1989: Year Without a Robin?

As 1989 began, it was the first year since 1940 that DC Comics had no character named Robin appearing (at least occasionally) as Batman’s young assistant. Toward the end of the previous year, fans had voted to let the Joker kill Jason Todd, the latest Robin.

The Batman editorial team was reeling from fans’ criticism of the character of Jason and from wider criticism of the decision to show his death. Interviews and introductions to Batman collections published around that time show how editor Dennis O’Neil was feeling more than a little shell-shocked.

To be sure, the company was still publishing stories about Dick Grayson, the original Robin, in his new guise as Nightwing. Those stories, in The New Titans, were among the company’s top sellers. And DC still owned the Robin trademark, which had been a source of licensing revenue for decades. But there was no Robin in the Batman comic books, and at least a possibility that there would be no replacement.

That year looked like it would be huge for Batman. It was the fiftieth anniversary of when the character debuted (without Robin). Warner Bros. would bring out a major Batman movie by director Tim Burton in the summer (without Robin).

Furthermore, some graphic novels had pushed Batman into more adult territory, including Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham’s Son of the Demon (1987), and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988). Neither of those volumes included Robin.

Frank Miller’s future-set The Dark Knight Returns (1986) debuted a new Robin in Carrie Kelley, but also presciently portrayed Jason Todd as dead and Dick Grayson as estranged from his mentor—hinting that there had been no Robin for years.

In fact, some comics readers and creators were insisting that Robin no longer made sense in the Batman mythos. Grant Morrison couldn’t convince Dave McKean to include Jason in their Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth graphic novel, due to be published in 1989. Morrison later wrote:

The original first draft of the script included the character of Robin as Batman’s sidekick. Robin appeared in a few scenes at the beginning then remained at Police Headquarters for the bulk of the book, where he spent his time studying plans and histories of the house, in order to find a way in to help his mentor.

Dave McKean, however, felt that he had already compromised his artistic integrity sufficiently by drawing Batman and refused point blank to bend over for the Boy Wonder—so after one brave but ridiculous attempt to put him in a trench coat, I wisely removed him from the script.

Not entirely, though. The Joker tries to unnerve Batman by alluding to his unseen partner: “How is the Boy Wonder? Started shaving yet? . . . a cute little long-legged boy in swimming trunks?” Those remarks underscored how poorly the character seemed to fit in a more realistic, more dangerous crime-fighting world.

The Batman movie became a huge hit, spawning three sequels. (I didn’t care for it myself.) Arkham Asylum, benefiting from coming out alongside the movie, sold half a million copies. Batman comic-book sales soared. Those developments helped touch off a speculative boom in the comics industry over the next few years. In sum, it didn’t look like Batman needed Robin to be a hit anymore.

But O’Neil and his writers were already planning a replacement for Jason Todd.

COMING UP: Her name was the Huntress.

New Wizard of Oz Musical, Sort of

Today I read a newspaper item about open auditions for the part of Dorothy Gale in a new musical. I tracked down the website behind it all, and this turns out to be publicity (and casting) for a show with the unfortunate name of WiZaRD. And this being America in 2010, there’s also a reality-show component, with audiences choosing who will get the role.

Although the poster has an Oz theme (MGM movie strand), and this open audition focuses on Dorothy, the show itself appears to be a one-set “jukebox musical,” suitable for national tours:

WiZaRD is a musical production centered on the hits of Oscar-winning composer Harold Arlen. The show unfolds in the mythical radio studios of WiZaRD whose set design combines the nostalgic feel of yesteryears studios with the high-tech studios of today. This collection of vignettes, based on Arlen’s most nostalgic songs, includes a Wizard of Oz scene, taken from the imagination of Frank Baum on the eve of the creation of his Oz characters.

Audiences are taken on a journey from the Cotton Club years, through the golden age of Hollywood, to the Broadway stage ...And to the land of OZ!

The new DOROTHY makes her debut alongside The THREE CROONERS, in this heartwarming family-friendly stage production slated to open at Jazz At Lincoln Center, December 2010.

Not that there’s anything wrong with hearing more Harold Arlen.

Members Will Rightly Wonder

When Oz and Ends last took note of William Donohue, self-appointed leader of the Catholic League, he had discovered that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series depicted an oppressive church. Rather than express thanks that his own church wasn’t so oppressive, Donohue decided that Pullman must have been attacking Catholicism. Curiously, Donohue chose not to take action until when there was a movie on the way and he could get more publicity.

Now he’s put himself back in the news complaining that the Empire State Building management isn’t putting up special lights for the centenary of Mother Theresa. Never mind that she herself wouldn’t want such foofaraw, as the New York Times reports:

“I concede the point that she would not want any attention drawn to her,” Mr. Donohue said in an e-mail in response to a question. But he added: “I have a mission, and it is that of an advocacy group, a pressure group, if you will. I do not run a pastoral institute.”

“If I allow a cultural elite like [the Empire State Building owner] to get away with this with just a shrug, my members would rightly wonder what has happened to me,” he said.

It would be hard to come up with clearer evidence that the Catholic League’s manufactured controversy isn’t about Mother Theresa. It’s about William Donohue, and his fundraising viability. Members might wish to wonder about that.

Where to Shelve the “Graphic Novels”?

Shelf Awareness’s current issue on graphic novels discusses some different approaches to selling comics in bookstores:

Powell’s separates its graphic novels into Manga (and separately, the sexually explicit manga genre Yaoi), Superheroes, Graphic Novels General, Toons (comic strips like Doonesbury), Classic Toons (Little Orphan Annie, for example) and Toon History, which includes works like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Graphic novels for kids are shelved separately.

Notably, fiction and nonfiction are not separated, though [new book purchasing supervisor Gerry] Donaghy said that “as more different kinds of graphic novels continue to be introduced, it seems inevitable that we will be further sub-categorizing graphic novels.”

A smaller store, closer to home, has gone the other way, consolidating all the comics titles together because their customers don’t separate out:

In 2007, when Riverrun Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H., started to raise the profile of graphic novels, the store had separate sections for adults and young adults. Later, however, the store combined all the graphic novels into one section. “We thought at first that the kids graphic novel section would be more successful, but it wasn’t,” buyer Michele Filgate explained. “It’s mostly adults and older teens who buy comics” at Riverrun, so having them all in one place made for better sales among customers who weren’t likely to venture into the kids’ section.

Of course, it has nothing to do with the maturity of comics readers.

Finally, one store even takes the daring approach of treating books in comics form like other books on the same topics:

Dan Kusunoki at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Calif., has been experimenting with this approach, and said, “It works great.” For example, Darwyn Cooke’s noirish story The Hunter is shelved in crime fiction/mystery, and Kusunoki has been delighted to shelve Asterios Polyp (David Mazzuchelli’s graphic novel of philosophy, architecture and relationships) next to works by Ayn Rand.

Of course, that’s in California.

Shelving in a good retail store is driven by what sells best for that store, which means it’s driven by what we customers expect and how we behave, which means it doesn’t have to follow any logic at all.

Mythologizing Toronto

Yesterday I started quoting from Chris Randle’s interview with Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim books. Late in the conversation they get deep into the meaning of Toronto:

BLO’M: I can tell you my new metaphorical structure for the book [vol. 6, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour], based on last year. Gideon is Edgar [Wright, movie director], and I’m Envy [local girl who’s been made into a singing star]. He came back to town and started this whole industry, and gave people jobs, and pushed everything around to feed ourselves. I was just kind of along for the ride. So yeah, I feel like in this book I identified most with Envy Adams, which is truly disturbing. . . .

I was gonna do a promo strip for the book that was…all these Toronto luminaries gushing about Gideon coming to town…It was gonna be, like, Chris Murphy and all that kind of stuff.

CR: Margaret Atwood.

BLO’M: Margaret Atwood [laughs]. People saying what a genius he is and stuff. I should still do that, it’d be fun. . . .

CR: I’m really interested to see how Toronto reacts to it specifically, because – I think Scott Pilgrim is part of the general comics zeitgeist in this past decade, maybe the representative series from what a younger generation of North Americans are doing. But also I think it was part of a smaller local thing in Toronto, starting around 2002 or 2003…celebrating or mythologizing [the city].

BLO’M: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of accidentally was in the right place at the right time. People always ask me about Toronto, what it is about Toronto, questions like that, and I’ve never really had a statement. I guess Scott Pilgrim is my statement on Toronto. I don’t think it’s conclusive in any way, but…I only lived there for three, four years. I just happened to be there. I was nobody. It was really weird to go back last year and be introduced to Chris Murphy and Broken Social Scene and all those guys, to have them be like: “Where did you hang out? Why didn’t we know you?” Because I was a fucking nerdy cartoonist! That’s why you didn’t know me, I’m not a rock star.

CR: [laughs] That’s great. I think it’s because Toronto is a really big city, but one that didn’t – I mean, it’s not like New York, where there’s whole layers of lore…

BLO’M: It doesn’t have that weird history, that mythologized history that New York has or L.A. . . . I’ve always been intimidated by New York for that reason, because there’s too many stories. It’s been [so] fictionalized that I can’t really comprehend it.

CR: And L.A., in a different sense, the glitzy sense. But Toronto didn’t have – it had boring, conservative Protestantism…

BLO’M: Conservative white people, yeah.

CR: But there was all this raw material.

BLO’M: Yeah, and I feel like I’ve maybe unfairly mythologized Toronto. I’ve definitely seen kids being like: “I want to move to Canada now!” And, um…it’s cool, but it’s just a city.

Is it perhaps characteristically Canadian to feel guilty about making a big, cosmopolitan city look like an interesting place to live?

I feel compelled to tell a story about Honest Ed’s, a Toronto landmark that serves as a major setting in the third Scott Pilgrim volume. Honest Ed’s is a discount and salvage store that looks like a cross between the old Spag’s, the Corn Palace, and a Las Vegas casino. It’s garish and commercial and more than faintly embarrassing. Scott actually needs goggles when he’s inside.

But when I read that scene, I remembered a secret about Honest Ed’s. When my first book was being published, the head of the press told me that firm’s landlord was Honest Ed. He liked having publishers, galleries, and other cultural institutions in the neighborhood, so he gave them good rates on office space. That garish, commercial embarrassment was actually a pillar of Toronto’s art scene.

So what does that say about Toronto? There are plenty of stories under its surface. The real myth of Toronto might be its “boring, conservative Protestantism.”

They Don’t Teach Subspace in Canadian Schools

One aspect of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books that I haven’t seen discussed enough is their Canadianness. Not just that the series was started and set in Toronto, and how most of its characters are Canadian, but how it depicts that city and the great nation surrounding it.

Of course, the American media wouldn’t take notice of that quality. And even the Canadian entertainment media skips that stuff mostly. But when Canadian comics journalist Chris Randle gets to publish the unprinted portions of his Toronto Globe & Mail interview with O’Malley on his blog, then it all comes out!

CR: The fact that Gideon opens up his sinister, decadent lair, his Legend of Zelda boss lair, at—

BLO’M: At this homeless shelter.

CR: Yeah, the corner with all the junkies and homeless people at Queen & Bathurst! It plays into all those debates about gentrification, and…

BLO’M: Yeah, totally. And Gideon is, you know, this American guy coming to town and making his own luxury bullshit…

That combination of awe and resentment toward America surfaces in volume 1 when Ramona Flowers brings Scott his Amazon.ca package. He asks how she was in his dream.

Ramona mentions the subspace highway through Scott’s head. “Is this something they don’t teach in Canadian schools?” she asks. “You guys probably just don’t know about them in Canada. I was wondering why they were always so empty up here.”

To which Scott can only reply, “So…um, I guess you’re American?”

Because who else would have such a casual attitude toward awesome power and other people’s space? Roller-skating through Scott’s dreams isn’t just a metaphor for a boy becoming infatuated with a girl. At that moment it also becomes a synedoche for how Canada views its southern neighbor.

But there’s hope for Ramona yet. In volume 6, she’s disappeared. Everyone assumes she’s gone back to Gideon (i.e., America). But at the end she reveals ***yeah, yeah, SPOILER*** that she went to her dad’s on a sort of “wilderness sabbatical”—just as Wallace and Kim told Scott to do. In other words, she’s become a little more Canadian.

TOMORROW: Toronto, city of myth.

Google d’Espalier

Yesterday I decided the language needs a new term: “Google d’espalier.”

It derives from the French “esprit d’espalier,” or “staircase wit,” meaning the riposte or witticism that occurs to a person as he or she is leaving the party, well after it would have been most apropos. They usually end up in diaries and memoirs, though some people have been able to use them in carefully writing up the occasion for a newspaper.

“Google d’espalier” is the sad triumph of looking up some fact after it would have been useful—after a discussion has moved on, an argument has died down, or the person seeking information is gone, no longer able to be helped or impressed.

Yesterday, for example, a visitor to Longfellow National Historic Site asked us whom Radcliffe College was named after. After he departed, I was able to cadge a wireless signal and determine that the name came from Lady Ann Mowlson, née Radcliffe (1576-1661), who endowed the first scholarship at Harvard—i.e., someone with as early but tenuous a connection to the Cambridge college as John Harvard had.

But of course by then it was too late.

(Photograph above of Fay House, the first building acquired by Radcliffe and renovated by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr., with funds from Alice Longfellow, as shown on the handsome Historic Buildings of Massachusetts archive.)

Don’t You Hate When This Happens?

Dick demonstrates Reason for Robin, #5: He slips, he falls! Of course, who wouldn’t?

From Detective Comics, #300, “The Bizarre Polka-Dot Man!”

Being Dyspeptic about Dystopics

Back in February, Karen Springen wrote in Publishers Weekly about this year’s crop of dystopian fiction for teens, and theorized:

Why now? Newspaper headlines about swine flu, terrorism, global warming, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are inspiring authors—and making kids feel uneasy. Some publishers also point to publicity surrounding December 21, 2012, the end of the 5,126-year Mayan calendar—supposedly an apocalyptic sign.

Still, most editors and authors credit lingering unease from the World Trade Center attacks.

Of course, any literary trend is a combination of interest from authors and publishers and interest from readers, working in a feedback loop. Those titles are probably getting extra attention because of The Hunger Games, which in turn may owe some of its success to City of Ember.

Beth Davis at the Spectacle posits a natural affinity between teens and dystopian literature:

That’s one reason why I think it appeals to teens so much. There is a lot out of teens’ control–a lot out of all of our control. We can’t really single-handedly sway our government to enter to leave a war. We can’t prevent a natural disaster–or a man-made one, probably. We are, in the end, rather insignificant. It’s when we’re teens that we first start to realize that the world is so unfair, and there’s only so much we can do.

Since teen lit is all the rage now (the New York Times Book Review says so!), genres that teens like would naturally sell better than ever.

Dan Wells is another observer who sees the reason for dystopias’ popularity in the times we live in:

Dystopia is huge right now, especially in YA. This is probably due to the fact that we live in one–or, more correctly, this is due to the fact that YA readers are finally paying close enough attention to realize that we live in one. The last time American teens were politically savvy enough to care about the condition of our country was in the 60s, with the Vietnam war, and I think that has a lot of parallels to today.

However, I’d like to see a rigorous analysis of these hypotheses connecting the literature to the times. Other periods of widespread unease and pessimism should correlate with other spikes in dystopic fiction. But do they?

And that doesn’t mean looking back at years when notable dystopic novels were published and finding stuff people worried about then; we humans always have something to worry about. It means finding a way to measure social unease and a way to identify spikes in dystopian fiction. Sounds like a master’s project. Anyone?

The Scott Pilgrim Movie Spoiled

The movie adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics novel offers a curious lesson. Some scenes are recreated almost exactly, particularly from the first four volumes. But toward the end the movie departs so much from the original that I found it undercut the very themes it was trying to get across. (And speaking of “the end,” be assured that this posting contains SPOILERS.)

Writer-director Edgar Wright made the movie even as O’Malley completed his graphic saga, and the plots diverge more and more as the stories unfold. It’s possible that the screenplay reflects what O’Malley was planning in the middle of his project. Or it might reflect the different sensibility of Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall. A big factor, I’m sure, were the requirements of movie storytelling.

The books take place over many months; the movie compresses the same core story into about a single week. We thus lose the cycle of seasons, the Canadian wilderness retreats, the band’s prolonged attempt to record an album. There’s too little time for Scott Pilgrim’s Big Steps—getting a job, moving into an apartment of his own (albeit paid for by his parents). While that compressed timeframe changes the tenor of the story, however, it doesn’t change its essence.

In one respect, I thought the movie made more of a narrative element than the books. The extra life Scott wins in volume 3 becomes not just a way to survive Gideon’s attack in volume 6, but also a chance for Scott to make things right to his friends, à la Groundhog Day. He gets to play level 7 all over again.

Other changes had diminishing returns. A lot of the secondary characters’ stories had to be sliced away. We don’t see, for example, Stephen Stills at work in the kitchen, recording with Joseph, breaking up with Julie, and so on. [Hey, I’m not spoiling everything.] Such compression is common in adapting novels for the big screen. Alas, the effect of this cutting means fewer reminders that a lot of life goes on around Scott while he doesn’t notice.

The screenplay’s second significant narrative change is to make Scott’s decisions more crucial to how scenes are resolved. In volume 3, Todd loses his vegan powers because he’s an arrogant rock star who never gave up gelato. It’s just a happy coincidence that the vegan police arrive when Todd’s about to finish Scott off. That may seem like a narrative defect, but Scott’s precious little life is founded on happy coincidences that he thinks he deserves.

In contrast, the movie Todd’s powers are taken away after the movie Scott tricks him into drinking coffee with half and half. The book Scott would need a lot longer than a week to come up with such a cunning plan, and would never be able to control his thoughts so effectively.

As another example, Young Neil’s big moment arrives not because Scott blithely drops the “Young” from his name, but because he takes over the bass guitar—he becomes a new Scott Pilgrim. Then Scott overtly declares that from now on the lad will be known as “Neil.”

Only in the movie does main villain Gideon offer the band Sex Bob-Omb a recording contract. That’s an obvious ploy to control them, and Scott alone refuses to sign. The other band members get shrunk into foils for the hero, whereas in the books they’re usually more grounded than he is.

The major characters who suffer most from the changes are Scott’s old girlfriends. Kim Pine loses her best moments in volumes 5 and 6. Knives Chau shows up to help Scott in his final fight (turning a couple’s moment into a threesome), and then dutifully sends him off after his new girlfriend. Envy Adams never makes her curtain call at the Chaos Theatre.

In other words, the movie has become All About Scott. Yet its stated theme, as in the books, is that Scott has to recognize that the world isn’t All About Scott. During the climactic fight in the volume 6, Scott gains the Power of Understanding. At the equivalent moment in the movie, he gains the Power of Self-Respect. But Scott Pilgrim already had more Self-Respect than he deserved.

Toward the end of both books and movie, Nega-Scott shows up—the embodiment of all the evil Scott has unthinkingly done. In the books, Scott must absorb Nega-Scott, accepting the reality of his past behavior. In the movie, Nega-Scott turns out to be “a nice guy.” That’s just wrong.

All told, the changes to Scott Pilgrim combine to produce a smaller, more focused story, appropriate to a two-hour commercial movie—yet a story that ends up working against itself.