A View of Oz from Oz

The honored Australian illustrator Robert R. Ingpen created this watercolor for an edition of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz commissioned by Palazzo Editions and published this spring by Templar Editions in the UK and Sterling in the US.

Melaleuca Galleries of Australia offers a page of Ingpen’s artwork for this book, including:

• Nick Chopper morphing into the Tin Woodman.
• Looking down on the China Country.
• Dorothy’s return home.

The image above comes via Melaleuca.

Batman and Robin on Ice—Without the Ice

A week ago, I accompanied Godson and Godson’s Brother, both nearly ten and a half, and their father to Batman Live at the O2 Arena in London. I can report that the show is a bombastic, highly amplified spectacle well tailored to an audience of older children. It’s also a more than adequate representation of Dick Grayson’s journey from orphaned circus performer to half of the Dynamic Duo.

My favorite moment: When Alfred presents Dick with his revamped costume for his new role as the crime-fighter…Circus Lad! (No? How about…the Carnival Kid!) Though this Alfred has the same snarky lines as in all other post-Dark Knight Returns portrayals, he’s also the biggest enabler I’ve seen, encouraging Dick to become a vigilante.

Godson’s favorite moment: When Robin makes jokes. I’m not sure whether we saw Kamran Darabi-Ford or Michael Pickering in that role; as with the title character, two actors alternate performances. The job calls for athleticism, an American accent (hearing interviews with the actors is a hoot because their regular accents aren’t just English, but “regional” forms), and good projection, but it doesn’t ask for subtlety.

Godson’s Brother’s favorite moment: When Robin beats up the Joker at the end. That moment was also one of the three that got the most applause from the crowd. Ordinarily the Joker plays little to no role in Robin’s origin, but this production has twin aims:

• to retell that chapter in the Batman saga, along with a little of the Caped Crusader’s own origin.
• to bring on most of the top Batman villains: the Joker and Harley Quinn, Catwoman, the Riddler, the Penguin, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and the Scarecrow.

(Godson and Godson’s Brother pointed out that Clayface did not make an appearance. After discussion, we agreed that it would be hard to portray infinitely malleable shape-shifting on stage. Advance publicity still on the website suggests that the Ventriloquist was also once in the lineup; I suspect he proved underwhelming at the arena scale.)

To connect Tony Zucco murdering Dick’s parents to the more famous Batman villains, this show has Zucco working for the Joker, who wants to take over Haly’s Circus. (Saving costs, there’s no Mr. Haly; Dick’s father runs the circus, and the same actor also plays Joe Chill and the Riddler.) Later the Joker takes over Arkham Asylum, opening the door to additional villains. Thus, when Dick goes after the Clown Prince of Crime, it’s personal—even if the Joker has forgotten who John and Mary Grayson were.

Another of the three applause moments was when Bruce Wayne told Dick, “I’m Batman.” I couldn’t tell whether the audience wanted to reward this emotional opening-up, or simply recognized a catch phrase.

And the third moment? That came in the middle of the second act, after the production had to shut down because of a technical problem. Bruce had gotten into the new-fangled Batmobile, ready to roar away. And then nothing happened. Alfred and Dick walked off. An announcer apologized. For five to ten minutes, technicians worked in the dark, and then the scene restarted—to a most enthusiastic ovation.

This time the Batmobile slid all the way onto center stage at the start, showing us what we’d missed. However, when Bruce hit a button that had set off fireworks before, nothing happened—they hadn’t been recharged. That didn’t stop Bruce and Dick from ducking, however. At the end of the scene, the car zoomed off as intended, “afterburner” spewing vapor.

It turned out that occasional Batman scripter Paul Dini was at the same performance in the O2. (Curiously, I didn’t see him there.) Yesterday on Twitter he pointed out that the Batmobile had lost its wheel and the Joker got away.

That technical delay naturally made me think of the notorious Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway. In newspaper interviews, the Batman Live creators have been eager to point out that they did not produce a musical. Nevertheless, the show has a couple of musical numbers, with athletic dance by the chorus but no singing.

Furthermore, both shows use sets to represent the rooftop panoramas of the city, and lots of swinging on wires. Both take much of their look direct from the comics, playing on the aesthetics of panels. Batman Live may turn out to be more successful, critically and financially, simply because it doesn’t aspire to the status of high art.

Instead, Batman Live seems designed to recall screen versions of the story that its target audience already knows. Its overall milieu seems based in the animated television series of the 1990s. The padded musculature of the heroes’ costumes comes from the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher movies. One sequence displayed by the giant bat-shaped video backdrop unabashedly mimics a videogame.

That backdrop means there’s plenty to see, especially for people seated (as we were) at the front of the stage. A particularly striking scenic effect is the giant dinner table at Wayne Manor, which becomes a raked stage in itself. In fact, the more stylized the set-pieces, the more impressive they often were; the Graysons’ circus performance left me disappointed, but their slow-motion death was visually moving.

What does the show lack? We never see any detective work. Instead, the Joker keeps trying to get Batman’s attention, thus driving the action from one scene to the next. Mark Frost was good in that role, though I thought Poppy Tierney’s performance as Harley Quinn stole the show. (She also fills the smaller role of Mary Grayson. And—calling Dr. Freud!—Emma Clifford plays both Martha Wayne and Catwoman.)

The Politics of Pronouns

Last month I quoted from an interview with James W. Pennebaker, a University of Texas psychologist who has researched our use of pronouns and how they correlate with other traits.

It turns out (not entirely as a surprise) that Pennebaker has a new book coming out, titled The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us.

Ben Zimmer’s review for the New York Times begins:

When President Obama addressed the nation after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, some conservative reactions to his rhetoric were all too predictable. On National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson highlighted the 15 times that Obama used “I,” “me” or “my” in the 1,400-word speech, and asserted that “these first-person pronouns . . . reflect a now well-known Obama trait of personalizing the presidency.” A few weeks later, when Obama gave a speech at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., the Drudge Report offered the headline, “I ME MINE: Obama praises C.I.A. for bin Laden raid — while saying ‘I’ 35 times.”

This “well-known Obama trait” has come up again and again in criticisms from the right — George Will has said that Obama is “inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun,” while Charles Krauthammer has written of the president’s “spectacularly promiscuous use of the word ‘I.’ ”

Regrettably, none of these pundits have bothered to look into how Obama might compare with his predecessors. . . . Pennebaker crunches the numbers on presidential press conferences since Truman and finds that “Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents.” If anything, Obama has shown a disdain for the first-person singular during his administration.

“Why,” Pennebaker wonders, “do very smart people think just the opposite?” He chalks it up the selective way we process information: “If we think that someone is arrogant, our brains will be searching for evidence to confirm our beliefs.” If we’re predisposed to look for clues that Obama is all about “me me me,” then every “me” he utters takes on outsize importance in our impressionistic view of his speechifying.

Especially if one’s standards for what seems arrogant in a black man’s speech are different from what seems arrogant in a white man’s speech.

This Is a Great Bed

A longtime Oz and Ends reader alerted me to the New York Times interview with London designer Murray Moss, in which he talks about revamping the display of the Great Bed of Ware at the Victoria and Albert Museum:

I love the Bed of Ware. The museum, through no action on its own, cleaned up the act of the bed — because it’s in the museum, it must be a noble bed. It’s this giant carved, circa 1590 to 1600 Elizabethan bed.

But the truth of the bed is that it was commissioned by an inn in the town of Ware, in Hertfordshire, as an Elizabethan publicity stunt to advertise, I’m sure, something along the lines of “Have the best sex of your life in the biggest bed in England.” They spoke about it at the time. Writers wrote about it and said it could sleep 20 couples. Shakespeare included it in a very bawdy way in “Twelfth Night.” I thought, why don’t I put the sex back into the Bed of Ware, because that’s something I can do.

How do you do that?

You put 14 pairs of what look like Elizabethan prostitute shoes around the bed, to suggest that 14 occupants, plus a 15th — whoever rented the bed for the night — is sleeping in it.

Among the literary allusions to this monument are:

• “As many lies as will lie in thy paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England.” —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.
• “Why, we have been…” “…In the great bed at Ware together in our time.” —Ben Jonson, Epicene.
• “One of my longings is to have a couple of lusty able-bodied men, to take me up, one before and another behind, as the new fashion is, and carry mee in a Man-litter into the great bed at Ware.” —Richard Brome, The Sparagus Garden.
• “A mighty large bed bigger by half than the great bed of Ware; ten thousand people may lie in it together and never feel one another.” —George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer.
• “And all (except Mahometans) forbear / To make the nuptial couch a ‘Bed of Ware.’” —Byron, Don Juan (of course).

Yeah, those British authors weren’t seeing the great bed as “noble” before the Victoria and Albert.

Things Our Government Still Isn’t Telling Us

At the end of today’s New York Times article about newly released recordings of air traffic control transmissions on 11 Sept 2001 (which are innocuous and add little to the historic record) are these paragraphs:

The account published this week is missing two essential pieces that remain restricted or classified, according to Mr. [Miles] Kara. One is about 30 minutes of the cockpit recording of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into the ground after passengers tried to storm the cockpit as hijackers flew across Pennsylvania toward Washington, D.C. Families of some of those onboard have objected to the release of that recording, Mr. Kara said.

The other still-secret recording is of a high-level conference call that began at 9:28 and grew, over the course of the morning, to include senior figures like Mr. [Dick] Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers.

The recording was turned over to the National Security Council. The 9/11 Commission was not permitted to keep a copy of it or of the transcript, Mr. Kara said, and investigators were closely monitored when they listened to it. Mr. Kara said he believed that the only truly sensitive material on the recordings were small portions that concerned the provisions being made to continue government operations if the attacks took out some national leadership or facilities.

“There was a staffer who was designated to sit with us, who would stop and start the tape, in my estimation to mask continuity of operations,” Mr. Kara said.

Nevertheless, he noted, the commission ended up with hours and hours of recordings that it initially did not have access to or had been told did not exist, a point Mr. Farmer echoed in the preface to the Rutgers Law Review article.

When the commission began taking testimony, military and civil aviation officials said “that no tapes were made, and we were told at one point that a technical malfunction would prevent us from hearing them,” Mr. Farmer wrote. “If we had not pushed as hard as we did — ultimately persuading the commission to use its subpoena power to obtain the records — many of the critical conversations from that morning may have been lost to history.”

The issue of how “to continue government operations” is very sensitive, of course, both militarily and politically (as Alexander Haig discovered). But that may be secondary to the issue of who was really in charge that day.

As we recall, the US executive branch also forced the commission to interview Cheney and George W. Bush together, so they could match their stories, and not under oath. People took notes on either side of the phone conversations between Cheney and Bush on 11 September, and neither one recorded Bush approving Cheney’s order to shoot down planes. Former chief of staff to the Secretary of State Lawence Wilkerson has recently acknowledged that Cheney “was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration.”

Okay, Break It Up

Artist Jesse Lonergan is offering silk-screened prints of this battle royale at SPX this weekend.

Among the combatants, visible toward the middle of the right edge, is the Tin Woodman.

For a closer view that allows one to pick out Astro Boy, Spaceman Spiff, Deadman, Beetlejuice, Graham Chapman as King Arthur, and a California Raisin, among many others, visit Lonergan’s blog.

Oz as China?

Years ago Martin Blythe sent me a link to his web essay titled “Oz is China: A Political Fable of Chinese Dragons and White Tigers.” Blythe, formerly top publicist for Paramount Pictures, makes an enthusiastic case that L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an allegory of Chinese politics, but not a convincing one.

Giving illustrator W. W. Denslow the first name “Frank” is obviously an error of carelessness rather than misunderstanding, but it doesn’t bode well for accuracy in detail. Similarly, Blythe writes, “In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s friends all end up with territories to run: the Scarecrow gets to rule Oz from Beijing, while the Tin Woodman calls himself emperor of the Winkies (just like the Kaiser, who decided to open a brewery there).” In fact, the word “emperor” never appears in that first book. The Tin Woodman adopts that title in later books, but Blythe's essay never acknowledges those.

“Oz Is China” repeatedly makes factual statements without offering support for them. For example, “Baum read the newspapers avidly and he was consumed with news from China.” As a former newspaper publisher and occasional journalist, Baum undoubtedly did read the papers, but what evidence suggests news from China “consumed” him? Did his pseudonymous Boy Fortune Hunters in China show an unusual level of knowledge about that country? (Check out its recent reissue as The Scream of the Sacred Ape.)

The essay lacks citations. The claim that Pearl S. Buck “would come to see The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a gentle satire on Western imperialism and the Christian civilizing mission in China” is not augmented by any quotation or reference to writing by Buck. Nor does it help that the essay says Buck was “exactly Dorothy’s age (6 years old)…when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written”; the book never states Dorothy’s age, and Buck was seven when Baum wrote the book in late 1899.

This is an example of the circular reasoning that spirals through the entire essay. Another:

Anna May Wong...discovered during her heyday in the 1930’s that part of being American means coming to terms with your “inner Dorothy.” So we could say, and should say, that Dorothy was also Chinese American.

The quotation marks might tempt one to think that Blythe is quoting Wong. But his essay offers no evidence that Wong ever read Baum’s book, much less saw herself in Dorothy.

Even when the essay does offer a citation, its claims go well beyond that evidence, as in these two paragraphs:

When Baum writes: “The Wicked Witch was angry to find them in her country,” the illustration shows her dressed in Manchu pigtails, her imperial regalia and her Golden Cap—the Empress Dowager in all her glory.

Many people spotted this when the book came out. The Boston Beacon wrote, in September 1900, that “the Scarecrow wears a Russian blouse, the fierce Tin Woodman bears a striking resemblance to Emperor Wilhelm of Germany, the Cowardly Lion with its scarlet beard and tail tip at once suggest Great Britain, and the Flying Monkeys wear a military cap in Spanish colors.”

Yet that quoted passage says nothing about the supposedly obvious resemblance between the Wicked Witch and the Dowager Empress, even as it proposed links between other characters and European figures.

“Oz Is China” resembles similar attempts to argue that Baum based Wizard on US monetary policy, the King James Bible, or Gaelic—I’ve read all of these. They all rely on:

• carefully selecting details from the books, movie, and/or Baum’s life and overlooking many contrary facts.
• ignoring how Baum had no idea that this book would be his major work and cared very little for storytelling consistency.
• overlooking how the “obvious” symbolism went entirely unremarked in Baum’s own time and every other time until the theorist’s revelation. 
• imagining that Baum was entirely devoted to that cause or area of knowledge, yet chose to keep its significance secret for the last twenty years of his life.

In sum, those are classic conspiracy theories, albeit harmless ones.

A little more convincing, because they don’t claim intent on Baum’s part, are arguments that the book could be interpreted in certain ways, such as Bird Brian’s reading at GoodReads that focuses on Japan instead of China. Of course, that review still refers to Dorothy as an “Aguished midwestern teen,” and appears to suggest that the 1900 novel reflected western concerns following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.

The DNA of Damian Wayne

Godson, Godson’s Brother, and I will be taking in Batman Live this evening, London time, and I plan to post our impressions in the upcoming week. But that leaves the weekly Robin in need of content today.

I’ll therefore observe the end of the post-Infinite Crisis DC Comics Universe by considering the genetic heritage of Damian Wayne, the current and near-future Robin.

But isn’t Damian the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul? Well, that’s what those characters and the Batman creative team have wanted us to think. Talia has certainly said Damian is her son by Bruce, but she’s duplicitous and ruthless, and her family plays the long game. (Her father makes himself immortal.) So there’s more than a small possibility she’s lying.

As for Bruce Wayne, he was ready to treat Damian as his son, but—let’s face it—his threshhold for taking in dark-haired boys and training them to fight crime by his side is very low. If Bruce perceived Damian to be in any sort of trouble, and/or felt any sort of responsibility for him, he might well treat the child as his son and leave the emotional fallout of keeping secrets for later.

Finally, the science of the DC Universe leaves a lot of flexibility in the circumstances of Damian’s life. Though the Son of a Demon graphic novel that helped to inspire writer Grant Morrison involved a night of passion under a tropic moon, Talia could just as easily have conceived Damian in a test tube, or cloned him, or obtained a suitable baby through magic or time travel or Craigslist.

Furthermore, Batman vs. Robin confirmed what Nightwing: Freefall hinted: that Talia has advanced technology for growing babies, and another already in the lab. Even though Damian has been ten, and the new universe’s Damian is twelve, he was probably conceived more recently and aged artificially.

So what does this mean for Damian’s DNA? The possibilities seem wide open. Tim Drake has asked Alfred whether Bruce did genetic testing on the kid, but I don’t believe the comics have ever given us a definite answer. That leaves multiple possibilities. So let’s imagine that Tim, as Teen Titans: A Kid’s Game shows he’s capable of doing, sneaks a genetic sample from Damian and has it tested. What could he find?

1. Yes, Damian’s father is Bruce Wayne. The writers have already been exploring this situation, of course. Eventually the drama might run dry, especially if the inherent tensions get played out and resolved. In that case, Damian’s genetic heritage might catch up with him in various new ways: premature aging, possibly fatal illness, an annoying little sibling or evil counterpart. (The last happens to almost all comic-book heroes if they stick around long enough.) Or the creative team might decide to shake up the family with a new revelation…

2. Damian isn’t Bruce’s son; he’s Bruce’s clone. This offers a chance to explore nature versus nurture. Are Bruce’s righteousness and Damian’s grumpiness simply manifestations of the same genes? Can Damian maintain the same drive as Bruce through adolescent ennui if he never sees his parents killed? (Of course, we might ask why Alfred hasn’t remarked on the similarity between Damian and the boy he raised. Perhaps the artificial aging process would have produced some physiognomic differences. Perhaps Alfred would know, and would be keeping the secret.)

3. Damian’s father is Ra’s al Ghul. Let’s call this the Chinatown scenario: Talia’s his mother and his sister. That’s already one screwed-up family. No wonder Bruce might want to get the kid away.

4. Damian isn’t Bruce’s son; he’s his grandson. Red Hood: The Lost Days showed that Talia had Jason Todd in her power for years, and that they eventually became lovers. So she certainly had access to his genes. What would it mean to Damian to discover he’s not the son of Batman, but the son of “Batman’s greatest failure”? How would Jason react to having a biological family once more?

5. Damian’s father was a rich businessman from Gotham—but not Bruce Wayne. Tim tests Damian’s Y chromosome and finds that it matches his own. That means when Tim’s parents traveled the world, Jack Drake did more than argue with Janet. Wouldn’t it be a kick in the tights for Tim to discover that he’s actually Damian’s closest relative?

And that’s just a start. What about David Cain, assassin active in Asia and father of Cass Cain, the second Batgirl? Or Superman, whose Kryptonian DNA can be combined with a human’s and whose powers (in the current continuity) didn’t manifest until he was a little older than Damian? Or…

In fact, about the only man whose DNA in Damian wouldn’t have caused great drama in the recently-shelved DC Universe, and most likely in the next, would be Dick Grayson. Which of course means we can eliminate him as a suspect.

Campbell: “Comics were supposed to have grown up”

In a 2008 interview with Tom Spurgeon, comics creator Eddie Campbell responded to a question about his “take on the New York publishing world, and how they may be slowly revamping the comics industry into an adjunct of the children's book publishing business”:

This is something that has been bugging me for some time. The latest news to come down is that First Second Books, the publisher of my last three books, are now under the umbrella of Macmillan's Children's Group. I'm not surprised, because the book world, by which I mean the mainstream book publishers as well as the libraries and the Library Association, has been viewing "the graphic novel" as a young reader's genre for quite some time.

In part I think it's because the part of a publishing house that is likely to be interested in bright illustrated narratives is the children's books department, and in part also because those publishers, and America's libraries, see the "graphic novel" as a way of grabbing a part of the literate populace that has hitherto proved elusive.

Now, I have no objection to young folks having their own literature specially designed for them, though when I was a young 'un myself I would have been highly suspicious of anything that the adult world thought I should read because it was supposed to be good for me. Let's not forget that this is one of the things that drew us to comics in the first place, the very fact that they were not approved by our adults; they were our visual rock'n'roll, the things we knew that they didn't. However, let's not get bogged down on that point.

The problem with this development is that comics were supposed to have grown up and become the "graphic novel," but now we are apt to find articles telling us that the "graphic novel has grown up." In other words we're back where we started.

Campbell then added a quote from “a relevant blog post” by, um, me.

That was rather exciting to stumble across. It’s also rather circular, since my thoughts on how our culture perceives the comics form had been pushed along by earlier comments from Campbell. So maybe it’s just the two of us muttering about this on opposite sides of the world.

But if you Google the phrase "graphic novels aren't just for kids", over 1,500 hits come up. With almost 500 more for "graphic novels not just for kids". And a lot of those hits are library sites.

In any case, let me reiterate how I enjoyed Campbell’s autobiographical Alec: The Years Have Pants, especially the pages that deal with the British comics scene of the 1980s and with parenthood. It’s fine work, and adult.

Isotopic Detective Work

I read about this forensic case in Chemistry and Engineering News, but found the abstract for the case study among the papers at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011: “Stable Isotope Profiles from a Lock of Hair Provide Information of Illegal People Trafficking Route used by a Vietnamese Organised Crime Group” (PDF).

The study was conducted by Wolfram Meier-Augenstein and Helen F. Kemp of the Stable Isotope Unit of the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee, and by Ian Brewster and Geoff Ronayne of the Gwent Police, “Croesyceiliog, Cwmbran.” (I’m assuming that’s Welsh, but I’m not familiar with the language of those ancestors.)

A young man with Asian features was left in the A&E department of a hospital in Gwent, South Wales (UK) by persons unknown and died shortly thereafter. A hit in the Interpol fingerprint database provided some information regarding the victim’s nationality but there was no record of this individual ever having entered the UK, at least not legally.

On behalf of Gwent Police, stable isotope analysis was carried out on a lock of scalp hair to generate chronological profiles for diet or nutritional changes as well as a recent geographic life trajectory.

Isotopes are atoms or ions of the same element with different atomic weights (i.e., numbers of neutrons). Different parts of the world have different concentrations of oxygen isotopes, which people and animals in those places take into their bodies. 

Moving from the oldest part of the hair (the tip) to the most recently formed part (near the scalp) the longitudinal 2H isotope profiles suggested the following. At 15 months prior to death, the victim spent approx. 2.5-3 months spent in Eastern Europe (most likely the Ukraine) followed by a direct move to Central Europe (e.g. Germany).

Subsequent to this move from the Ukraine to Germany, the victim lived in Germany for about 6-7 months from where he moved to the UK eventually to arrive at his final location of residency on or near the UK’s West Coast (South Wales). In contrast to the move from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, this move was not a direct transition from one location to another. This move either happened in stages over a period of 1.5 to 2 months interrupted by brief stays (< 0.5 month) at different locations, or the period between leaving Central Europe and arriving at the final location was characterized by frequent travel and change of location not necessarily related to or influenced by the final area of residency.

The information provided by stable isotope analysis in conjunction with enquiries carried out under Operation C#$#$## showed that the victim (a Vietnamese man) was indeed smuggled into the UK illegally and the trafficking route did run through the Ukraine via Germany into the UK. Once in the UK the victim was moved between Dover, London and Birmingham before eventually being settled down in South Wales, where he lived and was forced to work as Cannabis farmer for an organised Vietnamese crime group during the final 2.5 months of his life.

According to the C&E News story, a rival gang stole a big crop from this man, and his enslavers killed him as punishment. Those details would, of course, not be available through isotope analysis, so it’s quite possible the whole story could have come out through traditional police inquiries. But the match between those investigative findings and the isotopic readings confirms the value of both methods.

How soon will this technique show up in a television drama?