A Peek at Oz in Peekskill?

The Wall Street Journal reports on a proposal to erect these statues in Peekskill, New York.

Why Peekskill? For a couple of years as a child, L. Frank Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy. And there is a small stretch of yellow brick road in the city, reportedly old enough for him to have seen. Are those facts enough to make Peekskill a significant site in the literary history of Oz?

Who cares? Those statues are delightful! They’re by Richard Masloski, based on the character designs of W. W. Denslow. They can come large as life for only about a quarter-million dollars.

Surely there’s a library out there that wants the whole set.

(Hat tip to the Daily Ozmapolitan.)

The Universe Needs a Robin

The last weekly Robin quoted several reader letters from 1989 because I was struck by how closely those fans’ analyses of the Dynamic Duo’s relationship matched young Tim Drake’s rationale for a new Boy Wonder in the storyline mysteriously titled A Lonely Place of Dying.

The preceding story, “Year Three,” had shown how Dick Grayson’s parents died at a circus, and how Batman swooped down to offer comfort (or as much comfort as a man dressed as a giant bat can offer). Those issues also introduced a little dark-haired boy in the audience named Timmy. As at least one reader surmised, that wasn’t his last appearance.

A Lonely Place of Dying begins with Batman acting unusually violent and reckless. Actually, he’s not acting much differently from his appearances in many other stories, but both Alfred and an unseen observer tell us he’s acting unusually violent and reckless. That observer, who’s kind of short, is trying to track down Dick Grayson.

The next installment is a somewhat strained murder mystery at Dick’s old circus. Its real revelation is that the short tracker is Timmy Drake, now thirteen. He explains how years before he’d seen surveillance footage of Robin doing a quadruple somersault, and realized that only Dick could pull off that move. (Especially since, as pictured, it wouldn’t work.)

That realization has let Tim deduce the identities of Batman, Nightwing, and the second Robin, and to realize what’s making Batman crazy (again, relatively speaking for a man dressed as a giant bat).

“Batman has to have a Robin,” Tim declares. Caring about a kid sidekick actually keeps him careful and sane. Lest we miss that idea, Tim repeats it twice more. His first plan is for Dick to squeeze back into the multicolored suit, an idea that Nightwing’s fans were already writing in to protest. There was only one solution, the final act of the story makes clear: Tim has to become the Boy Wonder himself, at least long enough to save Batman and Nightwing.

Marv Wolfman’s story thus avoided a trap that had made the second Jason Todd unpopular with fans: looking as if he’d pushed Dick Grayson aside. Tim is Dick’s biggest admirer. He respects the original team. His prodigious detective skills are clearly different from Dick’s acrobatics. And in contrast to what Jason came to stand for, Tim’s trying to make Batman less violent, and he promises to follow instructions.

At another level, Tim’s character offered Wolfman help with his own psychological trouble, a crippling writer’s block. After creating some of DC’s most popular new heroes in the early 1980s, Wolfman was suffering through a creative dry spell. He also needed a Robin.

And DC Comics needed a Robin to provide a counterpoint to the violent, dark, and grim period that The Dark Knight Returns and A Death in the Family had set off. Tim Drake couldn’t stop the trends of the early 1990s, but he ensured that what Robin had traditionally meant in the DC Universe would endure.

COMING UP: And there was one more thing Tim Drake stood for.

“Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles”

From Prof. Ellen Handler Spitz’s appreciation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, titled “Yellow Brick Philosophy”, in The New Republic:

The book drops you, rubbing your eyes, into a mysterious ether—onto shifting sands (recall the “Deadly Desert”)—into oneiric realms, where you lose yourself and wander, enchanted: “The cyclone had set the house down, very gently… in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty….” “The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick…” “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?” Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself. Yet few readers have focused on the book’s prodigious mental adventures.

But first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum’s story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow’s line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion’s nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. One adverb reveals all: “‘From the Land of Oz,’ said Dorothy gravely.”

Beyond this—beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude—Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children’s terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He actually helps children learn to think. . . .

I quite agree that Dorothy grows only a little over the course of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—but there’s a clear difference in her self-presentation when she returns in Ozma of Oz. She’s realized the strength within her all along. Her companions, of course, never quite manage that discovery, and remain enamored of the Wizard’s symbolic gifts.

Though Spitz’s hook is the upcoming movie prequel being made by Sam Raimi (and the word “movie”) is in the URL), her article is all about L. Frank Baum’s text.

“In the center of the chair was an enormous Head”

The Lafayette School in Chatham, New Jersey, has mounted a production of The Wizard of Oz with all the characters (even Dorothy) portrayed using big papier-mâché heads.

The result looks sort of like a lost Sid and Marty Krofft production. In the Chatham Patch photo by Liz Alterman above, we see the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Dorothy, and Toto.

It looks like such “Head Shows” are a tradition at Lafayette. The school has also put on Alice in Wonderland and original dramas.

(Hat to the Daily Ozmapolitan.)

Making Lemonade Mouth a Little Sweeter

I heard an interesting publishing story at last week’s SCBWI New England conference. Mark Peter Hughes originally published Lemonade Mouth as a young adult novel in 2007. This story of a teen-aged band got good reviews, and Mark and his family toured the country to promote it.

Earlier this year the Disney Channel unveiled its adaptation of the book to big audiences. Even a moderately successful television show reaches more people than solidly successful book by multiple orders of magnitude, and the Lemonade Mouth movie was more than moderately successful. It may not be a High School Musical phenomenon yet, but it attracted a lot of Disney’s core viewers.

The only problem is that those core viewers aren’t “young adults”—they’re tweens, and possibly tween wannabes aspirants. What would those readers find when they looked for Lemonade Mouth in bookstores? What would their parents find?

Mark and his publisher decided to tweak the text for the book’s likely new readers as they reissued the paperback. The adaptations seem small—nothing to the plot, little to the language. The result is, I suppose, a “Disney version,” but it also speaks more directly to most tweens’ interests. It may also reflect a future of authors tailoring books to different readerships, something that digital formats will make even more economic.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if sixth-graders will whisper to each other to check out the library’s old hardcover copy of Lemonade Mouth.

“New England Voices” for 2011, Tuesday, 24 May

Tomorrow, 24 May, the Foundation for Children’s Books will host its annual “New England Voices” event in Walsh Hall at Boston College. This event, starting at 7:30 P.M., is free and open to the public. There will even be refreshments, as well as books available for purchase and signing.

Once again I’ll introduce the four regional authors who will speak about and read from their work:

• Karen Day is a colleague in one of my writing groups. She specializes in emotional novels about middle-graders. Her latest is A Million Miles from Boston, showing how twelve-year-old Lucy’s annual summer trip to Maine doesn’t turn out at all as she’d hoped.
  
• Nancy Poydar has written and illustrated twelve picture books, including No Fair Science Fair. She taught sixth grade for over a dozen years before becoming a full-time book creator.
  
• Susan Lynn Meyer is the author of Black Radishes. This debut novel is about a young Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied France was inspired by experiences of Meyer’s father.
  
• Christine McDonnell is a picture-book author and children’s librarian from Jamaica Plain. Her latest, Goyangi Means Cat, shows a young girl coming from Korea to live with her new American family.

Come out for an entertaining evening with some of New England’s many talented authors!

“He needs someone like Dick Grayson”

The death of the second Jason Todd and retelling of how Dick Grayson became Robin led to a flurry of reader letters in 1989 discussing what those events had meant to Batman, and what Batman himself meant. Here’s a selection.

Steven Milunovich, Batman, #436:

Most of the world thinks of Batman and Robin as inseparable, yet the creators of the comics can’t make the two concepts compatible. It does seem inconsistent to have Batman the avenger trailed by a teenager in bright red and yellow. But from Robin’s inception until his departure in the early 1970’s the team was a tremendous success, inspiring many copies.

So what of the present rendition of Batman? When Batman becomes a crazed loner, the entire supporting cast suffers. Is there no room for a lighter side in a man driven to fight crime because of the murder of his parents?

Michael Leon, Batman, #440:

In Batman’s current state of mind, he needs someone like Dick Grayson to alleviate his anger and his melancholy. Batman losing Jason Todd can be likened to when Dick Grayson left. It was like losing your own son twice. Batman becomes an embittered loner without a companion. He needs someone to keep him under control.

Malcolm Bourne, Batman, #440:

[Bruce Wayne’s] lack of reaction to Jason’s death could destroy him. We all need to grieve, and a failure to do so is catastrophic, emotionally and psychologically, for the grieving person. Maybe Dick can heal the rift and, at the same time, help Bruce through this difficult time. But first Bruce must acknowledge these differences.

(Another letter from Bourne appeared in issue #442, guessing that a new character would provide help.)

John Brindley, Batman, #440:

I’m a counselor at Sky Ranch for Boys in South Dakota, a home for troubled boys. . . . Many could identify with Jason’s juvenile problems. There’s a popular consensus that they would like to see Dick Grayson return as Robin someday. For now the boys prefer Batman alone as they are, always haunted by memories and past mistakes, yet continually striving to find peace in their lives and someone to share their future with.

Other letters also suggested that Bruce and Dick team up more regularly, but only this one said Dick should return to the Robin costume.

In fact, that prospect left most vocal fans anxious, as expressed by Leif Vanderwall, Detective Comics, #605:

I heard that Dick Grayson was going to join Batman again (after “Year Three”) and possibly change his name from Nightwing back to Robin. I don’t mind Dick Grayson joining forces with his old mentor from time to time but I think he is too old to be Batman’s “little boy.” I think he’s good where he is right now, being Nightwing and being the leader of the Titans.

That letter was actually printed twice, the second time in Detective, #607, probably because Assistant Editors got their signals crossed as one took over from another. The editorial reply in the earlier issue was non-committal. The second told Vanderwall and the rest of the readership that “Dick Grayson will not change his name from Nightwing back to Robin to join Batman again. He thinks it’s good where he is right now, too.”

At the same time DC was reassuring Nightwing fans, it was also trying to keep some mystery alive. The house advertisement for the “A Lonely Place of Dying” storyline showed Dick Grayson as Nightwing holding the old Robin uniform and looking sad. The copy read:

Batman is destroying himself. Can Nightwing help? Will he?

Of course, everyone knew Dick Grayson would try to help because he’s, you know, Dick Grayson. But how far was he willing to go?

As I noted last week, the “Year Three” recounting of how Dick Grayson saw his parents murdered at the circus also introduced a four-year-old fan in the audience. Which leads to the last letter…

Christopher Scott, Batman, #440:

I really like the way “Batman: Year Three” is going. I can’t know this for sure, of course, but from where I sit, it looks like by the end of this 4-part tale we’ll be seeing young Timmy in the yellow cape at the big guy’s side. I hope I’m right. Batman has been through a lot and taking on a new partner might be good for him.

The editorial reply to that letter said it had “been censored due to Christopher’s almost spilling the beans.” But because of what issue #442’s letter column called “a production error,” that speculation ran unedited at the start of a new storyline titled “A Lonely Place of Dying.” The only detail Scott got wrong was being three issues too early.

COMING UP: Young Timmy in the yellow cape.

Reversals and Recognitions

After I posted my “Plotting Made Simple!” flow chart this week, author Kimberly Marcus emailed me to ask what the different shadings for the arrows mean. So here’s more of my workshop from last weekend’s SCBWI New England conference.

In thinking about what makes up a plot twist, I went back to one of our earliest literary critics: Aristotle in the Poetics. He wrote, according to one translator:

the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy—Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes—are parts of the plot. . . . A Complex action is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both.

As I see it, Reversal is when your protagonist’s external situation changes. Suddenly he’s under arrest, or he’s been turned into a mouse, or he’s being mistaken for the President’s grandson. Reversals can be good for the protagonist, but they’re most exciting when his situation suddenly gets worse.

Recognition is when your protagonist’s internal situation changes. She sees herself, or other people, or the situation, or the world, in a new way. Those Recognitions grow out of the individual personality and situation an author has created, so it’s hard to generalize about them. But they usually link to the themes of the story.

Aristotle’s fave example was Oedipus. He suffers a Reversal when ***SPOILER ALERT*** he tumbles from being the king and hero of Thebes to being a blind outcast. And that Reversal comes about because of his Recognition that he’s killed his father and married his mother.

As that example shows, Reversal and Recognition are most powerful when they’re linked. In Oedipus’s case, Reversal follows Recognition. More often it’s the other way around: suffering a Reversal makes the protagonist realize what’s really going on, or what’s really important.

Take Jane Austen’s Emma, and another dose of SPOILER ALERT. The title character suffers Reversals when Knightley reprimands her, and then when she realizes she was wrong about the objects of Jane and Harriet’s affections—and that produces a Recognition about whom she’s in love with herself.

On my chart, the places where Reversals usually occur have gray arrows, and the places where Recognition usually occur have dotted arrows. But sometimes the arrows should be both gray and dotted.

Comic of the Week

Here are a few panels from Jon White’s comics-form rendering of the Presidential Campaign Press Release of the Month.

Click on the image or here for the full picture.

The cocktail-party-going, gun-toting, falsehood-firing sheep are of course the Mixed Metaphor of the Year.

A Dastardly Plot

Last weekend I was at the SCWBI New England annual conference, co-directed by my writing-group colleagues Greg Fishbone, Kathryn Hulick, and Marilyn Salerno.

At that conference I debuted a new workshop titled “Milestones to an Exciting Plot,” in which I tried to leave behind the three-act structure in favor of something less predictable.