Elections Have Consequences—Except Under OIP Derangement Syndrome

President Barack Obama’s opponents continues to try to apply double standards to him, though it’s not always clear when that’s the result of OIP Derangement Syndrome and when it’s simply hypocritical audacity.

Hedrick Hertzberg noted one example in the New Yorker this month:

In 2004, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, conservatism’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, congratulated President [George W.] Bush for “what by any measure is a decisive mandate for a second term” and exulted, “Mr. Bush has been given the kind of mandate that few politicians are ever fortunate enough to receive.”

This year, examining similar numbers with different labels, the Journal came up with a sterner interpretation. “President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times,” its editorial announced. Also:

Mr. Obama will now have to govern the America he so relentlessly sought to divide—and without a mandate beyond the powers of the Presidency. Democrats will hold the Senate, perhaps with an additional seat or two. But Republicans held the House comfortably, so their agenda was hardly repudiated. . . . Speaker John Boehner can negotiate knowing he has as much of a mandate as the President.

In fact, about a million more Americans voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republican ones. There will be more Democrats in the House in the next term. Boehner can count those votes and knows what a thin “mandate” he supposedly has.

Back in 2004, George W. Bush boasted at his first post-election press conference, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Bush put much of that “political capital” into partially privatizing Social Security, though his proposals before the election had been vague and his election narrow. Bush’s initiative was immediately unpopular and dead by spring.

In contrast, President Obama ran on a clear platform of higher taxes on income over $250,000 in order to preserve government services for the whole population. Mitt Romney offered a very different tax policy, though he later reversed himself to something more vague. Despite Romney’s feeble complaints that the Obama campaign was about little things, that difference over taxes was a big thing all along. It was part of the nation’s choice.

Now Republicans in Washington are acting shocked, shocked that President Obama is negotiating over the budget from the basis of the platform that he campaigned on and that Americans strongly voted for. Ezra Klein summarized the White House position for the Washington Post:

Republicans are frustrated at the new Obama they’re facing: The Obama who refuses to negotiate with himself.

That’s what you’re really seeing in this “proposal.” Previously, Obama’s pattern had been to offer plans that roughly tracked where he thought the compromise should end up. The White House’s belief was that by being solicitous in their policy proposals, they would win goodwill on the other side, and even if they didn’t, the media would side with them, realizing they’d sought compromise and been rebuffed. They don’t believe that anymore.

Republicans in Congress have given us very little reason to expect that they’ll be reasonable negotiators. This pretended surprise is just another sign that they don’t want to acknowledge the election results. They don’t want to respect this President or American voters.

Explore the graph above, showing U.S. top tax rates over time, at Visualizing Economics.

Two Parallel Channels for Kids’ Comics

From Graphic Novel Reporter’s interview with Scott Robins, coeditor with Snow Wildsmith of A Parent’s Guide to the Best Kids’ Comics, on the question of judging what’s appropriate reading for different ages:

Any kind of art that has a visual component will be scrutinized because of its immediacy. Looking at a page of comics is more in-your-face than reading a page of prose. This immediacy often causes people to make grand generalizations about comics, usually about the levels of sex and violence. Also, comics have struggled with being perceived as less literary and of lower educational value, which is a huge factor when discussing reading and books for children. . . .

Traditional children’s book publishers are putting out the bulk of comics and graphic novels for kids now. Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Candlewick, and others have decades of experience publishing books FOR kids and know what’s appropriate and what’s not. . . .

we came to the realization of how little superhero material is appropriate for kids and readily available for people to buy. DC and Marvel don’t really have a strong commitment to creating comics for kids and what they do publish doesn’t stay in print.

Children’s comics remains an area of obvious disjuncture between the comics publishing industry (meaning the specialized creators, publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and journalists) and mainstream book publishing (which has its own publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and journalists). The two businesses are parallel, which by analogy means they’ll never meet.

It’s not that bad, but last year I moderated a panel on which Gareth Hinds, adapter of Beowulf, King Lear, and other classics, talked about choosing the children’s publisher Candlewick to republish his work because he saw a choice between getting those books into schools and libraries getting them into comics shops. He knew he couldn’t have both.

I’ve heard the current proprietor of my favorite comics shop as a teen talk about buying the color Bone volumes from a discount bookstore because he didn’t have a Scholastic sales rep to order from. They were so hot he needed them right away and couldn’t afford the time to set up a new business relationship.

The distribution issues have gotten better as businesses realize there’s money to be made in the other channel. I’m guessing most of the flexibility comes from middle men (distributors) rather than the publishers or stores. But that’s what those distributors are for.

Oz, the Small and Meek

At Slate, Aisha Harris raised some serious questions about Sam Raimi’s upcoming movie Oz, the Great and Powerful, based on the most recent online trailer:

“You are here at last, and the prophecy shall be fulfilled,” says one witch. “I’ve waited for you to come and set things right,” says another. Is Oz slipping into an old-fashioned story about women needing a great male savior? Why are all these women with their own supernatural powers waiting around for an ordinary guy to come along and save them all?

L. Frank Baum’s original Oz books were published during the peak of the suffragette movement, and they were quite progressive in their depictions of a young female hero. Dorothy Gale, who ultimately reveals the man behind the curtain as the fraud that he is, was inspired by pioneer women and has been championed by some as the “first feminist role model.”

All that’s true. Not only was Dorothy the main protagonist of the Oz series, but the most powerful rulers in Oz were Ozma and Glinda.

I think Harris overstated her case, however, when she went on to say: “The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz stayed impressively true to this vision, giving us Judy Garland as an independent, curious young woman who aids a group of hapless men on their quest to see the wizard.” No, Judy Garland plays a breathy, largely reactive adolescent who decides she should never leave her own backyard to find her heart’s desire. The movie turned Dorothy’s happenstance visit to Oz from an adventure to a lesson about the dangers of running away, and thus into a punishment. In contrast, we next see Baum’s Dorothy on a voyage to Australia. Now that’s independent and curious.

But back to the Wizard. The whole point of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is that “Oz, the great and terrible” (the book’s words) is a humbug. And that’s clearly part of Raimi’s story as well. When a movie sets up a character as “Great and Powerful” in the title, we know that has to be ironic or a challenge. Otherwise, there’d be no place for the story to go, nothing to reveal.

Back in July, the director laid out the main character arc:

As for the plot itself, everything is centered around [James] Franco’s Wizard, who is kind of a dick. “It’s the story of a selfish man, who’s a little bit of a lothario, a little bit of a cad.” Oz is “a land of second chances” for the Wizard, who’s also redeemed by the love of Glinda, the Good Witch. “It’s how he became ensconced in the Emerald City,” said Raimi. “By the time this picture ends, the audience has one interpretation of how it all came to be [...] how he became the protector of that great city.”

The phrase “love of Glinda” gives me pause because the Good Sorceress has no—needs no—love interest in the books. But will this movie’s Glinda offer Oz romantic love, or does he merely assume so? Does he set out to show himself protecting Oz just to impress Glinda and become a bigger, better man along the way? We’ll see next year.

The Life Behind A Wrinkle in Time

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review asked Anne Lamott, “What book changed your life?” And she answered:

“A Wrinkle in Time” saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was 8 years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it — in the plot, the people and the emotional truth of their experience. This place was never a good match for me, but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.

The book never grabbed me that way, but it spoke deeply to many readers. Cynthia Zarin’s 2004 profile of Madeleine L’Engle included the author’s response to their passion:

One evening, while we were having supper together, I asked L’Engle about her relationship with her readers. “It scares me shitless!” she said. “Because it’s a responsibility. Over time, someone reads your book, and something happens. People want intimacy, and I have a terrible time saying no.” When people tell her, “You’ve helped me grow up, you’re my mother,” she tends to brush it off: her job, as she sees it, is to write stories, not to be known.

That warts-and-all profile appears to be a touchstone for many of the interviews in Listening for Madeleine, Leonard Marcus’s new oral history of L’Engle. The Book Reporter says of the book:

Most interesting are the voices from L’Engle’s childhood, through whom we learn about her distant relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and about her tendency to live her life through her imagination rather than through social relationships—more than one interviewee describes L’Engle as aloof or standoffish compared to her peers. Marcus seems to suggest that her lonely childhood and longing for her dad contributed to the number of absent fathers in her work, most notably Meg’s quest to rescue her father in A Wrinkle in Time.

One of those interviews, with a L’Engle cousin, is available from Macmillan. Publishers Weekly published three from colleagues. Kirkus noted in its review:

An actor by training, L’Engle consciously constructed her own public persona, transforming her biography and history into “mythic material,” as with the ever-expanding number of rejections she received for A Wrinkle in Time.

The Oz and Ends take on that legend back here.

Never Work with Children or Animals

The second installment of Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolf’s Li’l Gotham digital comics appeared this month, pegged to Thanksgiving. It established that Bruce Wayne is the Batman in this version of the mythos. (I thought the first installment was ambiguous on that question.)

This story also shows Nightwing’s chest stripe as blue, Barbara Gordon in a wheelchair, and Cassandra Cain in existence. In other words, Li’l Gotham definitely takes off of the DC Universe that was the publisher’s main “continuity” until last year.

But this is also a universe in which the entire “Bat family” (except, of course, for Stephanie Brown) gathers for an uninterrupted Thanksgiving dinner. Damian has his little friend Colin over, though in the comics Damian was keeping that comradeship a secret. Even Wayne family black sheep Jason Todd is there, though no one has saved him a seat.

Li’l Gotham thus takes place in a world akin to a lot of Bat-family fanfiction, in which reconciliation, togetherness, and cuteness are more important than that usual staple of superhero comics, kicking other people in the face. In both this episode and last month’s Halloween tale, all the action happens early, followed by many more pages of what we’d normally consider comic relief and a festive dinner at the climax.

Both stories also revolve around Damian Wayne, but not the troubled Damian of the main comics. In the current DC Universe, he deliberately killed one of the bat-cave’s bats and had trouble warming up to the Great Dane that his father bought him. In contrast, many fans had decided, based on one Grant Morrison story showing a possible future Damian with a cat he’d named Alfred, that Damian loves kittens. He really, really loves kittens. And the Li’l Gotham Damian gets to lead a parade of turkeys and bring one home with him and name it Jerry and keep it for his very own.

Those fan-created stories and illustrations aren’t necessarily any worse than the traditional type, including some officially published. But resolving foundational conflicts doesn’t leave much space for the next story, as serial publishers desire. And making everyone happy can wash out the distinctiveness of characters. Once Jason is back at Wayne Manor, what’s distinct about him? Once Damian actually has a pal his own age to invite over and trade baseball cards with, is he Damian anymore?

The Post-Election Numbers of OIP Derangement Syndrome

President Barack Obama won reelection with 332 Electoral College votes, more than 64 million actual votes, and 50.7% of the popular vote to his main opponent’s 47.5%. Those numbers and margins are higher than the last time a President was reelected, in 2004. In fact, more Americans voted for President Obama than for any other Presidential candidate except himself in 2008, and his popular-vote total might actually go up as large coastal states finish their counts.

But some people with OIP Derangement Syndrome can’t accept that reality.

In Maine, the Portland Press Herald reported, Republican party chair Charlie Webster alleged a particular sort of voter fraud:

“In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day,” he said. “Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in (these) towns knows anyone who’s black. . . .”

When [TV host] Carrigan pressed Webster on where it happened, Webster provided no specifics or proof of his claims, but said the party would investigate further.

When asked about the issue in an interview Wednesday with the Portland Press Herald, Webster again refused to provide specifics.

But Webster did inflate his figure to “hundreds” before apologizing under criticism:

“my comments were made without proof of wrongdoing and they had the unintended consequence of casting aspersions on an entire group of Americans.”

We must note that the Obama-Biden ticket won the state of Maine in both 2008 and 2012 by over 100,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia newspapers reported, Republican House Speaker Sam Smith complained, “I was told that 90 percent of the precincts in Philadelphia County turned out over 90 percent of voters. . . . It’s questionable.” The newspapers pointed out that Smith’s complaint was more than questionable; with Philadelphia showing a 60% turnout overall, Smith’s numbers were mathematically impossible. The Obama-Biden ticket won the state of Pennsylvania by over a quarter-million votes.

Before the election, Dean Chambers made a small name for himself by “unskewing” standard polls with a higher proportion of Republican voters. The polls in aggregate turned out to be right, and his website wrong. So after the election Chambers returned with a new website alleging voter fraud in four swing states, as Slate reported. All four of those states have Republican governors and legislative chambers that made a priority of voter fraud in this election year. Yet he suggests that nearly half a million fraudulent votes in those states swayed the election.

And his evidence? “Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes.” As Slate noted, such local results are no surprise: 57 Philadelphia precincts (out of more than 1,600 in the city) gave McCain no votes in 2008. Furthermore, a zero vote count is the easiest type of fraud to expose: Chambers and his fellow sufferers simply have to find one person claiming to have voted for the Republican ticket in those precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer went looking for such a person by starting with the very few people registered as Republican in those wards. And what did they find?

James Norris, 19, who lives down the street, is listed as a Republican in city data. But he said he’s a Democrat and voted for Obama because he thinks the president will help the middle class.

A few blocks away, Eric Sapp, a 42-year-old chef, looked skeptical when told that city data had him listed as a registered Republican. “I got to check on that,” said Sapp, who voted for Obama. . . .

Three of the 15th’s registered Republicans were listed as living in the same apartment, but the tenant there said he had never heard of them. The addresses of several others could not be found.

Will Chambers investigate the possibility of Republican Party registration fraud? I doubt it. OIP Derangement Syndrome doesn’t allow for that sort of rational thinking.

Pullman on “your appalling self-consciousness”

More from the Mother Jones interview with Philip Pullman:

The central moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they sort of come to after they've eaten the fruit and they realize they’re naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what had happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.” [Laughs.] Actually, I don’t think that was Joyce’s motive—but a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around—all that kind of stuff.

When I first started writing, I tried to do that sort of thing, but I realized that there was a limited value in that. And it also made it difficult to read, and I didn’t really want my books difficult to read. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren’t interested in the least about your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

This isn’t the only Christian allusion that Pullman drops in this interview—though he also describes himself in this interview as an agnostic and is notorious in some self-conscious circles for portraying organized religion in a harsh light. Which shows you can take the vicar’s grandson out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of him.

Of course, Pullman has other levels of belief:

The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me. A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story—and it’s my job to attend to what it wants to do. When I tell the story of “Cinderella,” the sprite does not want me to make it into an allegory of the fall of communism. The sprite would be unhappy if I did that. I can’t put it any more clearly than that because it’s a strange area and I’m not very sure about it myself. But I’m perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.

An almost supernatural way of divorcing his authorial consciousness from the act of storytelling.

Baum Quotations, Real and Imagined

Jared Davis of the Royal Blog of Oz recently asked about a quotation that many websites and a few books attribute to L. Frank Baum:

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

None of those sites and books identifies any specific book or article as a source. The idiom “feel blue” was current in the late 1800s, so Baum could have said this. But that’s not good enough. People making a historical claim have the responsibility to provide evidence for it, not shift the burden of proof to skeptics to disprove the claim.

In this case, the quotation doesn’t ring bells with any of us older Oz fans who imbibed our knowledge in past decades, and since close to 99% of Baum’s surviving writing was published before 1920, it would be unusual for a quotable line to be so unfamiliar. I checked Google Books and saw that the “feel blue” saying appeared in books through about 2005 without attribution, and with Baum’s name attached only since 2009.

The internet is a marvelous hothouse for false quotations. As soon as a quote appears on one website, it gets picked up and spread around on others. And soon someone doing a search for a quotation’s source will see what looks like a critical mass of confirmation. Even this page could look like further evidence.

I checked out Goodreads’ page of Baum quotations, and it’s a big mix. There are many quotations from Baum’s books. But there are also many quotations from the 1939 MGM movie misattributed to Baum:

• “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
• “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think?”
• “Nobody gets in to see the Wizard. Not nobody.”
• “It’s so kind of you to want to visit me in my loneliness.”
• “Going so soon? I wouldn’t hear of it. Why my little party’s just beginning.”
• “My world, my world... How can such a good little girl like you destroy all of my beautiful wickedness?” [Actually, that’s even a misquote of the movie line: “Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”]
• “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
• “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” [Which makes no sense at all.]
• “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow.”
• “Now I know I’ve got a heart because it’s breaking.”

Lines original to the screenplay should probably be credited to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, the screenwriters. Even that attribution might be questionable, however, since several other writers also worked on the movie, the last being John Lee Mahin.

In fact, the one person losing the most credit to Baum at Goodreads is probably E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote the movie’s lyrics and the Wizard’s speech as he presents the gifts to Dorothy’s companions. Harburg deserves credit for:

• “If I [only] had a heart…”
• “Lions and tigers, and bears, oh my!”
• “Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ‘ape’ in apricot?”
• “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.”
• “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”

The screenwriters adapted some of Baum’s dialogue closely. But even on Goodreads people remember the movie version:

“Oh – You’re a very bad man!"

“Oh, no, my dear. I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad Wizard.”

Baum’s original exchange was:

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

Then there are oddities in the list like this one, which has a grammatical error of agreement in the first sentence:

“People would rather live in homes regardless of its grayness. There is no place like home.”

Baum actually had Dorothy say:

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

Of course, the final line predates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by decades. It comes from John Howard Payne’s song “Home, Sweet Home!” (1823).

Here’s another commonly seen quotation:

“Never give up. No one knows what’s going to happen next.”

In The Patchwork Girl of Oz Dorothy really bucks up the moody young protagonist this way:

“Never give up, Ojo,” advised Dorothy. “No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”

Finally, there’s a platitude that I can easily imagine someone today writing and then attaching to Baum to make the sentiment seem more authoritative:

“Stunt, dwarf, or destroy the imagination of a child, and you have taken away its chances of success in life. Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old.”

But Baum actually said that in a 1909 interview with a magazine called The Advance.

The Takedown

At Publishers Weekly’s PWxyz blog, Peter Brantley highlighted some new Republican thinking about copyright law that was quickly squelched by old Republican thinking:

On Friday, 16 November, the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) released an amazingly liberal document proposing deep and substantive reforms in U.S. copyright law. Within 24 hours, on Saturday, 17 November, the report had been pulled from the House website and an email apology for its “inadequate” vetting had been flung out on the net. . . .

The report details four areas of potential reform: 1). Statutory Damages. “Copyright awards were meant to make the copyright holder whole – they were not supposed to be punitive. Reforming this process is an important element of federal tort reform, which unlike other forms of tort reform is clearly within the federal prerogative.”

2). Expansion of Fair Use. “Right now, it’s somewhat arbitrary as to what is legally fair use based upon judicially created categories.”

3). Punish false copyright claims. “Because there is minimal or nearly non-existent punishment for bogus copyright claims today, false takedown requests are common and have a chilling effect upon legitimate speech.”

And, 4). Limit copyright terms and create disincentives for renewal. The report elucidates one possible path, with an initial 12 year copyright award period and renewable elective terms that are fee-based, with a maximum cliff of 46 years protection. This last proposal is actually currently infeasible in an international context, which is based on life of the author plus 50 years (life+50) for most non-corporate works.

I suspect the report was more “libertarian” than “liberal,” though there’s significant overlap between those terms. It proposed to dial back government-backed legal advantages for copyright owners. (For some radical libertarians, governments shouldn’t be granting patents and copyrights at all.)

The American right is energized by four strains of conservatism: libertarian, social/theocratic, pro-business, and general pro-establishment crankiness. (To put faces on those impulses, consider Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, respectively, at the end of the 2012 Republican primaries.) Sometimes those strains are at odds with each other. This report reflected libertarian thinking. After business lobbies contacted party leaders, the stronger pro-business wing pulled it back.

As for the proposals, I think we’d all benefit from clearer definitions of fair use. I’m not sure point 1 is valid—sometimes damages are supposed to be punitive—but agree with point 3 that false claims should also produce punishments. Point 4 would reduce copyright terms to below what American creators have enjoyed for a century and, as Brantley points out, would go against international agreements. Copyright terms have become irrationally long, but the US can’t decide that point alone.

A Sidekick in the Pants

Sidekicks has a mighty “tween”-looking cover for a book that starts out with a boner.

In fact, teen-sidekick-getting-an-erection was the starting-point for novelist Jack D. Ferraiolo, as he explained on his blog:

I was a full-fledged Batman freak... and being that this was the early eighties (and the Batman comics from the 70s were still pretty available), the DC writers/artists were continuing the process of aging Robin up. I remember…looking at a comic of a late teen/early 20’s Robin and thinking, “Man, he should really cover up.” Here he is fighting hardened criminals – thugs, thieves, murderers – and he's wearing the tiniest pair of green jockey shorts imaginable. And no one mentions it?  I mean, not one street tough has something to say about Robin’s itty-bitty bikini bottoms? Especially with all those high kicks he was throwing around?

Actually, Robin’s friends had been calling him “Shortpants” for years by then. Marv Wolfman and George Pérez acknowledged the oddity of an eighteen-year-old in trunks as they discussed the early New Teen Titans. Mention of Dick Grayson’s bare legs was forbidden only for villains and, of course, Bruce Wayne.

Then came Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and more emphasis on realism/grittiness in superhero comics. In 2007, even DC addressed the erection question in Nightwing Annual, #2, which shows a late-teens Robin wishing for a longer cape and a minute to compose himself after getting too close to Batgirl.

Ferraiolo’s prose novel examines the plight of the adolescent sidekick through the voice of Bright Boy, ward of Phantom Justice. Their relationship is obviously modeled on that of Batman and Robin. As a dark-caped crimefighter, Phantom Justice says, “Good soldier”; he talks about “embracing the night” but can’t connect with anyone emotionally. There’s even an Alfred figure, a butler and voice of common sense.

However, in this world some people have been born with extra strength, speed, and/or intelligence. Phantom Justice and Bright Boy aren’t “badass normal” like Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. They’re “plus-plus.” And while their world has mad scientists with amazing inventions, there’s no Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, or Spectre to keep them from the top of the pecking order.

Reviewers obviously new to the superhero genre seem struck by the drastic reversals built into the plot, but those are common in adventure comics. What seems fresh to me is the realistic dialogue between the two adolescents feeling their way into a complicated love affair. On the downside, there are pages and pages of exposition.

I thought the biggest flaw in Sidekicks is that it ends with no “price of fantasy,” as Ellen Howard has termed it. At the start of the book, protagonist Scott feels like a nobody in high school and an embarrassment in the media—those are the costs of being a superpowered hero. (In addition, Scott’s parents died in an accident when he was little, but—unlike the ache that drives the Harry Potter books, even though Harry never knew his parents—we don’t feel that loss.)

At the end of Sidekicks [and that means SPOILERS AHEAD], Scott has solved the problems that bothered him at the start. He’s got a girlfriend, and pals, and cooler clothes, and public adultation, and freakin’ superpowers. For a while it looks like he has to pay a big price—he thinks two of the people he loves have died. But everyone turns out okay in various futuristic ways. The only person he really loses is someone whom he could never warm up to. Scott even manages to come out on top of the Oedipal conflict. It’s total wish-fulfillment with very little cost. [End of SPOILERS] But, as with the plot reversals, that probably won’t look like a flaw to teen readers not yet jaded about this genre.

Which brings me back to that cover. Amulet designer Chad Beckerman has shown how it went through a lot of changes, starting with a more realistic close-up of the main character (wearing braces, though I don’t think they’re mentioned in the book) before ultimately ending up with the art above. One intermediate version appears to the left. Twice, Beckerman writes, the design sketches had “too much crotch.” Yet “too much crotch” is exactly where the story starts.

Ferraiolo writes that he’s heard some criticism (from adults) and lost some library speaking gigs because people thought the novel was inappropriate for younger readers. I think the story’s quite appropriate for young adolescents. But the final cover’s cartoony art, and our culture’s assumption that all superhero stories are appropriate for kids, may suggest to some adults that this is a book for the middle grades.