The Pants Show That’s Not Actually the First Robin

This is yesterday’s entry from Dan Piraro’s daily comic, Bizarro. The comic for the day before was about Batman and Superman. And Piraro even has a collection of superhero spoofs on the market.

In my hometown paper, Bizarro is a real strip, in the horizontal format, albeit usually a single panel. But other papers and the web run the gags in this aspect ratio. That means Piraro has to redraw every entry with other details; in this case, the horizontal version has another curious framed artwork hanging to the right, next to the lit firecracker. What cartoonists won’t do to keep us entertained.

Torn About the Eisners, and a Bookstore Appearance

The new Eisner Nominations for “Best Publication for Kids (ages 8-12)” present me with a dilemma:

• Adventure Time, by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb (kaboom!)
• Amulet Book 5: Prince of the Elves, by Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic)
• Cow Boy: A Boy and His Horse, by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos (Archaia)
• Crogan’s Loyalty, by Chris Schweizer (Oni)
• Hilda and the Midnight Giant, by Luke Pearson (Nobrow)
• Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Braden Lamb generously collaborated with me on “The Greatest Spy Ever,” our contribution to The Greatest Comics Anthology of All Time.

Eric Shanower gently gave me my first tips on writing for comics, and less gently the valuable encouragement to just get started: “Page One, Panel 1….” Years back, he illustrated my short story “Jack Pumpkinhead’s Day in Court.”

I even owe Chris Schweizer for reacting so politely to my worry about his eighteenth-century characters, as in Crogan’s Loyalty, having facial hair—which would be all wrong for the eighteenth-century British Empire.

So I don’t know whom to root for. But tomorrow afternoon Braden and I, along with his partner in all things, Shelli Paroline; our publisher, Dan Mazur; and Fletcher Hanks successor Joey Peters, will be selling and signing books at Comicopia in Boston’s Kenmore Square neighborhood. Braden and Shelli will be there from noon to three; Dan, Joey, and I have the three-to-six shift. This is one of the short-notice events that popped up after this spring’s Boston Comic Con had to be indefinitely postponed because, you may have heard, the whole metro area was shut down yesterday.

Sen. John Cornyn on the Low Road

This week President Barack Obama called the U.S. Senate’s 54-46 vote for improved background checks on gun buyers, which wasn’t enough to enact a measure overwhelmingly supported by the American public, a “pretty shameful day for Washington.”

As The Hill reported, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) responded on the Senate floor:

When good and honest people have differences of opinion about what policies our country should pursue when it comes to the Second Amendment…the president of United States should not accuse them of having no coherent arguments or caving to political pressure. The president could have taken the high road…but instead he chose to take the low road…

Cornyn’s complaint about being blamed for “caving to political pressure” comes two months after this New York Times dispatch from February on how members of his own party see him changing political positions because of political pressure:

Mr. Cornyn seems to be shifting discernibly right, as evidenced, Republican observers say, by his recent positions on everything from cabinet appointees to a bipartisan immigration plan.

Of course, Cornyn is already firmly on the political right and has been since supporting George Wallace as a high-school student. But to avoid a primary fight he needs to be even more obstructionist.

Does Sen. Cornyn actually understand how “good and honest people have differences of opinion”? Last week he made a speech on the Senate floor to explain why he wouldn’t even vote to debate gun laws, and FactCheck.org concluded, “Cornyn is putting words in Obama’s mouth that he never said, and then calling them false.”

Keep Calm and Mind the Gap

I’m quite pleased to have been directed to BBC America’s Mind the Gap webpage, about differences between life in Britain and in America. It’s written for British expatriates in the US, but has plenty of information useful for Americans in the UK, or folks who just enjoy the discrepancies.

For example, American Habits that British Will Never Understand includes “Compulsive sentimentality”:

my husband and I recently checked out of a B&B [in the US] after a two-night stay. Instead of bidding us farewell with a firm handshake and a receipt, the owner – a man in his 50s – latched on to me, then my man, for a prolonged hug. Just when we thought it was over, he announced, “I’ll miss you guys!” No, actually. You won’t.

Other highlights:

• the reverse of the above.
• subtle differences in playground rhymes and games.
• British insults we Americans don’t understand.
• Ways we can insult British people without realizing.
• How to order in an American restaurant or café (which we of course pronounce with an accent on the second syllable).

Two of the site’s correspondents debate whether Americans understand sarcasm, and an American commenter responds, “I find it hilarious that a British ‘debate’ consists of two people who think the same thing, but one feels sightly more strongly about it.” It takes another commenter to note that there are profound regional differences over the use and grasp of sarcasm within the US.

That debate in turn led me to BuzzfeedUK’s “British People Problems,” such as: “A man in the supermarket was browsing the food I wanted to browse, so I had to pretend to look at things I didn’t even want until he left.”

Early Disney Television

Earlier this year I read the Carl Barks collection Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes. Though it’s volume 7 of Fantagraphics’s Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, it was the first volume to be printed. It collects Donald Duck comics from 1948-1950, after Bark had hit his stride and established most of his characters.

And I still can’t tell Huey, Dewey, and Louie apart.

But obviously Barks knew them well enough to anticipate how kids would behave in front of a television—even back in 1948, when only a few American families had a set.

Oz-Stravaganza’s Call for Short Oz Fiction

The Syracuse Post-Standard reports that the International Wizard of Oz Club is co-sponsoring an Oz fiction writing contest as part of the annual Oz-Stravaganza festival in Chittenango, New York, boyhood home of L. Frank Baum.

As the story and contest brochure (PDF) explain, there are four grade categories. The stories from grades 3-8 can be 500 words long, 25% longer than the stories from writers in grades 9-12 and above. But we all know that writing short is harder than writing long.

Entries in each category have to include certain words. For writers in ninth grade and above (including adults), those words are:

1. Magic 2. Forest 3. Courage 4. Hourglass 5. Danger 6. Rescue 7. Castle 8. Home 9. Soldiers 10. Wish 11. Crystal 12. Cyclone 13. Wizard 14. Witch 15. Escape

Entries must be submitted by mail before 8 May. Check out the article and booklet for all the rules and the requisite registration form. First-place winners in each category will be published in the Post-Standard as part of the June festival.

The Mystery

You might remember this photograph from 2007. That is Godson’s Brother, engrossed in a mystery.

For their shared birthday I usually send Godson and his Brother books, sometimes comics and sometimes prose. My choice for Godson last month was Tui and Kari Sutherland’s The Menagerie. For Godson’s Brother, who reads everything that his eyes fall on, I sprang for two paperbacks: Ellen Raskin’s The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel and The Westing Game.

Their mother is a stickler for thank-you notes, which arrived this weekend. Godson’s says in part:

I am very much looking forward to reading them. Captain Awesome away!

(Captain Awesome, the other side of the notecard makes clear, has telekinesis.)

Godson’s Brother wrote:

I really enjoyed reading them!

Well, I thought, that’s what I should expect. Two books couldn’t keep him occupied for long. Probably onto four more by now. Hardly made a dent.

But it looks like Godson’s Brother’s use of the past tense might have been a little poetic license. Today their mother emailed me that Godson’s Brother

ran into our bedroom at 6:10 this morning and exclaimed, “EUREKA! I GOT IT! I FIGURED OUT”…waving The Westing Game around. He sat on the floor, started to read again and said “Ohhhhhhh…”, got up, and wandered out.

Dick Grayson’s Uncle in the Young Justice Universe

The fictional universe of the Young Justice TV cartoon isn’t exactly like any other version of the DC Comics continuity. And in presenting the origin of Robin in issue #6 of the comic book, the creators of that universe added a significant new detail.

In every version of the DC Universe that I recall, going back to 1940, the Flying Graysons are a three-person act: John, Mary, and young Richard. But in the Young Justice cartoon universe, as shown in issue #6 of the comic, there are six relatives up on the trapeze platform together.

In September 2011 a fan asked Greg Weisman, one of the TV series’s creators, about that uncle. His reply revealed additional information:

Dick's father's name was John. His mother was Mary. And, yes, Cousin John was named after Dick's father. Dick's uncle is named Richard - Rick for short. (Dick was named for his own uncle, obviously - the two elder Grayson brothers were very close.) Dick's aunt was named Karla.

Some of that information never appeared in the cartoon or comic books, but coming from Weisman made it “canonical.”

The larger population of Graysons makes it harder for the creators of the magazine—Art Baltazar and Franco on the script, Christopher Jones on pencils—to explain how everybody but Dick fell to the arena floor when Tony Zucco’s men sabotaged their equipment. The answer, as shown at right, was an elaborate trick involving five Graysons at once.

At the bottom of this panel is the net, lying loose on the ground. In real life, big-top circus flyers always perform with a net. Sometimes they even incorporate that net into their acrobatics. Highwire acts often work without nets, which is why so many members of the Great Wallendas died or got badly hurt in falls. (Which makes it a bit gruesome that they eventually changed the name of their act to the Flying Wallendas.)

(Another notable detail about this panel is the missing “of” in the first caption box. This Young Justice run shows signs of being assembled and published in a hurry.)

After the accident, Dick as narrator describes his new family situation: “My mother and father dead, my aunt and cousin dead, my uncle alive but paralyzed for the rest of his life.” A living uncle!

In September 2011 and again in November, fans asked Weisman for more information on this Uncle Rick. “Is he comatose, mostly paralyzed, something else?” “Will we be seeing more of Dick Grayson's uncle Rick in the YJ series?” Both times, Weisman refused to comment, his way of preserving possible future plot twists from disclosure.

As I’ve written before, Weisman and his colleagues were playing the long game with Young Justice. They set up details that wouldn’t be explained until months later. They skipped five years between seasons and let viewers figure out what had happened in the meantime. And it appears that they included Uncle Rick as a potential complication for the future.

In this universe, Uncle Rick might show up at any time and want custody of Dick, or money from Bruce Wayne. He might recognize the masked hero Robin as moving like a Flying Grayson, just as circus owner Jack Haly does. Uncle Rick might thus be much more formidable than Dick’s Aunt Harriet, who appeared out of nowhere in the 1960s, moved into Wayne Manor, and moved out years later, still clueless.

But the cancellation of the Young Justice TV show and comic means we’ll probably never see that story and know what the continuity’s creators had in mind. Fanfiction writers are offering their own versions, which seem to lean toward the sentimental rather than the dangerous.

Really Most Sincerely

The biggest Oz news of the weekend is a collision of politics, historical accuracy, and poor taste that arose in the UK in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death.

Opponents of Thatcher’s policies made a concerted effort to drive up sales of a 51-second version of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead,” written by E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen for the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. As with the nation’s annual competition to put particular songs on the top of the British charts at Christmas, this wasn’t so much a matter of what music people actually want to hear as what statement they want to make charts make.

The campaign got the song to #3, which normally would mean that BBC Radio 1’s “Official Chart Show” would play it as part of a Top Ten list. But the controller of that station decided that the show would instead report on the song’s placement in its newscast and play a short clip. The whole song won’t appear in the countdown. At least not this week.

As a Facebook commenter noted, Harburg would be pleased—not because of a fresh batch of royalties accruing to his estate but because he was committed to the political left. Harriet Hyman Alonso’s biography Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist, published last year, goes into great detail about his political activity as well as his songwriting.

Thatcher might have the last word, though. Thousands of her opponents probably now have that song stuck in their heads. And so, probably, do you.

OIP Derangement Syndrome Producing No Good at All

In a front-page analysis for the New York Times, Jackie Calmes reported how OIP Derangement Syndrome, exhibited either by politicians or by people those politicians fear, has made the discussion of many important issues in Washington wholly irrational.

Members of both parties say Mr. Obama faces a conundrum with his legislative approach to a deeply polarized Congress. In the past, when he has stayed aloof from legislative action, Republicans and others have accused him of a lack of leadership; when he has gotten involved, they have complained that they could not support any bill so closely identified with Mr. Obama without risking the contempt of conservative voters. . . .

The challenge for Mr. Obama became evident as soon as he took office, when Republicans almost unanimously opposed his economic stimulus package even as the recession was erasing nearly 800,000 jobs a month. The author Robert Draper opened his recent book about the House, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” with an account from Republican leaders who dined together on the night of Mr. Obama’s 2009 inauguration and agreed that the way to regain power was to oppose whatever he proposed. . . .

In early 2010 Republican senators, including the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, demanded that Mr. Obama endorse bipartisan legislation to create a deficit-reduction commission. But when he finally did so, they voted against the bill, killing it. . . .

On immigration, Mr. Obama had wanted to propose his own measure because he had promised Latino groups he would do so. But Senate Democrats advised against it, fearing an “Obama bill” would scare off Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has presidential ambitions. Indeed, Mr. Rubio’s office once issued a statement to deny that he was discussing immigration policy “with anyone in the White House,” even as it criticized the president for not consulting Republicans. . . .

On the budget, Mr. Obama has tried both strategies — negotiating personally with Speaker John A. Boehner on a “grand bargain” for taxes and entitlement-program reductions, and when that failed, letting Congress try, which also failed. Now, with the bipartisan effort moribund, the president has decided he has no option but to publicly take the lead to revive negotiations with hopes of drawing some Republican support.

So the budget he is sending to Congress will embody his last compromise offer to Mr. Boehner in December. For the first time, Mr. Obama is formally proposing to reduce future Social Security benefits, if Republicans will agree to higher taxes on the wealthy and some corporations.

Republican leaders already have rejected the overture, based on early reports about it.

The only Obama decision that Republicans in this Congress would agree to is resignation. That won’t change until the 2014 election, if ever.