparknotes has this to say about symbolism in For Whom the Bell Tolls:

Animal imagery pervades For Whom the Bell Tolls, but rabbits and hares appear most frequently. Robert Jordan's nickname for Maria is “Rabbit.” When Robert Jordan first meets Rafael, the gypsy is making traps for rabbits. Later, Rafael, distracted by trapping a pair of hares that he has caught mating in the snow, leaves his post. The guerrilla fighters have a somber meal of rabbit stew after the Fascists slaughter El Sordo's men. And shortly before his death, El Sordo invokes the image of a skinned rabbit when thinking about how vulnerable before enemy planes he feels on his hilltop.

Not pattable, to be sure. But I still feel we should check the early printings of Oliver Wiswell to confirm that they really don't squeak.