All the Way Around the Half-Continent

At last I have a matched set! Kind of.

Some readers were bowled over by D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo and its sequels. I wasn’t one of them. I thought the first novel devoted too many pages to world-building, started too late, and ended too early. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on, and a lot more.

I remain impressed, however, with Putnam’s perseverance in seeking an audience for this series in the US. As you can see, the company revamped the cover design and even the series title with each new volume. But now the American editor has left the firm, and I’m not sure the books will get the same sort of attention.

Another series I’ve seen undergo that sort of ongoing reinvention is Linda Buckley-Archer’s time-travel series which began with Gideon the Cutpurse before it veered off into retitling. See the complete rundown of covers and titles so far at Damsels in Regress.

Two Ways of Building a Balanced Audience

In yesterday’s posting about the Young Justice TV cartoon, I quoted from an interview with the producers. Among the non-Robin-centric things they said was this, which speaks to one way modern mass entertainment is created:

[Greg Weisman:] I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit – but I’m not satisfied with that and I don’t think Brandon [Vietti] is either.

A, we want boys and girls, so there’s a lot of great relationship stuff in this, there’s humor in this show – I mean, it’s a serious show, but there’s a lot of humor in it, there’s a lot of eye candy for little kids. I think little kids could enjoy this show, and some stuff will go over their heads, but they won’t know it’s going over their heads.

The network’s need to “hit boys 6 - 14” might explain why this show not only features a team made up of twice as many boys as girls (four to two), but also why the pilot doesn’t show one of those girls until the very last moments, and the other not at all.

There’s a female trainer for the group, but in the pilot she doesn’t speak. Wonder Woman flies in the background, a female scientist walks around with a clipboard, and that’s about it for that half of humanity. (Now that I think of it, the female teammates might not even reflect humanity: one is an alien from Mars, and the other is Artemis, potentially a goddess. But maybe that’s how the target audience of boys six to fourteen view girls.)

This made me think of how Jacques d’Amboise introduced his celebrated dance classes into New York schools. As People magazine reported in 1982, “d'Amboise first invites only boys (‘otherwise all girls would sign up’) and girls later.“ The Young Justice pilot might be tilted toward the masculine more than subsequent episodes in order to assure sponsors it will attract young male viewers, and to assure those viewers it’s safe to start watching.

Contrast the development of that show to how Jimmy Gownley decided to center his comic for kids on a little girl, from a new interview with R. J. Carter for the Trades:

Somewhere along the way, you decided to make a run with a female protagonist. What caused this shift?

I was working on [a comic book called] Shades of Gray, and I loved doing it, but it was always going to be this sort of thing I did on the side. At this point I'd graduated college and was working as a graphic designer. I was publishing Shades of Gray, and it was doing okay, but it was never going to be a career for me.

I just took the page that I was drawing — I was drawing a page of Shades of Gray, what ended up being the last issue. I just flipped it over, and without any thought of what I was doing, I just started doodling. And I drew this little girl — Amelia, exactly how she appears in the first issue. I kind of liked the way she looked, and I held it up to the person who was sitting with me — at the time it was my long-suffering girlfriend, now my long-suffering wife, Karen — and I said, "Hey, what do you think of her?" And she said, "She's really cute," and I said, "Maybe I should do something with her. What should we name her?" We both thought about it, and then at the exact same second we both said, "Amelia." So I took that as my cosmic sign that I was supposed to write a comic book about this little girl.

The result was Amelia Rules, now published by Simon & Schuster. Gownley enjoyed the freedom of self-financed publishing, and of working in a medium that requires a lot less money than an animated TV show. Perhaps many other author-illustrators have tried to launch comics for kids with female protagonists, and Amelia Rules is the rare success. But the fact that it’s found an audience of both girls and boys might suggest that creating good stories matters more than marketing dicta.

A New Role for Robin in Young Justice

The Cartoon Network debuted its new Young Justice cartoon on Friday. This series takes place in a different universe from those of the 1998-2003 Young Justice comic book and all known Teen Titans groupings.

Instead, DC has told us, it’s set on Earth 16, which is much like the standard world of DC superheroes except that...there’s a Young Justice group we’ve never seen before.

The show mashes up elements of several versions of the DC superhero mythos: the TV Justice League plus Superfriends, the Superboy of the 1990s, the Kid Flash of the 1960s, and the Robin…

Well, this Robin is a mix of old and new. The producers assure us that he’s Dick Grayson, and he’s been working with Bruce Wayne for four years. But he’s only thirteen while Kid Flash is fifteen and Superboy is physiologically sixteen. The premiere emphasizes Robin’s computer-hacking skills, which in the comics are associated with Tim Drake. In sum, in this episode he appears to be this team’s nerdy little wise guy—a new role for a Robin.

Most interesting for group dynamics, as Laura Prudom at TV Squad reported:

In an interesting twist, 13-year-old Robin will not be leading the team as he has in previous incarnations; that honor will instead go to the older Aqualad, AKA Kaldur’ahm, an entirely new version of the character created specifically for the show.

We can tell Aqualad’s the leader just going by height, but he’s also the most emotionally mature of the guys. (The first episode shows us barely one of the two girls.) Khari Payton, who voices Aqualad, also portrayed Cyborg on Teen Titans, with a very different characterization. This extra-strength Aqualad has powers over electricity and water. Visually, he has brown skin and African features, combined with blond hair and webbed hands. I suspect the young Young Justice audience will respond better to a black leader than their elders.

The Young Justice producers asked Jesse McCartney, the singer-actor who voices Robin, to pitch his voice up so he sounds less mature. McCartney told ET Online that the character is “a young, prepubescent superhero…who isn't ready to head a team like this yet.” But that “yet” hints at how Robin will grow.

Indeed, in a USA Today interview McCartney stated that later in the season:

Robin is given the chance to really lead the team at certain times. You’ll see how he deals with that, when he’s faced with literally life-changing or –altering or –ending situations, how he deals with it. You can see how he’s still green — he’s still a kid and still trying to figure it out.

And in a Comic Book Resources interview, McCartney went even further:

Robin also learns pretty early on that no else is going to be able to lead this team. And everyone does get a shot. Aqualad has a huge episode where he tries to take on this team and essentially can’t do it, and there’s a nice scene between him and Robin where you see Robin realize for the first time: “I’m not that kid anymore. I can’t just be this cocky, brash little kid that can’t step up.”

It’s striking that McCartney seems to be the only voice actor giving long interviews about this show. Of course, he’s the biggest star. But he’s also Robin.

The producers have warned fans that heroes can be killed in this universe. Zatara of the Justice League seems slated for death, and I suspect Red Tornado, Young Justice’s adult minder/mentor, could be dismantled. That would open up a new role for Robin. Still, starting from “cocky, brash little kid that can’t step up” is a big departure from the way DC has previously gathered its young superheroes.

In the original Teen Titans, and in the Young Justice of the 1990s, the Robin character came to the team the most experience, the best brains, and the biggest brand name. It made sense for him to be the teams’ leader. Indeed, the first team-up of Robin, Aqualad, and Kid Flash back in 1964 revolved around discovering that the “guy without super-powers” was the biggest badass of the trio.

In the first issue of Young Justice, scripter Peter David had Red Tornado state Tim Drake’s role explicitly: he was the team’s superego. Geoff Johns’s Teen Titans magazine put off Tim’s ascendancy to leadership for a few years, but only because the team started with some twentysomethings from the Marv Wolfman/George Pérez New Teen Titans.

Comics writers have even played off the expectation that Robin must be in charge. When Jason Todd had a couple of outings with the Titans in the mid-1980s, Wolfman and Pérez highlighted the tension between his inexperience and his teammates’ habits. The latest issue of Teen Titans shows Damian Wayne coming to Titans Tower and assuming he’ll be top dog. (Of course, he assumed that at Wayne Manor, too.)

Another element of this new Young Justice show which we haven’t seen since a few odd stories about the original Titans scripted by Bob Haney and Bob Kanigher is undercover work. The end of the TV premiere says Batman will give them undercover assignments that the Justice League has become just too famous to deal with.

The early Titans and Young Justice both started mostly as a way for teens in the superhero biz to hang out with friends who understand, secondarily a way to tackle worldwide threats their size. Since one of this show’s ongoing themes will be figuring out how you stand alongside your mentor, we’ll see how that desire will intersect with the group’s assignments.

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in Germany

This week I heard a BBC report that the late Hawai’ian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s recording of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” has been #1 on German music charts for eight weeks. It’s also apparently spurred a boom in ukelele sales in that country.

The BBC reporter speculates that the song’s popularity might reflect the economic times:

“Over the Rainbow” was written by a left-wing New Yorker called Yip Harburg at the end of the 1930s as the world was coming out of depression.

He also wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in 1929, when the world was as deep in depression as it could go.

The earlier song is about economic despair, and the second one is about economic hope.

Does the success of “Over the Rainbow” mean Germans feel the worst is behind them?

But as I understand things, the worldwide recession never hit Germany as badly as a lot of other economies. Its current center-right government has certainly been antsy about other governments’ requests for aid or plans for domestic stimulus spending.

I suspect the recording’s popularity is simply because it’s a great song that Kamakawiwo’ole remade with lovely simplicity. And while Harburg was one of the most politically-driven of the great mid-20th-century American songwriters, at least some of the credit for “Over the Rainbow” belongs to composer Harold Arlen.

(Ahem) Getting a Little Hungry Out Here!

News That Would Break His Heart

This week the Associated Press issued a story about tests it commissioned on drinking glasses bought at the Warner Brothers Studio store. Those tumblers turned out to have high levels of lead and cadmium.

AP’s testing, conducted by ToyTestingLab of Rhode Island, found that the enamel used to color the Tin Man had the highest lead levels, at 1,006 times the federal limit for children’s products.

Every Oz and superhero glass tested exceeded the government limit: The Lion by 827 times and Dorothy by 770 times; Wonder Woman by 533 times, Superman by 617 times, Batman by 750 times and the Green Lantern by 677 times.

Also involved are glasses made with a Return of the Jedi license, and those for particular soft-drink and fast-food brands.

It appears that these glasses were made in China, where standards are loose, and compliance and enforcement lax—which is one reason why American manufacturers can find such cheap prices there. Now American companies are scrambling to take these products off their shelves.

There are political dimensions to this problem. One is whether the glasses are children’s products, as opposed to products for adult collectors. For biological reasons, safety standards for lead are much more strict when it comes to things children are likely to put in their mouths. The glasses would therefore be illegal as children’s products, but legal as adult products.

Another question is whether the government should regulate cadmium on “design surfaces,” meaning the outside of glasses like these. Tests show that the lead- and cadmium-based paint flake off under normal use, but it’s unclear whether it would be ingested.

And of course there’s the broad political question: whether the Republican approach to safety regulation, giving businesses a freer hand in the name of…business, serves the public well when it comes to balancing costs with safety. We may soon find out.

The Of Thee I Sing Sign-Off

Back in March 2009, the news media was a flutter with remarks on “President Obama’s New Book Deal.” I wrote an analysis of those news articles and what I thought was the truth about Obama’s publishing contract with Random House. The day after that posting, I received an email from one attorney involved in the negotiations which said simply, “Thanks for getting the Obama deal right.”

Having established my bona fides for you, I can now comment on a significant discrepancy between the news reports then and the recent publication of Of Thee I Sing, a classic celebrity picture book from the President and illustrator Loren Long.

By “classic celebrity picture book,” I mean that it has top-class production values, a big print run and matching marketing budget, and cover-to-cover didacticism. (See Kirkus.)

This book is not a quickie project; it’s been in the works for half a decade. The New York Times reported that after his career-making 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Obama “agreed to write another nonfiction book and a children’s book” for Random House. In its press release about Of Thee I Sing, Random House stated: “The book was acquired and the manuscript completed prior to the President’s taking office in January 2009.”

However, in March 2009 the Times also reported that incoming-President Obama’s financial disclosure form—the source for the news about a revamped book deal—stated “that he intended to delay both books [under contract] until he left office.” And that’s what I see as a “significant discrepancy.”

Did Random House press the President to let it move ahead with his Of Thee I Sing picture-book text during his first term? Presumably the firm promised that the project wouldn’t interfere with his, you know, job.

Yummy: There Is No Rosebud Here

I remembered the case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer from 1994 before reading Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty. I didn’t remember the boy’s name, but I remembered the news reports about an eleven-year-old killer on the run, eventually found murdered by his own gang in a tunnel.

I therefore knew how the title character’s story would end in Yummy, the comics-style retelling of that episode by G. Neri and Randy DuBurke. Younger readers might not, despite the phrase “Last Days” in the subtitle and the mention of death on the front flap.

G. Neri structures the narrative to maintain that suspense. It begins with Yummy Sandifer shooting a teen-aged girl, then circles back to his upbringing, entrance into gang life, and early crimes. When we return to the shooting, the story seems to have caught up with its telling. Though still in the past tense, there’s no sign of what’s to come.

The narrator Roger is another boy about Yummy’s age, a fictional neighbor and classmate. But he comes from a normative American family: mother, father, one other sibling. But we also see that Roger’s older brother was the member of the Black Disciples gang who recruited Yummy.

Like the reporter in Citizen Kane, Roger undertakes to find out more about Yummy, asking neighbors and friends. He describes his own encounters with the boy, who has sometimes seemed abused, sometimes a bully, sometimes just another kid. Neighbors share contradictory thoughts about Yummy and his behavior.

Unlike Orson Welles’s film, however, Yummy ends without an answer, even a facile one. (Citizen Kane was always more about audacious storytelling than about its story.) We never learn what made Yummy so much more violent than other “shorties,” or exactly why he shot two people on one August day.

We do, however, get a sense that Roger’s family has helped to keep him from that path. There’s even a family reconciliation at the end, providing the requisite “sense of hope.” But for the questions the narrator asks about Yummy Sandifer and the girl he killed, there are no adequate answers.

The artwork fits that stark story. Randy DuBurke’s panels are all in black and white; he uses hatching to create the illusion of grays, but there are no washes or half-tones. It’s a high-contrast world full of shadows and looming perspectives, with spindly-legged kids running for their lives.

(These comments based on a review copy sent by the publisher, Lee & Low Books.)

Is There a Great Nightwing Story?

In a September essay at The Comics Cube, Duy wrote, “A lot of comics fans - myself included - would name Dick Grayson as one of their all-time favorite characters. . . . But then if you ask people to name an all-time great Nightwing story, you’d be hard-pressed to get straight answers.”

Duy suggests that Nightwing is just too well adjusted and anchored to create opportunities for great solo tales:

Dick Grayson was the coolest guy in the DC Universe. He was the best big brother you never had. And he was so with it, so together, that there was nothing wrong with him at all. And that was the problem. . . .

The uncertainty that came with being Robin and the utter detachment and awesomeness (in the purest sense of the word) that came with being Batman wasn’t his. He could look Superman straight in the eye and tell him the real score. And because of the way the DC Universe worked, he couldn’t be put through the wringer like Daredevil has continually been. If you hurt Dick, Batman will come. If you take away his home, his money can buy him a new one. You can’t kill his supporting cast - they haven’t been around long enough for you to form an attachment to them. You can’t introduce things from his deep and dark past, because we’ve already seen his past. He was Robin. We’ve read and seen his adventures. So you can’t mine that.

What’s left when you’ve got an ultraconfident guy with no hang-ups with extraordinary abilities fighting crime? You’ve got, and I hate to say this, a generic superhero.

By which Duy means the pre-1960s, no-faults, catch-the-villain-in-one-issue hero. That would indeed mean little angst, suffering, or frustration. (Which brings up the question: are those elements necessary for a “great” modern superhero story?)

Duy’s suggestion for making the Nightwing magazine work starts with on “his greatest personality strength, which is his ability to lead and command respect from the entire DC Universe.”

But that of course leads to another, perhaps more powerful answer to why naming great Nightwing solo adventures is tough: because he appears in great stories with other characters. Created as a sidekick, Dick Grayson was defined from the start through his link to another hero; most other comics crime-fighters started as the only hero in their worlds. As Nightwing, Dick remains one of the most important characters in the Batman ensemble. And the character came into his own in a team magazine, The New Teen Titans.

Thus, for respected and beloved stories featuring Nightwing, we can start with The Judas Contract, the story by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez in which Dick takes that crime-fighting identity. That’s #13 in Brian Cronin’s November 2009 fan poll about favorite comics storylines, and on io9’s list of 75 DC Comics volumes every rich fan should own.

Comics for Guys Only?

Graphic Novel Reporter is featuring an interview with Bill Zimmerman about his new book, Your Life in Comics.

One notable aspect of this project is that it’s explicitly aimed toward boys. The subtitle is 100 Things for Guys to Write and Draw. The pictures show boys. The second color printed inside is, of course, blue.

Zimmerman explains:

A few years ago, I had written a book for the same publisher, Free Spirit Publishing, to help boys navigate adolescence—it is called 100 Things Guys Need to Know. When I originally proposed Your Life in Comics, I saw it as a book for boys and girls, but the publisher wanted instead a companion book to the original 100 Things. The subjects covered in the book should appeal, too, to girls since there are a number of boy-girl situations, but I am now working on a similar book for girls that hopefully will join the boys book.

Which will have different illustrations and, presumably, a different second color. Later in the interview Zimmerman adds that he’s working on that second book “With my daughter and wife,” which makes sense for both content and marketing. Because once a book raises the issue of group identity, buyers want to know if the author belongs. (There is, at this point, no 100 Things Gals Need to Know.)

It’s interesting that the push for a gendered book came from the publisher, which describes itself as “known for its unique understanding of what kids want (and need) to navigate life successfully.” Of course, that approach also fits with some cultural expectations about the comics form, right or wrong.