Archie Across the Globe

This week the New York Times ran a profile of Ahmad Saeed, a bookseller in Islamabad, Pakistan.

He inherited the business from his father this spring, and one of his first tasks as owner was accepting visits from “elderly men” who had come to apologize for shoplifting in their youth.

According to the Times of New York:

One of the penitent former book thieves who dropped in was Suleman Khan, the vice chancellor of Iqra University, in Islamabad.

“He came to say that when he was a child, 6 years old or so, he stole an Archie comic book and my father saw him,” Mr. Saeed said. “He said he was afraid he was going to get slapped, but my father said: ‘This is good that you like books. So every day you can take a book but keep it in mint condition and return it when you’re done so I can still sell it.’”

And then the vice chancellor said, “Everything that I am now, I owe to your father.”

That story seems remarkable in many ways, not least in how a comic story about teenagers inspired by life in Depression-era Haverhill, Massachusetts, could speak so powerfully to a six-year-old in Islamabad decades ago.

But Dr. Khan clearly isn’t the only Archie fan in that region of the globe. In 2014 a company executive told the Times of India that India was full of loyal readers. Riverdale is now home to characters of South Asian heritage, such as aspiring filmmaker Raj Patel, and Archie visited Mumbai in 2011, falling for Bollywood star Amisha Mehta.

A Robin Reader

Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder is a collection of serious essays about the sensational character find of 1940, published on the occasion of his 75th anniversary.

The book’s editor is Kristen L. Geaman, a medievalist, and many of the other contributors are also academics. Most don’t specialize in comic books or popular culture but are long-time fans of Dick Grayson in his various roles in the DC Universe. They combine rigorous scholarship with affection for the character. And one of those contributors is me.

In fact, my essay is the first in the book because I volunteered to cover the first thirty years of Dick Grayson stories, from his debut in 1940 to his departure for college in late 1969. I discuss the storytelling advantages of a sidekick, the emotional depth that Dick brought to the Batman saga, and Dr. Fredric Wertham’s complaints about the Dynamic Duo’s relationship.

On both Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s website, it’s possible to read a good chunk of my essay through the preview feature. Check it out and see if you want a copy of the whole book in print or digital form.

(Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder doesn’t contain any illustrations from the comics, and it wasn’t authorized by DC Comics—hence the non-trademark-conforming costume on the cover.)

“Shining in a ray of sunshine that fell between the trees”

The Bits & Pieces catalogue is offering this “Tin Woodsman” garden statue. It’s 30" high and “made of soldered iron.” (Ironic in multiple ways.)

The catalogue says, “Some minor assembly required.” Since Bits & Pieces’ main business is jigsaw puzzles, one might wonder what “minor assembly” means in that office. But I’ve ordered from that catalogue and was largely satisfied.

Santa Claus and the Modern World of Central Heating

One of the hallmarks of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy writing was the crossover—and often conflict or rivalry—of fairy-tale traditions with modern technology. Here’s a passage from the final chapters of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, published in 1902.

By and by people made ships from the tree-trunks and crossed over oceans and built cities in far lands; but the oceans made little difference to the journeys of Santa Claus. His reindeer sped over the waters as swiftly as over land, and his sledge headed from east to west and followed in the wake of the sun. So that as the earth rolled slowly over Santa Claus had all of twenty-four hours to encircle it each Christmas Eve, and the speedy reindeer enjoyed these wonderful journeys more and more. . . .

However, there was one evil following in the path of civilization that caused Santa Claus a vast amount of trouble before he discovered a way to overcome it. But, fortunately, it was the last trial he was forced to undergo.

One Christmas Eve, when his reindeer had leaped to the top of a new building, Santa Claus was surprised to find that the chimney had been built much smaller than usual. But he had no time to think about it just then, so he drew in his breath and made himself as small as possible and slid down the chimney.

”I ought to be at the bottom by this time,” he thought, as he continued to slip downward; but no fireplace of any sort met his view, and by and by he reached the very end of the chimney, which was in the cellar.

”This is odd!” he reflected, much puzzled by this experience. “If there is no fireplace, what on earth is the chimney good for?”

Then he began to climb out again, and found it hard work—the space being so small. And on his way up he noticed a thin, round pipe sticking through the side of the chimney, but could not guess what it was for.

Finally he reached the roof and said to the reindeer:

“There was no need of my going down that chimney, for I could find no fireplace through which to enter the house. I fear the children who live there must go without playthings this Christmas.”

Then he drove on, but soon came to another new house with a small chimney. This caused Santa Claus to shake his head doubtfully, but he tried the chimney, nevertheless, and found it exactly like the other. Moreover, he nearly stuck fast in the narrow flue and tore his jacket trying to get out again; so, although he came to several such chimneys that night, he did not venture to descend any more of them.

“What in the world are people thinking of, to build such useless chimneys?” he exclaimed. “In all the years I have traveled with my reindeer I have never seen the like before.”

True enough; but Santa Claus had not then discovered that stoves had been invented and were fast coming into use. When he did find it out he wondered how the builders of those houses could have so little consideration for him, when they knew very well it was his custom to climb down chimneys and enter houses by way of the fireplaces. Perhaps the men who built those houses had outgrown their own love for toys, and were indifferent whether Santa Claus called on their children or not.

Fortunately, the modern world also afforded Santa a solution for this problem.

“I will make all loving parents my deputies!” cried the jolly old fellow, “and they shall help me do my work. For in this way I shall save many precious minutes and few children need be neglected for lack of time to visit them.”

Besides carrying around the big packs in his swift-flying sledge old Santa began to send great heaps of toys to the toy-shops, so that if parents wanted larger supplies for their children they could easily get them; and if any children were, by chance, missed by Santa Claus on his yearly rounds, they could go to the toy-shops and get enough to make them happy and contented. For the loving friend of the little ones decided that no child, if he could help it, should long for toys in vain. And the toy-shops also proved convenient whenever a child fell ill, and needed a new toy to amuse it; and sometimes, on birthdays, the fathers and mothers go to the toy-shops and get pretty gifts for their children in honor of the happy event.

After all, Baum had been editor of The Show Window, a trade magazine for retailers, just two years before writing this book. He had abiding faith in the power of American shopkeepers.

“Inside Story” at Odyssey Bookshop, 3 Nov.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be introducing the many talented authors and artists who are participating in the “Inside Story” event at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

This event is sponsored by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in conjunction with First Book. The authors will share the story behind their latest books, which range from picture books through early readers and middle-grade novels to YA. There will be free prizes and a drawing to win a phone call from a famous author. First Book will donate a book to a child in need for every book purchased. Here’s the lineup of talent.

Picture book creators at 1:00:

• Diane deGroat
• Corinne Demas
• Deborah Freedman
• Jannie Ho
• Sandra Horning
• Jane Kohuth
• Jason Lefebvre
• Richard Michelson
• Hazel Mitchell
• J.C. Phillipps

Middle-grade and YA authors at 3:00:

• Stacy DeKeyser
• Christine Brodien-Jones
• Erin Dionne
• Natasha Lowe
• Jennifer Ann Mann
• Rebecca Rupp
• Chris Tebbetts
• Kathryn Burak

There are similar events planned all over the country.

Missing Voices in the Discussion of Multicultural Book Sales

Last month Lee and Low asked on its blog, “Why Hasn’t the Number of Multicultural Books Increased In Eighteen Years?” That’s an important question, and the posting attracted a lot of attention, mostly echoing the concern without offering new insight. Roger Sutton at The Horn Book was one of the few I saw who asked some follow-up questions.

I didn’t see anyone noting the huge missing voice in the discussion. Lee and Low had invited responses to its question from six professors of children’s literature, one book review editor, two authors, and one librarian/author, Betsy Bird. All important perspectives, but by no means a cross-section of people in the American children’s-book field.

In those responses, Kathleen Horning of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center explicitly blamed Barnes & Noble, though not based on direct knowledge. Poet Nikki Grimes spoke of “blockbuster-craving bookstore markets.” Rudine Sims Bishop of Ohio State mentioned ”my closest big chain bookstore” as an example. Several people spoke of the lack of “marketing.”

And yet the discussion didn’t include one bookseller or person working with booksellers. None of the respondents described working in a bookstore. None described seeing how most families actually buy or choose books. None indicated any experience in marketing a product, much less in working with the publishing industry’s minuscule marketing budgets.

And information from the commercial sector is vital to this conversation because individual sales are more important and influential in children’s publishing than ever before.

At one point, libraries and schools comprised a large and influential segment of the market for children’s books. Today they represent a much smaller portion of the overall sales. Professional book reviewers have become less influential and ordinary readers’ feedback more so.

At one point, publishers and bookstores were mostly family-run, and managers could take a risk or even a loss on certain books they thought were important without having to justify their actions to higher powers. (Lee and Low is a mission-driven press of that sort.) Today most children’s books come from publicly-traded corporations under pressure from stockholders to maximize profits, and bookselling is dominated by two more publicly-traded corporations, B&N and Amazon.

At one point, booksellers and publishers had no real-time systematic data about what books were selling. Now they have weekly reports from BookScan, Ingram, the big chains, and other sources. Amazon can track not only what its customers buy but what other titles those customers buy and what they look at without buying.

The strength and danger of profit-seeking corporations is that they want to make money any way they legally can. They may forgo immediate opportunities to increase long-term profitability (e.g., stepping away from a deal with cookbook author Paula Deen after she became a shameful punchline), but they’re always chasing those profits. And with the data that companies like Amazon and BookScan are collecting on book traffic, they can spot and chase unexpected areas of sales.

When Horning wrote, “I’ve heard many times from publishers that the ‘buyers at B&N’ believe multicultural books don’t sell,” the obvious next question is whether that’s true. Do B&N buyers still believe that? Does any data support that belief? Does data from other booksellers refute it? Have things changed over the past two decades? Only when we’ve probed the reality of bookselling can we dismiss any such belief as “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I understand why Lee and Low’s round-up didn’t include voices of booksellers. Chain buyers are a private bunch. Sales data is proprietary. Sales and marketing people at publishing companies (including Lee and Low itself) wouldn’t want to upset their major customers by complaining. And no one in this discussion would want to be the sole voice saying that “multicultural” books are less profitable than mainstream books.

But if the problem is, say, the inequities of wealth and education in a country affected by structural racism and growing inequality, with one result being disproportionately low sales and profits for books that are clearly about non-white children, then we’re not going to find the solution within the profit-seeking corporate sector.

Torn About the Eisners, and a Bookstore Appearance

The new Eisner Nominations for “Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)” present me with a dilemma:

• Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
• Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
• Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)
• Crogan’s Loyalty, by Chris Schweizer (Oni)
• Hilda and the Midnight Giant, by Luke Pearson (Nobrow)
• Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Braden Lamb generously collaborated with me on “The Greatest Spy Ever,” our contribution to The Greatest Comics Anthology of All Time.

Eric Shanower gently gave me my first tips on writing for comics, and less gently the valuable encouragement to just get started: “Page One, Panel 1….” Years back, he illustrated my short story “Jack Pumpkinhead’s Day in Court.”

I even owe Chris Schweizer for reacting so politely to my worry about his eighteenth-century characters, as in Crogan’s Loyalty, having facial hair—which would be all wrong for the eighteenth-century British Empire.

So I don’t know whom to root for. But tomorrow afternoon Braden and I, along with his partner in all things, Shelli Paroline; our publisher, Dan Mazur; and Fletcher Hanks successor Joey Peters, will be selling and signing books at Comicopia in Boston’s Kenmore Square neighborhood. Braden and Shelli will be there from noon to three; Dan, Joey, and I have the three-to-six shift. This is one of the short-notice events that popped up after this spring’s Boston Comic Con had to be indefinitely postponed because, you may have heard, the whole metro area was shut down yesterday.

I Don’t Think We’re in the Emerald City Anymore

This place would have totally confused me when I was a ten-year-old asking my parents for anything related to the Oz books.

The Land of Oz and Dorothy’s Place is a store in North Haven, Connecticut, that’s been open for thirty-three years. As the local Patch explains, it’s “a smoke shop and adult novelty store that…offers a variety of adult toys, movies and gag gifts.”

This Land of Oz is in the news because it was recently purchased by Monsignor Kevin Wallin, allegedly as a way to launder the proceeds of dealing methamphetamines, though he may also have been a customer.

Year Eleven

Godson and Godson’s Brother visited from London today. I shepherded them to the New England Mobile Book Fair, where the new management is actually starting to shelve new books by category and author regardless of publisher! Later we went to the Outer Limits comics store, and Godson’s Father became concerned the boys’ heads would explode.

In the photo above by Godson’s Mother, Godson and I discuss the available Nightwing graphic novels. But our real find was the stack of Sonic the Hedgehog floppies in the 50¢ bin. Godson’s Brother staggered out with four volumes of The Flash, but declined an Impulse collection as not serious.

Two Parallel Channels for Kids’ Comics

From Graphic Novel Reporter’s interview with Scott Robins, coeditor with Snow Wildsmith of A Parent’s Guide to the Best Kids’ Comics, on the question of judging what’s appropriate reading for different ages:

Any kind of art that has a visual component will be scrutinized because of its immediacy. Looking at a page of comics is more in-your-face than reading a page of prose. This immediacy often causes people to make grand generalizations about comics, usually about the levels of sex and violence. Also, comics have struggled with being perceived as less literary and of lower educational value, which is a huge factor when discussing reading and books for children. . . .

Traditional children’s book publishers are putting out the bulk of comics and graphic novels for kids now. Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Candlewick, and others have decades of experience publishing books FOR kids and know what’s appropriate and what’s not. . . .

we came to the realization of how little superhero material is appropriate for kids and readily available for people to buy. DC and Marvel don’t really have a strong commitment to creating comics for kids and what they do publish doesn’t stay in print.

Children’s comics remains an area of obvious disjuncture between the comics publishing industry (meaning the specialized creators, publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and journalists) and mainstream book publishing (which has its own publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and journalists). The two businesses are parallel, which by analogy means they’ll never meet.

It’s not that bad, but last year I moderated a panel on which Gareth Hinds, adapter of Beowulf, King Lear, and other classics, talked about choosing the children’s publisher Candlewick to republish his work because he saw a choice between getting those books into schools and libraries getting them into comics shops. He knew he couldn’t have both.

I’ve heard the current proprietor of my favorite comics shop as a teen talk about buying the color Bone volumes from a discount bookstore because he didn’t have a Scholastic sales rep to order from. They were so hot he needed them right away and couldn’t afford the time to set up a new business relationship.

The distribution issues have gotten better as businesses realize there’s money to be made in the other channel. I’m guessing most of the flexibility comes from middle men (distributors) rather than the publishers or stores. But that’s what those distributors are for.

When Authors Set Their Own Prices

For decades now, books have been one of the few American products that come with their price tags not just attached but integrally incorporated into them. That’s limited the flexibility of retailers. One of the changes wrought by digital publishing is that retailers can change the price of a product (or, to be precise about the big companies’ legalities, license) instantly.

The big bookselling sites offer that flexibility to self-publishers, and a couple of colleagues are taking advantage of it today.

Jason Rodriguez writes:

I just published my new sci-fi short, “The End of Stars,” to Amazon. It will be free on Monday but right now it is priced at 99-cents.

“The End of Stars” is a climate change fairy tale about a young girl who discovers that the sky is falling and tries to warn her neighbors before the village is destroyed. Due to the message in the story, I decided to donate all residuals made off of the book (I get 35-cents per download) through Sunday (and then it becomes free) to the Red Cross relief efforts centered on rescue and recovery following the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy.

And, to sweeten the pot, I will also donate all of the residuals made off of my other sci-fi shorts over the next four days to the Red Cross, as well. For more info, please feel free to go to this link.

In addition, Chris Eboch has extended her Halloween special for the ebook edition of her novel The Ghost Miner’s Treasure through today. She writes:

This is book 4 of my Haunted series originally published by Aladdin/Simon & Schuster. My editor got fired and the publisher dropped the series, so I finally decided to self-publish the fourth book, which was already written. Book 4 can be read on its own. It’s spooky but not gory, much more a comedy/mystery than a horror novel, suitable for ages 8+.

The Haunted series features two siblings working with a “ghost hunter TV show” that (unlike most of them) finds actual ghosts.

Baum and The Inland Printer

In the 1890s L. Frank Baum and his family moved to Chicago. He supported them as a freelance journalist and traveling salesman before parlaying his (brief and unsuccessful) experience as a shopkeeper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, into a job editing The Show Window.

In 1900 a Chicago-based trade magazine called The Inland Printer described Baum’s magazine in a squib that might have been supplied by the editor himself:

The Show Window, edited by L. Frank Baum, Chicago, is growing in interest from month to month. It is the official organ of the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, and contains an amount of information in this line to be had through no other source. Its half-tone illustrations of window display are worth more than the price of the publication. No storekeeper can afford to be without such a magazine. Its suggestions for Easter window decorations in the special Easter number are a treat to even the uninitiated.

By then Baum also had a second career as a children’s author. The Inland Printer noted that as well a few issues later:

The author of “Father Goose,” Mr. L. Frank Baum, has followed up his success with a remarkable juvenile entitled “A New Wonderland,” which is shortly to be issued by R. H. Russell, of New York. The reader is introduced to a marvelous and hitherto undiscovered country, peopled with the quaintest and merriest characters ever conceived to delight childish hearts. Frank Ver Beck has made many colored pictures for the new book, which bids fair to attain a popularity seldom accorded a juvenile publication.

That book is better known now under its reissue title, The Magical Monarch of Mo.

The Inland Printer didn’t take note of Baum’s other fantasy for children published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, that year’s volume did feature illustrations from W. W. Denslow, including the spooky “What’s the Use?” and three bookplates for the Wilkins family (two reproduced here via Google Books, and thus at less than optimum crispness).

So we know Baum was almost certainly reading The Inland Printer, and probably contributing to it. Which gives more significance to another item from the 1900 volume, a response to a reader’s proofreading inquiry on whether “climb up” was incorrect.

The Inland Printer’s editors said the word “up” was unnecessary and noted other common phrases that were equally redundant. The column added:

No dictionary except one even mentions the phrase “climb down,” and that one, the Funk & Wagnalls Standard, says that it is a United States colloquialism.

Thus, when Baum had Dorothy Gale pass on a lesson from her teacher not to say “climb down,” he was echoing advice he’d probably read a few years before.

TOMORROW: But did that usage bother Baum?

Harry Potter Changes the Rules Again

Every new Harry Potter book changed the rules of American publishing. The first book signaled the resurgence of fantasy after years of doldrums. Then readers started using Amazon.co.uk to get the second volume. That necessitated worldwide publication dates, which led to midnight book parties.

The New York Times changed its bestseller lists to keep those darned kids from annoying authors of adult fiction. Volumes 4 and above showed that ten-year-olds gladly read books more than twice as long as people expected, and so on.

I thought that the end of the series might mean the end of its disruptions. But the recent release of J. K. Rowling’s digital editions is making the same sort of waves. Not only is she managing those rights herself through her Pottermore site, but her team decided to release the ebooks without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Mike Shatzkin passes on the results he heard from Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore:

The key to Charlie’s disruption was his willingness to substitute watermarking for DRM. He said it definitely made him nervous to do it, but he couldn’t see any other way to achieve what he wanted for Pottermore. He had to be able to sell to any device; he wanted to be able to allow any purchaser complete interoperability. There was no way to do that and maintain DRM. . . .

Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what we’ve been asking for: delivering content DRM-free, across devices, at a reasonable price. And, by the way, don’t you know your file up there on the sharing site is watermarked? They know who you are!” And then the pirated content started being taken down by the community, before Pottermore could react. And very quickly, there were fewer pirated copies out there than before.

Shatzkin also reports that major British publishers were saying they might discard DRM as well. Already Tor announced that it would stop using it. Paid Content quoted an anonymous publishing executive saying that he or she now breaks DRM on ebooks. The industry may decide that going DRM-free is the only way to stem the rising flood of Amazon.

Of course, whenever the Harry Potter books shift the ground in publishing, the big question is whether those changes will benefit, or even affect, ordinary titles. Most books don’t have thousands of people lined up to buy them before pub date. Most authors haven’t become richer than the queen of England and therefore able to take chances with their digital domain.

Publishers and the DPLA

On Friday I attended the event at Harvard about the Digital Public Library of America. I ended up asking the last question of the session, which was about publisher support—or lack of it—for the venture.

Earlier that week, the news broke that Random House was planning to charge libraries up to three times the consumer price for digital books. As the speakers had pointed out, only one of the six major US commercial publishers was offering libraries terms on ebooks close to what readers can pay. Meanwhile, there’s a whole ’nother set of issues over scientific, medical, and technical publishers and what they charge to research libraries for access to papers.

In reply, Prof. Richard Darnton pointed out that publishers have legitimate reasons to be worried about digital public libraries damaging their sales. Prof. John Palfrey said that some publishers were observing the DPLA work with interest. Still, it didn’t sound like such companies were ready to jump in, and that left me wondering how that limited the DPLA’s potential.

Mike Shatzkin discussed just that issue in an essay titled “Libraries and publishers don’t have symmetrical interest in a conversation”:

Because libraries are, at most 5% of a general trade publisher’s business and far less of the ebook business, and because the market is changing so rapidly and because every retailer except Amazon can be said to be struggling to carve out a sustainable position in the global ebook marketplace, there are many legitimate reasons for the biggest publishers to take a wait-and-see attitude about libraries and ebooks. . . .

Of course, libraries view this differently because the big books from the big publishers are a lot more than 5% of their patrons’ interest.

Libraries need the big books more than the big commercial publishers now need libraries. Plus, when government budgets are being slashed and people are questioning the value of public services, libraries don’t have the same economic leverage they’ve had at other times in publishing history.

None of that came as a surprise to me, of course. In fact, I was sitting next to a gentleman who’s made much of his living publishing a local guidebook, and I pointed out that a digital copy of that book available to anyone could conceivably wipe out his business, or at least hurt it badly.

Shatzkin’s essay goes further to suggest that the divergent interests of big publishers and public libraries are further complicated by the industry’s longer game of trying to ensure that there’s enough competition for Amazon not to become a monopoly. Would cooperating with libraries mean hurting Barnes & Noble and other non-Kindle sources of ebooks?

One of the Book Fair Faithful

I grew up with the New England Mobile Book Fair as one of my local bookstores. It was a store like no other. The company started as a wholesaler for book fairs, but, fueled by our local community’s firm opposition to buying anything at retail, became a superstore with everyday discounts years before Barnes & Noble and Borders started their battle to the death.

With its roots in wholesaling, New England Mobile never adopted some standard bookselling practices. Like shelving books by category rather than by publisher/distributor and, within those groupings, author name. Like shelving books on attractive shelves rather than rough plywood. Like offering a computer system geared to its stock rather than Bowker’s Books in Print. Like opening a café, even though it’s one of the best cookbook suppliers in the country.

Hey, I remember when a colleague from the publishing company went to work for the store and brought the revolutionary idea of maps and signs for customers.

The family that founded New England Mobile just sold it to a retired insurance executive named Tom Lyons, the Boston Globe reported today. And Lyons has big plans to turn it into…a bookstore.

Lyons wants to sponsor author events at the store, create a more family-friendly children’s section, and invite the area’s professors and professionals to give advice on what specialty books to sell. He must computerize the inventory.

And — this may sound like heresy to the Book Fair faithful — he plans to reorganize the volumes by genre instead of by publisher.

Those will be tremendous changes in an establishment that aesthetically owes more to used-book barns than any mall. Indeed, Lyons expects eventually to sell used books in addition to the huge stock of remainders. But getting from the current situation to that new model will be a seismic event.

Meanwhile, bookselling is undergoing plenty of general seismic events. The Globe article starts by quoting Lyons on loyalty to printed books: “Pretty much everybody I talk to loves books and reads books and wants their children to feel and put their hands on a book,” says Lyons. Which would bode well for the store’s prospects if he wasn’t, you know, a 66-year-old bibliophile. Of course his circle likes printed books.

My first piece of advice to Lyons would be to install an Espresso Book Machine. Then he could publish his novels, and serve our local community of thousands of other people who have unpublished novels. He could even offer that service at a nominal discount.

Eloise et al.: “They were never children’s books”

At Graphic Novel Reporter, of all places, illustrator Hilary Knight talked about how he co-created the Eloise books with song-and-dance woman Kay Thompson:

The Eloise character herself was totally Kay Thompson. She told me who this little girl was. Kay was not particularly visual, and when we worked together, she would talk to me and I would draw things. And that’s how we did all the books. We worked directly together, which is very unusual.

And the other thing that I keep talking about, because Kay was so adamant about it, is that they were never children’s books. They have become children’s books, but Kay never agreed that they were. It was sort of a joke in the beginning. There was a chain of bookstores called Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York, and Kay lived nearby at the Plaza. She used to go in and [see that the Eloise books] had been moved into the children’s section. She would march in and carry them to the front of the store and put them in the adult section. And then they’d just get moved back again.

It was the best thing, really, that happened to her because it was kind of a novelty adult book. It even says that it’s not a children’s book; it says that it’s a book for precocious adults in a banner across the top. She never wrote the books down to children. Of course, they look like children’s books and they were about someone who was getting away with something, so it appealed to kids, thank God.

That’s an interesting way to reconsider Eloise—as one of those adult books that look like picture books, but aren’t at all meant for the traditional picture-book readership. Certainly they weren’t created in the typical picture-book way, but that means nothing about the intended audience.

A Peek Inside Minimum Paige

At Robot 6, local comics super-journalist Brigid Alverson interviewed Ryan Mita about the Minimum Paige comics anthology that he edited for the Harvard Book Store. It’s become the store’s top seller—no doubt because it’s not available anywhere else but the store’s print-on-demand book-making machine.

Ryan was, I think, the first person I met when I attended the Boston Comics Roundtable. Most folks there were interested in writing comics or drawing comics or both. Ryan said he was interested in marketing comics. And by assembling this anthology, he’s provided a platform for dozens of creators.

More than one hundred submissions came in, and among Ryan’s remarks in the interview is:

I think the biggest surprise was how professional all the artists were. Not a single submission came in after deadline. Not one. I remember having visions of artists calling at 5:01 asking for extensions, but it was silent, so I played with fonts instead.

Giving credit where it’s due, I must report that artist Alex Cormack handled the submission of our story, “Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie,” which leads off the collection. I might well have been on the phone at 5:01.

It’s Birds! It’s Planes! It’s…Supermen!

Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941 promises to fill gaps in “the origins and early development of superheroes and the comic book form.” Editor Greg Sadwoski has assembled an eye-catching collection of stories, magazine covers, and house ads showing unfamiliar faces from the first years of American adventures comics.

There are many familiar names, however. Sadowski appears to have sought out stories by creators who eventually found success with other characters: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby, among others. The collection includes two stories by the execrable Fletcher Hanks, who’s on his way to being the least deserving artist to have his entire oeuvre reprinted. My favorite item is the cover of Fantastic Comics, #3, by Eisner and Lou Fine.

Along the way there are a few landmarks in the development of the American superhero. We see the first caped flying hero (Zator, 1936), the first masked comic-book hero (the Clock, 1936), the first adolescent hero in cape and shorts (Dirk the Demon, 1938—two years before Robin).

But Supermen! is most interesting for what didn’t lead anywhere. All these comics are in the public domain, which of course makes them cheaper to republish. The book is thus a collection of failures—characters and storylines that didn’t attract enough readers to survive. There’s nothing from the firms that became DC and Marvel, and only a couple of items from M.L.J. before it found Archie. In the evolution of the American comic book, these are dead ends.

Seeing what didn’t work or become the norm can be as illuminating as seeing what did. For example, the field was already on its way to male domination when Al Bryant used the pen name “Allison Brant” for a horror story about “Fero, Planet Detective” in May 1940.

We can see publishers figuring out what sells. Silver Streak Comics’s first covers in late 1939 featured a villain—a sort of superhuman Fu Manchu named the Claw. By issue #3 the magazine showed off a hero named Silver Streak instead, and by issue #7 another new hero called Daredevil was fighting the Claw.

Several stories in this volume, especially the earliest, are space-opera science fiction, inspired by Buck Rogers (1928) and Flash Gordon (1934). Their heroes aren’t costumed crime-fighters, but square-jawed men with ordinary abilities in futuristic settings.

The earliest are chapters within continuing stories: the adventures of Dr. Mystic (1936), Dan Hastings (1937), and Cosmic Carson (1940) break off at cliffhangers rather than conclude with triumphs. Clearly, early comic-book publishers and creators were taking their cues from newspaper comics, with their ongoing adventures. But families had newspaper subscriptions, and municipal distribution networks were solid. In contrast, fledgling comic-book publishers probably couldn’t deliver the next installments so reliably, so readers gravitated toward magazines that told complete stories.

Now the industry’s gone back to stretching storylines out over several issues, a form of storytelling possible only because their readership has fallen and their distribution though comic-book shops is narrow but reliable.

“We need a new Robin right away.”

Yesterday I enjoyed Free Comic Book Day at Outer Limits, where the crowd seemed to be one-third regulars, one-third parents with kids, and one-third visitors from the International Steampunk City festival.

On the store’s freebies shelf I picked up a first issue with an embossed cover, indicating that DC Comics has high hopes for its title character. I suspect this young man will have staying power.

Last year I raised the question of whether in 1989 DC Comics might have decided to leave Robin behind. The comic-book business had moved its focus off the youth market, which the character had originally been designed for. That year’s Batman movie and the period’s bestselling Batman graphic novels didn’t include a current Robin. (The Dark Knight Returns introduced future sidekick Carrie Kelley.)

In fact, the Batman comics team apparently did want to let the Boy Wonder rest in peace as the editors and fans recovered from the brouhaha over Jason Todd’s death. But Warner Communications (which in March 1989 merged with Time, Inc.) saw no value in letting a nearly-50-year-old trademark wither. As Vaneta Rogers reported for Newsarama earlier this year:

Denny O’Neil, the Batman editor at the time, initially wanted to wait a while before introducing a new Robin. “After we bumped off Jason, I thought eventually, we’d need a new Robin, but I thought we’d give it a year,” he said. “But word came down from on high—I mean, higher than Jenette [Kahn, then DC president]—no, we need a new Robin right away.”

Marv Wolfman, co-creator and longtime writer of the New Teen Titans, had been instrumental in establishing Dick Grayson as an independent character, giving him the identity of Nightwing, and spurring the creation of the first Jason Todd. As for the search for a new Robin, he told The Titans Companion:

Actually, I was trying to stay as far away from it as possible, but I got a phone call from Barbara Randall—now Barbara Kesel—who was my editor, and she said, “Would you be interested in creating a new Robin?”

I wasn’t too sure, but then I thought about it and the idea came to me, and it felt like the old days where it was a real solid idea.

At the time Wolfman, having torn down and rebuilt the DC Multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths, was suffering from a debilitating writer’s block. He hadn’t created a successful new character for years. But this time he thought he had a winner.

COMING UP: O’Neil’s team prepares the ground for Wolfman’s “real solid idea.”

Supporting the Cause of Independent Comics

Of all the creator booths at this weekend’s Boston Comic Con, the Boston Comics Roundtable’s probably offered the greatest diversity of independently published material and facial hair.

(Photo by Retro Rocketer via Flickr. I’m not actually supposed to be able to show it like this, but heh heh…)