Where Serials End Up

Someone else considering the workings of serial fiction this week was Linda Holmes, writing for NPR on the public-radio-related podcast Serial, reinvestigating a murder.

Holmes notes how many listeners are trying to view the podcast through the lens of the recent limited television series True Detective, Fargo, and Lost. In other words, they’re asking for a clear conclusion even if (as in two of those examples) it ends up disappointing a lot of the audience.

Holmes writes:

What’s good about this wrinkle, and what seems healthy about it, is that it raises the question of what stories are for. Must there be a lesson or a moral? Must we sense a particular idea about life at the end, and can it be futility? If you raise a question, do you have to answer it? In real life, of course, Chekhov’s gun need not come to anything in the third act just because it was shown in the first. If this makes a good true story but would not make a good piece of dramatic fiction, why is that?

Assuming people do find the [Serial] ending satisfying despite what almost must be its messiness, is it possible that a piece of serial crime reporting with no conclusion will point to the idea that we've perhaps become overly obsessed in judging an entire piece of storytelling on whether we get the perfectly symmetrical, flawless, balanced, wry, doubt-drowning ending we deserve?

I find it telling that Holmes’s essay doesn’t mention what until recently was the necessary name-drop in any article on quality television: The Sopranos. That show famously ended without resolution, just a sudden black screen. And people were pissed. So it fits right into Holmes’s thesis.

A New Chapter in Chapters

At The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Nicholas Dames has probed the history of the chapter, starting with ancient naturalists and early Christian theologians and moving to the development of the novel:

Henry Fielding,…in “Joseph Andrews” (1742), explained “those little Spaces between our Chapters” as “an Inn or Resting-Place, where he may stop and take a Glass, or any other Refreshment, as it pleases him.” Chapter titles, Fielding proceeded to explain, were like the inscriptions over the doors of those inns, advertising the accommodations within.

Novels have always been good at absorbing and recycling, taking plots and devices from other genres and finding new uses for them. With the chapter, novelists began, in the eighteenth century, to naturalize an informational technology from antiquity by giving it a new cultural role. What the chapter did for the novel was to aerate it: by encouraging us to pause, stop, and put the book down—a chapter before bed, say—the chapter-break helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life. The chapter openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses—for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion.

Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” insisted that “chapters relieve the mind,” encouraging our immersion by letting us know that we will soon be allowed to exit and return to other tasks or demands. Coming and going—an attention paid out rhythmically—would become part of how novelists imagined their books would be read. . . .

Thus the novelistic chapter: that modest, provisional kind of closure, a pause that promises more of the same later, like the fall of night. As the modern novel developed, explanations like those of the Fieldings became less necessary. Chapter titles themselves lost their overt connection to the “in which” or “concerning” syntax, virtually a plot summary, which derived from Biblical capitula.

Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” could still pull off the old sort, as in “Chapter 38: Mr. Samuel Weller, Being Entrusted With a Mission of Love, Proceeds to Execute it; With What Success Will Hereinafter Appear”; by the eighteen-seventies, Anthony Trollope could title a chapter simply “Vulgarity.” As the chapter ceased seeming peculiar, it also grew in length; the average Victorian chapter was around thirty-five hundred words, roughly twice the eighteenth-century norm.

This article reminded me that chapters predated serialization in magazines, meaning that the breakup of novels wasn’t driven by the format and technology in which they first appeared. Rather, the established use of chapters made it easier to create divisions for each magazine issue.

J. A. Jance and the Oz Books

I’ve been hearing about the mystery writer J. A. Jance’s appearance at the Moravian Bookshop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so I decided to highlight how she became a writer.

She’s told this story in many brief ways, but this essay for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer seems to have the most detail:

I ended up in Mrs. Spangler’s [second-grade] class, and that, too, was a life-changing event. On a shelf under the window, Mrs. Spangler had a collection of books. If we finished our work early, we were allowed to go to the bookshelf and choose a book. I always finished my work early, and that’s where I discovered The Wizard of Oz–not the movie, but the book by Frank Baum. And not just that one book, either, the whole series, all of them. For me, it was love at first sight.

Some kids encountering The Wizard of Oz focus on the Wizard himself, the funny little guy hiding behind his green curtain. What I saw was Frank Baum hiding behind the words, and as soon as I realized someone had put those words on paper, that’s who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I wanted to write books; tell stories; put words on paper.

In another interview, Jance also highlighted John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee thrillers: “That was when I realized it was possible to write series books for grown-ups. There were of course other authors who wrote series books for grown-ups, but that was one that was readily accessible for me.”

I was struck by how the card page (i.e., the “Other Books by This Author” page) in Jance’s latest books, listing two hefty mystery series and a bunch of other titles, has the same sense of promise as the long list printed in some Oz books.

More on Nightwing, #93

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the controversy over Nightwing, #93 (published in 2004), and how Wikipedia’s one-sentence description of that comic book’s script was rewritten in 2010 to say the opposite of what it originally said.

Another source in assessing that situation was Birds of Prey scripter Gail Simone’s conversation with Nightwing scripter Devin Grayson in The Pulse website in June 2004, while the storyline was playing out. I found the text of the relevant exchange, copied before the interview disappeared from the web. Here it is for the record:

THE PULSE: Another reason this year has been hard for Nightwing is the breakup of his relationship with a very smart redhead whose book I happen to write [i.e., Barbara Gordon]. Dick’s obviously a physical character, especially lately, and I think you and other writers have clearly established that he’s not a loner. Without giving too much away, the ending of #93 had rather a shocking event in Dick’s love/sex life. Was this a one-time thing, a moment of weakness and disorientation, or is Tarantula something more to Dick?

GRAYSON: That particular moment was actually not consensual. Dick’s body sometimes has a mind and life of its own, and in this case, his heart was very clear (as were his words) about not wanting to be engaged that way at that time. But Catalina [a.k.a. Tarantula] overwhelms him to some extent, both physically and emotionally. He feels responsible now for, essentially, the destruction of her soul, and as of issue 93 (and this continues into 94), he’s not yet sure how to redeem her or himself, so she’s really got an odd kind of control over him while he tries to catch his breath and figure that out. She’s crystal clear about what she wants to be doing and how she wants him to factor into it – utterly undaunted by recent events – and Dick is, at this point, basically being dragged around behind her (this actually becomes literal in 94). Through a combination of shock and moral anguish, Dick has, to some extent, surrendered to her will. And in that particular situation, the sex itself was practically allegorical. I don’t mean it didn’t really happen, but rather that it was a final physical manifestation of an emotional violation that went much deeper.

Two months later Devin Grayson had the Q&A with fans in which she referred back to this conversation: “For the record, I’ve never used the word ‘rape,’ I just said it was nonconsensual (I know, aren’t writers frustrating? *smiles*).”

Curiously, in an exchange on the Legions of Gotham message board dated June 2004 (though at one point I recorded it as having occurred in January 2005), Devin Grayson was explicit:

from aneurysm: Theres been alot of online debate about what actually happened at the end of Nightwing #93. Was Dick raped? Was it consensual? Did they actually do anything other than a bit of dry humping? Everyone seems to be debating this and coming up with crazy explanations (the weirdest I've heard is that Tarantula drugged Dick!).

Devin Grayson: Okay, let’s see if I can clear this up while still retaining some necessary vagueness. The facts: if you’re over seventeen, that was way more than dry-humping. If you’re a younger reader, well, they were just being friendly. ;-) There were no drugs involved beyond the very potent chemical cocktails of pheromones with which we all come naturally equipped. The act was not consensual – Dick did not want to be touched, as he stated, and physical intimacy – especially with Catalina – was the last thing in his head or heart. He was, essentially, raped, though I think in an emotional and spiritual sense even more than in the physical sense. He almost certainly has the power to best Tarantula physically, but she definitely overwhelms him in other ways.

I think it’s significant that Devin Grayson said she had to maintain “some necessary vagueness” and attributed her frustrating coyness in the other Q&A to being a writer. Those phrases are why I read her combination of statements as signs of a storyteller trying to balance between giving readers the information they need to interpret her narrative and not spelling out that story before it concluded (several issues and one Batman crossover later).

The result was clumsy and, especially in combination with the delayed conclusion, frustrating and even infuriating for fans. Devin Grayson herself expressed regrets in a mid-2005 Q&A:

What made you come up with the idea to have Nightwing being raped in Nightwing #93?

What happened between him and Catalina on that rooftop was a physical manifestation of a much deeper marginalization of power. In hindsight, I regret it — not because it was controversial, but because readers have paid more attention to that moment than to the one that truly shattered Dick — the moment when he stood by passively in the face of someone’s murder. That was a far worse subjugation of everything he stands for than the subsequent physical violation.

At that point the story of Dick and Catalina’s relationship had ended—though Dick would continue working out his feelings about the murder in hard-to-follow ways over another year of issues.

Al Jaffee Archive Folded into Columbia Library Collection

When I was a boy, my favorite in MAD’s “usual bunch of idiots” was Al Jaffee. I especially liked his Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions series. I can’t really say why I bought those paperbacks more than those from any other cartoonist in the magazine, but I did. Jaffee was also known, of course, for the magazine’s last-page fold-ins.

In July, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University announced that it had acquired Jaffee’s archives. Its press release stated:

Jaffee was in the first graduating class of the LaGuardia-founded High School of Music & Art, where he met his long-time colleagues Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and Al Feldstein. Jaffee began his cartooning career working for Stan Lee on comic books such as Patsy Walker and Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal, and his Tall Tales comic strip appeared in the New York Herald Tribune for six years.

Plus MAD, which Jaffee has contributed to for nearly sixty years.

The New York Times just reported on the impending arrival of the first batch of material, and also provided more facts on the gift. Most notably, the librarian who approached Jaffee at last year’s New York Comic-Con, Karen Green, started as a specialist in ancient and medieval history. But she also “led a secret life as a cartoon and comic book fan.”

Green is now the library’s graphic novels specialist. And the Rare Book and Manuscript Department also houses material from former Columbia student Jerry Robinson (I think he dropped out after finding work on Batman) and X-Men scripter Chris Claremont.

Looking in on St. Nicholas

If I were in Manhattan Friday afternoon, instead of getting ready for MICE, I’d try to attend this lecture at the New York Public Library: “St. Nicholas Magazine: a Portable Art Museum”:

In November 1873, American publisher Scribner and Company published the first issue of a new illustrated monthly magazine for children, St. Nicholas Magazine: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys. Contributing to its success was the editorial vision of its first and most influential editor, Mary Mapes Dodge, who was to create a new kind of magazine for children, one in which illustration and art education were important foci.

The greatest expression of St. Nicholas’ art education program is seen in its many reproductions of fine art and architecture from Antiquity, the Old Masters, and contemporary academic artists. These reproductions accompanied art historical information, illustrated fictional stories, or stood alone for the reader to contemplate.

St. Nicholas also contained the work of trade illustrators who would become famous through the distribution of illustrated magazines, including Howard Pyle, Jessie McDermott and Reginald Birch. Contained between the two heavy, matte paper covers were innovative and artistic layouts, typography, and decorative designs that consciously paralleled the styles of the predominate artistic movements, such as those associated with the American Renaissance and English Aestheticism, that were popular among elite, genteel Victorian Americas.

The speaker is Mary F. Zawadzi, an art historian and writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study.

The picture above, courtesy of The Oz Enthusiast, is a poster advertising the publication of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy originally called “The Magic Cloak,” a titled that gradually changed into Queen Zixi of Ix. It probably underwent more rigorous editing at St. Nicholas than any other Baum fantasy; he usually worked with small publishers where he was a big fish and got a fair amount of deference. As a result, it’s one of his best.

The All-Too-Successful Career of Cassandra Cain

This chart is based on sales figures that Comics Chronicle back-calculated from reports by the Diamond distributor. It shows the relative performance of Batgirl (in black) and Robin (in red).

The protagonist of Batgirl in this period, as I’ve been discussing, was Cassandra Cain. She was a teen-aged protégée of Batman, dealing with issues of identity, values, and heritage, so her coming-of-age story was parallel to that of Tim Drake as Robin. But she was a new character, especially fresh since she was female and of Asian extraction.

When Batgirl launched in 2000, the magazine outsold the much older Robin by about 50%. Then its sales started to slide—as the industry has come to expect for all its titles. The sales of Robin could slide, too. The January 2002 rise for both magazines came during a crossover. The big jump in Robin sales in 2004 was when DC got a case of the Stephs. But the long-term trend is clear: while Robin bobbed along, Batgirl gradually ran out of its original gas.

And what was that fuel? I submit that it was the main character’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts. When Cass Cain’s story started, she was suffering the effects of a horrendous upbringing as a child assassin: she couldn’t read, could barely speak, and was haunted by her past deeds. Those burdens drove her quest for justice and made it much harder. They balanced out and humanized her preternatural martial-arts skills.

But then Cass Cain learned to read speak. She temporarily lost her powerful ability to read body language in fights, forcing her to recognize the trade-offs in her life—but she overcame that problem, too. Cass confronted and defeated her father, the nasty assassin David Cain. She confronted and defeated her mother, the slightly less nasty killer Lady Shiva. She overcame her feelings of guilt. She built friendships with other crime-fighters. In sum, Cass resolved all her main Foundational Conflicts.

And that left little fuel for future stories. To be sure, there were other factors—most importantly, the original creative team of writer Kelley Puckett and artist Damion Scott moved on. But other characters have survived such changes.

The fundamental problem was that Cass Cain won. Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake never resolved their Foundational Conflicts that way in the main storylines. Clark Kent and Dick Grayson did resolve theirs, in Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and the Batman stories of 2010-11, respectively—but those storylines led immediately into reboots that restored the characters’ original Foundational Conflicts. In a series, the problem with a happy ending is that it’s an ending.

DC ended the Batgirl magazine with its Infinite Crisis reboot. I suspect that the company editors set out to restore Cass Cain’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflict by taking her back to her roots as an assassin. By editorial mandate, she reappeared as the villain in a Robin storyline.

Cass’s characterization in the resulting issues is almost unrecognizable—once non-verbal, she now filled panels with expository dialogue. Once almost suicidally committed to justice, she was now a supervillain. Far from restoring Cassandra Cain as an interesting badass, that story and subsequent, more creatively successful appearances alienated her old fans and brought in few new ones.

Bruce Wayne’s death led to a reshuffling of the team he had assembled, with a new Batgirl. Cass Cain simply disappeared for a while. Eventually DC portrayed her fighting crime back in Asia, still linked to the Batman team through Tim Drake but comfortable working on her own. She had traveled farther than any of Batman’s male protégés and come of age. But as a protagonist, as opposed to a supporting character, she had nowhere else to go—not without a new Foundational Conflict.

And in DC’s latest universe, Cass Cain hasn’t yet appeared at all.

Batgirl’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts

Last week I started quoting from former DC Comics editor Scott Peterson’s recollection of the creation of the second Batgirl in the late 1990s. At first he was reluctant, but his boss insisted.

And then somewhere on the way back to my office I had this crazy vision of a new Batgirl. She was young—late teens, I thought—and Asian, because, well, at the time we had an awful lotta white faces in the DCU, and I thought, if we’re creating a brand new character in the DCU, why on earth would we make her white when other races are under-represented? And in my vision, she was cheerful and chipper and always up and good-natured and she had a complete and total death wish.

This did not seem like a good idea. In fact, it didn’t seem to even make any sense. But it wouldn’t go away.

So I called [writer and former editor] Kelley Puckett. And I said, “Hey, new Batgirl. Young—late teens, I think—and Asian. And cheerful and chipper and always up and good natured and she has a complete and total death wish.”

“But,” he replied reasonably, “that doesn’t even make any sense. . . . That’s completely contradictory.”

But the built-in contradiction was, as Peterson probably realized, the point. In serial fiction the best characters are fueled by contradictions. As I’ve written before, they face an Unresolvable Foundational Conflict that provides distinct characterization and an ongoing overall story arc.

Peterson’s original conception of Batgirl having “a complete and total death wish” but being “cheerful and chipper and always up” had to potential to be an Unresolvable Foundational Conflict. As it turned out, Puckett dropped the “cheerful and chipper” part.

Instead, the character he imagined, Cassandra Cain, was totally serious most of the time. She rivaled Tim Drake for being earnest and Bruce Wayne for being unsmiling. Which made the moments when she did smile or laugh or enjoy life all the more surprising and special.

But Puckett did give Cass Cain an Unresolvable Foundational Conflict—at least one. She was ridden with guilt for having been raised as a child assassin, but indefatigable about making up for that. Her upbringing gave her an extraordinary ability to read body language, useful in fights, but she had trouble with spoken language and couldn’t read at all. Physically she was small and slight and of course a girl, but she could beat Batman in hand-to-hand combat.

Cass Cain debuted in the mighty “No Man’s Land” crossover, Dennis O’Neil’s grand exit from the Batman desk. Having taken the mantle of Batgirl but in a new costume, in 2000 she started to appear in her own magazine, scripted by Puckett and drawn in a strikingly idiosyncratic style by Damion Scott. As protagonist of her own serialized story, she went about fighting criminals, and she went about wrestling with her Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts.

COMING UP: And how did that work out?

Television Hierarchies and Cliffhangers

I enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s essay in The New Yorker on what American television-watching has become, at least on the high end:

As viewers, we rely on hierarchies to govern our notion of television ambition: cable trumps network, drama is better than sitcom, adult is worthier than teen, realistic is more grownup than sci-fi, grim beats sunny, PBS documentary tops Bravo reality show, and “as good as Dickens” is superior to anything resembling a soap opera.

In particular, Nussbaum highlights the ongoing serial drama—a significant change from television shows a generation ago, when the basic situation in most television shows evolved as little as possible.

Sitcoms used to be, as the term implies, based on a rarely-changing situation. Miss Brooks never married, no matter how much she tried. Sgt. Bilko never got a promotion. Col. Hogan neither escaped nor won the war. Seinfeld was always about nothing.

Similarly, in dramas the basic premise remained the same. There was a detective squad, or a sheriff, or a hospital, and in sixty minutes it solved a problem and returned the world to the status quo ante. Dr. Richard Kimball was never caught until The Fugitive’s last episode. Sheriff Matt Dillon never married Miss Kitty.

Major changes came only when a show’s producers were forced by desperation or shifting casts. The medium fought against them—hence the two Darrens on Bewitched, the four sons on My Three Sons, the move of the entire cast of Laverne and Shirley to California all at once.

Today, however, many television fictions, and particularly those on the high end, are based on the possibilities of change. (Ironically, this was always the case in soap operas, a genre that Nussbaum notes we pooh-pooh.) In drama Hill Street Blues started to associate high-quality television with long-run character development and revelation. More recently we’ve watched The Sopranos, Lost, The Wire, and other drama play out in true serial form, each season a step beyond the last. Even a sitcom like The Office, based on the never-ending monotony of work, depicts great changes in the characters’ lives.

When shows don’t necessarily return to the status quo ante, that opens the door for cliffhangers, and Nussbaum meditates on the technique:

Narrowly defined, a cliffhanger is a climax cracked in half: the bomb ticks, the screen goes black. A lady wriggles on train tracks—will anyone save her? Italics on a black screen: “To be continued . . .” More broadly, it’s any strong dose of “What happens next?,” the question that hovers in the black space between episodes. In the digital age, that gap is an accordion: it might be a week or eight months; it may arrive at the end of an episode or as a season finale or in the second before a click on “next.”

Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying—when, as the cinema-studies scholar Scott Higgins puts it, “curiosity is converted into a commercial transaction.” They are sensational, in every sense of the word. Historically, there’s something suspect about a story told in this manner, the way it tugs the customer to the next ledge. Nobody likes needy.

But there is also something to celebrate about the cliffhanger, which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling.

Of course, having seen through such manipulation, I’m above it all. As long as Cartoon Network gets back to broadcasting more episodes of Young Justice soon.

Doing Justice to Young Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Quick End of Red Robin

Now that DC has published the two Red Robin volumes largely scripted by Fabian Nicieza, The Hit List and Seven Days of Death, I thought it would be interesting to review comments he made when he took over that series from Christopher Yost.

Nicieza had written Tim Drake’s transition from Robin to Red Robin in the issues of Robin collected in Search for a Hero. I felt that volume suffered from being forced to squeeze into the schedule dictated by Grant Morrison’s “Batman RIP” storyline. In interviews Nicieza clearly liked the Tim Drake character; in the magazines, he didn’t have enough pages to demonstrate that.

Taking over Red Robin in 2010 gave Nicieza a second chance with Tim Drake, this time with no end in sight. At that time, he told Newsarama:

He is “the smart one” of the Bat-family, the thinker and planner. I mean, of course Bruce Wayne/Batman is what he is, and Tim isn’t quite there yet, but Tim at 17 has a more developed intellect than Bruce at 17 did. That’s not to say Dick Grayson or Barbara Gordon are dumb, of course they’re not, but Tim’s level of thinking is a bit... thicker... than theirs. For me, Dick is about superior reflexive thinking, Barbara about superior operational thinking and Tim is about superior comprehensive, or all-encompassing, thinking.

What I love about Tim is that he shares some of the strongest traits of various Bat-family members. The intellect and detective skills of Bruce, the ability to lead others and be a friend to others like Dick has and even the ability to make cold, harsh decisions like Jason does.

Those qualities are certainly on display in Nicieza’s Red Robin stories as Tim maneuvers and manipulates, planning ways to take down villains and threats proactively. That created the storytelling challenge of a first-person narrator who’s been planning several steps ahead of the action being shown—but of course can’t spoil the story for us readers.

Within the DC Universe, Tim got the cyberspace beat. Several of Nicieza’s stories involve an evil digital network called the Ünternet, with his old rival Anarky as a touchy ally in that virtual world. Another couple of issues bring on the Mad Men, electronically fueled tricksters who challenge Tim’s logical thinking.

At the end of that interview, Nicieza threw out some teaser questions that referred to a plot thread that Yost had left hanging for him:

“Who[m] has Ra’s al Ghul ordered to take away Tim’s v-card – and will she succeed?”
“And if she doesn’t succeed, who else is on that ever-growing line looking to draw that card?”

As calculated, that talk of sex caught fans’ attention. But Nicieza soon stated: “I only drew the V-card gag answer as a direct result of a thread running that day on the Robin DC Boards. . . . I hadn’t even THOUGHT of [it] much until that thread.”

As Nicieza noted, over the years DC’s storytellers established several young women as romantic interests, and thus potential first sexual partners, for Tim Drake. Nicieza spun out some of those threads. He created a notable cliffhanger with Ra’s al Ghul’s half-sister trying to get pregnant by Tim whether he wants to or not, only to show him saved by another possible partner.

But contrary to some readings of those issues I’ve seen, Nicieza wasn’t trying to turn Tim into a suave playboy. He recently told Comic Book Resources:

Any relationship with a woman is one where Tim is never fully in control. Maybe that’s one reason he doesn’t have any successful ones under his belt—then again, how many 17-year-olds do? I like how Tim is so competent in so many other aspects of his life, but he is still an awkward doof when it comes to dealing with girls.

Tim’s anxious face when he sees what al Ghul is up to fits into the line of anxious faces he’s made when he thought Lady Shiva might sexually initiate him (first Robin miniseries, #4); when his first girlfriend, Ariana, suggested sex (Robin, #40); when he had to face Stephanie Brown’s pregnancy (Robin, #58); and even when Rose Wilson of the Titans made a play for him (Teen Titans: All Around the World). This DC Universe ends with Tim still awkward, still a virgin, and unattached. Nicieza really does know the character’s history.

Back in 2010, Nicieza was looking ahead to another Red Robin storyline based in Tim’s past:

Nrama: It seems Tim would have quite the reaction to Digger Harkness being brought back from the dead but not his own father [since Harkness, better known as Captain Boomerang, killed his father in Identity Crisis]...

Nicieza: …we will certainly touch on Digger’s return very early in my run—with a face to face meeting that will brew and percolate into a larger storyline down the road.

However, that larger storyline never came to pass. DC’s management chose to revamp its entire line for a simpler “New 52” continuity, in which Tim Drake has a new Red Robin costume and a new mission of forming the new Teen Titans. And there was a strict timetable for launching that.

Nicieza therefore had to wrap up his storylines very quickly. He squeezed a visit to Hong Kong and a big fight with a new young villain into a single page in order to leave the series’ final issue for the face-off with Captain Boomerang. What Nicieza planned as “a larger storyline” depended on Tim’s careful, extended planning—indeed, such planning is crucial to the story’s theme.

Logically, the result is an appropriate culmination for this Tim Drake’s character development from 1989 to 2011. Unfortunately, because the action had to be compressed into a single issue, it didn’t pack the emotional punch that Nicieza had no doubt initially hoped for. In addition, the last issues of Red Robin and nearly every other DC series were swamped by fan interest in what the publisher planned next. This saga ended not with a bang but with an “eep.”

The Paradoxes of Stephanie Brown’s Story

Stephanie Brown’s biggest fans appear to have two big beefs with DC Comics:

• That her tenure as Robin in 2004 was planned from the start to last only a few months and end with her (apparent) death.
• That the company’s current “new 52” continuity no longer recognizes that part of Batman history at all; the four past and current Robins are all dark-haired males.

On the one hand, this is like complaining that the food is horrible and the portions too small. If Stephanie’s stretch in the red and green was so demeaning, shouldn’t we be pleased the company is tacitly admitting that treating the character that way was a mistake?

Similarly, DC’s revamp last year wiped out many of the least popular storylines of the past decades: Roy Harper losing his daughter and an arm; Superman’s mullet and blue period; the deaths and betrayals of about two dozen Titans; and so on. Just the things that many fans have said they wish they didn’t have to think about.

On the other hand, the loss of Stephanie’s work as Robin in the current continuity, and her departure from the role of Batgirl, leave her with a much lower profile. It’s not even clear if the character exists in the current continuity. The changes also push the moment when females can be Robin off into the uncertain Dark Knight Returns future; stately Wayne Manor is once again an all-boys club.

Either way, as I wrote back here, this change provides yet more confirmation that nothing ever comes easy for Stephanie.

My take on the change is to read Stephanie Brown’s story from 1992 to 2011 as a successful coming-of-age. In the final issue of her Batgirl she confronted her father, the villain Cluemaster, who originally inspired her to become Spoiler. In that magazine, Batman Inc.: Leviathan Strikes, and other recent stories, she’s shown herself to be a full, trusted member of the Batman team. Her unresolved foundational conflicts are over. Stephanie won.

Of course, it would have been nice to see more good stories along the way.

A Lesson from Sir Hokus

My thoughts on the value of a ongoing characters having an unresolvable foundational conflict have their roots, I realize, in thinking about a character far less known than Superman.

It was Sir Hokus of Pokes, the first recurring character that Ruth Plumly Thompson added to Oz. He’s an old knight that Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion find in The Royal Book of Oz (1921). He moves to the Emerald City and plays a supporting role in several more adventures, rather as L. Frank Baum used the Shaggy Man. He’s not rounded, and I doubt he’s many people’s favorite, but he becomes a comfortable part of the fabric of Thompson’s Oz.

As such, Sir Hokus reflects Thompson’s sensibility, based on older European fairy tales. In contrast, Baum’s usually tried to find magic in contemporary American culture for Oz.

I think Sir Hokus’s unresolvable foundational conflict is that he’s a man out of time. He speaks in a medieval lingo, constantly expressing a wish to rescue fair maidens and slay dragons. His anachronism is underscored by his age. Like Lewis Carroll’s White Knight, he’s an old man, still active but gray. In both respects, he’s removed from his prime period, no longer able to undertake all the quests he yearns for.

In The Yellow Knight of Oz (1930), Thompson made Sir Hokus one of her protagonists. He goes off on a solo quest at last. Along the way, complications ensue. By the end of that book, Sir Hokus is no longer a man out of time; he’s ensconced in a medieval-style culture. Furthermore, he’s young again.

As a result, the character is no longer the least bit interesting. Sir Hokus’s foundational conflict has been resolved. Even though Dorothy looks in the younger man’s eyes and says he’s the same friend she knew, it’s no surprise that he makes only token appearances in the rest of Thompson’s series.

John R. Neill liked drawing Sir Hokus so much, evidently, that he brought the old knight back in his three Oz books, once more chasing dragons without being able to slay them. Neill offered no explanation of how, but neither consistency nor logic was part of his storytelling.

Superman’s On-Again, Off-Again Relationship

Thinking about serial characters led me to consider Superman’s relationship to Lois Lane, and his relationship to his unresolvable foundational conflict.

For more than fifty years, starting with Action Comics, #1, Lois was in a love triangle with Superman’s two identities: mild-mannered, often doofy reporter Clark Kent and world-saver Superman. Clark loved her, she loved Superman, Superman didn’t want to reveal his other identity, and the whole situation seemed unresolvable.

Not only did that tension fuel many stories in Action Comics and Superman, but it was the drive behind Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane (reported monthly sales in 1960: 458,000).

Occasionally DC editors would let their writers explore resolutions, but only in “imaginary” stories. After the company developed the concept of Earth 2, it showed an aging Superman marrying an aging Lois—but in that secondary universe only.

Alan Moore’s saga-ending “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” resolved the triangle by showing Lois married to a friendly fellow named neither Clark nor Superman—but, curiously, he had the same chin as both.

That love triangle was also part of the Superman radio show of the 1940s, the television show of the 1950s, and the first Christopher Reeve movies. And it was right at the core of the early 1990s television show Lois and Clark.

To give viewers something new after a couple of seasons, the producers of that TV decided to have their title characters marry. DC Comics scrambled to follow. The magazines showed Lois realizing that Clark and Superman are one and the same and eventually marrying the big lug (with a one-year delay while he was dead).

I wasn’t keeping up with superhero comics at the time. I heard that Superman had died, and knew he would come back to life. But when I resumed reading the comics a few years ago, I was shocked to find that the Clark-Lois-Superman triangle was no more. What had seemed like an unresolvable foundational conflict had been resolved—yet the story was still going on.

But not on TV. The ratings for Lois and Clark plummeted in its fourth season, coincident with the change in the title characters’ relationship. Even heavily hyped wedding episodes didn’t help. I suspect that version of the mythos was so tied to the three-way relationship as an unresolvable foundational conflict that it lost its raison d’être and appeal once that tension changed.

In contrast, breaking the love triangle didn’t seem to damage the comics much at all. (Well, their sales fell over time, but so did sales of all superhero comics.)

By the 1990s, Lois Lane’s role in the older comics had become embarrassingly anachronistic, anyway. The love triangle’s classic form rested on misogynistic assumptions: girls were icky, women’s desires were shallow, a married woman would give up her career, and so on. With the new relationship, DC could finally acknowledge that Lois Lane, ace reporter, had been right about Clark Kent’s secret all along.

And it turned out that Superman stories could be fueled by a different unresolvable foundational conflict: the title character’s struggle to protect his adoptive planet from every threat while also living on it as a regular human.

In its new universe, DC has returned to the status quo sevente: Clark Kent is once again single and pining for Lois Lane, who once again won’t give him the time of day but is curious about this new super-man. I don’t know if that relationship is at the center of the saga again, though.

Dick Grayson’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflict

This weekly Robin is a follow-up to last week’s, ToB’s comment on it, and the thoughts that inspired about how open-ended series need main characters with unresolvable foundational conflicts.

Adventure comics, in both newspaper and magazine form, have for the most part been open-ended, and thus demanded such characters. As Robot 6’s Tom Bondurant wrote in a Grumpy Old Fan column on the Watchmen prequels:

Superman and Swamp Thing were created to be ongoing characters with no definite endpoint, but Watchmen, [James] Robinson’s Starman, [Garth] Ennis’ Hitman, and [Neil] Gaiman’s Sandman were all finite series.

(At least they became so—I don’t recall Gaiman describing such a plan at the outset of Sandman when he was still a starry-eyed British freelancer happy for his big break.)

That’s why DC has commissioned prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel. Those new stories won’t affect the characters’ ultimate fates as Watchmen portrayed them. They’ll play out the characters’ foundational conflicts, but everyone who’s read the novel will know how those conflicts resolve. (And how different is that from the usual superhero comics?)

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the unresolvable foundational conflict of Batman and Robin was the tension between their comfortable “real” lives and the challenges of fighting crime while dressed in garish costumes and masks.

Every story about secret identities played off that conflict. Every time Bruce Wayne’s life as a playboy millionaire or Dick Grayson’s as a high-school kid interfered with the Dynamic Duo, that plot grew out of the same foundation.

In most 1940s issues of Batman, one of the four stories focused on the Dynamic Duo’s relationship under pressure from their double lives. “Bruce Wayne Loses the Guardianship of Dick Grayson” (issue #20) was one example. Others include:

• “Batman Plays a Lone Hand” (#13): Bruce kicks Dick out of Wayne Manor with no explanation in order to protect him from criminals.
• “Robin Studies His Lessons” (#18): Dick can’t fight crime until he gets his grades back up.
• “Collector of Millionaires” (#19): Bruce is kidnapped and a double takes his place.

Most of those stories would be impossible if Bruce and Dick gave up their secret identities, their crime-fighting, or their millions. (Or if they just talked to each other more.)

Batman and Robin let some partners in on their secret identities, starting with Alfred and Superman. That didn’t change the foundational conflict, however, because most of the world still didn’t know.

The imaginary tale “The Marriage of Batman and Batwoman” (#122) shows Bruce marrying Kathy Kane. Later imaginary tales of that couple show that the stories could keep coming as long as there was some circle of secrecy. But in that tale, Kathy accidentally reveals Batman’s identity, and the saga screeches to an imaginary end.

Of course, most Batman stories from those decades were driven by that month’s villains, or aliens, or plan to travel back in time through hypnosis. They could have worked with other heroes. It wasn’t until the 1980s that writers began to focus on longer story arcs and more complex motivations for ongoing readers. And then the “we have to preserve our secret identities” conflict just wasn’t enough.

Since 1980 or so, the unresolvable foundational conflict for Bruce Wayne has been his drive to fight crime, avenging his parents and defending innocents, even though that impossible mission threatens his health, his sanity, and his relationships.

For Dick Grayson, the unresolvable foundational conflict has been his relationship with Bruce Wayne. As critic Douglas Wolk put it in Reading Comics, Robin’s “symbolic value is as a son trying to learn from his father’s experience and wisdom without making his father’s mistakes.”

As Nightwing, Dick took a step away from Batman and had his own adventures, but his larger story kept coming back to his relationship to Bruce Wayne. Could he measure up to his mentor? Is taking his own path disrespectful, or a cop-out? Is being the most liked, respected hero on the planet enough when your father figure is so emotionally distant?

When Grant Morrison led DC into making Dick Grayson into Batman for a couple of years, that resolved the hitherto unresolvable conflict. Yes, Dick could be Batman. In some ways, he was a better Batman. He mentored his own Robin, more damaged and dangerous than his predecessors. He defeated Batman villains, Titans villains, and some new villains. He helped to get Bruce Wayne back from time.

But the problem with resolving a character’s unresolvable foundational conflict is that there’s no place further to go. The central question has found its answer. The story has reached its end. DC could put that Dick Grayson back into the Nightwing costume, but why? Better to let that version of the Dick Grayson saga end successfully, and then go back a few steps and a few years to start another one with the same symbolic value but no resolution in sight.

The Second Oz Series

When L. Frank Baum returned to the Oz series, he had left Dorothy and Ozma in a good place. Too good a place, in fact. Supposedly he wasn’t even able to contact them any more. Solving that problem (through the new technology of wireless) was less challenging, however, than coming up with a new fuel for stories about Oz now that Dorothy could live with her family in the Emerald City and Ozma could feel safe about Oz.

Furthermore, since Baum evidently now planned to keep writing Oz books as long as he could, he was no longer thinking ahead to a series end. He needed to keep his characters interesting, or come up with new ones.

With a story called “Little Dorothy and Toto” in The Little Wizard Stories of Oz (written for younger readers than the novels), Baum found a new unresolvable foundational conflict for Dorothy. Though she has a perfectly comfortable, safe home in the royal palace, she insists on wandering into the countryside and heading off on dangerous missions. In that story, the Wizard tries to cure Dorothy of this bad habit. It doesn’t work.

Thus, in The Magic of Oz, Dorothy’s idea of birthday shopping means going into a forest of wild beasts and asking to borrow a dozen monkeys. In Glinda of Oz she’s eager to go to the edge of Prof. Wogglebug’s map to get involved in a war. In The Patchwork Girl of Oz she invites herself on Ojo’s quest, and in Rinkitink in Oz she heads to the Nome Kingdom.

As for Ozma, she continues to be so kind-hearted that she has trouble governing. In Glinda of Oz, the title character advises her to stay out of the turmoil in one corner of Oz, and she insists on heading there anyway and telling her subjects they should be nice. In The Lost Princess of Oz she gets kidnapped, and Dorothy (of course) heads out to rescue her.

But for most of in his second series of Oz books, Baum had antagonists drive the plot, or found other young protagonists: Ojo, Betsy, Trot, Button-Bright, Inga, and Woot. Most of those new kids didn’t hold up for more than one adventure because they didn’t have unresolvable foundational conflicts. Once Inga rescues his parents, or Betsy finds a home, there’s nothing left for their characters to do.

The two young characters who play important, distinct roles in more than one of Baum’s novels came with foundational conflicts that continued to drive them into adventures. Trot is little, but curious and just as brave as Dorothy. Button-Bright gets lost whether he means to or not. If either of those sources of conflict ever disappeared, so would their stories. Like Dorothy and Ozma, Trot and Button-Bright are built for an open-ended series.

Characters in Need of Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts

In a traditional story with a closed ending, we want the main characters to resolve some conflict. Bud (not Buddy) finds a family. Jim in Treasure Island finds the treasure. Harriet the Spy learns a valuable lesson about friendship. Huck Finn manages to get freedom for Jim. That resolution doesn’t have to come at the end of one book: Harry Potter doesn’t defeat Voldemort until book 7/movie 8.

However, when authors ask us to follow characters through a series of stories with no planned ending, those characters need some foundational conflicts that they don’t resolve. If they ever put those conflicts to rest, then their story has effectively reached an ending. And perhaps run out of fuel for more.

That foundational conflict could be a frustration that will never end: Bruce Wayne will never get his parents back, for instance, and he will never preserve Gotham City from all crime. It may be an internal contradiction: Princess Ozma’s wish to be kind to all will always make it hard for her to deal with really nasty people.

To be sure, there are some characters in series whose personalities and situations don’t include some unresolvable. The Hardy Boys, for example, don’t have inner lives or difficult circumstances. But kids don’t read those books (at least the older versions) for character growth; they’re all about external events, and they depend on a never-ending supply of crime. If criminals ever stay out of Idaville or Bugs Meany gets sent away to reform school, there would no longer be an engine to produce Encyclopedia Brown stories.

Applying this thought to the Oz books, at the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, all the main characters have had their problems solved: Dorothy is back in Kansas, and her three companions have gained what they thought they were missing.

But the 1903 Broadway hit produced a market for a new book, and L. Frank Baum came up with The Marvelous Land of Oz. That story also seemed to end with resolutions all around: Oz has a rightful ruler, Tip has found a new life, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman can go off into the sunset together.

Returning to Oz for more books, however, Baum chose to tell more stories about Dorothy. For the next three adventures, she’s once again faced with the conflict of the first: she’s away from home and wants to go back. Each book ends with her back with her family, so what’s the foundational conflict? It’s how she’d be welcome (and powerful) in the beautiful Emerald City, but needs to return to her family.

At the start of The Emerald City of Oz, Baum resolves that foundational conflict for Dorothy. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em loses their farm to the mortgage-holder, and Dorothy insists that they all move to Oz. So Dorothy no longer has an unresolved foundational conflict.

The rest of the book has a mildly adventurous travelogue interspersed with the Nome King’s preparations for a terrible invasion. That takes us to Ozma’s foundational conflict: how she can preserve her values even when faced with such a threat. The Scarecrow helps her, and then (as quoted back here) Glinda apparently removes all such threats in the future. So Ozma no longer has an unresolved foundational conflict.

That wasn’t a problem because Baum planned to end the series with that book. He had brought his main characters to resolutions of their problems. There was no evident engine for future stories.

TOMORROW: But what about the next eight books?

Ness on Nesbit

Gracious, I missed that Mari Ness at Tor was reviewing all the books by E. Nesbit!

I didn’t see a mention of how in her golden period Nesbit wrote for The Strand, so her books appeared first in that magazine in chunks and only later were collected. That helps to explain their episodic rhythm, especially in the early years.

Ness gets rather cutting on a time-travel novel that I haven’t been able to complete, Harding’s Luck:

Nesbit also choose[s] to make Dickie into a poor crippled orphan, and thus, Extremely Good, so Good that Dickie is willing to return to poverty and disability, giving up the pony, just to turn a homeless beggar and thief into a hardworking, honest man.

I’m not certain that any writer could have pulled this off; certainly Nesbit couldn’t. I can believe in Nesbit’s magical rings and wishes; I can certainly believe in her portraits of children who do thoroughly selfish and foolish things or spend more time thinking about food and fun than about being good. But not this. . . .

By 1907/1908, when Nesbit was planning and writing Harding’s Luck, she was well established as a popular, clever, children’s writer. But then, as more than occasionally now, “popular,” “clever,” and “children’s” did not add up, in the eyes of important (and generally male) critics, as “good” or “of literary merit.” . . . Nesbit, on personal, friendly terms with some of these literary critics, knew what they were looking for, and she was prepared to change her writing to meet it. Thus the serious tone of this book, and its often self-conscious “literary” feel.

That’s not a selling review, is it? The title of this illustration by H. R. Millar might sum up the tone that Ness disliked in the book: “It hurt, but Dickie liked it.”

I think Nesbit was much more comfortable writing about upper and upper-middle-class children, though they might (as in The Railway Children) be in danger of falling into genteel poverty. Poor Dickie might have made her nervous, in her good Fabian Socialist way, so he had to end up better than life.

“Books…want to be a whole lot cheaper”

At GigaOM, Mathew Ingram contemplates the falling prices of the Kindle and other simple electronic readers, and the falling prices of simple genre fiction in digital form:

…books don’t want to be free; they just want to be a whole lot cheaper than they are. And when you make books (not all books, but some) $4.99 or $1.99 or even 99 cents, people will buy more of them. . . .

There’s even the possibility that books could be free and still make money: Amazon has an ad-supported Kindle, so why not extend that model to the books themselves? Magazine writers publish their content in an ad-supported medium, so why not books? Authors such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many of their novels on a monthly basis as magazine supplements. And Amazon apparently already has a patent that covers advertising-supported e-books.

As we’ve pointed out before, the book is evolving as it becomes digital — there are Kindle Singles that aren’t much longer than a magazine-length feature, and some magazines and newspapers are packaging features in just that format, as well as newer services like Byliner that have been commissioning custom content. A free Kindle could be just the beginning of an explosion of book-like content from Amazon and others: The company is already talking about a “Netflix for books” that would offer content for a monthly fee.

Why not offer a subscription to an author, so I can automatically get whatever he or she writes, regardless of length or format? This would blend the worlds of blogging, Kindle Singles, magazine-length features and novels into one stream of content, and I’d be willing to bet more people would read more as a result. The printed book, as Seth Godin wrote recently, is a fetish of sorts, like an expensive watch: something we buy because we like to look at it, but something that is no longer really functional or necessary. In the end, that’s likely to be a good thing, not a bad one.

I doubt that people would sign up for anything an author writes. But they might well sign up for notifications (and one-click purchasing) of anything she writes, so they can be sure of the genre, main character, or other necessary qualities. If such a system takes place, it will surely change the nature of the writing, just as we can tell where Dickens broke off his serialized installments while making sure readers would come back for the next.