Superman as “Meretricious Dreck”

From the Comics Journal’s appreciation of comic-strip collector and scholar Bill Blackbeard, who just died after a lifetime of preserving the nation’s daily verbal-visual entertainment:

“Far from being overwhelmed when Action came out with Superman,” he continued, “I thought it was meretricious dreck. I liked the art. I’d been following Slam Bradley [also by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster] in Detective Comics. And I liked the art and the storyline; I thought that was fine. But the Superman content did nothing for me because I immediately saw what many other people saw: there’s no story here. If he can do anything he wants to, who cares? Why bother? But the art did appeal, and I looked at it occasionally. It was nicely drawn.

“Then the whole superhero thing came in, and I recall thinking in the early forties that certain things—like Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch—I thought those were psychotic, the work of a lunatic. And of course Mickey Spillane was scripting, so I wasn’t that far off. I couldn’t understand how anyone would want to immerse themselves in such stuff.

Spillane did write some scripts and prose stories about the Torch and Sub-Mariner, but he didn’t create those characters. Ironically, Spillane’s biggest success came after he failed to sell a comic-book private eye of the Slam Bradley type. Unable to find a publisher for “Mike Danger,” he rewrote his script into a prose novel featuring Mike Hammer.

The Multi-Billionaire and the Dragon

One is a murderous creature who sits hoarding his wealth. The other is a dragon.

Earlier this month Forbes issued its “Fictional 15,” the most wealthy fictional characters. The accuracy of that list is debatable; it doesn’t agree with, for example, the AV Club’s list of “obscenely wealthy comic-book and cartoon characters.”

Forbes editor Michael Noer supplemented the main list with a long essay on calculating the net worth of Smaug the dragon from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

We know from the novel that Smaug’s wealth comes down to three primary components, the mound of silver and gold that he sleeps on, the diamonds and other precious gemstones encrusted in his underbelly, and the “Arkenstone of Thrain,” which is depicted as something like the Hope Diamond on steroids.

Estimating the size of the mound, Smaug’s belly, and the Arkenstone required going beyond Tolkien’s text to Dungeons and Dragons reference websites, current commodity prices, and a lot of assumptions.

Noer came out with a figure of approximately $8.6 billion. That’s higher than the magazine’s calculation of the fortunes of Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and mutual-fund company head Ned Johnson. But it’s less than a sixth of the estimation for Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

Facing Up to the Realities of Typewriter Fonts

Back when I was a book editor, each of the company’s books had a line on the copyright page stating that edition’s typeface: “Set in 12-point ITC Garamond Book by Pagesetters” in Bailey White’s Mama Makes Up Her Mind, for example.

That wasn’t included to answer a burning question for readers, or to give credit to the font designers. It was there so that, when we needed to correct a typographical error or update the text, the Production Department could quickly match the main type.

I see similar typographical lines in such new books as The Ghostwriter Secret, a Brixton Brothers mystery by Mac Barnett. The copyright page dutifully states:

The text for this book is set in Souvenir.

And indeed the main text is in that font, with a contrasting display font for the chapter titles. But fonts are so much easier to come by these days that many authors and designers (in this case Lizzy Bromley) don’t stop at just one.

The Ghostwriter Secret also has passages supposed to replicate pages from a mid-20th-century series book, albeit one with slightly distorted capitals. And others meant to look like the products of three different typewriters, one of them missing the letter T. And a school permission slip, a young detective’s handwritten notes, and an author’s autograph—all set in different fonts.

The typewriter fonts are particularly interesting because they’re not actually monospaced. Unlike real typewriters, their spaces, periods, and Is are narrower than their Ws and Ms. In sum, those fonts are simply reminiscent of typewriters.

(I note that the current paperback of Mama Makes Up Her Mind, from Da Capo, also uses a typewriter-reminiscent font on its cover.)

And whom is that illusion meant for? Fewer and fewer young readers have much experience with typewriters. (I've made this point about “Typewriter Realism” before.) The  ordinary, unpublished documents today’s kids see are rarely in that format. Their all-too-familiar-looking documents from an office or school is almost certainly be in Times, Helvetica or Arial, or even Comic Sans.

Fonts of Wisdom in Origami Yoda

At the back of Tom Angleberger’s The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is one of those usually high-falutin’ notes on typography:

The main text is set in 10-point Lucida Sans Typewriter. The display typeface is ERASER. Tommy’s comments are set in Kienan, and Harvey’s comments are set in Good Dog.

That note lists more fonts than is common, but still greatly understates the situation. There are other chapters credited to the characters Mike, Sara, Cassie, Lance, Marcie, Quavondo, and Rhondella, each in its own font. There are posters and suspension slips in yet more typefaces, probably also overseen by designer Melissa Arnst.

Origami Yoda has what my Parameters of Narrative Voice system calls a clear Paper Trail: the novel is made to read like a document or collection of documents from its fictional world. And in this case it looks reasonably like such documents as well: a middle-schooler’s report on recent events with classmates’ contributions, handwritten comments, illustrations, and graffiti.

Because Origami Yoda has such a powerful visual dimension, I was surprised to see it just won the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award. With good training and preparation, a reader could use different voices for each narrator to match the fonts. But how can an oral delivery get across the wrinkled pattern laid under each page, suggesting the whole document has been stuffed several times into a backpack? How does one read aloud a sketch of a Shakespeare bust falling down the margin of one page and saying, “Oh Poop!” upside-down?

(In classrooms, I suspect the answer to the last question is “Very carefully.”)

Harburg and Arlen

American Songwriter just posted a profile of E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, lyricist and uncredited collaborator on the screenplay of the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie.

Harburg was probably the most politically minded American songwriter to achieve popular success. And he came to those beliefs early:

After attending City College, Harburg chose to work in a Uruguay factory in 1917, which provided him an opportunity to make a decent wage, while avoiding being drafted against his beliefs into the First World War. Following the war, he married, fathered two children and became the co-owner of an electrical appliance company, that did well, but after seven years went bankrupt during the 1929 economic crash. After his business failure, Yip gravitated to songwriting. “I left the fantasy of business for the harsh reality of musical theatre”, he later joked.

In other Oz-musical news, Scott Thompson and Fred Barton are raising money to produce One for My Baby, “a sexy new song-and-dance book musical” built around songs by Harburg’s sometime collaborator Harold S. Arlen. Unlike some of his songwriting contemporaries, Arlen composed most of his classics for revues or Hollywood movies. He tried Broadway after World War 2, including the Tony-nominated Jamaica and the Truman Capote collaboration House of Flowers, but none of those were big hits.

About to Crack the Big Easter Case

Tim Drake never overlooks possibilities. He is, after all, pound for pound the best detective in the DC Universe.

Of course, there’s always pressure from some quarters to be more gritty.

Two Articles on L. Frank Baum, Movie-Maker

This week at Chicago Unbelievable, novelist Adam Selzer provided an introduction to the first movies ever made from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books—in 1908!

Called “Radio Plays” for reasons unclear, these lost snippets of hand-colored film from the Selig Polyscope studio were part of an elaborate stage production that Baum himself oversaw and financed. The show included a small cast of live actors alongside the movies, and he acted as host and lecturer, telling stories from his books.

The child actress who starred as Dorothy, with the astonishing name of Romola Remus, lived into the late 1980s. She apparently gave a lot of reminiscences to the Chicago papers. Selzer quotes one of those:

The privilege of knowing Mr. Baum was a happy and rewarding experience for me. I, also, portrayed the role of Dorothy in the first 'Wizard of Oz' movie. I believe it was the very first colored moving picture. It was produced by Selig's company.

I remember Mr. Baum was always on hand offering encouragement or constructive criticism to all his workers. When the film was shown at various theatres, he would lecture about his various books. I recall some proud and joyous moments standing beside this tall, gentle, dignified gentleman on-stage after each matinee. The little children would clamor for his autograph, with cheers of joy!

But the show was a financial failure. Despite reviews praising it as a family show, it didn’t sell enough tickets to adults to cover the high production cost, and Baum ended up signing away the proceeds of some of his books for many years.

After regaining his financial footing with new novels, Baum and his family moved out west to a suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood. By coincidence, the American film industry followed, and Baum became involved in another movie-making venture called the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. This time he didn’t invest much of his own money. Which was good, because that venture failed as well.

The movie magazine Daeida just published an interview with Baum’s great-grandson Robert about the family’s life in Hollywood. It includes many family photographs of the author’s house there, called Ozcot, along with the gardening trophies Baum won in his last years. You can read that article online in the April 2011 issue, starting on page 10.

Visiting the Wonder City of Oz

Earlier this week the auction house Doyle New York sold some Oz-related items from the estate of Fred Meyer, long-time secretary of the International Wizard of Oz Club. One of the most interesting items was John R. Neill’s manuscript for The Wonder City of Oz, along with the heavily edited version that saw print. As the auctioneer explains:

Neill was informed in early 1940 that Ruth Plumly Thompson was to retire as an Oz author. Asked to write the next book in the series himself after 35 years as the series illustrator, Neill pieced together sketches and stories he had been gathering and submitted the typescript. Reilly & Lee hired a ghost writer to alter and complete the story, evidenced by the second typescript and the finished book. The two drafts are drastically different, from the titles of the chapters to seemingly disconnected parts of the plot.

The main restriction on Reilly & Lee’s new story, it appears, was to string together as many of Neill’s illustrations as possible, so the publisher wouldn’t have to ask him for more. One result appears on another item in this auction, consisting of two pictures of Number Nine, the Munchkin boy who becomes a secondary protagonist.

Neill originally drew Number Nine clinging to a frozen rail, perhaps while being blown off. There’s no such scene in the finished book, but there is a moment when the boy is plummeting through the atmosphere. (As I recall, he threw his hat into the hair and forgot to let go.) So the Reilly & Lee production department painted the railing out of Neill’s sketch, and that drawing became a picture of Number Nine’s plunge through the air.

Oz fans have few good things to say about The Wonder City of Oz as published: the narrative is almost incoherent, the main protagonist unlikable, the picture of life in the Emerald City unrecognizable. One potential strength of the book, I think, is that it shows daily life in the capital of Oz for working kids who don’t get to hang around Ozma’s palace all day—but that strength remains more potential than realized.

Despite those flaws in the final book, Neill’s original manuscript probably wasn’t any better. I’ve read a summary of that disjointed story and his subsequent two Oz books (published without the same sort of editing, or possibly any), and they show similar problems. Neill was a fine fantasy illustrator, but not a great storyteller.

Two Issues of Oziana Back to Back!

Oziana 2009 (described yesterday) and Oziana 2010 comprise a double issue, bound back to back, each with a full complement of new and original Oz fiction and art. (For folks who enjoy back covers, however, you’re out of luck.)

The theme for Oziana 2010 is “The Challenges of Governing Oz,” and it starts with Tim Art-McLaughlin’s spectacular color image of “The Queen and Her Court.” Tim is an Oz fan and professional artist from Shropshire, England; email him if you’re interested in Ozzy commissions.

Tim also provided the art for “Celebrating Ozma: The Silver Jubilee Issue,” in which the father-daughter team of Andrew and Rachel Heller introduce us to Oz’s postage stamps and postal service. They are, of course, magical.

“Fiddle’s Revenge,” by Arianna Brown, won a student writing award at last year’s International Wizard of Oz Club conference at the Arne Nixon Center in Fresno. This adventure, set back when the Scarecrow ruled the Emerald City, brings back the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Winged Monkeys—as well as the danger of a giant spider. Author-illustrator Dennis Anfuso provided the suitably scary art.

In “Invisible Fence,” the Emerald City’s war against unauthorized magic takes the Wizard, the Tin Soldier, Snif the Iffin, and Dorothy to a dark Gillikin forest, where they find a most innocent-looking outlaw. This mystery story from me comes with nine charming illustrations by David Lee Ingersoll.

Copies of Oziana 2009/2010 are on their way to subscribers, and can be ordered from the Oz Club. The double issue offers two full-color covers, seven new stories, and original art at every turn.

Oziana 2009 Touches Down at Last

The issue of Oziana cover-dated 2009 is at last on its way to subscribers, and will be available for ordering from the International Wizard of Oz Club. It contains four original Oz stories, all completely illustrated.

The cover is “Lifting the Curtain,” a painting by Charnelle Pinkney, now a student in the School of Visual Arts’ program in Illustration as Visual Essay. That image symbolizes the issue’s theme of “Parodies and Alternative Views” of Oz.

In “Toto Reveals,” Dorothy’s companion shares his view of events in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Brianna Landon’s story won a competition for Oz writing by students in Lawrence, Kansas, a few years ago. It has charming new illustrations by Ben Wood, a picture-book artist from Australia who has illustrated books for Scholastic and other firms.

Playwright Eleanor Kennedy contributed “Barry Porter and the Sorceress of Oz,” which uses parody to explore some differences in tone between L. Frank Baum’s fantasy creation and J. K. Rowling’s. Sheena Hisiro provided stylish portraits of Glinda and a lost young wizard with a scarred forehead.

“The Ransom of Button-Bright” is Oziana’s first story in comics form, I believe. It’s a product of the hard work and good humor of artist S. P. Maldonado, working from a script by me (with plenty of inspiration from O. Henry). Who would dare to kidnap Button-Bright?

Finally, Prof. Stephen Teller’s “The Trouble with the Magic Belt” imagines a narrative fix for the Oz books—what if we simply did away with Ozma’s Magic Belt, and all the easy solutions it provides? John Mundt, Esq., illustrated this counterfactual tale with his usual verve, and provided readers with a puzzle as well.

Every copy of Oziana 2009 comes with a major bonus: Oziana 2010! More about that tomorrow.