I launched the weekly Robin series on 17 Nov 2007, meaning there have been a full year of Oz and Ends postings on that weighty pop-culture topic. Seems longer, doesn't it?
So this week the weekly Robin is taking a rest. But you might find something of interest at Boston 1775, which has been discussing Revolutionary War comics.
Golden Age Comic Book Stories has a tendency to sway far afield of its nominal topic. (Which reminds me, I might need to update that descriptive line above, mightn't I?) This month, that blog featured many nice scans of the illustrations for L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, drawn by Frederick Richardson in 1905. Click on the pictures there for bigger views.
That site spells Richardson's first name without the final K, and gives his dates as 1855-1934. Most other websites say he lived from 1862 to 1937, and I'm inclined to believe them.
But that title didn't sound so much like Baum's most famous fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz. So when the Century company republished the text and illustrations in book form, it chose a title focused on the ruler of a two-letter country. No matter that most of the story takes place in Noland, not Ix, or that Queen Zixi is the story's antagonist for a significant spell.
Queen Zixi is one of Baum's best fairy tales, perhaps because the St. Nicholas editors demanded his best work. Though episodic (it was originally a serial, after all), it's well structured and thematically unified. The young protagonists are a bit bland, but the supporting characters' humor is delightful.
Thanks to Fuse #8 for the pointer to that site. Here are some more Richardson illustration links:
"Otherwise, how will everyone know that we're dear, dear friends?"
In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviewed Calvin Trillin's book of verse about the recent US election with rhymes of her own: There once was a poet named Bud Trillin,
Which illustrates my primary rule for writing verse: rhyme is easy, rhythm is hard.
Who cast George Bush as his villain.
He sounded like a new Ogden Nash,
Writing doggerel with real panache,
Chronicling the reign of Bush Two,
And Rove’s quest to wipe out the blue.
My secondary rule is that you shouldn't write verse at all if you can't understand rule #1.
I commented on how it fits all too well into the American canon of Revolutionary War fiction, its historical inaccuracy, and Purvis's interesting use of a graphic technique to display the ambiguities of history--in a different comic.
David Elzey noted the first point from a literary perspective in his Sons of Liberty review at at the Excelsior File. Colleen Mondor in Bookslut also noted the story's similarity to Esther Forbes's great Johnny Tremain.
Showing his continued grasp of his best interests, Samuel J. "Joe The Plumber" Wurzelbacher has chosen to issue his short-awaited book through the PearlGate Publishing website that Thomas Tabback set up to publish his own novel.
Here's Tabback's description of that novel, Things Forgotten:
After a traumatic experience, Bronx Police Officer Paul Kelly awakens in a hospital with no memory. His life and loved ones are all lost to him, but a specter from the past awakens him to an identity more than 3200 years ago. In a time when the heavens still touched the earth and man witnessed the might of God with plain eyes, there lived Nahar, son of Nahath, son of Reuel. Through Nahar's eyes, Paul is about to recall events that would forever change the world, for he dwelt in the Jordan Valley of Canaan, as a chosen people prepared to cross the river into their Promised Land.Wurzelbacher and Tabback also designed a website with the title SecureOurFreedom.com. Unfortunately, that URL had been claimed by someone else by the time they went live, so they had to go with SecureOurDream.com. Dream, freedom--same thing.
Here's another fruit from last weekend's SCBWI New England ENCORE! session in Rhode Island. This spring editor Sarah Shumway, now with Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, had polled her Dutton Children's Books colleagues about what sort of authors irritated them most.
In this purely non-scientific survey, Shumway reported, those editors' biggest peeves were:
This is one part of Tor's slush pile in 2006, recorded by SF Revu.
The next day's New York Times Book Review included Jack Shafer's comments on Alphabet Juice, by Roy Blount, Jr., which discusses that rule in the form of "Murder your darlings," attributed to various writers. Blount noted the source as Arthur Quiller-Couch, in On the Art of Writing: You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of [John Henry Cardinal] Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels.
That is, however, a more florid restatement of advice that James Boswell heard from Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoting an unidentified college tutor:
Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." "[Oliver] Goldsmith tells you shortly all you want to know: [William] Robertson detains vou a great deal too long. No man will read Robertson's cumbrous detail a second time; but Goldsmith's plain narrative will please again and again. I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: 'Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'"
So if we trust Boswell's memory and Johnson's attribution, we can't name the individual who deserves credit for this writing rule; it's been passed along for too long.
Both forms of that remark involve writing style, when a particularly striking phrase might stand out and distract from the overall piece. But "kill your babies" is also useful in other parts of writing, when the one aspect of a story that you love the most might be throwing everything else off.
Last week Publishers Weekly ran a guest column by thirteen-year-old Max Leone on what teen-aged boys want to read. Young Mr. Leone actually has less experience as a teenager than Sarah Palin has as a governor, but he confidently tells us:
Except, it appears, if you’re asking that audience to read period or futuristic language, or plots much different from videogames. Got it.
Yeah, I'm being snarky. It's actually an interesting essay written with energy and fervor. And adolescence is large. It contains multitudes. Does it contradict itself? Very well then it contradicts itself.
(The picture above, from the New York Times, shows the young reader/gamer discussed here.)
Godson (right) and Godson's Brother last month on Halloween.
I swear I had nothing to do with Godson's choice to dress as Robin. Absolutely nothing. If asked, I could have made the case that Robin's the most heroic of the household-name superheroes because he's the least super. But my godfatherly advice was not sought. Which, I now posit, confirms the character's inherent appeal for some kids.
Godson's Brother chose Superman, and explained to me that he didn't need the version of the costume with the fake chest muscles. None of us could figure out why all the normally-red parts of his Superman outfit were brown. Though I can't rule out the possibility that that's an Earth-16 Superman uniform or something, I suspect the explanation is lack of quality control in some east Asian sweatshop.
It's been over a month since my last Reason for Robin: the Boy Wonder as a character younger readers can identify with. My next analysis of what Robin brought to the Batman mythos is closely related.
Reason for Robin #4: Robin displays a broad range of emotions.
In the first “Bat-Man” story in Detective Comics, #27, the costumed crime-fighter showed basically one emotion: grim determination.
Later writer Bill Finger gave Batman some sarcastic wisecracks as he fought, but they still came from a deep well of grim determination. When things went well for Batman, he was grimly determined. When things went badly, he was determinedly grim.
By adding Robin, the creative team brought in a character who could show more emotions. Half of Batman's face is covered, while most of Robin's is visible, and the eyeholes in his mask can apparently change shape to express different feelings. (Of course, Batman's eyebrows have been known to show through his cowl when they're needed.)
Robin's wide range of moods didn't just provide variety. The young readers who identified with Robin could take their emotional cues from him. He made the high points of each story higher, the low points lower.
Thus, while Batman occasionally allowed himself some grim, determined pleasure, Robin expressed great joy in besting the bad guys. Even a little too much, as in the panel at top, from the first issue he appeared in. By the mid-1940s, Batman was grinning and cracking jokes during fight scenes as well, so the contrast between him and Robin on the pleasure side wasn't that big. But it remained wide when it came to other emotions.
Batman could reproach himself for making a mistake, but the comics couldn't show him breaking down without lessening his status as a manly hero. In contrast, the Boy Wonder could fall to pieces for a while, and most readers would accept that because they knew he was still growing, like themselves.
Batman could be stymied by some villain, but only temporarily. Robin could be totally flummoxed, and by showing his puzzlement alert readers to the story's baffling twists.
In some stories Robin even expressed Batman's troubled emotions for the reader since the Caped Crusader was too stoic to emote himself. And of course that amplified the dire nature of their situation.
The combination of Reasons for Robin #3 and #4 helps to explain the vast quantity of "shocked Robin" covers that DC Comics put out in the 1950s, occasionally on issues of both Detective and Batman magazines at the same time. Like Robin, young readers were supposed to be watching Batman's predicament. Like Robin, they were supposed to be emotionally affected by what they saw. And then, of course, they were supposed to buy the comic book.
COMING UP: How this emotional dynamic evolved in the last two decades of Batman stories.
