Orphans 'R' Us

I was struck by this quote from a Publishers Weekly interview with the venerable Lois Lowry, on the occasion of her new book, The Willoughbys:

Lowry: I was in love with orphans when I was a kid, but that doesn’t seem to be very popular in today’s books. It’s become politically incorrect to do away with parents. We send kids to camp instead, to get away from their parents. So it began with orphans.

Wha'? No orphans in today's books? Heck, we're knee-deep in orphans these days!

What about a certain hero named Potter? Or the Grimm sisters? Or the Baudelaire children?

Lowry: I haven’t read Lemony Snicket, I’m afraid.

Ah.

The title characters of Lowry's Willoughbys are, PW says, "a quartet of old-fashioned kids who aren’t orphans--but who long to be." So it seems she's unwittingly come up with a parody of the recent trend of parentlessness in popular children's literature, as well as the previous trend of same. Still, it seems wise to know what you're parodying before you launch into it.

The Way of the Kurds

Here's another recent article from the Boston Globe about a writing-group colleague, in this case storyteller Diane Edgecomb, who has just published an unusual collection, A Fire in My Heart: Kurdish Tales. The paper discusses her research travels:

Edgecomb met some Kurdish refugees in 1999 and was impressed by their strong oral history. With politics and modernization threatening to render the old ways obsolete, Edgecomb set out to record their stories, doing most of her work in Turkey between 2005 and last year.

Accompanied by a guide and translator, Edgecomb spent hours listening to and filming the tradition bearers. "This isn't just a project to create a book," said Edgecomb. "I'm documenting the tellers and creating an archive." The book, released this month, is the first volume of Kurdish tales published in English, and also includes recipes, games, and color photos. . . .

"We found one teller whose family for generations had been in the mountains," said Edgecomb. "A nomadic family, and only in the last year had they come down to the cities." The man related epic tales of Rusteme Zal, a legendary figure of Kurdish folklore. "He went on for two hours with just one story and then he told me that was only the outline," Edgecomb said.

Of the pieces she's collected, a yarn about why the moon has dirty spots on its face is a favorite. There are also humorous themes. "They love telling stories about the fox . . . tricking people and tricking other animals," said Edgecomb. "Those are very funny stories. Also beautiful fairy tales, wonderful wonder stories, which go on and on and on."

Kurdistan seems to edge closer to de facto independent status each year, though perhaps pushing for de jure nationhood would wipe out some of those gains. Not that the current administration is facing the hard choices of that situation. I quote from Jeffrey Goldberg's cover story "After Iraq" in the current Atlantic Monthly:

At a conference in 2004, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated, “What has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis--whether Kurds or Shia or Sunni or the many other ethnic groups in Iraq--have demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq.”

As Peter Galbraith, a former American diplomat and an advocate for Kurdish independence, has observed, Rice’s statement was disconnected from observable reality--shortly before she spoke, 80 percent of all Iraqi Kurdish adults had signed a petition calling for a vote on independence.

Kids “Universally” Dislike Clowns?

This month, the Reuters wire burned with a new scientific finding: Kids hate clowns. The dispatch stated:

The news that will no doubt have clowns shedding tears was revealed in a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children's wards.

The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.

"As adults we make assumptions about what works for children," said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university.

"We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

This prompted complaints from clowns who visit hospital wards, as a follow-up dispatch reported:

Unhappy clowns from around the world say a study that reported that children didn't like them has wiped the big smile from their faces, and have been falling over their large shoes to put their case. . . .

In a deluge of emails to Reuters, they say they misrepresent just how popular they really are.

"The 'universe' of 250 children used for the Sheffield University study was miniscule compared to the 250,000 one-to-one bedside visits made by Clown Care to hospitalized children annually," said Joel Dein, director of communications at the Big Apple Circus in New York.

I can’t read the original article without a Nursing Standard subscription, but I have doubts about any study that surveys fewer than 300 English children and then prompts a declaration that “clowns are universally disliked.” Social scientists rarely speak in such absolutes.

On the other hand, amidst all the caterwauls and chuckles, the news media lost track of the confines of the original study. The Sheffield team didn’t research kids’ thoughts on actual clowns; they’re studying how to design and decorate children’s hospital wards. As HospitalHealthCare.com reported, the lead researcher “said that children preferred colourful spaces and references to contemporary culture.”

Well, of course they do. This study basically asked kids aged four to sixteen in a social environment (i.e., where there was every possibility of peer pressure to be cool) how they’d like their bedrooms decorated. How many kids today are going to demand a circus theme? But that doesn’t mean kids, in hospital or not, dislike the clowns who come to entertain them once in a while.

(Creepy image of card-playing, cigarette-smoking child clowns above by artist Ron English, available as a poster. Now that’s decorating!)

Reignited Candelabra

Marcus Mébès’s Pumpernickel Pickle press has announced the availability of a reprint of L. Frank Baum’s By the Candelabra’s Glare. Baum self-published this small book of verse in 1898, setting the type himself.

By then, Baum had made friends among Chicago’s artistic community through editing the trade magazine The Shop Window, so several notable illustrators contributed decorations for the book. Among them was W. W. Denslow, Baum’s collaborator in 1900 on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Characteristically, Baum begins his foreword with some self-deprecating wordplay:

A friend of mine, who has attained eminence as a critic, once found me glancing through a book of verse.

“What are you looking for?” he demanded.

“His excuse,” said I.

“My dear boy,” returned the eminent critic, frowning severely, “there can be no excuse for a book of verse.”

It looks like all the illustrations and decorative pages of the original have been reprinted, and the poems have been reset for easy reading. The collection is broken into sections of “Semisentimental Verse,” “Cycling Verse,” “Children’s Verse,” and two sections of miscellany.

I figure many people are as unfamiliar with the genre of cycling verse as I am, so I’ll quote a short example:

I catch a flash from merry eye--
I see a wave of golden curl;
And then there swiftly passes by
Upon her wheel, a pretty girl!

I know my seat is not secure,
(I’ve only had my wheel a day,)
And yet one glance I must procure
Before the vision speeds away.

Vainglorious fool! Upon my head
I land, nor see the sight I sought;
For down the street my charmer’s fled
And I’ve a header had for nought!

By the Candelabra’s Glare has always been one of the rarest of Baum’s books, especially when we set aside his early work on stamp-collecting and chicken-raising. I believe this is the first reissue ever at an affordable price, made possible through Mébès’s enthusiasm and print-on-demand technology. It’s available in hardcover and digital editions.

Why Western High Art Disdains Speech Balloons

Andy Konky Kru had an article on his comics history website titled “The Evolution of the Speechballoon”, and it’s left traces on other people’s blogs, particularly Karl Jones’s. However, neither Google nor I can find the original.

Other resources (i.e., Wikipedia) explain that the convention appeared first in Mayan art in the Last Classic period (600-900 CE); those graphics have come to be known as “speech scrolls.”

Something similar appeared in Western art in the 1200s. Ribbons of writing unspooled from people’s mouths to show what they were saying. Those ribbons got the name of phylactery, borrowed from the Greek word for the containers for small scrolls of Hebrew scripture. The example shown above comes (via Wikipedia) from Bernhard Strigel’s Saint Anne and Angel, circa 1507.

But this posting isn’t about the long history of speech balloons, but about why they became unfashionable in our civilization’s high art, eventually relegated to the mass popular art of cartoons?

I’m pinning part of the blame on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in 1555. That gossipy, opinionated, and highly influential history of Italian art included this anecdote about two fourteenth-century painters named Bruno di Giovanni and Buonamico di Cristofano, called Buffalmacco. (There are various translations, and I’m quoting from Mrs. Jonathan Foster’s, published in London in 1851.)

While employed on this work, Bruno complained that his faces had not the life and expression distinguishing those of Buonamico; when the latter, in his playful manner, undertook to shew him how his figures might be rendered, not life-like only, but even eloquently expressive.

He then bade Bruno paint words proceeding from the mouth of the woman who is recommending herself to the saint, with those which the saint utters in reply proceeding in like manner from the mouth of the latter; which Buffalmacco had seen done in the works of Cimabue.

And this method, as it pleased Bruno and other dull people of that day, so does it equally satisfy certain simpletons of our own, who are well served by artists as commonplace as themselves. It must, in truth, be allowed to be an extraordinary thing, that a practice thus originating in a jest, and in no other way, should have passed into general use; insomuch, that even a great part of the Campo Santo, decorated by much esteemed masters, is full of this absurdity.

Vasari was mistaken about the genesis of this technique, as other scholars noted, and how widely it was accepted. Nevertheless, his critical message was clear: only an untalented (and gullible) artist would resort to such an “absurdity,” and only “simpletons” would enjoy it.

I suspect Vasari’s harsh criticism helped to shape fine artists’ and connoisseurs’ tastes in the following centuries. Meanwhile, painters became more interested in capturing realistic images than in imparting a message, then in replicating the effects of light, and finally in expressing the unphotographable. Phylacteries and speech balloons floated out of paintings. They survived in political cartoons, popular engravings, and finally comic strips--but that only cemented the technique’s association with “low” art rather than “high” art.

Authors in Profile

Yesterday's Boston Globe featured an article about Mitali Perkins and Karen Day; I'm lucky enough to be in a critique group with both of them.

Mitali has a new series called First Daughter, about a teenager adopted from South Asia whose father, a respected military veteran, becomes a leading candidate for President of the U.S. And would that ever happen?

In the newspaper article, Mitali talks about the inspirations of her own childhood as an immigrant encountering various parts of America.

"My stories come out of the things that I experienced when I was in middle school," said Perkins. "About being between cultures."

Perkins was 7 when her family emigrated from Bengal, India, to the Flushing section of Queens, where she felt comfortable since "nearly every nation was represented," she said.

But when they moved to California, Perkins found herself surrounded by whites who had all been born and raised in the United States.

"Not one kid spoke to me for two months," said Perkins. "The principal introduced me as 'a new student from Asia.'"

Mitali also has a story about her school's Trekkers that's simultaneously hilarious and heart-breaking, which I hope she'll one day build a novel around.

As for Karen, I tease her about being a jock, but her athletic background and discipline are a big part of her writing. There's at least a little sports in almost all of her books, even if it's just the family bowling nights in Tall Tales. Karen's upcoming No Cream Puffs is about the first female pitcher in her town's Little League.

Until reading the Globe article, I didn't realize that Karen's athletic career led to her writing in another way:

Day was playing baseball with boys and traveling on an elite tennis circuit at a time when the world was taken with Billie Jean King.

Being a much better athlete than all of the boys left her isolated, said Day.

"I really didn't have anyone to talk to," she said. "I kept a journal - writing has always been a part of me that felt really safe and good."

The first draft of Tall Tales that Karen shared with the group was in diary form. Eventually she chose a different narrative voice, but I now understand how natural it was for her to start from that form of writing.

Robin Breaks the Fourth Wall

This weekly Robin highlights a striking example of what I've called the comics style's freedom to "show the invisible" in ways that traditional book illustration usually doesn't.

These panels are from Robin, #112, published in 2003, with script by Jon Lewis and penciling by Pete Woods. (I cut an intervening panel, so the layout below doesn't look exactly like the magazine.)

In the lower panel, narrator and title character Tim Drake addresses us readers directly in the captions. We know those are Tim's words not just because he tells us, not just because the captions' green border matches his jacket, but because he apologizes for being impolite--a characteristic remark for Tim. (It's also characteristic that when Tim disguises himself and adopts another persona, he acts like a boor. But that's a matter for his writers or his analyst to work out.)

Tim's words reveal that he's undercover as a young hitchhiker looking for "hippie chicks." The art shows him winking to us. And most interesting, all the physical elements of his disguise--fake ponytail, false eyebrows, earrings, and stick-on soul patch--pop off his head for an instant.

Of course, that doesn't really happen, even within the reality of the comic book. But in comics art, we readers are allowed to see what remains unseen.

Free Play

I enjoyed Jenna Russell's interview in the 20 Jan 2008 Boston Globe's Ideas section with Roger Hart, CUNY professor of environmental psychology. It's headlined, "Sheltered lives: When did kids stop playing outside?"

As a graduate student in 1972, Hart visited a Vermont town to study how children played. That led to a series of short documentaries with filmmaker John Marshall. (Flickr set of images from those movies here. For Americans of my age, I suspect there's a definite Zoom vibe to the whole project.)

The Globe interview included this interesting exchange:

HART: Back then, there wasn't this tight intermeshing between parents' and children's lives. On weekends, especially Sundays, there would be greater locking in, but the rest of the time, children came home from school and went straight out.

IDEAS: And now?

HART: There was a question the children would jump to, this time, when I asked it, which was, "Tell me the times when you're just with other children, without adults organizing you." No one has ever asked them that before, but they immediately know the answer, and it's important to them. They'll say things like, "Oh, before football practice, when we're just hanging around, before we start, and then when we're on the school bus." So they know these settings where there's a chance for them to invent their activities with one another, and it's very rare.

IDEAS: How did they get so busy?

HART: There has been too much hype from psychologists in the last decade about how crucial it is to push children when they're young, and not many saying what they should be saying, which is that there are also benefits to children having free play.

IDEAS: Are the changes affecting the skills children develop?

HART: A sizable number of my parents say they're concerned their children are not as imaginative as they were, not as able to invent activities without the script being given to them. Parents say their kids often say to them, "What do I do now?" If the parents ask them to go outside and play, the kids say, "Come and play with me."

IDEAS: Are there any positive changes?

HART: There are. Almost all the parents feel closer to their children than their parents were to them. That's fascinating -- it's the flip side of children having less freedom.

The American Psychological Association website offers another article on Hart's work from 2006.

WAVE, TOSS: Another Way to Show Movement

During this month's COMICS WEEK, I commented on how producing digital images had given artists a new way to show movement: by drawing as crisply as usual, then blurring the result with Photoshop or a similar program to replicate the effect we see in photographs.

That posting listed some pre-digital methods to convey motion. But since then I've noticed quite a few examples of yet another method that I'd left out: simply labeling the action.

The top example here comes from from Paul Gilligan's daily comic strip, Pooch Cafe, for 21 Jan 2008. The words "WAVE WAVE" are obviously not sound effects, not spoken words, not words that would actually appear in the scene. They simply tell us what the lady across the street is doing. Probably if newspaper comic strips didn't have to be so small Gilligan could have conveyed the same information with motion lines around her hand. [ADDENDUM: Or maybe not. Today's strip uses the same technique despite having more space available.]

The previous day, I'd seen another example in Jim Pascoe and Jake Myler's "manga-style" Undertown, running in Sunday newspapers. It showed a boy clutching his teddy bear, with the word "CLUTCH" drawn beside him.

The example on the right is from Sara Varon's graphic novel Robot Dreams (a Cybils nominee). In addition to the parenthetical "toss," she shows the movement with the dashed arrow.

I suppose I should count this technique among other ways that comics artists show the invisible in their drawings, along with speech and thought balloons, sound effects, established symbols for collisions and emotions, and the like. But it seems more like telling, not showing.

You Never Know What You Might Find

It all started when a friend and colleague alerted me to the Toronto Public Library's Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, which now contains some of our correspondence, of all things. Then I noticed that that collection is also the repository of papers from author Susan Cooper, and a finding aid for Cooper's papers is available for downloading as a PDF file.

So I downloaded and saw some intriguing items. Series 1, Box 3, contains "The Gift of Gramarye [1973?] / Original typed manuscript with extensive corrections (354 p.)." That manuscript eventually became The Dark Is Rising.

I wondered how widely known Cooper's working title was, so I Googled that phrase. That search led me to this guide to writing Dark Is Rising fanfiction. It hadn't occurred to me that people would be writing such stories; I guess Cooper's cycle always struck me as complete in itself, and not (like the Oz books, for example) encouraging further exploration.

But if inspiration ever strikes, now I know this site contains such valuable information as this, from a profile of Will Stanton:

When "undercover", he can look faintly stupid. He smiles amiably, mutters vaguely, and avoids fights. Jane thinks that he is sometimes like an adult in the way he behaves.

Mary says that he's pompous sometimes.

Jane notices how he manages to deflect arguments - e.g. when Simon is trying to pick a fight. She thinks that he's like a grown-up sometimes.

I found a more pithy characterization of Will at a website linked from that one, DarkIsRising.net:

Ordinary. So ordinary and unassuming you may feel the need to kick him. Enthusiastic, knowledgeable, pleasant, voted most likely to blend in. Occasionally has a habit of seeming a fair bit older than he is. And more commanding. And take charge. And knowing everything. Please try to ignore his other habits of controlling magic, time-skipping, living forever and being what's basically the main avatar of the Light.

And that website in turn holds this archive of Dark Is Rising "slash" fanfiction (i.e., focused on gay, usually male love affairs and relationships among the established characters). Again, I'd never imagined there was such.

As I wrote in connection to King of Shadows, and as Cooper herself said in her talk at the Cambridge Forum last fall, she prefers to write about preadolescents because they don't have the hormone problems of teenagers. Nonetheless, the fanfiction archive shows some fans must like writing about romantic and/or sexual pairings among her characters, with the overwhelmingly popular option being Will/Bran.

I have no objection to the hobby of "slash" fanfiction. I do have a strong objection to stories composed without enough commas or plot, which prevents me from enjoying a lot of fanfiction, and I haven't looked at any of these examples. Just knowing that they're there is enough to think about.

This trail of digital bread crumbs does lead to one dead end. In June, the moderator of the slash fanfiction website added a new category just for people who were inspired by the movie adaptation, The Seeker. That area remains empty.