death of Tim Hildebrandt

I think the brothers Hildebrandt, Greg and Tim, defined the look of high fantasy for readers of my generation more than any other illustrators. Like many others, I first encountered their work in the context of Tolkien. Later Greg illustrated an edition of The Wizard of Oz.

Tim Hildebrandt died on 11 June of the effects of diabetes. The brothers' Spiderwebart Gallery website now contains a memorial page with photos from their childhood, as well as many prints.

highlighting Highlights

I didn't mind when the New Teen Titans went vaguely manga for their TV show. After all, I'd read that comic book during the George Perez years of the 1980s, and no animation studio in Asia could replicate his artwork 20 frames a second.

Nor did I mind the new, vaguely manga look for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a few years ago, or this week's news that their TV look will change a little bit more. After all, they always had a Japanese inflection.

But I was a little taken aback by this year's model of Goofus and Gallant from Highlights for Children, that waiting-room staple. They've looked about the same since my early childhood. The magazine revamped the pair when it switched to a full-color interior, but their basic style remained: realistic pencil sketching, timeless clothing, whitest boys in America. Samples are preserved at Fark.com.

So I checked out the Highlights website. I was pleased to see that, despite the new stylist, Goofus still doesn't comb his hair. That gave me courage to try out the choose-your-own-very-mild-adventure pages for G&G. It felt like being one of those cartoon characters with a little devil on one shoulder and a little angel on the other. I can therefore report that Gallant comes off as even more of a prig. All is well.

This week the Boston Globe ran a story about Highlights on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary and (so the magazine says) billionth copy. The August issue will explain the concept of a billion this way: "If Goofus stacked a billion children on his shoulders, they would reach the moon, wrap around the moon 11 times, stretch back to the earth, wrap around the earth five times, and there would be enough kids left over for 34,944 Little League teams." But where could we possibly find a billion kids stupid enough to trust Goofus to hold them up?

I understand that Highlights is narrowing its target audience, no longer aiming for the upper-elementary grades at all. This revamp of G&G as cuter may be part of that strategy.

"Tin Soldier" rejection letter

Dear Mr. Andersen:

Thank you for sharing your manuscript of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" with us. We apologize for any delay in responding, but we receive a large volume of submissions every week. Unfortunately, our editors has decided that this project is not right for us now.

The premise of "Tin Soldier" is a strong one, as the Toy Story movies have shown. The text offers many illustration opportunities--we especially like the scene with the rat customs officer in the sewer. Though the main character seems to have few facial expressions, we feel that a skilled artist could find ways to express a variety of moods. It's also refreshing to see that, although your protagonist is missing a leg, the story does not revolve around "fixing" that situation.

That said, we feel the story would leave young readers with many serious questions and concerns, producing a less than satisfying experience for families. The main character is essentially passive, and the paper ballerina does little to make herself interesting. The action seems to be driven by the imp's motiveless mischief rather than arising from the little soldier's desires.

We always like our books to leave young readers with a sense of hope. The return of the soldier through the fish does that, outlandish as the coincidence may be, but we don't see how most children will maintain that hope after both the soldier and ballerina are burned in the stove. Especially when the soldier is thrown into that fire by a child for "no reason." We suspect that you meant the molten tin heart to symbolize the survival of the soldier's love. However, we don't think that children would find that a reassuring conclusion.

As you know, different publishers have different needs. We wish you every success in placing this project elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Early reader turns precocious reviewer

CNN's website offers the opinions of guest reviewer Andrew Oglesby on five recent picture books. Andrew is six. Something tells me school has been out in Atlanta long enough for Andrew's mother to be eager to find something for him to do.

Here are short selections from each of Andrew's reviews, showing what he looks for in a picture book, at least until he turns seven:

"I really like the part where the grape smells his armpits."

"This is an outstanding book. The author who made this was wise."

"I liked three of the poems. . . . I liked those because they were short."

"The best part is how the rooster followed him and how he said 'How boring!' I just think that's funny. I don't know the reason, but I just think it's funny."

"This book is amazing because the funny part is the poop, poop, poop."

Overall, Andrew's opinions put me in mind of something I heard at a conference from reading specialist Tony Stead. The teachers he'd polled thought the most important ingredient in a picture book was a valuable lesson about life. The kids thought the most important ingredient was humor. Their sort of humor.

On the hunt for girl detectives

CLUES, a scholarly journal devoted to detective fiction in all its forms, has announced plans for an issue on "the Girl Sleuth." See the call for papers at the Children's Literature Association wikisite.

Stories about female detectives have been marketed to young readers for over a century. The Old Sleuth, one of the most popular dime-novel detectives, had an assistant named Maggie Everett, who specialized in trailing criminals; in case she was attacked, she carried a club in her purse. Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives, went further: she used pistols and a knife in her own 1892 adventure. These and other dime-novel female detectives were all adults, as far as I can tell.

The creation of the girl detective, like that of the boy detective, seems to have come in the early twentieth century. It probably started with one-offs in standard girls' series, like Marion Marlowe's Skill; or A Week as a Private Detective, by "Grace Shirley" in 1900. One pioneer in writing series about teenaged "girl sleuths" was L. Frank Baum, who published Mary Louise under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne in 1916. That book's second protagonist, Josie O'Gorman, is a policeman's daughter who goes undercover. Toward the end we read:

"It's good to see you again, Josie," said O'Gorman, as they seated themselves on the bench. "How do you like being a sleuth?"

"Really, Daddy," she replied, "it has been no end of a lark. I'm dead sick of washing other folks' dishes, I confess, but the fun I've had has more than made up for the hard work. . . . I'm patting myself on the back, Dad, because you trained me and I want to prove myself a credit to your training."

Despite not being a WASP, Josie grew increasingly important in the Mary Louise series. Under second writer Emma Speed Sampson, she took it over entirely.

In 1917 Baum even referred to the young heroines of The Lost Princess of Oz as "girl detectives." That book's not really a mystery, but I had to say something in this entry about fantasy, hadn't I?

Click on the thumbnail cover of Old Sleuth Weekly above for a bigger, better picture of "Wild Myra" punching out kidnappers about 1910. It comes from the Stanford University library's online exhibit of dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and popular literature of other currency, which is well worth a browse. The University of Minnesota library offers a checklist of girls' series.

A wizard from a Barron: The Lost Years of Merlin

T. A. Barron's The Lost Years of Merlin is in one way a radical addition to modern Arthurian literature. In both traditional and modern versions of the Camelot myth, as in The Sword in the Stone or even Over Sea, Under Stone [ooh, I told!], Merlin is the mentor figure. Arthur or, once his story got told, various young knights were the heroes.

But Barron (an American inspired by Wales, like Lloyd Alexander) reimagines Merlin as the young hero in his own coming-of-age saga. The result is more than serviceable high fantasy, but I'm not sure why besides the Merlin "brand name" it has to be tied to Camelot.

Some reviewers have said that the Lost Years starts slowly. I think it starts fine, but then it starts again, and again.
Usually a novel should begin when the protagonist's life changes in a major way. Thus, for example, Franny Billingsley's The Folk Keeper starts when its main character arrives on an island to take a new job. Of course, that gives the author the challenge of filling us in on the character's previous life, but it's inherently dramatic.

Lost Years has, by my count, not one but four moments when a sudden and drastic change comes on the hero:

• Prologue: Young Emrys finds himself washed up on a strange shore. He can't remember anything of his past, and he knows his life will never be the same again.
• Chapter 2 (or, rather, II): Emrys discovers that he has untold magical powers, and is sure his life will never be the same again.
• Chapter VI: Having responded to a bully with magical fire and then tried to save the other boy from it, Emrys wakes up blind, haunted by the memory, and certain that his life will never be the same again.
• Chapter VIII: Emrys discovers that he has the gift of second sight, restoring his independence and proving once and for all that his life will never be the same again.

How to train your metaphors

After taking in an audiobook of How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell (already optioned by DreamWorks, apparently because it's Shrek-like), I felt a pressing need to hunt down a list of bad metaphors I'd once read. And I found them at Funny2.com: a whole page of Questionable Analogies. Some samples:

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center. (Russell Beland, Springfield)

His fountain pen was so expensive it looked as if someone had grabbed the pope, turned him upside down and started writing with the tip of his big pointy hat. (Jeffrey Carl, Richmond)

He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose. (unknown)

Sometimes some of these lines are spread 'round the 'net as examples of poor student writing--evidence for each generation's smug belief that today's students are vastly worse than themselves. But it’s obvious that the authors of the lines were trying to create bad metaphors. If students had created them, they'd be signs of the ability to write, or at least to distinguish bad writing when it really matters. But in fact internal evidence suggests that Washington Post readers created many of these lines for the paper’s “Style International” column, retired in 1999.

What made me wish to seek deliberately bad metaphors as avidly as I wish to stop the Four Tops’ version of “Macarthur Park” from playing in the back of my brain? That Dragon book. This is a comic fantasy in exaggerated, crowd-pleasing style. (Well, boy-pleasing; there are no girls to be found.) It’s supposed to be told in the voice of an aged Viking warrior looking back on his youth.

Yet How to Train Your Dragon tells us that the glowworms illuminating a cavern of sleeping dragons resembled an array of low-wattage light bulbs. Apparently this book's Vikings not only made it to North America before Christopher Columbus, but they also developed light bulbs before Thomas Edison.

Metaphors don't just float in empty space like a bubble. They float in empty space like a GPS satellite, part of an interlaced system of imagery. They help to establish the mood, tone, and setting of stories. The two things that a metaphor compares (technically, the “tenor” and the “burden,” though I don’t recall which is which) have to resemble each other in a crucial way. But they should also fit with the story’s overall milieu. Otherwise, the metaphor stands out like bullet on a birthday cake and undercuts the story's verisimilitude.

So now I wish to cleanse my palate with a generous gulp of good metaphors. Luckily, I have P. G. Wodehouse's The Mating Season on my iPod. Wodehouse novels are an excellent place to start a simile hunt. But of course they're an excellent place for a great many things.

My teenaged spy adventure

The Ian Fleming estate continues its grandiose plan to conquer the world [have they learned nothing from those books?] with the Young James Bond franchise. This month the second book by Charlie Higson rolls out in the USA. There's also the Young Bond website, and promises of graphic novels in 2008. All of which begs two questions.

First, wasn't James Bond fairly adolescent already?

And second, considering all the technical gadgets that today's teenagers have at their fingertips, wouldn't the most advanced technology of the period when young James was at Eton seem as slow and frustrating as, say, those thrilling scuba sequences in Thunderball?

My own teenaged spy novel would harness the latest scientific discoveries:

"Gosh, Terry! How are we ever going to get out of here? That guard's guarding us like a...well, like a guard!"

"Let me think, Chris. Let me think. We need some way to distract her for up to thirty seconds. I have my Swiss Army knife with two blades, a file, and an eighth-inch drill. What do you have in your backpack?"

"Just a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and some Mentos."

"Darn. Is that all?"

"Nothing but a paper clip."

"Why didn't you mention that in the first place? I saw something on the Internet..."

Check out the video and complete instructions at EepyBird. Thanks to Jerry Bell for the link.

New launch for Ozoplaning

Hungry Tiger Press has announced that it will launch a new edition of Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, the last Oz novel that Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote for Reilly & Lee. That book was first published in 1939, when the publisher knew that MGM was about to release its big-budget Judy Garland movie. Thompson was therefore under pressure to deliver a story that took off from the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz but was new and exciting. The result looks both back and forward. Thompson chose her heroes from the characters whom Baum had invented for Wizard, but then took them into the stratosphere on rocket-powered balloon-levitated magic Ozoplanes. (No, the machines don't make any more sense when you read the book.)

One great quality of past Hungry Tiger Press Oz titles and other latter-day Oz books designed by David Maxine is that they were the first to replicate the "look and feel" of the Reilly & Lee series. The typeface, layout, and trim size reflect the originals--though often with thoughtful variations. That makes nearly the whole series fit together well on a shelf.

In this case, however, the Tiger is roaring about "a whole new look for the classic Oz books!" Not just the out-of-the-world cover by Eisner Award-winner Eric Shanower, but a bigger trim size--with bigger John R. Neill illustrations inside. So this Ozoplaning will not fit with the Reilly & Lee Oz books, or others on that model. What's the flight plan here?

The answer seems to appear in this interview with Eric Shanower at Comic.con. (Thanks to Eric Gjovaag for the alert.) Eric S. states, "I’ll be doing covers for new editions of some of the Oz books from Hungry Tiger Press." The plurals in that sentence hint that there are more Oz reissues ready to take off--and they will, I presume, fit well on a shelf with each other.

Cheesiness in Philadelphia

Geno's Steaks of Philadelphia, which will always be thirty years behind cheesesteak originator Pat's King of Steaks, is getting press this month for posting a sign that says, as the Associated Press image shows:

This Is
AMERICA
When Ordering
"Speak English"

I can't help hoping that people who proclaim themselves guardians of the language would use correct punctuation.