The Most Endangered Comma

As long as I’m talking commas, I should mention last month’s Twitterfuffle over the “Oxford comma” used before a conjunction in series, as in:

the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion

This punctuation is standard in most American book-publishing style guides but eschewed by newspapers, which prefer a minimal number of keystrokes. In the Great British Punctuation Shortage that followed World War 2, many British book publishers dropped the serial comma, with Oxford being one of the few institutional holdouts.

Last month an Oxford University Press memo on writing press releases told publicists to drop the comma in order to conform to journalistic style. This was reported on Twitter as the end of the Oxford comma, and there were several hours of mourning before the misunderstanding was corrected.

But the serial/Oxford comma is not the most endangered type, I believe. Rather, that’s the comma that sets off a term of direct address.

Back in 2006, Linda Lowenthal sounded the warning at Copyediting:

Just look at your e-mail messages: “Hi Linda,” most of mine begin, perhaps under the influence of the superficially similar let ter opener “Dear Linda.” But don’t blame e-mail, either: song, book, and movie titles from long before the Internet age are full of plain blank spaces before or after a name or the equivalent where we might think a comma should go. “Please Mr. Postman.” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Baby It’s You. Even Goodnight Moon.

The popular reading of “SURRENDER DOROTHY” that I discussed yesterday fits this pattern.

These commas vanish most common in informal writing, of course. Missing commas in direct address are almost a hallmark of online fanfiction. But the problem is creeping into more formal, edited types of prose. Readers, we must stop this travesty!


From The Writing Resource.

The Wizard Will Explain It!

As long as I’m on the topic of this message from the MGM Wizard of Oz, how do you read this message grammatically?

The “SURRENDER” is an imperative verb, but to whom is it addressed? Most people seem to treat that as a message to Dorothy, which should have been punctuated as “SURRENDER, DOROTHY.”

Without the comma, “DOROTHY” becomes the object of the verb. The Witch’s message is therefore directed at the Wizard and the people of the Emerald City, telling them to turn Dorothy over to her.

Two additional facts about this moment in the movie, according to Aljean Harmetz’s Making of The Wizard of Oz:

• A special-effects man wrote the message using a syringe filled with ink inside a tank of water, producing the effect of skywriting without the expense.
• The message was originally “SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE, WWW”. But the movie’s editors realized that just the first two words made the message abundantly clear.

Or did it?

Sarcasm for the Masses

Three years after Oz and Ends suggested using backslant (i.e., left-leaning italics) as a way to signal written sarcasm, Sartalics.com has take up the suggestion.

They offer links to an online petition.

Because those always have so much effect.

And a Twitter feed.

Since no one else has one of those.

More on proposed sarcasm indicators here and here.

Washington’s Surrender Message

The Washington Post columnist John Kelly recently wrote about the mystery of who painted “Surrender Dorothy” on a railroad bridge near the region’s palatial Mormon temple. The photo above shows how the message appeared from the 1970s to 2007; presently only the word “Surrender” survives, in what looks like a stencil rather than hand-lettering.

That graffito’s a comment on the temple’s architecture, which evidently reminds many people of the skyline of the Emerald City in the MGM Wizard of Oz. I don’t see a strong resemblance, but the spires are definitely striking and otherwordly.

Kelly couldn’t identify the artist in paint, but he did find a story of the first “Surrender Dorothy” message near the same spot, with letters made of rolled-up newspapers threaded through a chain-link fence.

In the fall of 1974, the senior class of Holy Child, a Catholic girls school in Potomac, visited the Mormon Temple before its dedication. To some, the building resembled the Emerald City. “The Wizard of Oz” might have been on their minds. It was going to be the school play that year. Almost immediately, a plan was hatched.

“We thought it was brilliant,” remembered Chris Brennan, Holy Child Class of 1975, “but being good girls we didn’t want to deface any property, so we came up with the idea to use wadded newspapers to spell out the letters.” . . .

Some time after midnight, the girls headed to the bridge. There were 13 girls in all. Each was responsible for at least one letter. The girls who finished the first letters then hurried to do the last letters. . . .

The next day, Montgomery Journal photographer Hoke Kempley happened upon the girls’ creation. On Oct. 31, 1974, his picture of it ran in the Journal under the headline, “Wicked Witch of the Beltway?”

The painted version evidently went up soon after the newspapers were taken down. Which suggests that a “Surrender Dorothy” message has been gracing the Beltway for more than half the time since that Wizard of Oz appeared in cinemas in 1939.

Stephanie Brown’s “intrinsic importance to the Bat-verse”

Back when I discussed the second Jason Todd, I posited that death was the best thing that had ever happened to that character. Dying removed Jason from current Batman stories for fifteen years, but it solidified what he symbolized within the DC Comics mythos. It resolved the conflicting roles and personas that different writers had depicted in the preceding years.

Did the apparent death of the fourth Robin, Stephanie Brown, have the same effect? I don’t think so. Instead, it amplified the symbolic meaning she already had, which DC’s editors and many of its writers hadn’t recognized.

The development of the Stephanie Brown character began in 1966, when Batman writers created the Cluemaster as a stand-in for the Riddler when they wanted to tell a Riddler-type story (villain unaccountably leaves clues about his upcoming crimes for Batman to figure out). The Cluemaster was so generic that his last name was Brown.

In Detective Comics, #647, writer Chuck Dixon brought the Cluemaster out of character limbo, having cured himself of his compulsion to leave self-defeating clues. But someone else was revealing all his plans: a young woman calling herself the Spoiler! Tim Drake, rookie Robin, discovered that the Spoiler was a teen-aged blonde. Finally, Batman stopped the Cluemaster at a crucial moment by revealing that the Spoiler was the man’s own daughter, Stephanie.

In a 2008 interview with Comic Book Resources, Dixon said:

“Frankly, Spoiler began as a pure plot device and evolved, because of fan interest, into a romantic foil for Robin. I’m not really certain of her intrinsic importance to the Bat-verse other than the fact that she’s become a beloved supporting character.

“It’s also kind of cool that Robin has someone around his own age to run rooftops with,” laughed Dixon. “It’s sort of a male fantasy to find a girl who shares your hobby.”

Dixon and his editors thus used Stephanie as a supporting character in the Robin series—rooftop companion, romantic complication (Tim already had a girlfriend from his second miniseries), and source of valuable lessons about life.

For example, immediately after Robin and Spoiler officially became an item, in Robin, #58, Stephanie discovered she was pregnant by her previous boyfriend. That being a magazine about Robin, the subsequent action hinged on the question, What would Tim do? Because he’s mature for his age, and a natural hero, he found a way to help Stephanie through labor. Tim’s solution involved a skeevy alternate identity and help from the Flash getting back to Gotham, but he was there for her.
Then Stephanie put the baby up for adoption, and almost nothing more was said about it. (Except in fanfiction.)

Almost all of Stephanie’s subsequent storylines in Robin involved her dealing with another Horrible Burden: “My dad is a supervillain who brings his friends home with him!” “My mom is addicted to pills!” “I was sexually abused as a young girl!” Some readers complained that she was nothing more than a magnet for Afterschool Specials. Indeed, the PFS Bookclub even defines such a fictional archetype this way:

The Afterschool Special represents a character that is maimed, killed, or otherwise emotionally devastated for the purpose of another character learning a valuable lesson in life. The name comes from the television trope of the 80’s afterschool specials, which were designed to teach children life lessons. An example is Stephanie Brown, who was killed in battle to teach Robin that he bears a responsibility to protect the people.

Stephanie’s death in Batman: War Games thus simply extended an existing pattern.

That said, Stephanie played other roles in other DC magazines. When she interacted with Batman, she was mostly not-Tim-Drake: someone Bruce Wayne used to manipulate Tim while the Dynamic Duo was on the outs. When she interacted with Cassandra Cain as Batgirl, a preternaturally gifted martial artist unfamiliar with normal life, Stephanie was regular-girl.

What was common across all those appearances, and key to her character, was that things never came easy for Stephanie Brown. She wasn’t close to being as good an acrobat as Dick Grayson, a detective as Tim, or a fighter as Cassandra. In fact, by their high standards, she was close to incompetent—but only because she aimed so high from where she started.

Stephanie was from a working-class family; she didn’t have Bruce Wayne’s billions or Helena Bertinelli’s millions or Barbara Gordon’s technology. She sewed her own costumes and, most of the time apparently, secured her own equipment. She didn’t even have the independence of being an orphan; she was still hiding her crime-fighting life from her mother, and her occasionally returning father.

But Stephanie never gave up. In the context of Tim Drake’s story, and Bruce Wayne’s, that made her a complication to deal with. Her perseverance could get her in trouble (or, occasionally, get them out). In the context of her own story, that spunky quality made Stephanie Brown a hero. After all, no superheroes give up.

Stephanie’s death by torture in War Games fit right into the line of Horrible Burdens the character was saddled with. So did the apparent disrespect from Batman not installing a trophy case in her honor. And—this is where it gets interesting—so did the apparent disrespect of DC Comics, first using her as a sacrificial supporting character and then declaring “she was never really a Robin.”

Both within the fictional DC Universe and within the fan culture around that universe, Stephanie Brown came to symbolize someone who wasn’t getting any breaks.

And yet she, and her fans, never gave up. Stephanie came back from the dead—perhaps a little ahead of schedule. Even then, as the quotation from Dixon above shows, DC’s creative team still had trouble understanding her unique symbolism within the Batman mythos. But unwittingly they had created one for her.

In 2009 Stephanie Brown took over the role of Batgirl, for the first time becoming the title character of a magazine. A magazine which will soon be canceled because of sliding (though not disastrous) sales and the overall DC reboot. I’ve read some fun issues in that run, and look forward to reading the rest as collected. But I wonder if enjoying advantages at last—Barbara Gordon as committed mentor, advanced equipment, better training, official status within the Bat-family—washes out some of what’s made Stephanie Brown interesting and unique.

Deink and de Paper

The latest Chemical and Engineering News reports on an unforeseen consequence of increased digital printing: getting new kinds of ink off paper in the recycling process. Amanda Yarnell’s article “Rethinking Deinking” provides the details, and here’s my précis.

Paper recycling has been designed around oily inks that float to the surface of a recycling tank and can be skimmed off. Toner in a typical black-and-white laser printer, photocopier, or digital book printer works much the same way. Wikipedia says this process is called “froth flotation.”

However, two newer types of inks cause different sorts of problems. Hewlett-Packard’s Indigo color presses use a liquid toner that can leave colored specks in the new paper. And “high-end ink-jet presses” use ink that’s soluble in water; it doesn’t float up to be skimmed away, but sticks around and makes the new paper a little bit grayer. There’s no way to identify paper that’s been printed with those inks and separate it from the rest.

The article goes on to discuss different ways chemical engineers are working on the problem. Does it require changing the inks? The paper? Or the whole deinking process?

(You remember when recycled paper was first fashionable, and manufacturers made sure it had visible little flecks so we could feel good about using it?)

Fix This Stat, Stat!

Yesterday’s trend in the blog reader was recalculating statistics.

At the Purple Crayon, Harold Underdown dug for the sources of a statement in the latest Atlantic Monthly that the number of young adult titles published in 2009 was 30,000, ten times the number in 1997, and that their total sales exceeded $3 billion. Harold’s conclusions are that those statistics are based on:

• confusing the revenue from sales of adult books with the revenue from sales of children’s and YA books.
• treating all ISBNs issued in a year as a measure of new titles published, regardless of whether those codes were used on reprints or other editions rather than new titles, or not used at all.
• combining novels published for teens with all other “Juvenile” titles, including picture books, novels for younger kids, nonfiction, and possibly even educational and library titles.

Roger Sutton at The Horn Book added some remarks, evidently based on the number of titles his magazine tracks.

The errors were spread out among the Atlantic article’s sources. That magazine’s writer was far from alone in struggling to find reliable statistics about trade book publishing because the industry does such a lousy job at tracking itself. Simply put, no one has any idea how many new children’s books are published in America each year, or how to consistently separate educational and library books from trade books, children’s from YA, new books from reprints.

Anyone who’s been watching American book publishing knows that there’s been a boom in YA titles, and that that category is one of the few bright spots of growth of recent years. But as for providing a handy, meaningful statistic reflecting that trend which will look good in a news article? Not a chance.

Over in the comics world, Vaneta Rogers at Newsarama examined the basis for a widely quoted complaint from one fan at the San Diego Comic-Con about the percentage of female creators at DC Comics dropping from 12% to 1% with its fall reboot:

The 12 percent number stems from a "gendercrunching" article by blogger Tim Hanley that was calculated from May's comics using all DC titles, including DCU, Vertigo, Johnny DC, video game tie-in comics and more. It counts editors, assistant editors, colorists, inkers and letterers along with writers, pencilers and cover artists.

In fact, if you look at Hanley's numbers, a large proportion of that percentage of females at DC are editors.

On the other hand, the 1 percent number from the same blogger does not include Vertigo or any other publication outside the 52 new DCU titles. The statistic counts only artists, writers and covers. No colorists. No letterers.

And no editors.

Newsarama did an apples-to-apples comparison of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and cover artists alone, and found that there was no statistically significant change. That’s because so few women filled those roles in both sampled months—five or fewer, and less than 10% of all contributors. The reboot that’s attracted fans’ attention and occasional ire doesn’t affect the long-term gender imbalance in superhero-comics publishing at all.

O’Connor on the “Surgence”

I first encountered George O’Connor’s art when he illustrated some editions of L. Frank Baum’s lesser-known novels for Books of Wonder, his employer at the time. His cover art didn’t always convince me he’d read the books carefully, but the drawing for American Fairy Tales had definite personality.

Since then O’Connor has established himself in our two dominant forms of visual-verbal storytelling: picture books and comics. His Journey into Mohawk Country is an eye-opening and entertaining interpretation of a historical document, but his series on Greek gods seems to be bringing more sales.

Seven Imps recently ran an interview with O’Connor in which he talked about being able to find respect in the comics form:

I’m not sure “resurgence” is the term I’d use — it makes it sound as if graphic novels had previously reached this level and retreated. Like you said, they seem to be more popular than ever. They’ve moved into uncharted territory regarding their mainstream popularity and acceptance, particularly by librarians and teachers. Is “surgence” a word?

So, with that being said, I love it. I grew up always wanting to be a creator of both comics and picture books, but when the time came to try and break in to the business, I went for picture books first, because comics as a medium seemed to have a hard time being taken seriously. For so many years, the only way to make a viable living at it was to draw superhero books. (Not that there’s anything wrong with them.) Now, in incredibly short order (and I credit this largely to the teachers and librarians coming aboard), comics have blossomed into this amazing field that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible.

Longtime Oz and Ends readers may recall that I’ve attributed that change to Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me.

Henry Darger as L. Frank Baum’s Literary Heir?

Earlier this year Steve Ahlquist, principal creator of the early-1990s Oz Squad comics, wrote at Forces of Geek about “outsider artist” Henry Darger as L. Frank Baum’s true literary heir.

Baum’s Oz books certainly inspired Darger (1892-1973). The photo at right (courtesy of Some Girls Wander) shows that at his death Darger owned four Baum Oz books and one by Ruth Plumly Thompson, plus some more that might be missing their spines.

Darger might even have been part of Baum’s original audience, having grown up in Chicago around the turn of the last century. However, he also had a poor childhood, ending in orphans’ homes, so he might not have been able to enjoy much reading.

Ahlquist writes:

When Baum died, the mantel of “Royal Historian of Oz” was passed to Ruth Plumly Thompson, a capable if uninspired writer too often given to formula and romance. Though she wrote under the L. Frank Baum byline [note: for only one book, The Royal Book of Oz], the stories she contributed to the series never lived up to the original 14 novels Baum produced. The magic, it seems, had gone out of Oz.

But not out of Darger. While Baum's publisher, Reilly and Lee, sought to promulgate the fiction that Ruth Plumly Thompson was somehow the Royal Historian, in truth that job would fall to Henry Darger. His dark visions charted the exploits of a new and more dangerous space in the meme world of children’s literature. No longer were we in the safe realms of children’s fantasy, we were in the realms of the unreal, where fantasy and horror abutted one another uneasily.

Darger wrote of Child slavery, child murder, and explored his own confusion about, violence, sex, identity, good and evil.

I think that this essay, in the quest for a provocative formulation, gives too much credit to Darger’s crazy fantasies. While Baum’s plotting could be haphazard, he at least had plots. Darger’s sprawling epic has little coherence and two endings. Baum’s strength was in creating characters and showing how they interact. Darger seems to have treated all his characters as nearly interchangeable little bodies, without personalities. He’s recognized primarily as a visual artist, even if he saw himself as illustrating a story. Most important, Baum knew he was writing for an audience of children.

As for sex, there’s much more of an undercurrent of that in Thompson’s Oz books than in Baum’s.

Also at Forces of Geek in March, Ahlquist shared material on his planned prequel to Oz Squad, and how he saw his version of Ozian history building on Baum’s series:

Dorothy and Ozma named their son Ozzy, and one day perhaps he will become King Ozzy I.

Rewriting History for Laika

Back in 2008 I wrote about Nick Abadzis’s affecting and grim graphic novel Laika, arguing that it didn’t seem like a book meant for young readers despite being:

• a dead-dog story.
• in comics form.
• picked up by a lot of Young Adult gatekeepers, part of a trend that convinced publisher First Second to stop trying so hard to issue graphic novels for adults.

In honor of Big Planet Comics’s 25th year in business in Washington, DC, Abadzis has created four alternative endings for Laika. One includes lots of “Kirby crackle” and allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Two more are straight alternative histories, on the small and large scale. And one borrows atomic-age superhero tropes to give us the ending we’d been hoping for.