Why We Quip

This weekly Robin installment is a follow-on to the preceding essays about the Boy Wonder as comic relief, and DC's collective effort to develop established aspects of superhero characters into meaningful personality traits. In this case, it's about an unnecessary step in the same direction.

From the very beginning of American superhero comics, the heroes and villains have conversed while fighting. Usually the villain lobs threats and the hero makes jokes. We often see panels that contain both punches and a long word balloon--or two.

Some readers find that unrealistic. Obviously the punch takes place in less time than the speech. Folks can accept people with superhuman powers and/or outrageous costumes, but not those same characters puffing out witticisms during a fight.

Judd Winick is among the comic-book scripters who have tried to provide a logical explanation for that habit, as in this panel from The Outsiders.
And below is another explanation, based on personality rather than fighting tactics, from Dick Grayson to Damian Wayne in the latest issue of Batman--also scripted by Winick.

Such efforts strike me as both futile and unnecessary. Futile because no explanation really covers all the circumstances in which superheroes observe this convention. Plus, the notion that quipping offers an advantage in a fight would mean vigilantes would need gag writers as well as costume and weapons designers. ("Okay, so you start with a few 'Your mother's so ugly' jokes, and--What? Starro is an alien species with no mother?")

An unnecessary because the essence of all comics is words and pictures together--two types of visual information stimulating different parts of the brain. The words make superheroes and supervillains distinct, and add the symbolic weight which makes the better stories more than people in costumes hitting each other.

I figure superhero comics are unrealistic enough already that they can do stuff that doesn't make sense, that's in the story just because it's fun.

Dorothy Meets Her Match

From L. Frank Baum's The Road to Oz, the focus of the Winkie Convention that starts today in California. While on a hike that will eventually take her to Oz, Dorothy meets a younger child.

In the shade sat a little boy dressed in sailor clothes, who was digging a hole in the earth with a bit of wood. He must have been digging some time, because the hole was already big enough to drop a football into.

Dorothy and Toto and the shaggy man came to a halt before the little boy, who kept on digging in a sober and persistent fashion.

"Who are you?" asked the girl.

He looked up at her calmly. His face was round and chubby and his eyes were big, blue and earnest.

"I'm Button-Bright," said he.

"But what's your real name?" she inquired.

"Button-Bright."

"That isn't a really-truly name!" she exclaimed.

"Isn't it?" he asked, still digging.

"'Course not. It's just a--a thing to call you by. You must have a name."

"Must I?"

"To be sure. What does your mama call you?"

He paused in his digging and tried to think.

"Papa always said I was bright as a button; so mama always called me Button-Bright," he said.

"What is your papa's name?"

"Just Papa."

"What else?"

"Don't know."

"Never mind," said the shaggy man, smiling. "We'll call the boy Button-Bright, as his mama does. That name is as good as any, and better than some."

Dorothy watched the boy dig. . . . "What are you going to do?" she inquired.

"Dig," said he.

"But you can't dig forever; and what are you going to do then?" she persisted.

"Don't know," said the boy.

"But you must know something," declared Dorothy, getting provoked.

"Must I?" he asked, looking up in surprise.

"Of course you must."

"What must I know?"

"What's going to become of you, for one thing," she answered.

"Do you know what's going to become of me?" he asked.

"Not--not 'zactly," she admitted.

"Do you know what's going to become of you?" he continued, earnestly.

"I can't say I do," replied Dorothy, remembering her present difficulties.

The shaggy man laughed.

"No one knows everything, Dorothy," he said.

"But Button-Bright doesn't seem to know anything," she declared. "Do you, Button-Bright?"

He shook his head, which had pretty curls all over it, and replied with perfect calmness:

"Don't know."

And by the end of the book, we still don't know Button-Bright's real name, home, or how he came to be by the side of that road.

For Added Body

Travel broadens the mind, especially in regard to what substances manufacturers have decided to put into shampoos.

I favor a shampoo whose main ingredient appears to be...shampoo. I know, however, that there's a healthy market for shampoos built around things we usually consider edible, floral, or medicinal.

Even so, I wouldn't have thought that pine tar would be high on the list of substances one should put in one's hair. Who would think of that?

Oh, Edgar Cayce.

The Comeback of Vanished Fictional Forms

I'm typing this in the San Francisco Bay Area, America's technology heartland, so it makes sense to consider how our new world of digital media might change the forms in which we tell and consume verbal stories. (In other words, what we used to call "books.")

Last month thriller writer J. A. Konrath opined about how one form of digital publishing might change the forms in which we tell verbal stories:

I believe novellas are where e-book self-publishing really has an advantage over print. A 15,000 word book doesn't cost much less than a 70,000 word book to produce, so it has to be priced comparably, and people don't want to pay full price for something so short. But in a digital world, you can lower the price of shorter work.

I agree. In another fifty years literary critics might look back and see a reflowering of the novella in the early 21st century, and wonder about its artistic roots. I suspect the real impetus will be economic.

Looking at the offerings on Scribd, Lulu, or other electronic publishing sites show that already many of their most popular items are shorter works. That's probably fits with how people read digitally, in snatches of time. Konrath is correct that readers want more for a "book price" than a mere novella, but online a novella's relative brevity and cheapness could be a plus.

Another form I think is likely to make a return is the serialized story--again, distributed digitally direct to subscribers (or web visitors) rather than on paper.

In the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, this was the dominant form. Only after stories were completely told in popular magazines was the same text put between book covers.

We can still see the effects of that economic model in the novels of such authors as Charles Dickens and E. Nesbit. They laid down their stories in serialized installments, like layers of sedimentary rock. Often those stories work best when one reads from one installment to the next, as the original consumers did.

In the mid-twentieth century, general-interest magazines like The Saturday Evening Post shrank, physically and in number. With them went their serialized stories. Magazine fiction became synonymous with short stories coming out of MFA programs. When Rolling Stone serialized Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in the 1980s, it seemed like a rare novelty.

Already we've seen one massive bestseller grow out of online "serialization": Diary of a Wimpy Kid. More will come.

Gerald and the Ugly-Wuglies

This spring Eva's Book Addiction offered an insightful review of E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle, with particular attention to the Ugly-Wuglies:

those creatures created out of coats and hangers and pillows and blankets and broom handles and hockey sticks and gloves to fill out the seats for the children's home theatrical performance. They come alive accidentally due to an unwise wish, and scare the dickens out of everyone when they start applauding at the end.

It's horrible when these scarecrow-like figures get up and stump down the hall on their odd and unwieldy legs but worse yet when one of them tries to talk. A long string of vowels comes out of its painted mouth, vivid against its white pillow-case face, and it says the same thing over and over - "Aa oo re o me me oo a oo ho el?" - until finally Gerald understands. And what horror did this Ugly-Wugly utter?

"Can you recommend me to a good hotel?"

The Ugly-Wuglies are, it turns out, empty versions of middle-class Victorian Englishmen and women. And nothing's scarier than that.

What’s So Funny About Batman?

As I discussed in the last weekly Robin installment, starting in the early 1980s DC Comics writers began to treat Dick Grayson's sense of humor as more than a long-established character trait to entertain readers. It was a long-established character trait with meaning. Dick's puns (1940-c. 1970) were presented as a manifestation of his boyishness.

During the 1990s, the character of Batman became more grim, moving closer to the driven character in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Batman became known in the DC Universe for not making jokes--or at least every time he does so, it's cause for comment.

That of course makes a big contrast with Dick Grayson's usually light-hearted attitude. To build on Douglas Wolk's argument in Reading Comics that superheroes symbolize different ideas, Bruce and Dick show us different approaches to life, bound up in how willing each man is to joke.

Does Batman have to be grim? (Well, he wasn't grim from 1940 to 1965 or so, but that's another story.) DC is exploring that question now that Bruce has temporarily died and Dick has taken on the cowl. In the upcoming issue of Batman, characters and preview readers observe that the Caped Crusader is actually smiling.
And that's not all. Over the past twenty years, DC's writers have presented Dick's sense of humor as having important meaning for Bruce Wayne. Despite his dark personality and pessimism, Bruce enjoyed Dick's jokes and happy attitude. Seeing Dick have fun kept Bruce level.

Thus, Robin's puns, which started in 1940 as simple comic relief during fight scenes, have developed into a trait that illuminates not just his character but other characters around him.

This isn't an individual scripter's portrayal, but the collective vision of many writers and editors riffing off what's come before. The two major comic-book universes are the creations of hundreds of people, most of whom grew up visiting earlier versions and trying to figure them out.

Why did the original Batman have a "laughing young daredevil" at his side? Why was Robin always cracking jokes? Those things couldn't be in the magazines just to entertain us--not if the DC Universe were to have internal coherence and logic. By putting together two logic-defying aspects of the Dynamic Duo, DC's creators found their way to portraying a more complex relationship between the two icons.

Interviewing an Author on Interviewing Characters

Something to chew on from the Institute of Children's Literature's online interview and chat with Cynthia Leitich Smith on her preparation for writing her novels:

seasplash: How do you interview your characters?

Cynthia: I tend to do a Q&A of each one especially the protagonist and antagonist. I think writers tend to underestimate the complexity and importance of the antagonist. I ask them a lot of questions about themselves, but also the other characters. Sometimes the character's best friend or worst enemy will reveal something that they won't.

COCOA: When you start to write a story, how much of the plot do you have to set in your head? Is it all plotted out or do you sort of figure it out as you go along?

Cynthia: I usually have an opening line. Sometimes, but not always a whole scene. But I have a good idea of what the protagonist thinks he/she wants. Usually, it takes a lot of drafts before he/she (for that matter I) figure out what the deeper, true goal is.

Which is, of course, something that interviewing the character can't answer because he or she doesn't know yet.

And of course everyone in children's books should know about Smith's Cynsations website.

“The Nearby Explosions”

In anticipation of Independence Day, here's a quick extract from Steve Macone's Boston Globe essay about the temptation and dangers of illegal fireworks (illegal in Massachusetts, that is):

As an adolescent, fireworks were a kind of currency. You’d take them out of a backpack while your friends perched nearby on bikes and set them off in a spending spree.

Once, my father walked by and caught us. Just happened to be walking by, he said at the time. How unfortunate, I thought at age 12, to have my father be out taking a stroll, which he had never done before, and have him stumble upon us. It wasn’t, of course, the fact that he found troubling the combination of my not being home and the nearby explosions. . . .

We all know what’s good about fireworks. There’s something of the American ideal in their upward trajectory and beauty on the backdrop of open space. The fingers of the explosions, shooting off in exponential pathways, are a sort of Manifest Destiny writ large across the sky. And each beach organization always trying to improve upon last year’s show is like pyrotechnics as a sign of progress.

But that’s where fireworks belong: in the sky, not in kids’ hands--reflected in a child’s glimmering eyes, not lodged there. No one ever watches the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and thinks, “You know, I would like to orchestrate a smaller yet more dangerous version of that in my backyard.”

And that was true even before the Macy's balloons started crippling people.

It Turns Out He Can Write

Shaun Tan is best known in the US for The Arrival, his wordless picture book in comics form. His Tales from Outer Suburbia is a collection of surreal vignettes told, for the most part, in a more traditional illustrated-book format. There are a couple of spreads with art and text mixed together, but more often we see narrative prose matched with full-page illustration.

Almost like a real picture book, one might say. Except that the reading level is higher, and the sensibility much higher, probably even adult. Yes, most of the vignettes include a child's point of view and are perfectly readable, but I suspect it requires more perspective to appreciate them fully.

Tan's illustrations come in a variety of styles--some color, some grayscale or sepia; some sketchy and others rendered in detail; some heavy with lines and cross-hatching, others painted in splots of color. Yet they share a common visual style that links them to The Arrival.

Similarly, Tan's prose has hallmarks that extend through most of these pieces. Even though some of the anecdotes take place at specific times and others are general descriptions of Life (or How It Used to Be), they share a sense of absolutes. Such words as "always," "never," and "everyone" appear a lot.

We don't get a chance to know many individual characters; the pieces are too short, and I also feel a sense of distance or disconnect between people on top of the surrealism. But we do get a sense of this suburban society--or is it societies? In other words, we do get a sense of everyone.

To my tastes, nothing in the book surpasses the first two vignettes, "The Water Buffalo" and "Eric." But all together Tales from Outer Suburbia adds up to an experience as well as a book.

[ADDENDUM: And it turns out Tan can speak, too. But I need time to tune into his Australian accent. Graphic Novel Reporter is featuring three videos of Tan drawing and talking about the friendly creature from The Arrival. At least I think that's what he's talking about.]

A True Story That Will Never Become a Picture Book

In the comments to yesterday's posting, one Oz and Ends reader asked, "So inquiring minds want to know: what was your favorite phallosymbolic school-age anecdote of the last five years?"

This story starts two summers ago when I was visiting a friend's house in the country. Between that house and others nearby, there were a great many children underfoot, all related by blood, marriage, adoption, or simple proximity.

One little boy (who, I should note for the record, was neither Godson nor Godson's Brother) was about to go into kindergarten. As a consequence, his parents were working hard to discourage his habit of absently clutching his genitals through his shorts.

This little boy, whom I'll call L, held himself tight only when he was anxious or upset. However, since he was four or five, those occasions were not infrequent. L had learned not to clutch himself in public, but soon I and other guests had become familiar enough that we didn't count as the public. He was more successful at remembering not to hold himself when he was outside.

But one afternoon L's father set up some simple model rockets in the big back yard. We all gathered to watch. After the first couple of launches, the dad started inviting different children to come and help him press the launch button. "This is E's rocket. . . . Now we'll try K's rocket. . . . And now it's L's turn."

L's rocket failed to launch. His father worked furiously to fix the problem. The other children ran around offering advice. But L's only consolation was clutching his genitals more firmly then we'd ever seen. L didn't let go until, as Freud would have told us, his rocket successfully shot into the sky.

But that's only my third-favorite phallosymbolic school-age anecdote of the last five years. I tell it because it's necessary to set up my top choice, which comes from the following summer.

A year in school matured L tremendously. There were fewer anxious moments, and he handled them better. His speech now differentiated the sounds of R and W. He no longer clutched his private parts, even in the privacy of the home.

Except once. When I had to break the news that there were no hot dogs left for lunch.