Biggest Role Yet

So what do Robin the Boy Wonder and the White Rabbit have in common?

Both characters have been played by Kamran Darabi-Ford, the young British actor cast as Dick Grayson in the Batman Live arena show now touring Britain.

He’s also played “the fey Simon in Cameron Jack’s exciting and successful production of Lord of the Flies,” and “an acrobatic Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC Fringe Festival.”

Future Tense

For several years now, many superhero comics fans have been mentally vibrating among three periods. That’s bound to cause difficulties—not life-threatening, but certainly anxiety-forming.

The first period in which fans live is when each of us was twelve or fourteen, or whenever we dove deep into the superhero genre. Even though we often recognize some new, individual stories as better, comics as a whole never feel so exciting again as in that initial exploration. And of course we’re never going to be that young again, either. The result can range from a thinly rueful nostalgia to an undercurrent of rage, depending on personality, but some sense of disappointment is almost inescapable.

The second period is the present, and the storylines we’re following. Ideally, readers should be immersed in those stories, the heroes’ immediate situations and near-future possibilities.

The third period is the heroes’ future a little further out, as hinted at but never fully revealed in the descriptions and covers for upcoming issues. The big publishers, starting with DC and Marvel, put out those previews to promote orders from comic-book shops. The internet has made it impossible to keep fans from finding them, too, and in fact the industry has evolved so that those previews are designed to prompt fans to order magazines that intrigue them.

Previews’ story summaries are always written in hyperbolic prose. The covers are sometimes masked to maintain narrative surprises. Closer to publication, the publishers release sample pages, and often the creators share work in progress on their own websites. All of which takes attention from the current storylines.

Previews are designed to raise expectations, but they’ve inevitably produced a plethora of new disappointments: that a highly anticipated magazine gets delayed (e.g., All Star Batman and Robin, Batwoman), or that a magazine published on time came from a different artist or writer than the preview described. Of course, if fans paid little attention to previews, they wouldn’t feel disappointed by the fact that plans can change in a deadline-driven industry. (We can still feel disappointed by bad stories, of course.)

Currently, DC Comics is promoting a new continuity, to debut this fall. Which means that few fans appear to be paying attention to or deriving enjoyment from the stories the company’s writers and artists are telling right now. Instead, most of us are scrounging for information and speculating broadly about the status of favorite characters in the new universe. DC has released information in small amounts. As details have become clear, the loudest response has been, unsurprisingly, disappointment.

Fans of Stephanie Brown as the current Batgirl are so busy lamenting her displacement from that role and her low profile in the new continuity that I’ve seen very little discussion of her current storyline. Batgirl’s a fun magazine—or it was while fans could still focus on it.

After a couple of years of complaining about horrible things happening to Roy Harper (Speedy/Arsenal/Red Arrow/Arsenal), that character’s fans are now focused on how the new universe’s Roy Harper will be too young for any of those horrible things to have happened to him. (I’m not sure what character will be left.)

Fans of the original Titans also noted that DC set aside no space for Wally West (Kid Flash/Flash) and Donna Troy (Wonder Girl/Troia/…just leave it at Donna Troy). DC has also said little about Gar Logan (Beast Boy/Changeling/Beast Boy), but, alas for him, far fewer people seem to care. When artist Brett Booth joked about drawing Wally and Donna and then had to point out the joke, Titans Tower chided, “Fans are just asking for simple answers, not sure why that’s so hard to comply.”

In response to such comments, Booth wrote on his blog:

I think you new fans are getting far, far to[o] spoiled! I remember when I had to wait and see if the local drug store actually ordered my favorite comics. No internet, no wizard [magazine], no comic store by me. Why would you want to know everything before the books even come out? It's like being told what your Christmas presents are before you get them!

I have to agree with that attitude. The superhero genre has long relied on storytelling surprises: characters popping up unexpectedly, heroes having had a plan all along, people not being who or what they seem. In these slow-paced days, the companies keep upcoming plotlines secret for years—which also gives them the power to reverse course.

If superhero storytellers actually explained what was going to happen, the stories wouldn’t be as exciting. If they reassured fans about all their favorite characters, the adventures would have less of an edge. If the companies locked themselves in for years to come, then the stories would soon get stale. Either way, fans would eventually be disappointed.

Of course, we usually are anyway.

Performance Issues

Scott Hedley on Facebook alerted me to a Playbill ad seeking unpaid actorsin New York for Dorothy in Oz, “a skewed take on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, set in a mental hospital.” The featured parts:

Dottie - A mentally disturbed seventeen-year-old, who has been involuntarily committed to the Oslin Center, a psychiatric institute in Kansas.

Aunt Em - Dottie’s aunt and legal guardian.

Mrs. Goode/Glinda - Dottie’s flaky therapist, as well as one of the characters in Dottie’s hallucination.

Dr. Green/The Wicked Witch of the West Wing - The insensitive doctor in charge of Dottie’s case, as well as the antagonist in Dottie’s hallucination.

Skarekrow - A goth-rocker suffering from severe drug dependency and depression in Dottie’s hallucination.

Rusty - A heartless ruffian with anger issues in Dottie’s hallucination.

Mr. Lyons - An overweight sexual deviant with “performance issues” in Dottie’s hallucination. . . .

The Great Oz/ Dr. Oslin - The mysterious man, whom Dottie and her friends seek for aid in her hallucination, as well as the busy head of the Oslin Center.

I’m guessing this adaptation has a different target audience from The Yellow Brick Road, mentioned here and just reviewed in the New York Times.

The company behind this show, Adam Roebuck Productions, is also preparing an R-rated version of Alice in Wonderland. Two years ago the organization produced a play of The Wizard of Oz as adapted by Kathryn Schultz Miller for children and families. Again, different target audience.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Boston Comics Roundtable publishes three comics anthologies: Outbound, featuring science fiction; Inbound, covering everything else on a given theme, such as local history or food; and Hellbound, devoted to horror.

I read hardly any horror, and I write just a little more. Nevertheless, the 2011 issue of Hellbound will contain a comics story I created with artist Andy Wong, called “RobMeBlind.com.”

More info to come around (naturally) Hallowe’en.

La Maga de Oz

TheatreworksUSA is offering this new stage musical for young audiences:

Dora feels like she’s caught between two worlds: on one hand, she is expected to embrace the Latino family traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation, but she also wants to be a contemporary American teenager… She sometimes thinks she’s trapped between a pinto bean and a cheeseburger. Dora can’t figure out where she fits in, and she longs for a place where she can forge her own identity.

On the eve of her coming of age quinceañera, a mysterious woman disrupts Dora’s fifteenth birthday fiesta to foretell a journey of discovery that will take her far from home.

Sure enough, a gran tornado carries Dora (and her little dog, too) to a magical world filled with munchkins and a wicked bruja who’ll stop at nothing to steal Dora’s ruby zapatillas.

Dora meets three friends, each from a different Latin culture, while traveling on the amarillo brick road en route to the Emerald City. She seeks the only person who can help her return to the world she knows… the superstar who has all the answers: the Wizard of Oz—la Maga de Oz. 

Converting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a coming-of-age story is, I believe, driven by the need to cast a teenager as Dorothy. The original tale is about discovering competency rather than identity.

Mom, It’s Copying Me!

I saw this product in a mail-order catalogue today, and then found it featured at Geek Alerts.

A Chatimal is a stuffed animal programmed to repeat back whatever you say, but in a high, squeaky voice—apparently using the same technology as in this iPhone app.

Just the thing for people who miss sitting next to a younger sibling on long car trips.

Just the thing for people who miss sitting next to a younger sibling on long car trips.

Personally, I think a Chatimal would soon lose its charm.

Personally, I think a Chatimal would soon lose its charm.

Stop that!

Stop that!

When DC Comics Sales Got a Case of the Stephs

As the last weekly Robin discussed, in the spring of 2004 DC Comics put Stephanie Brown, formerly the self-guided teen crime-fighter Spoiler, into the Robin costume. All along this was part of an overarching Batman storyline about a gang war in Gotham City that would end with Stephanie being killed.

The company didn’t anticipate the reader reaction to the new Robin. Stephanie appeared in the multi-colored costume on three issues of Robin, one of Detective, one of Batgirl, and one of Teen Titans. (There may be others I missed.)

Sales of Robin jumped from 32,925 for issue #125 to 49,060 for issue #126, the first to feature Stephanie in the multicolored costume—up by nearly 50%. It’s normal for sales to rise when readers expect an issue to be a milestone, but in this case the sales also stayed significantly higher than before: 40,750 for #127, and 37,255 for #128. The magazine then entered the War Games crossover.

The same effect appeared in two other magazines, though to a lesser extent. Batgirl was selling about 26,000 copies before and after issue #53, which featured Stephanie as Robin on the cover; that issue sold 30,000. Detective Comics was selling about 35,000 copies; the issue that highlighted the new Robin sold almost 37,000. Stephanie’s cover appearance on Teen Titans, #13, had no effect on that magazine’s pattern; it was already one of the company’s top sellers.

(All those figures come from the invaluable Comics Chronicles website. They’re based on back-calculating the numbers reported by Diamond, the dominant comics distributor. While not exact, they’re useful for comparisons.)

Paul Sebert’s article at Inside Pulse noted a couple of other measures of fan interest, though without documentation: “Fan art of Stephanie as Robin,” and general chatter. Sebert, writing two years later, went on to criticize the publisher’s lack of response to that interest:

So just how does DC respond to this totally spontaneous and unexpected fan response? How do they adjust their plans realizing that they’re about to kill off the breakthrough character of the year? Well they do nothing… really. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead they decide to continue their original plan for the War Games crossover in which they killed off Steph Brown just for the sake of well… it was a crossover and for some strange reason you can’t have a crossover these days without killing someone.

But everyone knows that comic books are planned months in advance. By the time DC got word that Robin sales were staying up, the magazines that showed Stephanie dying were well into production. And the company probably had further storylines planned out, with Batman becoming more isolated and Tim Drake back as Robin and full of adolescent angst. The company was on that train, and couldn’t jump off.

Furthermore, as much as comics fans and creators like to criticize crossovers and character deaths, they sell magazines. Detective jumped from 37,000 copies to 51,000 when War Games started, and Robin jumped from that Stephanie-fueled 37,000 to over 45,000. However, unlike No Man’s Land and some other Batman crossovers that preceded it, neither critics nor fans seem to remember War Games fondly.

Stephanie Brown’s last cover appearance as Robin (so far) was on Detective, #809, the first issue in which DC went back to address the fallout of War Games, both in Gotham City and in the real world. This “Dead Robin” cover produced another big sales jump over the previous issue of Detective—from 38,000 to 49,000. But that might well have been due in part to the success of the Batman Begins movie that same month of 2005.

Corrina Lawson at Wired’s Geek Dad wrote criticized the cover image: “I gave up reading monthly Batman comics in 2004 [sic] after DC featured the bloody body of a teenage girl on the cover.” That raises the question of why the Wired website itself displays the image.

It seems significant that this cover showed Stephanie as Robin in death, even though in War Games Batman had fired her from that role and she was back to being Spoiler when she died. It was a tacit acknowledgment that she was a more popular Robin than DC had expected.

This issue also portrayed Dr. Leslie Tompkins, a physician who knows Bruce Wayne’s secrets, confessing to having let Stephanie die as a lesson to him. Fans roundly criticized that moment as out of character. But was it, as a few fans claimed to have foreseen, the DC creative team’s way to open the door for Stephanie’s eventual return?

The Xeric Foundation’s Change of Focus

This month the Xeric Foundation announced that after one more grants season it will stop giving money to independent comics creators seeking to self-publish.

Founded with the overflowing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles money in 1992, Xeric has been supplying selected comics work with funds and attention for two decades. Among this year’s grant recipients was Seamus Heffernan for Freedom (sample pages here).

But technology and market conditions have changed, and it’s no longer necessary (and, to some respect, feasible) to seek a readership by offering a paper product through comics retailers. Storytellers are turning to the web, where the reproduction cost is small and the potential reach is broad.

But where’s the money? The web offers some possibilities. This same month, Publishers Weekly posited that Kickstarter had become the third-largest independent (non-DC, non-Marvel) publisher of graphic novels. The source of funds has spread out among readers. In a way, we’re all the Xeric Foundation now.

Male and Female Storytelling Energies?

Last week, in a discussion on Facebook of whether Harry Potter is a feminist saga (prompted by this essay), author Bruce Coville shared some interesting thoughts about what defines a “boy book”:

It's not the gender, it's the energy. I've spent a couple of decades thinking about this, in no small part because of the reaction to MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN. This is a book I wrote first person female, yet it is still considered a "boy's book." I cracked my brain over this for a long time, and in the end I came to the conclusion that it's about the "storytelling energy" of a story. . . .

The very best (and most successful) books partake equallly of male storytelling energy (action!) and female storytelling energy (relationship).

Jo Rowling merges them seamlessly.

Coville has been talking about that blend for years, which is why I feel comfortable quoting his Facebook comments.

I think gender roles are one of the areas in which Rowling’s execution actually undercuts the values on the surface of her books. But Coville is correct about the types of energy she’s combined in her story, whether or not those are intrinsically male and female.

Building on Sand

This is one of Eric Wilbur’s photographs for the Boston Globe of this month’s sand-sculpting contest at Revere Beach. I was struck by how many of this year’s entries had large arches, tunnels, and other hollow (or cantilevered) structures in their designs.

The Sandscapes team says:

Wherever we go we invariably hear someone in the crowd say that the "Big Secret" is: sugar water, hairspray, unicorn tears or Mountain Dew. Other than attracting every ant within five miles and throwing piles of cash out the window these magic additives would accomplish little, if anything. . . .

In a word the big secret is "friction". More specifically, the sum total of all friction between the grains acting on each other. This is why compaction is so important. When you compact sand you increase the friction between the grains.

Uncompacted sand has relatively large pore spaces between the grains but compacted sand shrinks these spaces increasing points of contact between the individual grains and thereby increasing the friction between them. The more friction there is, the more resistant the grains are to separation.

While that article pooh-poohs the importance of the surface tension of water within the sand matrix, NASA says that’s definitely a force in how sand castles stick together.

Damp sand sticks together because water forms little grain-to-grain bridges. Surface tension--the same force that lets some insects walk on the surface of a pond--acts like rubberbands between the grains. Adding water to damp sand fills spaces between the grains. The bridges vanish and the sand begins to flow more easily.

In sum, there’s an equilibrium state between wet and dry, which probably varies for a particular form of sand. The sand at Revere Beach might be particularly well suited for this type of sculpture.