A Higher Level of Transition in Comics

At this transitional time, I turn to the matter of transitions in comics. Duy at the Comics Cube has provided a two-part review of the types of transitions between panels listed by practitioner and taxonomist Scott McCloud:

• Action to Action
• Subject to Subject
• Scene to Scene
• Moment to Moment
• Aspect to Aspect
• Non Sequitur

I think we should give equal weight to the transition from one page spread to the next, which are perforce also transitions between panels. Picture-book creators have long played with such page turns as an element of their storytelling and pacing. Comics creators do so as well, as McCloud was well aware, but this transition may have been overshadowed in his emphasis on what makes comics different from other forms of illustrated narrative.

Unlike a transition from one panel to the next on a single page, readers can’t see both images at once during a page turn. Their minds can’t compare and contrast panels even as they focus on one and then the next. The transition therefore depends more on readers’ memory.

Furthermore, a page turn can hide the entrance of something new in the scene—a character, a sudden event, a shift in tone. A page of many small, cramped panels can transition to a single, large panel, or vice versa. Mainstream adventure comics, which rely on plot twists and other surprises, use the page turn quite a lot to introduce some element the readers literally haven’t seen coming.

Finally, the physical act of turning the page is (while not as essential to the act of reading a book as many of us traditionalists like to believe) a signal to readers’ minds which may facilitate a shift of scenes, or a leap forward in time.

I’ve noted before how picture-book artists map out spreads while many comics artists—at least at one point—planned individual pages. The latter tradition was undoubtedly shaped by the large number of panels to get through, and the lack of control over where page turns would fall as stories were broken up with advertising and reprinted. Of course, comics creators still used the page turn at the end of a story.

Lately, I see the page turn becoming increasingly important in comics. “Decompressed” storytelling has produced fewer and bigger panels, and the advertising-free book form makes page breaks more predictable and permanent. Indeed, when a book in comics form doesn’t use page turns, I feel something missing.

TOMORROW: Comics without page turns?

(Image above showing a prototype page turn with Ty Landercasper’s Comic Reader Mobi app. And Yotsuba!)

An Early Effort by Wodehouse

This month I read P. G. Wodehouse’s The Intrusion of Jimmy (1910) for the first time. I may have read it earlier under its alternate title, A Gentleman of Leisure. If I’d forgotten, that’s not because it’s a typical Wodehouse farce but because it dates from before he found his basic formula, and he didn’t have enough material to make a memorable novel.

I’m rather fond of Wodehouse’s work from the 1910s, before he decided to focus on English country manors and city clubs, with an occasional intrusion from the working classes.

There’s the wild but toothless satire of invasion literature in The Swoop (1910). The semi-serious picture of a couple expecting their first child in The White Hope/Their Mutual Child/The Coming of Bill (1915). And my favorites, which follow characters from Wodehouse’s public school stories into the working world: Psmith in the City (1910), and Psmith Journalist (1915).

Psmith appears one more time in Leave It to Psmith (1923), which brings him to Blandings Castle, introduced in Something New/Something Fresh (1915). And those books were so successful that Wodehouse rarely tried something so fresh again.

The Intrusion of Jimmy/A Gentleman of Leisure is clearly a transitional novel. It starts in the world of New York theater and journalism that Wodehouse was then trying to enter, with a dollop of crime and corruption.

The setting then moves to an English manor house with the cast of characters that would soon be familiar: a spineless and penniless young lord, an overbearing moneybags uncle, a stern aunt, a pretty girl. Also a rope of diamonds and amateur theatricals.

Unfortunately, Wodehouse didn’t really develop those elements of the story as he later would, perhaps because he hadn’t yet realized he would have to distinguish the characters in this book from others quite like them. It wasn’t enough to have a stern aunt—one must do something with her.

The book has only one girl, and only two boys, one in love and the other not. The one in love is also the title character, admirable, and rich, so there’s no suspense in the love story. The narration keeps telling us how much that boy is in love with the one girl, but we don’t see that happen. There’s a lovely moment at the end where it becomes clear that she’s fallen in love back—we know that because she actually believes the plot that’s unfolded so far.

I kept waiting for one of the story’s bigger crooks to get some sort of comeuppance, but no. Some secrets are revealed, but there’s not enough follow-up. In a short time Wodehouse would learn to do so much more with similar ingredients.

The small number of rooms where action takes place made me wonder if Wodehouse had adapted this novel from a stage play, but things worked the other way round. A Gentleman of Leisure was Wodehouse’s first book adapted for the stage. Douglas Fairbanks played the lead on Broadway, and then John Barrymore in Chicago. There were even two silent movies made from this novel. (Trying to imagine silent Wodehouse is the biggest challenge I’ve had all month.)

That made A Gentleman of Leisure a big success for Wodehouse, which is probably why he went on to explore more manor houses, to better effect.

The Sky Is Falling, One Way or the Other

Last summer the industry-research firm Simba Information put out a report that it touted as finding that one in four comics readers is over sixty-five years old. I don’t know if that counts newspaper comics, but it doesn’t match the demographics I see in comics stores and sections of bookstores.

In any event, the thrust of the report was:

Despite notable efforts from many in the industry, comics and graphic novels continue to be repeatedly mislabeled as just another children’s book category…

And I’d certainly agree with that, having noted various examples of the comics form making people perceive stories are appropriate for younger readers than they really speak to.

Curiously, the reaction to this report within the mainstream American comics industry appeared to be just the opposite of its conclusion. “This confirms what we know!” people were writing. “Our core audience is dying off!”

Oh, yes! Adults read comics! Oh, no! Adults read comics!

Weekly Robin Christmas Story

This weekly Robin is appearing one day early, and perhaps a few hours late, because it points to a fanfiction short story set on Christmas Eve.

This tale takes place in the DC Comics continuity as it existed in the mid- to late 1990s, I believe. Tim Drake is living with his dad in a Gotham suburb and serving as Batman’s Robin. Dick Grayson, the narrator, has moved to an apartment building in Blüdhaven, which is like Gotham City’s Newark, and tends bar nearby when not patrolling as Nightwing.

There are pretty obvious influences from New Titans, #65, when Tim visits Dick in New York for training before becoming Robin, and Nightwing, #6, when he drops in on Dick in Blüdhaven. The story even shares the title of that latter issue: “The Visitor.” And there’s another, seasonal influence floating behind the prose:

On the night before Christmas, across all Blüdhaven, not a siren was wailing, not a babe needed saving. No crimelords or mooks had abruptly reformed. It was twenty degrees out! They were home, staying warm.

I was in my apartment, atop all those steps, preparing to shower after doing some reps, when all of a sudden came a noise overhead—not a clatter, or thumping, but a single foot-tread.

My visitor might not have meant any harm, but whoever it was had sidestepped the alarms. I threw on a bathrobe and killed all the lights to see out the windows and scan that dark night.

With a glance to the north side, I froze like the weather: whoever was up there had let down a tether and was clambering hand under hand to my floor. I crept to my balcony, opened the door, and blasted him with an extinguisher hose.

It took me a sec to distinguish the clothes: my caller was costumed in red and green tights, and wearing short sleeves on this blustery night.

“Cut it out, Dick! It’s me!” shouted Tim with a sputter as he slammed back and forth on the wall like a shutter. . . .

The little story continues here. Best wishes of the solstice season to all readers.

“Wizard of Oz 2010”?

From Friday’s New York Times, Claudia La Rocco’s profile of a bar in Bergen County:

...there we were on a chilly November night in Ridgefield Park, N.J., in the Westside Village Tavern, a distinctly working-class bar nicknamed the Zoo. Dan Greco was bartending and had commandeered not one, but four of the five flat-screen televisions behind the blond-wood bar for that Technicolor classic [The Wizard of Oz]. (He’d thrown football fans a bone, leaving a game playing on the fifth).

“It’s the Emerald City part!” Mr. Greco barked. “A little quiet, please.”

The command was superfluous; everyone was watching, even the kitchen staff, peeking around the saloon doors during down moments. A pleased Mr. Greco surveyed his happy kingdom, a hangout frequented by cops and ironworkers in a town where many people stay their whole lives. He chortled mischievously: “It would be great if the Good Witch’s skirt blew up and she was wearing a red thong. ‘Wizard of Oz 2010’!”

A customer — by the looks of him, all too regular — ambled by, slightly bleary-eyed: “I don’t even remember this movie. I know she gets home in the end.”

That is indeed one of the most important parts. And Greco at least understands what color of thong Glinda would wear.

While searching for images to accompany this posting, I stumbled into FrockTalk, dedicated to motion-picture costuming. Here’s its discussion of The Wizard of Oz.

Comfort and Joy

If you’re in the mood for Ozzy holiday decorating, check out this posting from John Nickolaus’s Adventures in Oz blog. I suspect that’s one of Karyl Carlson’s handmade Woozy dolls; I keep mine at my bedside.

The effort of creating that holiday display might have worn Mr. Nickolaus out since he hasn’t posted much more, but he left quite a bit to explore in just those images.

More recently, Bill Campbell at the Oz Enthusiast has shared pictures of his handmade Jack Pumpkinhead and Sawhorse and Tik-Tok, to go along with the Scarecrow and Scraps.

I prefer to decorate vicariously by posting links like these. Otherwise, it seems too much like work.

Exploring Oz through Google Books Ngram Viewer

As I discussed yesterday, I played a little with the Google Books Ngram Viewer last week. This program graphs the relative frequencies of words and phrases in Google’s growing database of English literature. At this point it seems most useful as a dipstick for measuring the verbal context of a literary work, or its verbal impact.

For example, we may associate the phrase “rags to riches” with Horatio Alger’s novels of a century ago, but that phrase actually flourished after 1925. In Alger’s time “get rich quick” or “strike it rich” were more prevalent.

And what have English speakers called readers in their teens? We can watch the term “teenage” swamp the older phrase “young adult,” with “teenaged” a late arrival.

So what can the Ngram Viewer tell us about L. Frank Baum’s Oz books? I started at the beginning, with the storm that carries Dorothy away from Kansas. Technically it’s a tornado, as Baum acknowledged in a letter after publication. But “Kansas cyclone” was a very familiar phrase back in 1900, perhaps even cliché.

And what do we call Dorothy’s friend Nick Chopper? In Baum’s books, he’s the “Tin Woodman.” The 1939 MGM movie called him the “Tin Man,” and that phrase became much more prevalent in the late 1900s as the movie aired over and over on television. Meanwhile, ”Tin Woodsman,” which has no textual support but sibilants, is also on the rise.

Glinda of Oz introduces three Adepts of Magic. That noun was unfamiliar to me when I first read the book, and I was interested to read later that Baum borrowed it from theosophical usage. The Ngram Viewer shows how the popularity of the capitalized “Adepts” spiked around 1880 and hit a second high around 1920, the year that book was published (after Baum’s death).

I was surprised to see a recent sudden spike in the use of the word “Ozma.” Because of the musical performers who use the name? Because of Project Ozma? Knowing more about Google’s sample might explain that.

Finally, I used the Ngram Viewer to graph the frequency of three phrases:

• “no place like home,” which Baum borrowed from John Howard Payne, as I discussed back here. It was near the peak of its popularity around 1900, when Baum wrote.
• “Munchkin,” Baum’s own coinage, which has entered our language for something small. It had a burst of usage a century ago, and has been growing more common since 1970.
• And, as a comparison, “Muggle,” which has been around for decades but achieved new heights after J. K. Rowling used it in her Harry Potter books.

Weekly Robin Ngram Viewer

Like a lot of other researchers, I put in a little too much time with Google’s new Books Ngram Viewer this week. It allows one to search Google’s entire corpus of digitized English literature to see how the relative frequencies of published words or phrases change over time.

I learned how the programming is case-sensitive, hates hyphens and other forms of punctuation, and makes graphs with familiar colors.

I’m sure there are still bugs in the database. Look at the blip in mentions of “Bruce Wayne” and “Dick Grayson” during the 1970s; that must be an effect of the sampling, not a natural plateau. On the other hand, that same graph may accurately reflect the doldrums of the mid-1980s Superman movies when people stopped caring so much.

The phrase “boy wonder” was on a steep rise in 1940, when DC Comics introduced Batman’s sidekick, and started to level off soon afterward. So did “the boy wonder of,” indicating the use of the phrase in varied contexts. But since 1960 the capitalized forms “Boy Wonder” and “the Boy Wonder” have become more popular than before. Does that mean our culture now has only one Boy Wonder, at least not labeled unironically?

Similarly, the growing popularity of “Batman,” capitalized, may be making the uncapitalized term for a type of servant less popular.

How about “dark knight/Dark Knight”? The phrase was coined by the Romantics, as I wrote back here, and spikes first in the early 1800s. Then it fades for a while, returning with a vengeance (and capital letters) in the mid-1980s after Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. I mean, right after.

Likewise, the capitalized and specific “Superman” now soars over the uncapitalized and generic “superman.”

And here we see the spread of the terms comics, comic strip, comic book, graphic novel, and bande dessinee (no accent marks) at different moments in time. TOMORROW: Google Books Ngram Viewing and Oz.

Unconditional Superpowered Love

Confirming that I’m not a Superman guy, I actually let last night’s posting appear with the name of the Man of Steel’s dog mentioned as “Astro.” That is, of course, the name of the dog on The Jetsons. Superman’s dog is named Krypto.

I actually enjoy what DC’s writers have done with Krypto over the past decade, recognizing the inherent goofiness of a superpowered dog in a cape while also recognizing how comfortably he fits into the myth. Isn’t Clark Kent all about all-American traditions? Who wouldn’t want a little unconditional superpowered love? (Well, the current Superboy has had to get used to his taking care of his “cousin’s” pet.)

That said, I have a problem with Krypto’s name, which is probably why I don’t remember it well. “Krypto”—is he cryptic? No, he’s a dog! Dogs don’t do deceit. Symbolically, the name doesn’t fit.

Krypto’s a dog from outer space, so “Astro” would be more appropriate. Maybe if I were a Superman guy with more feeling for the planet Krypton, I’d better appreciate a living memorial of that doomed world.

It’s Not Superman (at least as I understand the story)

I finally figured out what in Tom De Haven’s It’s Superman! strikes me as a fundamental shift away from the core Superman myth, which of course reveals what I think that myth fundamentally is. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book, but I wish I’d realized this point earlier so it wasn’t nagging at me as I read.

In the extended essay he wrote after this novel, Our Hero: Superman on Earth, De Haven says, “I’ve always been a Superman Guy.” I don’t make the same claim, so my reaction might be based on a more limited idea of the myth’s capacity.

My problem isn’t the book’s setting in Depression-era America. That fits perfectly with De Haven’s aim to offer a backstory for Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor up to 1938, when Action Comics appeared on newsstands. Nor do I mind De Haven’s choice to shift the saga’s urban setting from generic Metropolis to New York City under Fiorello LaGuardia.

Like many other people writing novels about superheroes, De Haven seems to revel in long scene-setting descriptions and internal monologues that the comics don’t have space for. But he also does a good job with the twists and turns of plot, looping a relatively small cast of characters together to make the narrative keep flowing briskly.

Rather, my problem is with a single character: Willi Berg, aspiring photographer. All my unease comes down to this one addition to the usual cast of characters.

Otherwise, the story in It’s Superman! is familiar, if not exactly like any previous telling. The novel establishes Clark’s childhood in Smallville and his sole-survivor status. It leaves him as a new, bespectacled reporter at the Daily Planet.

Lois Lane is a more experienced reporter at the same paper. Clark is gaga for her; she thinks he’s a hick, a rival, and an unworthy shadow of his friend Superman. Lex Luthor is a criminal genius on the edge of respectability who once had red hair.

The novel eschews the aspects of Smallville established in the Superboy stories of the 1950s through 1980s. There’s no Pete Ross, Lana Lang, or Krypto. Clark doesn’t go to college or spend junior year abroad in Atlantis (added to the comics in the post-GI Bill 1950s, I think). But I never assimilated those details into my basic idea of Superman, anyway.

The myth has proved to be accommodating about whether Ma and Pa Kent are dead (the old canon), alive (the current canon), or dying in the course of the story (All-Star Superman, Smallville, etc.). Again, De Haven’s choice seems to fit into the acceptable limits.

But then there’s Willi Berg. At the start of the novel, he’s Lois Lane’s boyfriend, hustling photos to the tabloids. Soon he becomes an unwitting enemy of corrupt alderman Lex Luthor.

About a third of the way through the book, Willi meets Clark Kent in Kansas and tumbles to his immense strength. The two then travel America, hopping freight trains, working odd jobs, and ending up in Hollywood—Clark as a near-invulnerable stuntman, Willi as a cheesecake photographer.

All that while, Willi urges Clark to test and develop his powers. Together they come up with the notion of a “Superman” separate from Clark. Together they return to New York, connect with Lois, and take on Luthor again.

(It’s Superman! also depicts Clark finding a girlfriend in Hollywood before he starts wearing glasses. She sees he’s close to invulnerable, and she designs the suit with the S on the chest. I doubt she’ll have a problem recognizing Superman from the newsreels. But at least she’s on the opposite coast, and thus out of the picture.)

Unlike De Haven’s other additions, Willi strikes me as a fundamental change to the basic story. His presence means Clark has a friend in the city who knows all about his powers and secret identity. It means that the fraught relationship between Lois, Clark, and Superman has yet another corner. Indeed, Willi is lodged so deep into this version of the story that it’s impossible to imagine subsequent tales that don’t involve him (or at least his memory).

Even more important, Willi Berg changes Clark’s psychological situation. He’s no longer the only person outside his family who knows his secrets, no longer isolated—which in the usual story echoes his status as Krypton’s last survivor. When in the comics Superman shares his secrets with Batman, Lois, and/or the Justice League, that feels like a connection he’s earned from having spent decades alone.

Adding an intimate friend at the start of the Superman myth doesn’t just change its plotting, I think, but also its symbolic meaning. And symbolism is what superheroes are all about.