Ooh—Scarry!

Sterling, the book-publishing wing of Barnes & Noble, has republished eight of Richard Scarry's books. These aren't his best known titles, which are still under contract with Golden. But they all fit into his trademark "Busytown" mode of anthropomorphic animals and crowded pages.

My favorite among them is Richard Scarry's Find Your ABCs--one of the best alphabet books out there, with an ingenious use of colored type. That stars of that book are the inept detectives Sam Cat and Dudley Pig, and Richard Scarry's The Great Pie Robbery and Other Mysteries collects three more stories about the pair.

Sterling's website offers a long account of the man's life, from Boston to Gstaad. An even longer, less reverent, and yet apparently accurate bio appears at rotten.com.

Alan Taylor used Flickr to document how Scarry updated his Best Word Book Ever to keep up with social mores after a quarter-century had passed. I understand some stories that played on ethnic stereotypes have dropped from Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World, one of my childhood favorites, for the same reason. But cost-cutting might also have factored into that change.

Scarry would be ninety years old this year, so Sterling is promoting their eight titles with giveaways. The first stages are open only to people "employed by a school, academic or professional library, or retail store." But Publishers Weekly also said:

The second giveaway, 90 Books for 90 Birthdays, will be a one-day sweepstakes held on Friday, June 5 (starting at 12 a.m. EDT and ending at 11:59 p.m. EDT), and is open to any Scarry fans. Those who wish to enter can submit their names and addresses to sterlingkids@sterlingpublishing.com.

But darned if I can find anything about that on Sterling's website today.

POD Overtakes Regular Printing

Last week was all about the comics, so this week I'm gonna try to make Oz and Ends all about book publishing.

The biggest news of last month was a milestone in how books are produced. Publishers Weekly had the accurate headline: "Number of On-demand Titles Topped Traditional Books in 2008."

(GalleyCat's "Self-Published Books Up 132 Percent" was off the mark since not all print-on-demand titles are self-published--though self-publishing has migrated to that technology. In fact, POD books will see grow most in unit sales as regular and specialty publishers take advantage of the technology.)

The spread between the two ways of printing books is only about 2% of the total:

The number of new and revised titles produced by traditional production methods fell 3% in 2008, to 275,232, but the number of on-demand and short run titles soared 132%, to 285,394.

And the spread will probably widen. Will on-demand sales revenue eventually top the corresponding number for printed books? How about on-demand units? I suspect not for a long time--not because printed books will come back but because sooner or later electronic formats will bite off some of the market now served by POD.

What frightens me about this news is that Bowker counted well over half a million "new and revised titles" coming out in 2008. I'll link those numbers with news from packager Michael Cader and industry consultant Mike Shatzkin about the industry in the past. As Shatzkin tells the tale:

Part of what I learned from Michael is that the annual output of new titles as measured by Bowker from the 1920s until the 1970s was about ten thousand titles per year.

To feel confident in that comparison, I'd like to be sure about how Bowker counts "new and revised titles" and how Cader's source did. Are they looking at the same swath of the industry? Are we comparing trade books to all books, including textbooks, specialty reports, etc.?

Furthermore, if Bowker now counts by ISBNs used, then there's a problem because publishers can assign ISBNs to special editions that never get into stores, to catalogues, even to the pieces of cardboard used to build special displays. By doing so, they can manage everything in their warehouses on one inventory system. But that would mean Bowker's count of "new titles" would be much too high.

Whatever the specifics are, the rise in titles issued is a clear sign we're moving closer to Authorgeddon. Sorry. Wish it were any other way.

The Last Times We Saw Dick Grayson as Batman

As the weekly Robin has traced, in the Batman comic books Dick Grayson has now taken over the mantle of the Caped Crusader while his mentor, Bruce Wayne, is temporarily dead. Last week I discussed my theory that one of scripter Grant Morrison's inspirations for this plot was a friendly rivalry with Frank Miller, who's been exploring the dynamic of the Dynamic Duo in the All-Star Batman and Robin series.

At Newsarama, a commenter named roshow suggested another source: a series of six "imaginary" stories from the early 1960s showing Dick Grayson as a future Batman and Bruce Wayne's son as a future Robin.
The first of those tales appeared in Batman: From the ’30s to the ’70s, which Morrison read as a child (as did I). He's acknowledged drawing inspiration from "Golden Age" Batman stories.

However, Robin II was quite a different personality from the boy taking over as Robin now. Bruce Wayne, Jr., was the imaginary future son of the billionaire and Kathy Kane, that era's Batwoman.

The new Robin is Damian, who may be Bruce Wayne's child with antagonist Talia al-Ghul. He's already a well trained fighter, and the new series will be about Dick trying to rein in the boy's killer impulses and teach him to be a better person.

In contrast, the earlier stories were about a decent kid learning to fight crooks better. As Dick was doing in the "real" stories of the time, Bruce, Jr., fell down a lot. He wasn't sure he could live up to the expectations of either his father or "Uncle Dick."

The Silver Age blog points out that many of those "Batman II" tales ended with Bruce Wayne, Sr., dressing up in his old costume and saving the day. Which didn't make Dick look any more competent than Junior. After all, the name of the magazine was still Batman, not Batman II!

The saga of Batman II and Robin II was the fictional creation of Alfred the butler. Those stories disappeared from the magazines after Batman's "New Look" removed Batwoman and even Alfred (for a time). But perhaps they stuck in Morrison's memory.

Within the current continuity, Dick Grayson took over as Batman for three months of comics in 1994-95. A villain had broken Bruce Wayne's back. His first choice of a replacement had proved even crazier than he is, tossing Tim Drake out of the cave (which opened the door for the separate Robin series).

Eventually Bruce defeated his first successor in the most difficult intervention ever, then decided that he needed to retrain. Meanwhile, Dick had left the Titans because of declining sales, so he was available to take over the Batman role. He gave up his Nightwing identity and hid his ponytail under the cowl.

Those stories were collected in Batman: Prodigal, now out of print. (I bought my copy from an English church thrift shop.) Because Tim Drake remained Robin, that book reflects a very different team dynamic from what Miller and Morrison are exploring.

I see that dynamic in this moment, one of my favorites in Batman literature (truncated from Shadow of the Bat, #33, script by Alan Grant and art by Bret Blevins). Dick and Tim are up on a skyscraper, preparing to hang-glide across the harbor. Tim does an exceedingly rare thing for a superhero, deciding that he's not up for some feat. And Dick supports him. As this exchange shows, they get along. They like and respect each other. They can communicate, decide what's best, and not carry around resentments. Thus, there's little chance of them generating the ongoing conflict that fuels long storylines.

Since Prodigal, Dick has dressed as Batman again at least once, for a moment at the start of Batman, #588. Wearing the Batman costume (and elevator boots), Dick walks into a bar and roughs up a hood named "Matches" Malone. The other thugs therefore accept "Matches" as one of them--but he's really Bruce in disguise. Right after this encounter, Bruce gives Dick notes about how he should have played Batman better. Plenty of tension and resentment there.

Restimulating Old Neurons with The Brave and the Bold

On a whim, I picked up my public library's copy of Mark Waid and George Pérez's The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck, the first collection from DC Comics's revived team-up magazine. And I was so happy I did.

Pérez was the artist on New Teen Titans, the last comic book I read regularly as an adolescent. I'd forgotten what a pleasure it is to look at his artwork: the panels crowded with characters and emotions, the way he draws many types of faces instead of just a few, the imaginative panel shapes and transitions, the luminous clarity of line.

Having been a Marvel fanboy instead of a DC one, I'm sure I missed half of Mark Waid's in-jokes in this saga. I still don't care about the Rann-Thanagar War, and I still can't tell members of the Legion of Super-heroes one from another. But the sprawling story was great fun nonetheless.

This Brave and the Bold collection also helped me solve a mystery that had nibbled at the back of my mind for decades. One of the first comic books I can recall reading included a science-fiction story featuring three protagonists--two white men of different ages and one young white woman. Each received a medal.

In discussing their separate experiences, each described how he or she had survived because of something learned from one of the others. Thus, man #1 recalled hearing how man #2 had won some interplanetary pentathlon, and therefore pole-vaulted out of trouble. Man #2 recalled hearing how the woman had won a target-shooting contest, and so on.

I must have read that comic about thirty-five years ago, and never seen it since. I think what made it stick in my brain was how the story was obviously an artificial construction, and yet embodied what we like in a narrative. It had unity, logic, symmetry, and--dare I say it?--a moral.

Toward the end of this volume, Batman is pulled across time, and Pérez illustrated that with a montage of DC's futuristic characters. One tiny picture showed three characters--two white men and a white woman. Waid's note at the back of the book sent me to look up "Star Rovers" on Wikipedia. And sure enough, those are the adventurers I'd read about; their names are Homer Gint, Karel Sorensen, and Rick Purvis. There seem to have been all of thirteen Star Rovers tales published before 1990. Their creator, Gardner Fox, is better known for some of the early Batman, Flash, and Hawkman stories.

Further searching brought me to Mike's DC Database, and I can now identify the particular story I read as "Who Saved the Earth?", first published in Mystery in Space, #80, Dec 1962, and later reprinted. (This Brave and the Bold volume kicks off with Green Lantern contacting Batman about a "mystery in space"--now I get it.)

That Star Rovers adventure is ten pages, too short to fill a comic book, so I must have seen another story or two at the same time. But only the Space Rovers, with their interlocking tales snapping tight as a purse, stuck in my mind.

Judge Hand in the Land of Superheroes

I was intrigued by the opening of an essay by Peter Coogan in A Comics Studies Reader, just published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book says this article was excerpted from Coogan's book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, which is less widely available--perhaps because it comes from a publisher called Monkeybrain Books. (Just a hunch.)

The essay starts this way (at least as the Reader presents it):

In his 1952 ruling that Wonder Man copied and infringed upon Superman, Judge Learned Hand provided a succinct definition for the superhero. The characteristics of mission, powers, and identity are central to Hand's determination that Wonder Man copied Superman.

Legal scholars often call Hand the greatest American jurist never to serve on the Supreme Court. He was especially influential in defining the law of intellectual property, a topic that came up a lot in his New York circuit. The thought that Hand had a hand in providing a legal definition of a superhero--on the level of circuit-court precedent--was intriguing.

But the date nagged at me; the Wonder Man lawsuit, I recalled, occurred early in the history of superhero comics. And when I looked into this statement further, it turned out to be wrong in other ways. It mixes up two separate suits involving Superman, misstates Hand's role, and reads too much into the pertinent ruling.

The first suit was filed in 1939 by DC Comics soon after Fox Comics published the first Wonder Man story, commissioned from Will Eisner and his studio. DC claimed that the story infringed on its copyrights for the early Superman stories. Fox responded that both characters were based on older, more general heroic archetypes, so there was no copyright. Don Markstein's Toonopedia describes the proceedings this way: "Fox carefully instructed Eisner on how to testify. Instead, Eisner told the truth," which was that Fox had indeed asked him to come up with a hero as much like Superman as possible.

Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in favor of DC, and Fox appealed. In 1940, a panel of three judges upheld the decision. One of those circuit-court judges was Learned Hand. But the judge who wrote that 1940 decision was actually Learned's cousin, Augustus Noble Hand.

Learned Hand returned to the field of superhero law in 1952, at the end of a lawsuit between DC and Fawcett over whether a more successful comic-book hero, Captain Marvel, infringed on the Superman copyright. A lower court had ruled that the Big Cheese would have done so except that DC had made a legal blunder in not registering some Superman comic strips with the US Copyright Office. Hand reversed that decision to declare that Captain Marvel was a copyright infringement anyway.

So, to return to the quotation above, the Wonder Man suit was in 1939-40, not 1952, and Learned Hand didn't write the decision. Which brings me to the final point: that decision really didn't address what defines a superhero.

The judges were ruling on a narrow question: Was the Wonder Man story in Wonder Comics, #1, an infringement on DC's copyrights for Action Comics, #1-12, featuring the Man of Steel? They saw several points of similarity:

The attributes and antics of "Superman" and "Wonderman" are closely similar. Each at times conceals his strength beneath ordinary clothing but after removing his cloak stands revealed in full panoply in a skintight acrobatic costume. The only real difference between them is that "Superman" wears a blue uniform and "Wonderman" a red one.

Each is termed the champion of the oppressed. Each is shown running toward a full moon "off into the night", and each is shown crushing a gun in his powerful hands. "Superman" is pictured as stopping a bullet with his person and "Wonderman" as arresting and throwing back shells. Each is depicted as shot at by three men, yet as wholly impervious to the missiles that strike him.

"Superman" is shown as leaping over a twenty story building, and "Wonderman" as leaping from building to building. "Superman" and "Wonderman" are each endowed with sufficient strength to rip open a steel door. Each is described as being the strongest man in the world and each as battling against "evil and injustice."

If those traits actually defined a superhero, then comic-book heroes who don't run toward a full moon, who are shot at by more or less than three men, or who have powers other than being the strongest man in the world wouldn't qualify. And the ruling didn't touch on other qualities Coogan's essay says are distinctive ingredients of a superhero, such as a "codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, characters, powers, or origin."

So the essay opening that intrigued me instead reinforced my feeling that research in this field needs to be more rigorous and less wishful. Learned Hand's contribution to the definition of a superhero is as much a myth as Elvis Presley's imitation of Captain Marvel, Jr., or DC planning to cancel Batman in the early 1960s.

Greek Myth Graphics as a Gateway

At the Graphic Classroom, Chris Wilson wrote recently about using comics about Greek mythology as a way of buttering up elementary-school students for Rick Riordan's first Percy Jackson novel, based on that mythology. The strategy worked--for some students:

I introduced my comics to the students in my student teaching class early in the semester. I had an entire box filled with Greek mythology from Lerner Publishing [Graphic Legends and Myths series].

At first, only one fourth grade student--a boy in the gifted program--picked them up. It was on my recommendation and I thought he would enjoy them. . . . It was not long until I had a group of nearly 10 boys reading Greek myth. The girls, except one, were uninterested.

When we finished our daily read-aloud book, I introduced The Lightning Thief to the class. Instantly, the boys became so excited when the story mentioned Perseus, the Minotaur, Medusa, Zeus and other Greek characters. So excited in fact, that they would often interrupt the read-aloud to share what they knew about the characters. There were times when they would stand up and shout and flap their hands.

Fourth grade boys
Shouting
About literature

I could not keep my Greek myth comics in stock. They were in backpacks and on desks and in hands, some even read during recess.

I soon left the classroom to begin my rotations. When I came back four weeks later, I discovered the kids had finished The Lightning Thief. Many of the boys had gone on to check out the next book from the library or purchased it from the Scholastic book fair.

I sat down with the students and asked them about it. The boys were almost uncontrollable in their excitement over both the comics and the novel. The girls, on the other hand, were not. I asked them about it.

They were confused.

The girls, you see, had not picked up the comics so they were very unfamiliar with the characters or the back-story. Thus, they were so-so on the book.

Just as the girls had been, for the most part, so-so on the comics. But might that have been because Greek myths--or at least those about heroes and monsters and gods hitting each other--hold more appeal for American boys no matter what format they come in?

Rick Riordan started the Percy Jackson stories to appeal to a boy--specifically, one of his sons. And according to this interview, that young Riordan already enjoyed Greek mythology.

Maybe someone could run Chris Wilson's experiment using comics and a novel thought to have more appeal for American girls, and see if the students' responses are reversed.

This anecdote also reminded me of a moment last summer when I was visiting Godson and his family in upstate New York. I had ended up with the largest bedroom in the house, more real estate than I could use, and I came back to that room one day to find all the kids playing inside. Godson's Brother had found the latest volume of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze comics among my books and was intently studying the vast family tree at the front. The comics pages didn't draw him in as much as all those polysyllabic names.

(Pointer from Good Comics for Kids.)

Neil Gaiman on Robin (well, a little—but not enough for Sunday)

DC Comics persuaded Neil Gaiman to write the script for a two-part Batman story called "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" Wired interviewed Gaiman about his inspiration:

When I was 5, I was in a car with my dad and he mentioned that there was this Batman TV show in America about a man who dressed up in a costume and fought crime. The only bat I ever knew was a cricket bat, so what I thought he looked like was rather odd, based on that.

Months later, the series hit the U.K., and I remember watching and being affected by it. Really worrying, genuinely worrying, on a deep primal level, "Will he be OK?" That is the way it was with every deathtrap. If I missed the end of an episode, I’d get my friends to tell me he was OK.

Because of the Batman TV show, my dad picked up Smash! comics for me, which reprinted a Batman cartoon strip, which were much more about continuity than the television program. Those were my gateway drugs into Batman. . . .

I wanted my comic to contain all of that, from the story to the art. I wanted it to have that love in there. I wanted to write the last Batman with honor and love. . . . The joy of this Batman story is that there were 70 years of Batman and I wanted to try and talk about all of it.

And as for working with artist Andy Kubert:

I kept asking Andy to do things that are impossible, and because no one told him they were impossible, he did them. Normally someone asks him to draw three panels, but doesn’t ask him to draw those three panels in the style of Brian Bolland or Jerry Robinson. I loved the fact that I could ask Andy for Robin when he’s 17, off to college and still wearing the costume, the Speedo and everything, which looks kind of stupid. But I still want it to be moving. And he did it.

DC will release Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? in a hardcover volume with his other Gotham City stories this July.

(Pointer from Batman Obviously.)

Fleep Fleep

A long while back, Publishers Weekly ran a rather extraordinary interview with Jason Shiga, library employee and cartoonist. His most recent milestone then seemed to be an Ignatz nomination for Bookhunter, a "library crime procedural."

Shiga told the magazine:

I get pegged as the math cartoonist, but to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything in Fleep that someone who’s passed all their math courses in high school couldn’t figure out. Certainly nothing past freshman calculus anyway. Maybe a little group theory and combinatorial analysis. But mostly my comics are just extremely rigorous and analytical. Also, there’s a little graph theory in my last two comics.

You know, Mr. Shiga--I think that makes you a math cartoonist.

Shiga's Fleep is an episodic comic about a fellow trapped inside a phone booth, applying logic to each decision point--without, however, getting any closer to the outside.

Shiga also has comics whose narratives are variable, based on reader choices. He told PW:

I’ve always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was a child. I think part of the allure of the genre is that as a child, you don’t get to make any choices in your life. As an adult, however, one aspect I really love is the idea of collaborating on a story with the writer. I like to use my imagination when I’m reading and I’ve noticed that seems to be the direction a lot of narrative is heading. . . .

I only sell [those comics] at conventions. They’re basically too heavy, and I get killed in the shipping. Hello World is the world’s first programmable comic. The story centers around a mother who gets to pack items into her children’s lunchboxes. The children pull out the items that can cause other items to go in or remaining items to get switched around in various ways. So essentially, the comic works as a very basic three-line stack program.

Okay, remember what I was saying about "math cartoonist"?

Knock Knock is another choose your own adventure comic except instead of two or three choices, the reader gets to choose from over a dozen choices at each node. The only thing is, after the reader makes three choices, a crazed gunman bursts through the door and shoots you. There are over 250 ways to die and only one way to survive. The reader must in his three moves pick up enough clues about his identity, the identity of the killer and why he wants to kill him to formulate some sort of survival strategy.

Figuring out the reasoning of a "crazed killer." Perhaps there are some things beyond logical analysis.

Single-Sheet Comics

From the Stumptown Trade Review's article and podcast, I learned about Kenan Rubenstein's single-sheet "oubliette" comics.

That word seems to be the artist's own coinage for this Fibonaccian form. It's a comic on a single sheet of paper, 8x11 in the US, folded four times. Each unfolding produces a surface twice as large as the one before, providing space for the next panels. The pages thus double in size, allowing the panels to grow as well, and the final panel can be as large as the full sheet.

Rubenstein notes that Jon Chad's Whaletowne unfolds (both physically and narratively) much the same way as his oubliettes.

While looking to see if other artists are working in this form, perhaps calling it by other names, I found Mimi's instructions for a different type of single-sheet comic, using folding and cutting. In this case, the pages are all the same size and shape.

And of course in Andrew Clements's Lunch Money, the kids make comics by folding, cutting, and stapling single sheets of paper into the traditional codex form. Richard Bryan has pictures of that format. But I like the elegance and Rubenstein's folding.

(The same Stumptown Trade Review podcast ends with an interview with Bone creator Jeff Smith.)

Competing Portrayals of Batman and Robin

In September 2005, DC Comics launched a magazine called All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, written by Frank Miller and drawn by Jim Lee--two of the very biggest names in American comics. Its first story arc retold the origin of the Batman and Robin team: vengeance-driven billionaire Bruce Wayne takes suddenly orphaned young acrobat Dick Grayson under his webbed wing.

Two months later, the companion magazine All-Star Superman took off, featuring words by Grant Morrison and art by Frank Quitely. The first six issues were collected in a book in 2007, the next six earlier this year. They're just a whole lot of fun.

Meanwhile, Miller and Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin trundled on in fits and starts. It became notorious for production delays; after three years, there were just enough issues to fill one book. And Miller's script became even more notorious for its portrayal of Batman as a borderline psychopath.
Both All-Star titles sold big, but All-Star Superman got universally good reviews while All-Star Batman and Robin has been lambasted. Some people love it, to be sure, but part of what they enjoy is how much it ticks so many other people off. DC assured readers that these stories weren't in "regular continuity"--i.e., readers could treat them as imaginary. (As opposed to other Batman and Superman stories, which are real.)

For weekly Robin purposes, all that matters is that at the center of All-Star Batman and Robin is the relationship between the Boy Wonder and the Caped Crusader. At the end of the first story arc, "the goddamn Batman" finally realizes that he's pushed Robin too far toward his own madness.

This year, DC Comics will launch a new magazine called Batman and Robin, by Morrison and Quitely. (Last week we learned about a variant cover by J. G. Jones.) This story is "in continuity" as a follow-up to the "Batman RIP" arc in which Bruce Wayne died, sort of. To the surprise of few, the Batman in these stories will be Dick Grayson, grown up. (He took on that role in 1994 as well.) And the Robin of this magazine will be Damian Wayne.

Who? Back in 2006--i.e., soon after Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin started--Morrison introduced this character into issues of Batman magazine that have been collected as Batman and Son. Damian was supposedly Bruce Wayne's child by Talia al Ghul, an old nemesis. He fights well above his weight, having been raised in the League of Assassins, but has no moral sense and a big chip on his little shoulder.

A new interview at IGN confirms implicitly that Morrison was planning to make Damian Wayne a new Robin ever since he invented the character. And from that start, Damian has insisted that he--not Tim Drake--was Bruce Wayne's rightful partner and heir.

Morrison has said he was inspired by the Son of the Demon graphic novel, written by 1987 in Mike W. Barr. Bruce and Talia's child in that story has a different fate, but it was always "out of continuity."

I wonder if an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Morrison was Miller's concurrent take on the Batman and Robin team. This new Batman and Robin magazine seems to reverse the All-Star premise. Instead of a humorless, violent "goddamn Batman" finding Robin as his inspiration to remain sane, we'll see a more solidly grounded Batman trying to rein in and teach "the goddamn Robin."

This wouldn't the first time that Morrison drew inspiration from Miller, and perhaps tried to outdo him. Back in early 1986, Miller published The Dark Knight Returns, arguably the most important Batman story since 1940. Months later, Morrison pitched DC the idea that in 1989 became Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. It took the notion that Batman was as crazy as his enemies about as far as it could go. In a reissue of that book Morrison wrote:

The repressed, armoured, uncertain and sexually frozen man in ARKHAM ASYLUM was intended as a critique of the '80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven and borderline psychotic.

What "’80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven and borderline psychotic" could that be? None other than Miller's depiction in The Dark Knight Returns, of course.

How will the response to Morrison's Batman and Robin compare to the response to Miller's? Fans will hate Damian as Robin, at least for a while, because Robin's supposed to be the good cop. (That's coming up in my "Reasons for Robin" series.) DC tried to shake up the Dynamic Duo's dynamic the same way in the late 1980s, and it ended with the reader-voted death of the second Jason Todd. Whose costume, I can't help but note, Damian Wayne put on in Batman and Son.

(This analogy between the Miller and Morrison Batman and Robin magazines has been discussed elsewhere, such as The Big Smoke and the new scans_daily, but not to my knowledge at this verbose length. Batman and Son must not be confused with the delightful parody webcomic "Batman and Sons.")