I’m very fond of Chris Wormell’s picture book George and the Dragon, which I discussed back here.
But I’m even more impressed by this British illustrator after seeing Seven Impossible Things’ wonderful interview and sampling of his work in other media. 
The same guy who created this bunny also painted the cover above. 
And that’s a wood engraving. By the same guy. Really.
In December 1981, The Comics Journal published an interview with comics scripter Gerry Conway. This conversation took place during the period when, as recent weekly Robins have traced, Conway was helping to move Dick Grayson out of the shadow of Batman’s cape.
In the interview Conway stated, “I’m tentatively scheduled to write the Robin backup feature in Batman.” Depending on when the interview took place, this might be an early reference to the mid-1981 three-part story about Dick returning to a traveling circus that I described last week. Or it might refer to plans for an ongoing feature that never came about.
Conway expressed a traditional view of Robin, as well as Captain America’s boy sidekick:
Bucky ideally should be about 15 years old, just as Robin ideally should be about 15 years old. They should be on the verge of manhood, they should be on the verge of taking on the responsibility for their own lives, and they should be looking toward Captain America or Batman or whoever as the model on which they want to build their own lives. . . .Conway thus helped to bring Dick Grayson to independence without having a clear sense of what the character would represent after that. No wonder the conclusion to his three-part story—“I am myself!”—is tautological. The question remained: Who is Dick Grayson to be?
Robin now is almost a college graduate in his early 20s, I would guess, or late teens; at the very earliest he’d be 19. So you’ve lost that essential connection.
As it turned out, he didn’t. Titans artist Pérez described the situation in a 1984 interview archived at the Titans Tower website: Gerry Conway, who was handling the Batman series at the time, had priority over Robin. Since he was the leader of the Teen Titans, it put us in a compromising position. Marv was being complimented on his characterization, I was being complimented on making Robin look like an adult at last. Yet we couldn't do anything more than just maintain a certain facade; we'd just make a very virile Robin. but couldn't do anything with his personality or his basic character. That was all the responsibility of whoever was writing Batman.Conway’s vision that Robin “should be on the verge of manhood” thus opened the door for an older Dick Grayson to become Nightwing, affirming his step into adulthood. Conway went on to introduce the first Jason Todd who, in Detective Comics, #526, first went into a fight as the new Boy Wonder.
It wasn't until Gerry Conway said that he had no intentions of using Robin that we were given carte blanche. Then, there was talk that they wanted to give Batman a new kid sidekick, in order to bring back the father image of the character.
Many of the Munchkin performers were in their late teens in 1938, when they shot their scene. That means they were about twenty years old when the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the US into World War 2. Many of the young men were eager to serve their country, but because of their height they were all classified as 4-F, ineligible for military service.
Raabe ended up training pilots as part of the Civil Air Patrol. He was the smallest licensed pilot of the time, and ended up flying more types of airplanes than he would have in military service.
Raabe discussed that work, and other parts of his career, in Memories of a Munchkin, assembled with Daniel Kinske. I feared this book would be a hodgepodge, but it hangs together well, and the production values are excellent.
Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz was nominated for Best Limited Series or Story Arc, and for Best Publication for Kids. Shanower has won two Eisners for his Age of Bronze series, but for Young, judging by his reaction on Twitter, this is an exciting new honor.
Philippe Ghielmetti’s design for the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz collection from Sunday Press was nominated for Best Publication Design [and, the Wonderful Blog of Oz points out, for Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips]. This is a giant-size reissue of the newspaper comic page Baum wrote in the early 1900s, along with a competing series from his former colleague W. W. Denslow.
And, though it’s several steps off the Yellow Brick Road, the magazine Fables received nominations for Best Continuing Series and Best Writer in Bill Willingham. A young magic-worker named Ozma has been appearing in this comic book’s recent storylines.
David Small’s Stitches received nominations for Best Reality-Based Work and Best Writer/Artist–Nonfiction. It’s notable that this book was not nominated as Best Publication for Kids or Best Publication for Teens. Within the comics community, there’s no assumption that the comics form automatically makes a work suitable for younger readers.
Last month Mike Shatzkin mused on the life of In Cold Type, by his father, Leonard Shatzkin—a high-level dissection of trade publishing issued in 1982. In particular, he noted Houghton Mifflin’s curious disclaimer (PDF) that, although the company found the ideas in the book interesting, it did not share or endorse them.
Shatzkin noted that after In Cold Type went out of print, his father quickly got it into a print-on-demand system. But that prompts a new observation:
While Dad’s book is in Lightning [Source], there’s hardly any reason for somebody to buy the POD version anymore. The combination of the ones we’ve sold over the past 10 or 12 years and the relentlessly-increasing efficiency of the online used book supply system means there are probably enough copies in circulation to require bulk demand — for, say, 25 or more copies — for it make sense to do anything but shop the net for used. This is happening book by book. It would mean that the valuable shelf life of many scans for POD purposes might be considerably shorter than forever and that some books probably sell their very last newly-printed copy every day.Of course, the digital file used to create the print-on-demand In Cold Type might become the viable version now that so many people in the book’s small but dedicated target audience are using electronic readers.
I had a conversation with a colleague at the New Yorker where I was pushing and saying how come we don’t review more children’s books and more children’s literature? The only thing I can get the New Yorker to do is a yearly paper on it, but not on a regular basis. We don’t do book reviews in general, but still, we do mention books.(I plan to discuss whether all children’s literature is genre literature in my workshop on what it means to write within genres at the SCBWI New England conference in May. But I think genres are defined by readership expectations, not limitations. And I suspect that authors who don’t write with the thought of communicating to their readers don’t get published by major presses or magazines. But back to Mouly.)
And my colleague was bluntly saying, “Well, it’s because children’s books are not real literature.”
I said, “Oh, okay. Explain that.” And he did.
He said, “Well, they are geared for a specific audience, and in literature, the author writes for himself, doesn’t have a specific audience in mind. But by definition, for children, you have to know who you are writing for and you have to take into account the limitations of your reader, and that makes it genre literature, not true literature.”
Now that’s interesting. To him, that’s obvious. To me, that made me realize even though it’s true we were specifically as editors trying to help the author come up with his or her best version of his strip, not worrying whether people would like it or how complex it might be, and that’s true for the New Yorker as well.Mouly has further interesting things to say about Jeff Smith’s Bone and Spiegelman’s Maus as unintended literature for young people, what defines a classic, and why major publishing corporations shy away from establishing new types of books.
When you work for kids, especially the Toon books, for example, you have to take into account the reading level, not just the age, but the vocabulary, and we work within those limitations. I even had a conversation with my husband [Art Spiegelman], who wasn’t at first that interested in having to do something for kids because of those limitations. It’s only when he did it that he realized it’s akin to doing formal poetry. You have a set of limitations; you can only do your sonnet with so many beats—but then within that there is room for art.
Last month master comics letterer Todd Klein looked at the evolution of a form of punctuation unique to comics: breath marks.
Those are little radiating lines—Klein notes they became standardized to three on each side—around certain words in comic-book dialogue. Experienced readers understand that the character doesn’t speak that such a word, nor does it approximate any sound from the character’s mouth.
Rather, the word within breath marks is a label for the sound the character makes and its emotional meaning. Breath marks and the word balloon’s tail are the equivalent of “he sobbed” or “she sighed” or “the whole crowd gasped” in prose.
Using panels from early DC Comics, Klein traces early comic-book letterers’ struggles to show characters’ non-verbal sounds within word balloons. At first they used parentheses—which were also part of how some comics signaled thoughts. But after a few years letterers codified the use of this new punctuation mark.
Letterer Nate Peikos has said that breath marks are also called “cat’s whiskers,” “fireflies,” and “crow’s feet.” On Klein’s blog writer Kurt Busiek offers another alternate term: “roachlegs.” He comments:
I remember working with one editor [Cat Yronwode, this discussion suggests] who insisted that anything that would ordinarily be enclosed in roachlegs be spelled out as a sound, so “gasp” became “H-hh!” or something. [T]he reasoning was that no one in a book or movie would actually say “gasp,” and so such things were comic-booky.Opinion appears to be divided on how best to signal breath marks in a script:
My argument that in books they do it through narration, but comics evolved other methods, and if we were going to shy away from comic-booky things, it was worth noting that in books and movies when people talked, big white ovals with their words in them didn’t appear over their heads, and loud noises didn’t manifest as floating letters, either, fell on deaf ears.
>cough!< *wheeze* =puff puff=I recently typed my first *sigh*, but I was trying to match this classic style. I actually prefer the sound-effect approach—more showing than telling.
Having traced the development of American comics thought balloons, their typical use, and alternate systems of narration, I approach the question of why they’ve virtually disappeared from mainstream American comics. Why did one comics publisher recently tell a star novelist not to use them at all?
This conversation among comics scripters offers several competing explanations:
This is going to sound self-centered, but I know one thing that greatly influenced overuse of the “first person caption as substitute thought balloon” in the mid-80s: my use of the gimmick in the PUNISHER mini series. Now I wasn't particularly influenced by Frank or anyone else when I used them, I just had a vision of The Punisher as someone who felt under no compulsion to explain himself to anyone, but he had been established as keeping a diary/war journal…so the first person captions became essentially this running diary he kept in his head, his dislocated commentary on his situation.Grant’s use of the “diary/war journal” to help tell his story is what my Six Parameters of Narrative Voice calls a “Paper Trail”: narration through what purports to be a document created within the story.
Thought balloons (discussed at length yesterday) were part of a system of narration that dominated American adventure comics for decades. This system also involved an omniscient narrator, often bombastic and occasionally redundant.
Using thought balloons, this narrative approach could reveal any character’s thoughts, including hero or villain, as long as it served the story. Conversely, since adventure comics depended on sudden plot turns, this style also involved concealing characters’ thoughts if they would give away the next twist too early. (See “Reason for Robin, #2.”)
Other comics genres took different approaches to narration. Romance comics were often told in the first-person voice of the central character, like magazine “confessions”; both captions and thought balloons let us into that character’s head, and hers alone. Horror comics were introduced and narrated by recurring figures like the Crypt Keeper, who had supernatural insight into characters’ thoughts and fates. And of course there were experiments and exceptions within every genre.
To find examples of the typical adventure-comics approach in full flower, I looked at Batman issues from the early 1980s, since they were handy. Batman, #336, has a script by Roy Thomas, based on a Bob Rozakis plot. The captions are in the voice of an omniscient narrator. There are thought balloons from Batman/Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Commissioner Jim Gordon, and two villains, the Spellbinder and the Cluemaster. That narrator knows everything!
This style offers leeway for a character to take over the narration for a while. Gerry Conway’s main story in Batman, #338, has an omniscient narrator, also displays the hero’s voice in both thought balloons and captions, and quotes the villain’s voice in captions for a flashback. The captions in characters’ voices include quotation marks around the words. (This tale also has one passing thought balloon for a saleswoman we never see again.)
Yet that same stretch of Batman magazine offers an alternative way of narrating adventure comics, a way that would come to dominate the form. That style appears in the back-up feature in Batman, #337-9, featuring none other than Robin.
Written by Conway, this three-part story shows Dick Grayson looking back on his life, exploring his roots in a traveling circus, and solidifying his identity beyond being Batman’s sidekick.
That story is narrated by Dick himself. The captions are all in his voice; there are no quotation marks to set them off from an omniscient narrator‘s captions.
Likewise, Dick is the only character trailing thought balloons. As narrator, he’s not privy to other characters’ thoughts, only to their actions and words. And as the following panel shows, the captions and thought balloons run into each other. (One theme of this installment is that Dick’s fretting about his past can distract him from the present.) 
This first-person narrative approach makes perfect sense for this story. The external plot—a murder mystery at the circus—is minor. So minor that Dick appears in his Robin costume in only three panels of the third installment, all flashbacks.
What matters in this tale is Dick’s internal journey to figuring out who he is, separate from Batman, with a different drive. That continues a process which began in preceding issues of Batman and which we also saw in concurrent issues of The New Teen Titans. And it was a forerunner of recent decades of superhero stories that are, at least nominally, as much about the heroes’ individual emotional lives as about their ability to catch bad guys and hit them.
TOMORROW: Along the thought balloon trail.
NEXT WEEK: Gerry Conway on Robin.
As early Superman panels showed yesterday, it took a few years for American comics to settle on a way to communicate characters’ thoughts: a new kind of word balloon. But in the last couple of decades, mainstream publishers largely discarded that system, and thought balloons aren’t that common in more artistic “indie” comics, either.
In a recent publicity interview, novelist Stephen King discussed how he learned that DC’s Vertigo imprint no longer uses what the reporter calls “thought bubbles.”
Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they're thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’”King’s interview led Joe McCulloch into a discussion of what thought balloons symbolize.
So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it’s a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character's thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”
captions can be a…cool device, sharp-edged and—this is vital—aloof from the thinking character, hanging away from their head or drifting through entirely unrelated scenes, panels with no characters at all. In contrast, thought balloons have a ‘chain’ that latches them to the applicable thinker, a forced, perhaps confining intimacy, very revealing in looking so silly like fresh thoughts would seem if seen.Scott McCloud expresses a similar understanding in his response:
The important difference for me is that a thought caption—with or without borders—embodies each thought in a way that encourages us to assume ownership of it as we read. We literally bring each sentiment into existence as a thought, creating an instant bond with the character.Barry Deutsch thought that analysis doesn’t hold up, and, like McCulloch and McCloud, shared some imaginative uses of thought balloons.
The thought balloon, regardless of shape or style, just by virtue of its pointer, brings a third party into the relationship: the author, gently putting his/her hand on our shoulder and pointing to the face of the thinker with the words “he thought.” Maybe thoughts are just too private for that kind of parental intrusion.
