Prologues and Passengers

Last month folks were discussing the value of prologues in novels; see comments from Nathan Bransford and his community and Dear Editor.

I’ve long heard that most kids don’t read prologues and other ancillary material. I did, but then I went into publishing. So did, I expect, many other people who grew up to write blogs about books. The problem is that authors have to aim for audiences larger than the kids who’ll read anything, even a bowl of Alpha-Bits.

As I’ve said before, I think writing the first chapter is like making a big airplane take off. You need a lot of forward thrust. Your readers are the passengers, wanting to feel that surge of power and be lifted away.

Flashbacks can break that forward momentum. Just as readers are supposed to focus on what’s happening right now and what lies ahead, flashbacks ask them to imagine some earlier time. Too many flashbacks (and I’ve seen manuscripts and books with handfuls of them in the first chapter), and readers don’t get a sense of narrative thrust. They’re back in the cabin, nervously muttering, “Come on, come on! Faster! Oh, god, we’re all gonna die!” Well, maybe not that last part, but some of them will bail out.

Prologues can produce a different problem. They can feel like a little puddle-jump flight before you get on the jet plane—you don’t cover much ground before you have to get off and do the whole boarding process again. Most people would rather take a non-stop. They can catch up on what they need from the in-flight reading material.

What’s Really to Blame for the Deficit

From the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, using official projects from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: Full article here. Nor should we forget that the Bush-Cheney administration inherited a budget with no deficit.

Why Publishers Use Stock Photos for Book Covers

Publishers Weekly just ran a story by Judith Rosen about the making of the cover for a Young Adult novel. This story was, of course, part of the book’s marketing campaign, positioning it as a Big Title for January 2011. (Which means that this blog entry has also become part of that campaign.)

It would be a mistake to read the article as a description of how most book covers are assembled. Most books don’t have the budget that’s behind Sara Shepard’s The Lying Game. Not only is that book in a hot genre, but the author has a track record from her earlier series Pretty Little Liars, which now has popular exposure in the 99th percentile of all YA books as the basis of a TV show.

Those expectations allowed Alloy Entertainment and HarperCollins to spend $25,000 on a photo shoot with a model; photography team; and stylists for wardrobe, hair, and makeup. That’s even far above a typical cover budget for Alloy at $18,000.

In fact, it’s enough to professionally produce two entire short novels—even the covers. It looks like any firm could buy the photo on the right for less than $1,000 through iStockphoto.com. It’s not appropriate for The Lying Game, but it could be right for another story, and it took me about five minutes to find with no need to deal with stylists.

Stock photos have another advantage for publishing firms. A designer can create several comps using alternate possibilities, and everyone can see what the final product will look like. There’s no need to gamble on a photo shoot coming out well. To be sure, there are disadvantages, like the same photo showing up on different books. But dollar for dollar, using stock photos lets publishers produce more books.

The Short, Happy Life of the First Jason Todd

When I posited that Reason for Robin #10 is that “Robin Isn’t Evil,” I promised to discuss the two major counterexamples. Actually, back when I conceived of that series, I had only one counterexample in mind: the second Jason Todd. And to lay the groundwork, I have to address the first Jason.

Back in 1940, Dick Grayson went from meeting Batman to becoming his costumed companion in the course of a few panels on one page. His decision to leave the partnership in the early 1980s took considerably longer, aided by the huge success of the New Teen Titans magazine. Leading DC’s hottest team (in every sense of the word), Dick became an independent young adult.

The pivotal moment arrived when a meeting of writers Gerry Conway and Marv Wolfman, artist George Pérez, and their editors concluded that Dick Grayson should break free from the Batman books and adopt a new identity—eventually Nightwing. Meanwhile, Conway could develop a new character to take his place at Wayne Manor.

This was the first Jason Todd. Conway had a traditional understanding of how Robin functioned in Batman stories, and his Jason was very much like Dick Grayson. To the extent of being a young trapeze artist whose parents are murdered by criminals and goes to live with billionaire Bruce Wayne.

Jason fought crime in a costume and mask in Detective Comics, #526—the 500th appearance of Batman in that magazine, and Conway’s last issue. But it took the rest of 1983, and some black hair dye, before he officially became Robin. One milestone in that period was when Dick Grayson graciously passed on the red, green, and yellow outfit. For merchandising reasons (all those pajamas with Robin’s picture on them), Jason had to look exactly like Dick.

Just like the Robin of the 1940s through 1960s, the first Jason Todd was occasionally impetuous and immature. He made mistakes, and showed more emotional reactions than Batman. He was, after all, still a kid.

In that period, each superhero comic usually had a complete adventure in one issue, but subplots extending over many months. The first Jason Todd became the object of a custody battle between Bruce Wayne and Natalia Knight, the criminal Nocturna; basically, he went undercover as her adoptee. Again, that plot emphasizes how Robin is still a child.

Robin scholar Mary Borsellino quotes a letter from a reader in Detective Comics, #530, calling this Jason a “quiche eater,” an allusion to the 1982 bestseller Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. But of course a Boy Wonder isn’t supposed to be a Real Man—yet.

In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s terrific Superman story, “For the Man Who Has Everything” (1985), an extraterrestrial conqueror dismisses Jason as “the little yellow one.” Yet who saves the world in the end? That tale is the first Jason Todd’s finest hour.

(In that story, Jason had also grown up enough for Batman to famously remind him, “Think clean thoughts, chum.” But different artists depicted him at different stages of adolescence.)

Then two major events jolted the DC Universe. The first was Wolfman and Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-86), which opened the door for DC to relaunch and redefine all its major franchises.

The second was Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the story of a potential future Batman. Among its innovations was a female Robin. Among its allusions to the standard comics was a brief line about Jason Todd being dead; clearly, this was a rougher Batman in a rougher world. This series was highly stylized, highly violent, and highly successful.

Post-Crisis, DC commissioned Pérez to retell the origin of Wonder Woman, John Byrne to relaunch Superman, and Miller to set a new tone for the regular Batman series. Editors thought that the character’s origin myth still worked, but that readers would appreciate more grit. The audience for superhero comics now consisted of young adults in specialty shops, not kids browsing in drugstores.

In Batman, #404-7 (1987), Miller and David Mazzucchelli showed the start of Bruce Wayne’s career as Batman. Like Miller’s earlier series, Batman: Year One was stylized, stark, and very successful.

The first Jason Todd, cheerful former circus acrobat, had come out of the Crisis of 1986 intact, and appeared in a few more months of stories. But DC’s editors felt that his character didn’t fit the new, grittier Batman’s world. Therefore, in Batman, #408, the Caped Crusader met a new Jason Todd.

COMING UP: Battling for the soul of a new Robin.

The Future of Publishing: Free Books at a High Cost?

Scott Adams, himself a bestselling author and even artist, recently wrote on his blog:

I predict that the profession known as “author” will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. . . .

The iPad [and its coming clones] has a browsing capability that allows you to see any content on the Internet, legal or not, and consume it from just about anywhere. . . . At some point, I assume, a Google search for any popular book title will return an illegal source at the top of the page.

Back in December, I quoted publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin saying much the same thing. He then proceeded to discuss other ways that authors will be able to make money, primarily by using their ability to attract eyeballs, just as storytellers in the free but advertising-supported media do now.

Other analyses of the future of publishing focus on bottlenecks. Currently the narrow spot is getting published. In future, the distribution part of publishing will be easy. The finding-a-significant-audience will be hard. The bottleneck will therefore move further down the pipeline toward readers.

Agent Nathan Bransford predicts:

bookstores are still going to work according to the current system, i.e. they’re going to be selling books published by publishers. What will expand further is online bookselling, where there are already millions of titles anyway and where you are already successfully navigating a giant jumble. I don’t really see this impacting how you find books, except that you'll have more options if you want them. . . .

Nor do I think everyone is going to have to self-publish first. Publishers are still going to exist and will still probably be the place where the biggest books are generated, including debuts! . . . What will change is that books that may not have been taken on by publishers because they weren't seen as a safe bet will have an opportunity to catch on with readers and spread through word of mouth via blogs, Forums, and other social media, and I see this is as a really awesome thing.

However, Laura Miller at Slate imagines the future of literature as the equivalent of publishers’ slush piles:

Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems out in the slush pile -- one manuscript in 10,000, say -- buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it exceeds the value of the jewel. With slush, the cost is not only financial (many publishers can no longer afford to assign junior editors to read unsolicited manuscripts) but also -- as is less often admitted -- emotional and even moral.

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés -- for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue.

But of course that’s why Editorial Assistants get paid the big bucks. Hahahahaha!

Miller concludes: “it's a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, and if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours. Also, no one will pay you for it.” On the bright side, according to Scott Adams, you won’t have to pay anyone for the privilege.

Prime Material

Gene Luen Yang’s Prime Baby was one of the two comics serials published in the New York Times Magazine a coupla years back that I actually liked. Now it’s coming out in book form.

Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter interviewed Yang about creating this comic, designed to be published in short installments, as well as books like American Born Chinese. Yang said that he normally thinks in terms of page units:

I do rely heavily on the rhythm of the page turn when I write comics. I try to have something that entices the reader to turn each page, maybe a question to be answered or a mild punchline. My love for the page turn is why I’m reluctant to do Scott McCloud’s Infinite Canvas thing, despite being a computer nerd and very McCloudian in my thinking about comics.

The “Infinite Canvas” is McCloud’s vision of how comics can work in a digital environment with one panel leading into another (or several others) without regard to tiers, pages, or other relationships dictated by the shape and size of a printed page. In effect, the only building-block is the panel, and the only transition from one panel to the next.

But the page has proven to be a useful unit, allowing a comic to show readers more than one panel at once to compare and contrast. Page turns can punctuate a scene or make a transition to a new scene. On some recent practice scripts, I’ve found myself imagining what each page should show, then working down to panels.

Yang has a lot more to say about his Prime Baby storytelling process in this blog entry.

Because Prime Baby was both text-heavy (the protagonist is a wordy little sociopath) and limited in space (it was originally published in The New York Times Magazine), I laid out the words in Photoshop first and then sketched over print-outs of the dialog. I got the idea from reading about how they used to do those old EC comics.

I remember being blown away when I saw in Grant Geissman’s Foul Play!: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics how the much-admired EC Comics visual storytelling was stuffed in around the factory lettering. I knew lettering wasn’t that line’s strength, but I hadn’t realized how little flexibility its artists had. (The line’s top editor allowed even less, sketching out every panel for his artists.)

Yang at least could go back and adjust his word balloons as he felt necessary.

Gotta Wear Shades

Mike Shatzkin ran the math on the declining prospects for the Kindle, Nook, Reader, and similar dedicated devices setting the course for electronic publishing. Instead, he sees the near future in the land of Apple:

even if 2 million new iPad owners, on average, buy 1/3 as many ebooks as 700,000 new single-purpose ebook device purchasers, the larger, full-color, web-ready screens sold in the last two months would be responsible for as much ebook consumption as the book-dedicated devices.

Which means Editorial Anonymous was right to advise illustrators to keep their skills up with the technical capacities of those “larger, full-color, web-ready screens”:

I was shown a Dr. Seuss book on the iPad and had to wonder at the possibilities. As an illustrator I'm attempting to prepare for this brave new world by learning some animation techniques. As things become more digital do you think that this will be,
A) Incredibly useful
B) Kinda handy
C) A waste of time, static images will still be the norm

(A), and sooner than anyone thinks.

The future is not just ahead of us, it's sitting on top of us. It's sneaking up behind us. It's the milk in your cereal and the monster under your bed.

It’s also pleasant to consider that iPads will maintain the importance of interior page design. Electronic readers are all about the text, and often that’s all we need for a compelling read, as mass-market paperback editions show. But I like books that have a distinctive visual look as well.

I Was Hoping to Have the Tower Room Myself

Rex Parker at Pop Sensation featured this back cover for a paperback edition of John Dickson Carr’s The Case of the Constant Suicides: The web tells me that Dell published many of these “mapback” editions in the 1940s. Commenters at Parker’s blog point out that the approach isn’t ideal for this particular setting. There is, after all, only one door visible, and it’s quite big; only one road that leads anywhere; only one wooden structure built out over the water. A reader doesn’t really need the map and labels.

On the other hand, an image of the Castle of Shira on the book exterior makes it look like an exciting place to visit. Except for the constant suicides, of course.

Pop Sensation’s asking price for this back cover is only $9, and for that you get an entire murder mystery as well.

Virginia Lee Burton’s Kids Comic

Yesterday I showed a sequential-art print that Virginia Lee Burton created about 1940 for new colleagues in her Folly Cove Designers cooperative. We know she was studying the comics form around that time because the next year she published Calico the Wonder Pony, or the Saga of Stewy Stinker, an attempt to create a picture book that could compete with comic books for her sons’ attention. (A decade later, Burton was able to go back to Calico, rework some of the pictures, and reattach her original title; that’s the form available today.)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quotes Burton as saying: “Calico the Wonderhorse I did for both Aris and Mike in an attempt to wean them away from comic books.” In Virginia Burton: A Life in Art, Barbara Elleman quoted her as saying: “I really dislike the comic books for their lack of design and drawing more than anything.”

But she steeled herself to research the form of adventure comics, coming to these conclusions for The Horn Book:

the hero must be endowed with more than the average physical and mental powers, besides being all that was chivalrous and virtuous, and the villain the antithesis. There must be action, suspense, and tremendous but possible odds against the hero, but no one must get seriously hurt. Humor was welcome. Westerns were the most popular.

Curiously, Western comics weren’t flourishing in 1941, except as spin-offs of cowboy movies. But they may have been popular in Burton’s house; she recalled letting her boys listen to The Lone Ranger on the radio.

Elleman wrote that “In making her horse, Calico, female, Burton felt she was giving a tongue-in-cheek poke to Western comics, where women were mostly ignored.” That said, Burton had already established her habit of making her main non-human characters female.

Burton’s comments on comic books indicate she was assessing their content, not just their form. Thus, she came up with an exaggerated, fast-moving, action-filled, Manichean adventure. Calico contains sequential, juxtaposed images, one of the hallmarks of the comics form. But otherwise it seems to tell its story through a standard picture-book technique: third-person narration, set off in plain text from the illustrations. Nonetheless, the Burton family labeled Calico a “symphony in comics.”

The book’s original reviews were mixed. Parents said it “meets the sensational comics on their own ground,” while Bangor librarian L. Felix Ranlett wrote in The Horn Book, “We like our funnies and our books kept separate and we don’t know whether Calico is a book or a funny.” (As late as 2002, biographer Elleman wrote that the comics technique “is not often seen in today’s trade books.”)

Last year, James Sturm of Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies called Burton “Godmother of the Graphic Novel” in a slide show at DoubleX. He referred not just to Calico but also to The Little House and her more successful books. Peggy Burns at Drawn and Quarterly agreed with Sturm’s assessment while Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter thought he hadn’t made his case. Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat archived the resulting debate and prolonged it.

Virginia Lee Burton’s Adult Comic

This weekend I attended what I might call my first and last academic conference about fashion, co-sponsored by the Costume Society of America and the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

Elena M. Sarni gave a presentation about Folly Cove Designers, a Cape Ann cooperative of designer-craftsmen who created prints, home goods, and clothes starting in 1940. Their leader was Virginia Lee Burton, also author-illustrator of Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and The Little House.

Each designer submitted her or (in rare cases) his design to a jury of experienced members for approval. After a person finally had her first design accepted, Burton gave her a wall hanging printed with a series of vignettes about printmaking.

I’m showing a detail of Burton’s print here. Life magazine published the whole thing in 1945, and it appeared in a brochure that Folly Cove Designers issued to market their work.

The print fits my definition of the comics form. It’s made up of sequential, juxtaposed images, showing a printmaker in action from her search for inspiration through making the final print (by jumping on a linoleum block, in the absence of a press). The question marks in the top vignettes are elements of written language working with the images to tell the story; those punctuation marks become graphic elements of the whole, and they “show the invisible” by symbolizing the artist’s puzzlement.

TOMORROW: Burton’s attitude toward comics.