Looking at Picture Books from a Comics Vantage Point

Folks outside the comic-book world (as I was myself when I started Oz and Ends) probably don't grasp the full implications of the name of J. Caleb Mozzocco's blog, Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

Wednesday is when new comic books go on sale, just as the music industry has seized on Tuesdays to release new albums and the movie industry counts down the days to Friday. Some industry analysts have suggested that book publishers should calls dibs on some other day of the week in order to focus attention on their projects, but that seems unlikely.

Moving on, therefore, in a couple of blog postings Mozzocco noted some picture books that use some of the basic storytelling techniques of comics. First, Noah's Ark, by Peter Spier, published in 1977 and winner of the Caldecott Medal the following year. Mozzocco writes:

Noah's Ark falls into that overlap of the comics and children's books circles on a hypothetical Venn diagram. . . . whatever Spier, Doubleday or Noah's Ark itself may think, it's a book told in sequential images, most of its pages divided into various grid shapes like a comic book page (there are no square blank ink borders around the "panels," but they're set apart from one another with gutters of white space.

That multitude of images in front of the eye at once is indeed one way comics differentiate themselves from traditional picture books.

This book doesn't contain any words, however--neither narrative text blocks nor word balloons. That means we don't know how Spier would have treated those words--as part of the art or separate from it. I also don't see sound effects, motion lines, emoticons, or other ways that comics "show the invisible." So Noah's Ark never floats into full comics mode.

Mozzocco also discusses Melanie Watt's Scaredy Squirrel, though on this picture book he spends more time on Scaredy's diagnosis than on the use of multitple images on the same page spread.

(Thanks to Tegan at Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog for the initial link.)

The Blue Fairy Would Be So Proud

From Van Jensen's preview of his comic Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, drawn by Dusty Higgins, to be issued in print this fall by SLG Publishing.

(Link thanks to Comics Ought to Be Good.)

Onion Sauce! Onion Sauce!

In Sunday's Boston Globe, Katherine A. Powers elegantly dissects the two competing annotated editions of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows out now--Seth Lerer's from Norton and Annie Gauger's from the Belknap Press.

And, like a surgical dissection, the patients don't survive the procedure that well. Powers writes:

neither editor seems really at home in the world that gave rise to "The Wind in the Willows." Though they are forever supplying definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary, neither appears to have looked up "metalled," both believing that a "metalled road" has something to do with metal (rather than broken stone).

Lerer, clearly no student of Mrs. Beeton (who recommends onion sauce as the best accompaniment for rabbit dishes), believes that Mole's taunting the rabbits who annoy him with "Onion Sauce! Onion sauce!" is the equivalent of his saying "hogwash," going on to say, apropos of nothing in the story, that "By the nineteenth century, onion-sauce had come to represent the simplicity of home cooking, in contrast to the fancy cuisine of court or the Continent."

For her part, Gauger does not recognize vegetable marrows, once a staple of the British table (alas), speculating that those shown in an illustration by Arthur Rackham could be "water-melon sized cucumbers or giant leeks."

In possibly my favorite part of the book, the animal friends surge forth to retake Toad Hall from the weasels, stoats, and ferrets. Mild-mannered, home-loving Mole, now "black and grim, brandishing his stick," shouts "his awful war-cry, 'A Mole! A Mole!'"--echoing Scottish warriors of yore whose battle cry was their clan name.

For Gauger, however, "This odd war cry resembles one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare's Richard III . . . 'A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!'" This makes no sense at all and, worse, misses a very good joke.

For another complaint that Lerer hasn't done his homework in the field of children's literature, see Perry Nodelman's remarks quoted in this post.

The Best of the Dead End Kids

Last week I noted in passing that Angels with Dirty Faces was the Dead End Kids' finest film. That deserves some elaboration.

The Dead End Kids were young actors assembled for the 1935 Broadway play Dead End. Samuel Goldwyn hired them to play the same characters in his movie version of 1937, and they stayed in Hollywood for decades. The group was billed under a variety of names, depending on the studio where they had a contract: Dead End Kids, Crime School Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids, Bowery Boys. The core ended up being Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey (top and left in the photo above).

The group's best films came early in their career:

1) Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). James Cagney plays a gangster the teens admire, Pat O'Brien his childhood friend who's become a priest, and Humphrey Bogart a lawyer who's cheated Cagney out of his take. It's a moralistic melodrama with fast wisecracks, but Cagney's final scene jolts the whole experience to another level.

2) Dead End (1937). Slice of life in a New York slum, with Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sidney as noble lovers trying to get out. This time the gangster returning to his old neighborhood is played by Humphrey Bogart, and he grabs the movie in a scene when he meets his ex. Another moralistic melodrama, fewer wisecracks. Watch the whole thing at Hulu.com.

3) They Made Me a Criminal (1939). John Garfield plays a boxer fleeing a murder charge who ends up at a ranch for juvenile delinquents. Claude Rains is Garfield's Javert. You can take the kids out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the kids.

In the 1940s the young actors started making quickie formula comedies, like Abbott and Costello but less lovable. Some ended up in the stereotypical child-star cycle: typecast, turning to alcohol or drugs, dying or getting sober, and scrounging out character work in middle age. But one of the six guys above got out of show biz and became a happy and successful California physician.

Where It All Started

And speaking of folks who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, tireless children's book blogger Jen Robinson describes herself as "a native of Lexington, MA (where the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought)."

But the fictional Alvin Ho would differ with that. He says that the "American Revolutionary War" started in Concord, which happens to be where he lives. Partisans of the two towns have been debating that point for nearly two centuries.

What's more, Thérèse, the narrator of Gail Gauthier's The Hero of Ticonderoga, tells us the Americans didn't win at either Lexington or Concord. As a native of Vermont, she counts the first American victory of the war as the Green Mountain Boys' takeover of Fort Ticonderoga across Lake Champlain in New York. Though, to be fair, the provincial militiamen certainly didn't lose on 19 Apr 1775.

My take on the start of the Revolutionary War? December 1774 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And I'm not even from New Hampshire.

Out of Lexington

I first read Scott McCloud’s recollection of being dragged kicking and screaming into superhero-comic fandom by Kurt Busiek in, I believe, his introduction to Busiek’s Astro City: Life in the Big City. Both boys from Lexington, Massachusetts, went on to become award-winning comics creators.

That story appears in more detail in McCloud’s new Zot! collection, which both collects his black-and-white comics published from 1987 to 1991 and serves as a portrait of a comics artist as a young man. I wasn't surprised to see McCloud mention the Million Year Picnic, the same Harvard Square comics shop I used to visit; there weren’t a lot of choices at the time (though back then Newbury Comics was actually a comics store on Newbury Street).

I was surprised to see McCloud drop the name of Christopher Bing, the Caldecott Honor-winning picture book artist. He was the boys’ “slightly older friend,...deadly serious about breaking into the big leagues.” But then I remembered hearing Bing talk about growing up in Lexington, and realized he was about the same age as McCloud, so it made sense for them to be a crowd.

Also in the same little cohort were Ted Dewan, a cartoonist and children's-book illustrator now based in England, and his brother Brian, now a musician and graphic artist.

And I found yet another familiar name: these guys started to come together at the William Diamond Junior High School. Diamond was the teenager whose drum summoned the Lexington militia on 19 Apr 1775, the first day of America's Revolutionary War. Diamond's name has also been adopted by a modern-day youth fife and drum corps.

Robin Sits Out an Anti-Drug Campaign

In the early 1980s, the New Teen Titans was DC Comics's hottest magazine. It had characters in their late teens and very early twenties, and its creators--Marv Wolfman and George Pérez--were addressing serious issues like teenaged runaways.

As a result, the US Department of Education arranged with DC to use the Titans magazine in a drug awareness campaign. Each magazine would contain a very special letter from Nancy Reagan. Education Week announced the first magazine on 4 May 1983, and it was so popular (whether or not it was successful) that two more followed.

Within the DC universe, the Titans had a personal reason to fight illegal drugs. In 1971, Neal Adams and Dennis O'Neil had created a story in the pages of Green Lantern/Green Arrow about Green Arrow's kid sidekick, Speedy, having a heroin habit. A habit that he kicked in a mere two issues, but still it was groundbreaking. In fact, it was so radical that the character's addiction was never mentioned in the Teen Titans magazine of the time, where Speedy also appeared.

Wolfman, who had been an ambitious young writer back then, remembered that story when he and Pérez relaunched the Titans in 1980. Readers asked what had happened to Speedy, as well as to Aqualad, another founding member left out of the new lineup. In 1981, therefore, Wolfman and Carmine Infantino collaborated on a ten-page story called “Reunion,” published in the Best of DC, #18. This quick and rather empty superhero procedural showed Speedy and Aqualad returning to work with the Titans in fighting a drug ring. It established Speedy as a government agent with a special interest in stopping drugs because of his own past.

Thus, it was easy for Wolfman to motivate a series of three drug-awareness stories to be published with government support in 1983. Once again, Speedy returned to the Titans for help taking down drug dealers. The first very special issue had art by Pérez, the second (profiled at Polite Dissent) art by Ross Andru, and the third a script by Joey Cavalieri from Wolfman's plot and art by Adrian Gonzales.

The first issue actually has an interesting structure, profiling young addicts to examine why they got into drugs, and it has that gorgeous Pérez art. The third story shows the younger brother of an addict in the first starting to take drugs himself--implying that a visit from the Titans is actually quite ineffective at discouraging drug use.

In a 1987 interview, Pérez talked about the creation of these stories:

Unfortunately, with the drug books we were dealing with so many committees, it became a much more watered-down book than it was intended to be. Marv's research on real drugs was muted by a lot of editing down. They didn't want to cause blame here, they didn't want parents to feel intimidated there; a lot of groups were kind of cross-pressuring, until the book became a watered-down version of what it was originally intended to be. Had we produced the same story strictly as a DC book, I am sure it would have been a lot more potent--and probably a lot closer to reality than the book ended up being.

And even after those committees approved the scripts, that wasn't the end of the outside pressure on these magazines.

Each special issue had a sponsor that bought lots of copies for distribution to fourth-graders, thus subsidizing the project. Keebler paid for the first, IBM the second, and the American soft drink industry ("The only good white powder from Latin America is sugar!") the third.

And that's why none of these magazine featured Robin, the established leader of the Titans. DC Comics had already licensed exclusive commercial rights to that character to Nabisco. Robin therefore couldn't appear in a magazine associated with Keebler, a competing company.

So, in a last-minute change, the DC staff came up with...the Protector!
In an interview at Titans Tower, Pérez recalled how that worked:

Dave Manak--who was editing that book--whited out the entire costuming on Robin and drew this costume they quickly designed, and renamed him The Protector. So you have The Protector doing all the Robin-type things, like flying the T-jet, and giving all the orders--and who is this guy? Every single pose he's in, that was Robin in the original pose. Anyone who has the original artwork can see all the whiteout on that Protector figure and, if you hold it up to the light, you can see Robin's costume underneath.

Only later, for an edition of Who's Who in the DC Universe, did the company come up with a backstory for the mysterious Protector (curiously giving him the same first name as the boy who replaced Dick Grayson as Robin):

Young high school student Jason Hart watched helplessly as his young cousin, Ted, slowly became a drug addict. . . . He thought that if a family member couldn't talk to Ted, maybe a Batman-type super-hero could. He adopted the guise of the Protector, seeking to help his cousin.

The masquerade backfired, however, when, through a long chain of events, Jason had to pretend to actually be a super-hero, and actually protect his cousin from drug dealers who were looking to exploit Ted.

So far as I know, that "long chain of events" has never been told, and probably never figured out. That Who's Who entry (written after Dick Grayson had given up being Robin to become Nightwing) concludes: "When the story eventually broke, it came to the attention of Nightwing, who rewarded Jason with an honorary membership in the New Teen Titans, and an intensive training course."

The Protector also appeared in a New Teen Titans anti-drug commercial produced by Hanna-Barbara. He was last seen was in a crowd in Infinite Crisis, DC's big crossover event for 2005-06. Nobody knows if he survived. Then again, nobody cares.

But here's one way for the Protector to return. Obviously, he's into protection and public-service announcements. He's got a mostly purple costume with a big bright red triangle on the front. DC could use more gay heroes. I think the Protector's got a future talking to youth about safer sex. Give the character to Judd Winick, creator of Pedro and Me, and let's see what happens!

Your Tax Dollars at Work on Comics

This posting is Oz and Ends's observation of Free Comic Book Day. Last month Publishers Weekly's Comic Week brought news that the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has a website of government-issued comics, free for downloading. These include instructional booklets, hortatory stories, and advice about safety on everything from disposing of chemical waste to surviving nuclear war.

As far as I can tell, the earliest example of a government comic in this collection is a 1918 booklet called The Cartoon Book, designed to sell Liberty Bonds. It collects many drawings from political cartoonists of the era, most of them single panels. But two artists used sequential images, like this.
Other examples cover a broad range of topics:

• Judy Joins the WAVES.
• The Battle of the Energy Drainers, featuring Captain America.
• A Handbook for Auxiliary Fireman, with art by Milt Caniff.
• The Adventures of Ray Cycle, Recycling Superhero: Connecticut Recycles.
• Our Vacation in Ontario.

My favorites are, of course, two of the three very special anti-drug issues of The New Teen Titans from 1983. Tomorrow's weekly Robin will look at corporate influence on these comics, and why the Titans were missing their leader.

As government documents, all these comics are in the public domain, and eminently downloadable. But be warned: the pages have been scanned into TIFF format, so a 36-page color comic fills nearly 100 MB.

Where to Find Finding Oz

Here are two long interviews with Evan Schwartz, author of Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story--

• at Blair Frodelius's Daily Ozmapolitan website.
• on WBUR's On Point interview and call-in radio show.

What Do Jughead, Goober, and Bim Have in Common?

Oz and Ends is not about to institute an award for Archie comics research to go along with its occasional honor for Batman research. Nonetheless, the editorial board feels a need to recognize the work at the "I'm Learning to Share!" blog on the history of Jughead's hat.

Though pictured these days as a crown, that hat originally had a crown, and covered more of Jughead's pate. It was, in other words, a recognizable version of the hats that other characters wore in the 1940s and even, in the case of The Andy Griffith Show's Goober Pyle, well into the 1960s. In American culture at the time the Archie comics launched, such hats were a marker of youth, and thus appropriate for the Jughead character.

The In Crowd has collected many examples of such hats, including one worn by Leo Gorcey in the Dead End Kids' finest film, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). And that indefatigable blogger has gone further to theorize about how such hats were created:

It appears that the first people to wear the original 'Jughead'-styled caps were auto mechanics, welders and other workmen who found they could get the same 'safety' function of a factory worker's beanie by altering an old worn-out fedora.

The method was to turn a fedora upside-down, push the hat's crown inside-out, then turn up the brim and trim away its excess with a scalloped cut.

Oz and Ends breathlessly awaits further research on these questions:

• Can we confirm the In Crowd's hypothesis by, for example, unearthing magazine instructions on how to make such a hat when they were cool?
• What term people did use for such headgear before it became nearly exclusive to Jughead? Were such caps seen as a simple variation of the 1920s "whoopee hat"?
  

(Tip from Good Comics for Kids.)