Superhero Comics as a “Novel of Ideas”

When I started to explore superhero comics again after a gap of over twenty years, I found the task of interpretation (as in, “figuring out what the hell was going on”) greatly helped by these passages from Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean:

Superhero comics are, by their nature, larger than life, and what’s useful and interesting about their characters is that they provide bold metaphors for discussing ideas or reifying abstractions into narrative fiction. They’re the closest thing that exists right now to the “novel of ideas.”

That’s what’s kept this particular weird little genre so closely connected to its much broader medium: a form that intrinsically lends itself to grand metaphors and subjective interpretations of their visual world goes well with characters who have particular allegorical values. . . .

Virtually every major superhero franchise, actually, can be looked at in terms of a particular metaphor that underscores all of its best stories. . . . that subtext deepens the experience of the surface text, and over time it makes characters meaningful parts of the master “universe narratives.”

That last remark about universes reveals how Wolk’s thinking is most influenced by, and most applicable to, the American comics of the last quarter-century. In that period, the major superhero publishers have cross-pollinated character histories and plot lines as they chased an aging and shrinking readership.

In the industry’s early decades, comics creators were interested only in telling adventure stories effectively enough to keep food on the table. Sure, their major characters embodied forms of wish-fulfillment: the nerd who could secretly beat everyone up, the towering and omnipotent bringer of vengeance—and those were just Jerry Siegel’s creations! But they would have laughed at the notion of deeper symbolic significance.

Subsequent generations of readers grew up thinking about those heroes, perhaps too much, and then got the chance to develop those characters further and add new ones. Crossovers, team-ups, and landmark events became more important in superhero storytelling, forcing writers to find ways to differentiate one hero from another. And eventually cookie-cutter characters came to represent different approaches to heroism.

For example, Aquaman’s personality was originally quite like that of DC Comics’s other heroes—he just lived in the ocean and ordered fish around. In recent decades, however, writers have emphasized Aquaman’s separation from land-dwelling humanity, his environmental concerns, his status as king of Atlantis. He’s come to represent an elemental force on DC’s Earth rather than just a watery Superman.

As another example of what this means in practice, here’s what Wolk sees as the idea behind/represented by the Caped Crusader, at least since the 1980s:

Batman...has pushed himself to the edge of being greater-than-human—and what he’s defined as the peak of humanity is dangerousness and a lack of weakness. His relentless drive, though, had made him (for all practical purposes) psychotic: he’s a benign psycho but barely functional as a person.

His enemies mostly get sent to an insane asylum rather than a prison—they’re like him but malign rather than benign, as virtually everyone who’s written Batman comics over the last few decades has hammered in. And his drive is the kind that parents often pass on to their children; hence his parental relationship with Robin...

TOMORROW: Reason for Robin, #9—what idea Robin represents.

American Comics and the Fantastic

Yesterday I suggested that Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn is garnering better reviews than we’d expect if the same magical plot—child fixes the Dust Bowl drought by conquering the embodiment of Rain—had appeared in prose. (Or in a verse novel, as Karen Hesse used for her Dust Bowl novel, Out of the Dust.)

I listed a couple of elements that might make a fantastic story seem more appropriate: age of reader, gender of protagonist. But I left out the biggie: the fact that The Storm in the Barn is in comics form.

American culture has more fantastic expectations for comics than for other forms of print storytelling, and is therefore quicker to accept supernatural or unreal elements when they appear in panels.

First of all, comics can put fantastic events right in front of our eyes. It’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief when one is seeing a man fly, a duck talk, or the embodiment of Rain fighting with a Kansas farm boy.

In a prose novel, and especially in a verse novel, writing about the Rain as a character would be taken as a metaphor. (“That’s called ‘personification,’” the rhetoricians would say. “And that dialogue is an ‘apostrophe.’ And it’s still going on. And on.”) But when we see the Rain’s angry face and clutching hands, we accept it as a character within the story.

Second and probably more important, American comics magazines have historically been dominated by fantastic genres: superheroes, horror, monsters, science fiction, funny animals. Of course, there have always been American comics that stick to a realistic world: stories of romance, crime, teenage life, and so on. But in the US, forms of the fantastic have dominated and to a great extent come to be seen as the form’s default setting.

Even the most serious topics can thus get a fantastic treatment in American comics. Take the work of Art Spiegelman. Maus adopts elements of the talking-animal genre to dramatize the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers draws from Winsor McCay and other comics geniuses to depict Spiegelman’s psychological, philosophical, and political struggles after the terrorist attack on New York in 2001.

The first graphic novel to crash the ALA prizes for younger readers, Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award-winner American-Born Chinese, intertwines mythology, memoir, and what looks at first like an unrelated tale of growing up in a way that would be even harder, and possibly more off-putting, in prose.

(Eleanor Davis’s Stinky, a Geisel Honor Book, offers a monster and uses comics tools for “showing the invisible.” But that book’s not such a useful example of contrast because its traditional analogues—picture books and early readers—often have elements of the fantastic as well.)

The comics medium, I posit, let Phelan tell a story set in the Dust Bowl that would have been impossible, or at least greeted quite differently, if he’d tried it in prose.

Not Directly about the Dust Bowl?

My favorite part in Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse’s Newbery-winning novel in verse about the Dust Bowl, is ****SPOILERS**** when the teen-aged heroine, Billie Jo, corners the embodiment of the Rain in an old barn and fights him into opening his carpet bag.

By releasing the thunder and lightning in that bag, Billie Jo forces the Rain back into his natural state and restores the landscape around her family farm. Although the book doesn’t say so explicitly, I think the return of the rain also means that Billie Jo’s sister won’t die of that lung disease.

Okay, that’s not what happens in Out of the Dust. It’s what happens in The Storm in the Barn, the new graphic novel by Matt Phelan.

In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo’s mother burns to death, the child she’s carrying also dies, Billie Jo’s own hands are so burned that she can no longer play the piano, and she runs away from home, only to turn back in order to end the book with the requisite sense of hope. (I told you there would be SPOILERS.)

In fact, if Hesse or anyone else had offered a literary novel about the Dust Bowl whose plot turned on fighting an embodiment of the Rain on top of a windmill, I suspect most reviewers would deem that story not serious enough for its setting and topic. Certainly critics have questioned whether children’s fantasy was an appropriate medium for addressing the Holocaust or other periods of great human suffering.

The Storm in the Barn’s plot doesn’t even include what I recall Ellen Howard calling “price of fantasy”: young Jack doesn’t have to make any trade-offs for how he benefits from magic. (Some might say that he and his family have already paid a price, however, and deserve a break.)

That fantastic, wish-fulfilling plot hasn’t stopped The Storm in the Barn from garnering rapturous reviews. Here’s a sampling of positive notices from Shelf Elf, A Fuse #8 Production, and Comics Should Be Good! And on a page-by-page basis it’s very affecting.

To be sure, The Storm in the Barn was created for somewhat younger readers than Out of the Dust. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy (action!) instead of a fourteen-year-old girl (feelings!). In the author’s note Phelan states, “I wanted this book to be set in the Dust Bowl but not a story directly about the Dust Bowl.”

I’m just asking, would that possible for a serious prose novel? Could someone writing for young people today create a novel set during, say, plantation slavery, but insist that it’s not directly about plantation slavery, offer a plot that ends the suffering of that system through supernatural means, and still gain reviewers’ praise?

TOMORROW: Fantasy and the comics form.

Lacking Moral Lessons

A Washington Times column headlined “Children’s Books Lack Moral Lessons” by Julia Duin has prompted a lot of complaints from other authors, publishing pros, and people who have higher opinions of SCBWI conferences (some of which I help to run).

I don’t expect much good from the Washington Times, the capital’s far-right-wing newspaper. Back on 27 Feb 2002, it ran a story on the SCBWI Midyear conference in New York. That article is off the paper’s website, so I can’t tell who wrote it. But the reporter managed to mention Laura Bush, who wasn’t there, and not mention Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, the keynote speaker.

Duin covers religion for the Washington Times. I imagine that beat might be awkward, given that the paper was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-declared Messiah, and is heavily subsidized by his Unification Church. Duin occasionally has to cover Moon’s activities, though apparently doesn’t always have to note his stake in the paper. Indeed, Media Matters noted one odd moment just last month when Duin sniffed at a Muslim speaking at the US Capitol without mentioning that the son of her employer had done so as well.

Apparently Duin is a respected reporter in that field, but I think her biases are evident, especially in her columns. This isn’t the first time that she’s complained about not finding enough “virtuous” children’s books on the market. I don’t accept any Washington Times writer as a reliable judge of “virtue”—there’s the paper’s whole Confederate nostalgia thing, to begin with. But I can accept that tradition is important to Duin.

However, in reading the latest column about children’s books it becomes clear that its real fuel is Duin’s “fury” at how “editors’ eyes glaze over when I presented my ideas” at SCBWI events. She also complains about not being able to hand proposals and manuscripts to those editors instead of submitting by email, though I can’t imagine she’d be so upset if an editor had enthusiastically invited her to email. And since Duin once edited her newspaper’s culture page, I wonder how she reacted to people pressing manuscripts or résumés on her at public appearances.

Duin’s emotion surfaces as her complaints about children’s books become patently wrong and self-contradictory. She says that “Everything [for young readers] is fiction, of the ‘problem books’ variety,” yet among those books “A lot are about the supernatural, particularly vampires.” The “problem book” genre (apparently her out-of-date understanding of “edgy” YA fiction) is at the opposite pole from supernatural romance. Then she complains that “Very few [new books] speak in moral terms,” but the examples she admires are two best-selling, widely imitated series published in recent years.

The column becomes a bit pleading as Duin laments that among today’s children’s book, “Few are retold classics,” and concludes that “The discerning parent and teenager will have to seek meatier stuff from previous centuries.” Pleading because Duin’s own published book for young readers consists of “retold classics” from “previous centuries.”

As Duin wrote in her earlier column, “In 1998, I published a collection of Victorian fairy tales called Knights, Maidens, and Dragons.” That’s actually the title of her 2004 Xlibris (i.e., self-published) reissue. This book originally came out as Waiting for True Love: And Other Tales of Purity, Patience, and Faithfulness from Chariot Victor/Lion Publications, whose other titles include The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible.

The stories in Knights, Maidens and Dragons are rewrites of fairy tales embedded within Annie Fellows Johnston’s Little Colonel novels. It might indeed make sense to rewrite parts of those books: in Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were Misled by Their Favorite Books, Deborah O’Keefe recalled, “I was too obtuse to notice Johnston’s racism and the gross Negro dialect she created.” However, I’d think that plucking the currently acceptable bits out of “classics” should take one out of the business of knocking other people’s “political correctness.”

Then again, I don’t expect consistency from the Washington Times.

Wizard of Oz Back on Bestseller List

This time it’s the graphic novel adaptation by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young.

The original novel appeared before modern book bestseller lists, but it was clearly the children’s-book hit of 1900. The musical extravaganza adapted from it for Broadway in 1903 was the boffo stage show of that time. The 1939 movie, often said to have been a money-loser, was the second biggest grosser of that year, (way) behind only Gone With the Wind.

More recently, in the last few years the second edition of Michael Patrick Hearn’s Annotated Wizard of Oz and Robert Sabuda’s pop-up adaptation both made the New York Times Book Review lists. And now the Marvel comics adaptation is on the graphic-novel bestseller list, most recently #3.

I’ll quote from the perceptive review (i.e., I agree with its points) from The Graphic Classroom:

Shanower took care in this adaptation by giving us details that have – for most people anyway – been lost because of the celluloid translation. In fact, so many details were left out of the movie that many parts of this book give the reader new insight – new teeth – with which to chomp into this new-old story. From the green goggles worn in the Emerald City to Dorothy’s magic kiss, to the fact that Oz sees each of the four individually (and always in a different form), or the fact that the flying monkeys only did the Wicked Witch’s bidding because they were forced to, it is to the reader’s delight that the old story is fresh.

And another from Sequential Tart, which looks at comics from female fans’ perspectives:

Best of all, Dorothy maintains her status as an ‘every’ girl, brave and kind, to whom all children can relate. It is Young’s portrayal of her that brings the visual realism to the story. If we can believe in Dorothy, then we can believe in Oz, the Munchkins, and a talking Lion!

And of course we can believe in Dorothy Gale.

At Last It Can Be Told

I once again volunteered to be a judge for the Cybils Awards. In past years I was part of the process for Fantasy and Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, and Middle-Grade Novels. This year I decided to mix it up with Nonfiction Picture Books, and my fellow mixers are:

Panel Organizer
• Jone Rush MacCulloch, Check It Out


Panelists (Round I)
• Bill and Karen, Literate Lives
• Kara Dean, Not Just For Kids
• Amanda Goldfuss, ACPL Mock Sibert
• Jone Rush MacCulloch (see above)
• Debbie Nance, Readerbuzz
• Franki Sibberson, A Year of Reading
• Carol Wilcox, Carol's Corner


Judges (Round II)
• Shirley Smith Duke, SimplyScience
• Roberta Gibson, Wrapped in Foil
• Emily Mitchell, Emily Reads
• Carol Hampton Rasco, Rasco from RIF

And me.

The nominations period lasts through 15 October.

A Return to Carrie Kelley

Last month the weekly Robin examined a couple of times in the early 1980s and ’90s when Batman creators considered making Robin a black teenaged boy. In that same period, writer-artist Frank Miller did what many fans found even more radical: he made Robin a girl.

Of course, readers didn’t have to accept that portrayal as real. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns miniseries depicted one possible future for Bruce Wayne, after he and his fellow superheroes have been driven underground or coopted by an authoritarian US government.

Gotham remains crime-ridden, and an acrobatic, hero-seeking teenaged girl named Carrie Kelley spends two weeks of lunch money to make herself a Robin costume, then finds herself rescuing the aging caped crusader and becoming his sidekick.

An Oz and Ends reader named Raius spontaneously sent me an essay on Carrie Kelley, perhaps not realizing how hungry a daily blogger is for material. So I asked if he’d share those thoughts with the world, and here they are.

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The first time I read Dark Knight Returns, Carrie Kelley was one of my least favorite elements. I didn’t like Robin being a girl, I didn’t like her lack of really obvious talents or skills, and I didn’t like the way she talked.

I was a lot younger then. I recently re-read the book. All I could think as I read it was, “This is exactly what Batman’s dynamic with Robin should be like.” I loved all the little nuances of how he sees her, why he lets her join, and why he likes having her around despite Alfred’s protests and the cries of child endangerment from virtually everyone else.

To Bruce, kids are serious business. He took himself seriously as an eight-year-old with murdered parents, and he sees himself in all children. He likes having a kid around because it keeps that part of him alive. He likes their hope, their naïveté, their sincerity, their openness to teaching, their recklessness, their devotion, and their simplistic view of right and wrong, so close to his own.

With Carrie, we see all of this. Batman revels in mentorship. When she complains about waiting on ledges, he enjoys teaching her about patience, something he probably wishes he’d been able to learn earlier. He likes her pluckiness, the way she just states she’s Robin, and he accepts the assertion. He enjoys her ingenuity, when she changes the controls on the helicopter to help him out, even in defiance of his orders. He admires her bravery as she starts to fall to what could easily be her death and notes that she doesn’t make a sound. As a much older man at this point, he envies her youth and potential, as he watches her learn to ride and grow. He empathizes with her loss of innocence as she sees a man who was trying to kill her fall to his death, even as he relies on her resilience in dealing with such things and her continuing support of him and his war, contending with threats that are really years beyond her.

She embodies everything that gives him hope, that makes the mission about more than his own demons. Last but not least, he just seems to enjoy having someone out there with him, someone to share the night with.

Also, all of these things are implied about his earlier relationships with Dick and Jason, to one degree or another. He remembers Dick as his “little monkey wrench”—that little x-factor that skewed bad situations in his favor.

In some ways, I feel like he even sort of preferred Jason because the age difference between them was greater, he was more of a fixer-upper, and possibly even more of a son to Bruce. Dick was almost more like a little brother, who’d already had his own strong parental figures, and eventually becomes his own man, with his own views and such (not quite so positively in the Millerverse, but I tend to ignore The Dark Knight Strikes Again). I always loved that line about Jason. “I will NEVER forget Jason. He was a Good Soldier. He HONORED me. But the WAR goes on.” Just got me right here, ya know? He had so much to teach Jason, who had so much life left to learn it in, and then he died a hero’s death. No wonder Batman retired in Miller’s ’verse. His hope died with Jason.

So anyway, I came away with a much more charitable view of Carrie Kelley, if only because she works as such a wonderful foil for Bruce, someone to bounce things off of that we wouldn’t see otherwise, which is of course one of the original “Reasons for Robin.” She’s still not my favorite, but I think portrayals of other Robins could maybe learn something from her dynamic with Batman.

•

Thanks, Raius!

All the pictures in this posting come from The Dark Knight Returns, which offered the darkest portrayal of Batman until then. As you can see, Carrie Kelley with her light red hair, her green sunglasses instead of a mask, and her traditional Robin costume with turned-up toes is the lightest, most colorful Robin to date. The Dynamic Duo’s visual contrast thus became even more striking.

The Dark Knight Returns remains only one potential future for Batman, and Carrie thus remains only a potential Robin. But of course symbolically any Robin is all about potential.

Me So Horn Booky

I’m just home from the Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards at the Boston Athenaeum. (All winners listed here.)

Since I grabbed the chance to do a little Boston 1775 research before the ceremony, I came down the elevator and stepped right into the VIP gathering. Before I could get too uncomfortable, though, Roger Sutton called M. T. Anderson and me over to tell Candace Fleming about folks next door in the Old Granary Burying Ground. Ben Franklin’s parents! Paul Revere! John Hancock (remembered at left)! John Hancock’s slave Frank!

Candlewick continues to do well at this awards show, having Honor Books in all three categories. HarperCollins, with its bigger list, also took in three. All the thank-you speeches were good, with Terry Pratchett’s (delivered by his US editor, Anne Hoppe) the stand-out. Neil Gaiman sent both the text of a speech to be read and a video, but the video part didn’t work so we got to hear only his disembodied voice—quite appropriate, really.

I remain astonished by the cheeses that the Athenaeum obtains for its receptions. They’re even drier than the crackers and the wine. On one tray was a half-keg of what looked like a light and fluffy Camembert, but you literally had to chip shards off it with the little round knife.

Cybils Nomination Season Begins!

The call has gone out for nominations for the 2009 Cybils Awards! The invitation reads:

All kids books published in English between Oct. 16, 2008 and the close of this year’s nominations are eligible. Nominations close at 11:59 p.m. on October 15th. . . .

First, some important advice:

1. Brush and floss daily.
2. Nominate only one book per genre.
3. Pick a book you’re passionate about.
4. See rule #3 above.

I mean, geez, if you’re kinda iffy on a book, why would you want to inflict it on us? We want to read books you think we shouldn’t miss.

This year there’s a handy nomination form, for which you’ll need your nominee’s 13-digit ISBN.

“Sometimes the Voice Works, and Sometimes It Doesn’t”

From Publishers Weekly’s recent long interview with Richard Peck:

You often write in the first person. Why?

I was a teacher once, and as a teacher I was painfully aware of how long students would listen to me, as opposed to each other. Writing in the first person keeps me—the alien adult—off the page and off the stage. It also provides a healthy control on language. If I wrote in the third person, too many multi-syllabic words and adult locutions would steal in. First person controls that, and it increases the intimacy of the experience, as if one young person is saying to another, “Let me tell you a story.”

What is one of the biggest challenges for you in writing a novel?

Finding that young voice which will be the right one to tell the next story. Will it be a boy or girl? Now or then? Urban or rural? I have to do casting calls—sit down and start writing in a particular voice. Sometimes the voice works and sometimes it doesn’t, and I have to know when it doesn’t.

This interview comes on the occasion of Peck’s A Season of Gifts.