Wizard of Oz Exhibit Reaches Long Island

The Great Explorations Children’s Museum of St. Petersburg, Florida, has developed a traveling exhibit based on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, which is now at the Long Island Children’s Museum. Its iconography appears to have just enough reminiscent of the MGM movie to appeal to the American populace, and not enough to get sued.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot:

First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.

Plus, make sure there’s a “surprising plot twist” every 1,500 words.

Not a Bit of It

Doing far more than is called for, Mari Ness recently reviewed The Cowardly Lion of Oz, by Ruth Plumly Thompson, at the Tor website. Published in 1923, this is the earliest Oz book still under copyright protection. It’s also one of the few strong arguments I know for keeping books that old out of the public domain.

Ness zeroes in on one of the annoying aspects of this book, the character of Notta Bit More, the neurotic circus clown:

The clown follows, he explains, four rules whenever he is in danger. One, try to disguise himself. Two, be polite—very polite. Three, joke. And Four, when all else fails, run away. And not at all to his credit, he follows these same four rules over and over throughout the book, leading to the same scene, over and over:

Clown sees, or thinks he sees, danger.

Clown puts on disguise.

People react with fear/anger/weapons/claws/large buckets of water.

Clown attempts to be polite to justifiably irritated/angry/frightened/distrustful people who are now in no mood for politeness.

Clown tells unfunny jokes.

People tie up or sit on clown. Readers wait in unfulfilled hope for someone to kill the clown.

In addition, Notta Bit More overshadows the book’s young American protagonist, erasing one of the strengths of the Oz books, even others with poor plots: empowered children.

One recurring theme of Ness’s reviews of the Oz series is “Ozma fail,” or poor decisions by the young ruler of the Emerald City. Of course, the biggest challenge of telling stories about Oz is that after the first eight books or so Ozma and her mentor Glinda are so powerful and have so much information available to them that it’s hard to build up a real threat. Some things we have to accept for the sake of the story.

But Notta Bit More isn’t one of them.

Portrait of a Young Artist as a Robin Fan

Last year Sean Kleefeld, author of Comic Book Fanthropology, looked back on his early-childhood interest in Robin, prompted by his parents’ discovery of a drawing he’d made at about age four. Kleefeld wrote:

it looks like it was done by a child, of course, but it had all the elements that defined Robin visually, including the lacing up the front of his shirt. (Interestingly, while I managed to get those types of details in place, I still only gave him three fingers on each hand.)

Which shows how much comics characters are defined by the visual traits that set them apart, like a costume, rather than those we can simply assume, like five fingers. After all, there’s a whole school of cartooning that eschews unnecessary fingers.

On the topic of that costume, Kleefeld muses:

I have to say that I actually did like the short cape and flared bootlets. It definitely gave the impression of a child/elf with a flair for the dramatic and acrobatic. The collar around the cape was a nice touch, I always thought. He looked like a circus performer having fun.

He even got his mother to make him a costume.

Other very young artists’ versions of Robin here and here.

”The Idea That the Story Is True”

In Bringing Down the House, an ostensibly nonfiction book, author Ben Mezrich acknowledged creating composite figures and adding details that were totally new to the MIT students he claimed to have written about. Mezrich’s next book, on the founding of Facebook, apparently signals concocted scenes with phrases like “We can picture what happened next...”

When Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe confronted Mezrich about how many details in Bringing Down the House were fictional, the author offered this reply: “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true.”

Unfortunately, he's right.

Serialization and Stories with No End

As long as I’m talking about not knowing when stories end, I’ll discuss the two types of mass-entertainment stories that usually don’t offer an end these days. One comes to us in comics form, including monthly comic books and some daily newspaper strips. The other comes to us in televised form: dramas with overarching plots (e.g., The Sopranos, Lost) and even some situation comedies.

In every other narrative entertainment medium I can think of, we expect a full story with an ending in each unit that we consume: novel, movie, play. Sure, the story might leave room for a sequel, and a very large book might need to be split into volumes for physical reasons (I’m talking about you, Lord of the Rings). But the storytellers have a clear ending from the start, and know when it’s supposed to arrive. They’re not improvising according to market response.

The situation used to be reversed. Novels would reach the public first as magazine serials, sometimes with authors still struggling to finish (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island). A trip to the movies included a short serial for the kids.

On the other hand, comic books offered complete adventures, at one point three or four in each magazine. And most television episodes had a beginning, middle, and end (soap operas being the notable exception). In fact, in most early sitcoms, the “sit” barely changed; we don’t have to watch episodes of Our Miss Brooks in any particular order because the characters and relationships are the same.

Dennis O’Neil saw the shift happen in superhero comics as a reader, writer, and eventually editor of the most respected Batman crossover events in the 1990s. He described it in a conversation for The Comics Journal:

For the first 25 years of my life, every story that I experienced had a beginning, middle and end.

Sure, there were continuing characters all over the place. But it was Boston Blackie solving this crime in this movie. Not Boston Blackie getting a start on solving this crime but you have to see his next movie to find out whodunit. Same way with radio shows.

So I think I knew about structure before I had a vocabulary to express the concept, because that’s the stories that I grew up experiencing. The major change [in comic books], I think, in the last 50 years is going into a predominately serialized narrative form. . . .

TV has learned from us about structure. Seems to me, the predominant structure on narrative TV is: The protagonist has an ongoing problem. Just like Burn Notice; he’s gotta find out who sabotaged his life. But, in the meantime, he has a problem that’ll be solved in the next 50 minutes. In order to make money, or to help out his mother or something like that — he has a set of problems, he solves them, but he still doesn’t know who screwed him up and he’s gotta keep working to find that out.

Almost every major television show has some of that element. They have the same problems that comic-book people do. Continuing characters. They need to figure out a way to deliver your $2.50’s worth of entertainment and still give you a reason to come back. We’ve all solved it the same way.

O’Neil’s approach, detailed in his DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, was much as he describes Burn Notice above: small adventures, each with its own beginning, middle, and end, strung together like links in the chain that defines the larger narrative.

In the last decade, however, the American superhero comics industry has adopted “decompressed” storytelling with bigger panels and more reaction shots for emotions. That means stories are spread out over arcs of four, six, or twelve issues, with no story resolution until the last. The most buzzed-about TV dramas take that approach as well. And that seems to produce a whole new set of emotions among the people consuming that entertainment, waiting with increased expectations and impatience for an ending.

Seeking “the Heft of the Book”?

Earlier this month author Tracy Chevalier had some observations about the experience of reading printed books and reading the same texts on electronic readers:

the only thing an e-book has going for it is its size. Hornets' Nest is a hefty tome, hard to carry in a normal-sized handbag and a little awkward in bed, whereas the Kindle is slim and easy to handle.That was also one of its problems, though: the Kindle felt flimsy and insubstantial, making the book I read seem flimsy and insubstantial too.

In fact, it was a fascinating experiment because it made clear to me that reading is a three-dimensional experience. When I read I'm not just taking in words on a page. Also affecting me is the geography of the two-page spread, where I can see more of the text than I'm reading. I can look ahead and notice dialogue coming up, or how long or short paragraphs are, or how someone's name is recurring a lot on a page.

And then there are the physical pages, the heft of the book that physically represents the heft of the story. I can literally feel how far I am into a story, when I'm halfway, when I have just a little bit left.

It’s only natural that we’ve gotten used to the quirks of the printed codex, such as being able to see each recto page as we turn to the preceding verso page. But I don’t think those sensations are inherent in the act of reading a novel. Before the codex was invented, people read scrolls, and today some people read manuscripts; neither of those forms allows or forces readers to look ahead every other page, and the narrative experience isn’t significantly different.

I agree with Chevalier that knowing how much of a narrative remains to be consumed is significant to the experience of reading a book. I’ve been brought up short by histories that have unusually large backmatter, thus ending “early,” and by stories that turn out to be only the first volume of several, thus ending not at all. (I’m talking about you, Gideon the Cutpurse and Children of the Sea.) But most electronic readers provide just that information.

As Chevalier goes on to note, “the Kindle told me I was on, say, ‘locations’ 5432-37 out of 12,789, and that I'd read 42% of the book.” She calls that data “meaningless.” Apparently she prefers to see 42% of the pages in her left hand and 58% in her right—exactly the same information in an analog “display.”

At the end of the day, when we want to curl up with a book, I think these differences will turn out to be as insubstantial as the electrons in a digital file. The point of reading an engrossing narrative is to become immersed in its world. A good story makes us think a lot about stuff that isn’t there at all, and as little as possible about the weight of the object in our laps.

Looking Back on American Virtue

Today’s New York Times offers Janet Maslin’s review of The Death of American Virtue, a history of the Clinton impeachment debacle by Duquesne Law School professor Ken Gormley.

The review calls the book “tough, labyrinthine,” and sometimes in its detail “impressive but not entirely necessary. . . . But by and large Mr. Gormley has packed his narrative with intense, overdue and definitive testimony about the still-surprising investigation of Mr. Clinton’s activities spearheaded by Kenneth W. Starr.”

I edited Ken’s previous big book, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation, which also offered a very detailed account of an impeachment—in that case, of Richard Nixon for abusing the powers of the presidency. The Watergate controversy was the first national news I remember paying attention to, and I was honored to work on that book and meet Cox.

Somewhere back then Ken told me about his idea for this new book, and I was skeptical. Not of the importance of delving into how a failed development in Arkansas became a constitutional crisis that ended in offers of free plastic surgery. Rather, I thought it was too soon: sources might not be ready to talk, and the public certainly wasn’t ready to read more about the controversy.

But that was ten years ago, before the Supreme Court assigned George W. Bush the presidency, before the terrorist attack on New York, before the Iraq War and Guantànamo prison. Now we can even feel nostalgia for the days when Congressional Republicans wanted to impeach the President for lying about an affair.

You remember those defenders of American virtue: Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Bob Livingston, Rep. Henry Hyde, Rep. Bob Barr, Rep. John Ensign, Rep. Mark Sanford, Rep. Joe Scarborough, Rep. Dan Burton, Rep. Vito Fossella, Rep. Helen Chenoweth, Rep. Bill Thomas, Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Larry Craig, Sen. John McCain,…

A Cybils Winner that Shines

I’m pleased to share news of the winner of the Cybils Award for Nonfiction Picture Book published in 2009.

The Day-Glo Brothers
by Chris Barton; illustrated by Tony Persiani
Charlesbridge
Nominated by: Cynthia Leitich Smith

It’s hard to imagine a world without Day-Glo’s shocking greens, blazing oranges and screaming yellows. But before World War II, those colors didn’t exist. After an accident in a ketchup factory derailed Bob Switzer’s hope to be a doctor, he and his brother Joe, who was interested in magic, set out to find a paint that glowed. Eventually, the Switzers did what nobody else had — they invented new colors. The war produced a need for fluorescent paint, and today it’s everywhere. The brothers’ invention allowed both to do what they wanted; save lives and dazzle crowds.

This book is the first on its topic, a result of original research from family interviews and newspaper clippings. Barton explains the science with a kid-friendly manner and an easy narrative style. Readers can relate to the brothers’ thwarted plans and celebrate their persistence. Persiani’s stylized art evolves with the story, from a dull gray to splashes of color to brilliant Day-Glo tones at the end.

Helping to judge this Cybils category was a pleasure, and not just because the books are short and colorful. They all have strengths, and I learned a lot. Our final vote was close. I look forward to saying more about The Day-Glo Brothers and the other finalists in the coming weeks.

Here are all the Cybils winners for this year.

An American Batman in London

This weekly Robin has no Robin per se, but it’s all about the original Robin, Dick Grayson, as Batman.

Cameron Stewart, artist for recent issues of Batman and Robin, kindly posted some of his layouts on his blog. Stewart wrote:

Note some of the differences between the layouts and the final printed artwork in the traffic scene. This was my first attempt at it, and I did some revisions to punch it up for the final.

So I’m noting. The major difference comes on page 4 of the magazine, as Batman makes his way through London traffic on Westminster Bridge.

Here is Stewart’s sketch for much of that page. The top panel in its original form shows the Big Ben Tower at the left; that has disappeared from the final version below, probably because it was on the wrong end of the bridge. Omitting that detail allows for a closer image of Batman swinging up onto the bridge from a river boat. We see the biggest change in the second panel. The sketch version shows Batman bouncing from vehicle to vehicle until he lands on a van headed in the right direction. Multiple images of the same character in one panel is one way comics artists have discovered to show fast action over a short span.

In the version below, Batman does the same acrobatics, but Stewart has broken each step into its own smaller panel. I find the action in the original to be more clear, especially on the right side, where below there are suddenly two Batmans in one panel and the more prominent is the one we should read second. (Stewart inserts a visual clue that the rear Batman comes first by having his cape overlap into the previous panel, but that’s somewhat lost in the dark border.)

That said, a black and white sketch is naturally going to be clearer visually than a color version with the usual Gotham/London gray laid over the line art. I doubt the original layout would have been as successful in color. The last of these panels shows another change: Stewart brings us closer to Batman’s face, showing us his characteristic grim determination as he speaks by radio to his sidekick for the day.

Stewart’s second batch of page layouts contains a panel from the same issue in which two characters confront each other. As printed, this conversation has become a bit confused, ending with the new Batwoman saying, “I’m the new Batman.” Stewart explains:

As you can see, the page was laid out with the characters oriented consistently from left to right, but after I’d completed the final artwork I was asked to reverse panel 3 because the dialogue (which is written after the art is completed) required Batwoman to be on the left. I did make the change [electronically] but somewhere along the way the original art file was used by mistake, and thousands of readers scratched their head in puzzlement.