Oz and Ends

Learning to Speak Fannish

2009-07-18T08:55:00.001-05:00

At noscans_daily, a poll has asked members what types of fan activity they participate in besides discussing comic books in that forum. After asking about other things people might be fans of, the survey queries:

What fanworks do you make? What fan activities do you participate in?
Fanfic
Fanart
Cosplay
Filk
Vidding
Remixing
Vidblogging
Podcasting
Machinima
Con-going
Blogging (not everyone here uses their journal [i.e., their LiveJournal account], or uses it for fannish purposes)
RPing
None

Which necessitated a trip to Urban Dictionary. I was pretty sure I'd never filked or machinima'ed, but if I had I'd want to know about it. I inserted links above for the terms I didn't know, or didn't know a couple of years ago.

Then I got to the comments on this survey, which added even more to my vocabulary:

"I mostly just watch fandom from f_w, to be honest."
"I do game translations but I also do game playthroughs on Youtube."
"And fangirl/boy, and write bandom RPF, and include the term 'selling out' in their vocabulary?"

Oh, there's so much to learn.

Another Way that Travel Broadens the Mind

2009-07-17T08:43:00.000-05:00

How many ways must one person learn to turn on the water in a bathroom?

Traditionalist that I am, I prefer the classic approach. You turn the knob. Left is hot, right is cold. Lefty loosy (more water), righty tighty.

But I'm familiar with the option of swiveling the lever. Left is hot, right is cold. Up is more, down is off.

Or you twist the two separate levers, colored red and blue.

Or you tip the knob. Back is hot, forward is cold. Down is more, up is less.

Or you punch back the buttons. Or perhaps you push down the buttons. And punch or push again when the water stops after five seconds.

Or you wave your hand under the spigot.

And then there are the shower controls. And the drain plugs.

As you might be able to tell, I've spent the last week using bathrooms in various hotels, restaurants, airports, and friends' guest rooms. And I'm very glad to be home.

To Tread the Jewelled Thrones of Earth Under Her Feet

2009-07-16T21:29:00.006-05:00

From Kristopher Reisz at the Guys Lit Wire:

Conan the Barbarian in one of those iconic characters--like Sherlock Holmes or Dorothy Gale--that people think they know without bothering to read the actual stories they appeared in.

A fine comparison indeed.

Cimmerian versus Kansan, I'm putting my money on the blonde.

Batting .666

2009-07-14T00:03:00.004-05:00

Today I played my first game of pick-up softball in about twelve years. (It's hard to form a company team when you're self-employed.) I learned that regaining softball skills is proverbially like riding as bicycle. The moves come back quickly enough, and the legs last only about half an hour.

Because of the paucity of players, we were playing with three teams of three and no far right field. That meant for a very quick rotation through the batting order.

In my first at-bat, I had an inside-the-park home run to the opposite field. In my next up during the same inning, the outfield shifted right, so I hit a double to far left. Ha!

The next inning, I hit a couple of singles. While in the field, I lost a throw in the sun, and found it when it bounced up and hit my forehead.

The final inning I flied out to second and struck out. On about eight straight swings. (Pick-up rules.) So obviously those old skills had hit a cliff. And goodness knows how my body will feel tomorrow.

Why We Quip

2009-07-12T09:11:00.006-05:00

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

2009-07-10T10:53:00.003-05:00

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

2009-07-09T08:36:00.000-05:00

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

2009-07-08T14:44:00.001-05:00

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

2009-07-06T08:57:00.000-05:00

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?

2009-07-05T09:02:00.001-05:00

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

2009-07-04T08:42:00.001-05:00

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”

2009-07-03T08:29:00.000-05:00

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

2009-07-02T08:58:00.002-05:00

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

2009-07-01T09:00:00.001-05:00

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.

Popular! I’ll Help You Be Popular!

2009-06-30T09:23:00.003-05:00

Josie Leavitt at Shelftalker recently wrote about young customers asking for books that they know are popular, but--she suspects--won't hold any other interest for them:

School let out on Friday and since then I've had four nine-year-old girls ask for one or more books in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Now, don't get me wrong, I think Twilight is a fine series. I enjoyed it immensely when I read it. I am forty-four, not nine. I'm not sure what to do with this current phenomenon. I don't like to judge purchases by anyone in my store, but this troubles me.

These bouncy, pigtailed nine-year-olds seem to have no reason to read these books other than "my friends are reading it." They don't even like boys. I find asking them "Do you like boys?" is a great weeding-out question for some of the younger set. A giggle, and a sheepish "no" can usually sway them away from any book, except Twilight.

Because Twilight is so popular, and perhaps even a marker of maturity.

This reminds me of a story I read on the Child_Lit email list a coupla years ago. A school librarian had noticed that a bunch of young boys were taking out different Harry Potter books each week. She knew their reading skills weren't up to finishing those books, certainly not at the speed they circulated. The boys just wanted to have the popular books in their hands.

She heard those boys sitting around a table, discussing the books. Not what they had read, of course. No, they were comparing size: "I've got the biggest one." Girls might compete to be the most mature, but boys compete to be the biggest.

Of course, we book-lovers outgrow the need to be seen reading the popular titles, right? Mature book bloggers would never be racing to announce that they've already read Catching Fire, would they?

Parading One’s Vocabulary

2009-06-29T08:17:00.001-05:00

At the start of this month, I read in the local paper about a school "Vocabulary Fair." I'd never heard of this tradition. What are those crazy schoolkids up to, I thought, now that they've gotten past Pi Day?

The little boy to the left is carrying his mask for the word "prehistoric." The little girl staggering across the stage below is "discombobulated." (Both photos by Mark Thompson for the Newton Tab.)

There were prizes in each grade for "the most memorable word or costume, the most original word or costume and the costume or performance that best matched the word," plus Best Overall Noun, Verb, and Adjective. (Showing up as "underneath" would, I suppose, be a losing preposition.)

With some Googling, I discovered that the tradition also exists in the form of a "Vocabulary Parade," as in this example from Alpharetta, Georgia, archived by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and this from Mrs. Gorham's Second Grade Class. And here are a couple of sets at Flickr.

Cute as the results are, I imagine that parents sometimes perceive vocabulary fairs as just another burden. Come up with a costume that your child likes to illustrate a word that child probably hasn't heard of yet! Yes, your originality and craftsmanship will be on display for all the other parents. (And did we mention it's time for your child to bring in 100 of something?)

Sometimes these lexical events occur near Halloween, when kids are already focused on dressing up. In those cases, some parents seem to have chosen the better part of valor and found a word to fit the already-chosen costume.

Apparently, this new tradition owes a lot to author-illustrator Debra Frasier, who has instructions for such an event on her website promoting Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster, published in 2000.

In particular, I note that there's a costume for the word "effervescent" in Frasier's gallery that I've seen replicated at a couple of Vocabulary Fairs, in at least one case winning a prize. So does that costume actually represent "plagiarism" or "cliché"?

Now I must go envision a way to dress up as "verisimilitudinous."

Robin Changes His Sense of Humor

2009-06-28T08:41:00.001-05:00

The last two weekly Robin installments discussed how the Boy Wonder offered refreshing comic relief in the early Batman stories, and how the jokes he inflicted on the magazine's bad guys became an explicit part of his personality.

But as time went on, that characterization became embarrassing--especially after Burt Ward's "Holy hand grenades, Batman!" portrayal of Robin on TV. Superhero comics in the 1970s swerved away from that camp, trying to show heroes with deeper and more realistic personalities (even as they continued to find themselves in unrealistic situations).

Furthermore, when Dick Grayson had solo adventures or led the Teen Titans, he stopped being the comic relief. Sure, he still had a sense of humor, but in the New Teen Titans series of the early 1980s the character who cracked lame jokes was Garfield Logan, a/k/a Changeling (previously and later called Beast Boy). So what could scripter Marv Wolfman do with Robin's famous puns?Punning became a trait and symbol of Dick Grayson's departing youth. When Dick gave up his identity as Robin in New Teen Titans, #39, he not only took off his mask, but he also set his juvenile jokes in the past.

There was a new young Robin at the time, the first Jason Todd. He tended to be more serious than Dick Grayson had been in previous decades, but superhero comics overall were more serious. More interesting shifts in Robin's sense of humor began with the introduction of the second Jason Todd after DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-86).

As the panel to the right shows, scripter Mike W. Barr had a very traditional view of Robin, and wrote Jason as the humorous half of the Dynamic Duo. But his collegues Max Allan Collins and Jim Starlin and editor Dennis O'Neil saw more dramatic potential in making Jason an angry Robin. His sense of humor shrank, and the tone of his jokes was bitter.

In short, Jason Todd's character stopped embodying some of the traditional "Reasons for Robin." And in late 1988 comic-book readers decided to kill him off.

The next Robin, Tim Drake, was also more serious than Dick Grayson. But instead of angry, he was endearingly uptight. As his comrade and occasional girlfriend Spoiler notes in the panel to the left, when Tim acts tough and shoots off snappy jokes like Dick, it comes across as trying too hard.

Tim Drake as Robin still lightened Batman, but with emotional openness, not with broad jokes. On his teams, first Young Justice and then a reconstituted Teen Titans, Tim's Robin tended to be straight man. It's unclear how humor will play a role in his new identity as Red Robin.

Meanwhile, yet another Robin made his debut this month, little Damian Wayne. As I've discussed before, the moral and emotional dynamic of Batman (now Dick Grayson) and Robin has been reversed.

What sort of humor can Damian brings to the Batman magazine? So far it all seems to be at his expense; we readers are encouraged to snicker at Damian's ego and excesses. Can he avoid the fate of the second Jason Todd?

NEXT WEEK: What Robin's jokes have come to mean for Batman.

Gathering in the Fold

2009-06-27T08:43:00.002-05:00

CFP Week as Oz and Ends ends with a CFFC--a Call for Foldy Comics.

Late last month I wrote about a single-sheet form of comics developed independently by Kenan Rubenstein and Jon Chad. Each surface (and thus potentially each panel) is twice as large as the one before.

Kenan has now launched a website devoted to this form at FoldyComics. I believe he's using "foldies" as the generic term while titling his own series of semi-autobiographical examples as "oubliettes."

And he's invited other comics creators to send in their examples. So far there are some from Reid Psaltis, including "The Naturalist," which takes advantage of the expanding form. It's virtually inspiring.

Dr. Greystroke, I Presume?

2009-06-26T09:06:00.002-05:00

And from Twilight we move to another exploration of the border between the wild and the civilized, between animal instinct and noblesse oblige. Profs. Michelle Ann Abate and Annette Wannamaker are soliciting essays for a collection tentatively titled From King of the Jungle to Cultural Icon: Tarzan at 100. Their CFP says:

Since its debut in serial format in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ narrative about an orphaned white boy being raised by a band of black apes in the African jungle has become a transnational literary classic, frequent cinematic, film and comic book icon and powerful--as well as problematic--cultural archetype. This collection will allow critics from a wide range of disciples to explore the past place, present status and future importance of Tarzan in popular print, visual and material culture.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Tarzan and (de)construction of gender, boyhood, masculinity and sexuality
Homosocial and/or homoerotic readings of Tarzan
Primitivism, race, and colonialism in Tarzan
Tarzan in popular print and visual media: comic books, graphic novels and video games as well as cinematic, theatrical and television adaptations of the Tarzan story
Tarzan as convergence culture [buzzword alert! This refers to Henry Jenkins's notion for the overlap of old and new media, audiences and storytellers.]
Tarzan on the Internet
Tarzan and/as children’s literature
the life of William Charles Mildin, the supposed factual model for Burroughs’ fictional character
the Disneyfication of Tarzan
Tarzan and the origins, history and evolution of the “boys’ book”
Tarzana, California
Changing visual representations of Tarzan
Tarzan and the feral boy story, both past and present
the presence of Tarzan in non-Western literatures and cultures
Tarzan Clubs, fan culture, and “the cult of Tarzan”
Johnny Wëissmuller [shouldn't that be Weißmüller?] as the popular face of Tarzan
Tarzan’s influence on other texts, parodies of Tarzan, and allusions to Tarzan
Tarzan as myth and icon
Tarzan and British identity, nationalism and culture; Tarzan and American identity, nationalism and culture
Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length (roughly 250-500 words). Please send abstracts plus a CV electronically as Microsoft Word attachments to Michelle Ann Abate or Annette Wannamaker.

The author’s name, email and postal address should appear in the message that accompanies the submission. Proposals should conform to the Modern Language Association bibliographic style. See the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed., for procedures regarding in-text citations and Works Cited. Deadline: November 1st, 2009.

Historicizing and Problematizing Twilight

2009-06-25T09:29:00.001-05:00

Nancy Reagin, professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at Pace University, has issued a call for proposals for a collection on “History and the Twilight Series.” Her CFP:

We are currently accepting proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection with the working title of “Twilight and History,” to be published by Blackwell Publishing in June, 2010. We’re looking for essays that historicize Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, examining individual characters or aspects of the series against a historical backdrop, or analyzing how popular historical understandings inform the series.

The collection is aimed at a broader audience than is the case for many scholarly collections, and seeks to make visible or problematize the use of historical contexts or events within the series. We welcome work from historians or those in cognate disciplines, including gender studies, Native American studies, religious studies, or cultural studies.

I hope the finished book will explain the value of its contributors' attempts to "problematize" in "cognate disciplines." Otherwise, it's not going to reach that "broader audience." (Remember when we enjoyed that sort of jargon in It's Always Fair Weather? Me neither.)

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
masculine honor and gender roles in Edward’s world and Bella’s
more than a generation gap: marriage and courtship in Edward’s youth
Twilight werewolves and werewolves in historical legend
essays that examine Jacob, Emily, Leah, Sam and their people against the history of the Quileutes and Northwest Pacific native cultures
Carlisle and witchcraft persecutions in Early Modern England
Alice Cullen and the (mis)treatment of the insane in 19th century America
The Amazon coven and South American native cultures
The Cullens and European vampire folklore
the Volturi, art patronage, and politics in Italian history
This collection will be published by Blackwell Publishers, which will pay contributors an honorarium of $350.

Please email a 500-word proposal, a one-page c.v., and contact information to Nancy Reagin by July 10, 2009. Notification of accepted proposals will be made by July 15, 2009. Chapter drafts of approximately 5,000 words will be due by Sept. 15, 2009.

Proposals should be in .doc or .rtf form, and should include the author's name and contact information.

“Graphic Narrative and Its Links to Jewish Identity”

2009-06-24T08:59:00.001-05:00

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is planning an issue devoted to Jewish comics, slotted for Summer 2010. Its call for papers begins:

The scholarship surrounding comics and “graphic novels” has proliferated over the past several years, as has [sic] studies focusing on particular comics themes or visual texts created by certain ethnic communities. Indeed, over the past three years alone there have been at least six critical studies investigating the links between comics and Jewishness.

I thumbed through one of those new books in the library on Sunday. But a superhero is never daunted by overwhelming numbers, and the journal forges ahead:

The scope of this volume will take in the theoretical, literary, and historical contexts of graphic narrative and its links to Jewish identity and discourse. Possible topics could include, but are certainly not limited to:
The ways in which comics have articulated the American Jewish experience
Comics and the Holocaust, as expressed in such narratives as Maus, Auschwitz, I Was a Child of the Holocaust, We Are on Our Own, Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir, and Yossel: April 19, 1943
The contributions of Jews in the history of comic strips and comic books
Images of Israel in the works of Joe Sacco, Rutu Modan, Ari Folman, Miriam Libicki, and the Dimona Comix Group
Jewish identity through superheroes and villains, from Superman to The Spirit to Shaloman
The form of the contemporary “graphic novel” by Jewish writers/artists such as Kim Deitch, Joann Sfar, Miss Lasko-Gross, Ben Katchor, and Aline Kominisky-Crumb
Graphic adaptations of Jewish texts and legends
Immigration and ethnic urban landscapes in the works of comics artists such as Will Eisner and Ben Katchor
Comics, the Diaspora, and Jewish internationalism
Jewish identity and world conflict, from the world wars to 9/11
Jewish autobiographic comics (e.g., Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and Will Eisner’s autobiographic fiction) as well as graphic biographies of such figures as Franz Kafka, Emma Goldman, Houdini, and Anne Frank
Representations of the Jewish gangster in comics
The uses of the golem and its relation to the superhero
All essay submissions should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, including notes. Contributors should format submissions based on the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, and use footnotes. Authors will be responsible for securing copyright permission for all images used.

Address all inquiries, and submit all completed manuscripts, to the guest editor, Derek Parker Royal. Please include the words “Jewish Comics” in the subject heading. Deadline for final manuscript submission is October 2, 2009.

My early-morning thought: Is there tension between the prohibition in some forms of Judaism on visual representations of the human form (based on the Second Commandment against "graven images") and the basic act of visual storytelling?

Shofar is published for the Midwest Jewish Studies Association, the Western Jewish Studies Association, and the Jewish Studies Program of Purdue University by the Purdue University Press.

Magical Money

2009-06-23T08:24:00.001-05:00

The end of the academic year has brought a bountiful crop of CFPs, or calls for papers. I'm going to feature some of my favorites on Oz and Ends this week.

On 1-3 Oct 2009, the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg will play host to an academic conference on “Fairy Tale Economies.” Its call for papers wins the award for most thorough use of bullet points; just when you think you're out, they pull you back in:

Mindful of our own global economies, this colloquium addresses economies in fantastic literature and culture. We shall identify economy both as a theme within literatures and as a way of thinking about the value of fantastic literature itself. . . .

We encourage scholars to think creatively about this conference theme, and invite papers on topics including but not limited to:

Economy of fairy tales
As a genre: the brevity of its narrative, the economy of its words, the size of its books.
The economy of fairy tale publications and adaptations: the market for fairy tales, production and consumption costs (both literal and figurative), the careers of writers.
Economy in fairy tales
Economic systems within fairy tales
The worth of people and things
Economies of the body and social body
Discourses of poverty, wealth, and class status
Economy and fairy tales
Ideas of worth and value associated with the fairy tale
The fairy tale as a renewable resource or recycled form across genres and eras.
The ways in which various (current or past) economic discourses have been shaped by fairy tale structures, motifs and themes
Even more broadly, we invite proposals that investigate ideas of “value,” “worth,” “profit,” as well as “conservation,” “sustainability,” and “recycling” with reference to:
Book history and genre adaptation
Narrative “unrealism”--the Gothic, supernatural, or uncanny
Fantastic and uncanny bodies of all kinds
Proposals should outline topic, as well as theoretical and disciplinary framework. Please send proposals (300 word maximum), together with a brief biography that indicates academic affiliation and scholarly activity by June 30, 2009 to Dr. Molly Clark Hillard. (We also invite proposals from graduate students: please indicate status in your biography.)

One of my own favorite fairylands doesn't use money--but of course it still has an economy. Yet the most widely repeated economic interpretation of that fairyland remains worthless.

(Picture above courtesy of Old Book Art's posting on John R. Neill's color plates for The Marvelous Land of Oz. It shows the Scarecrow at a time when he was stuffed with money instead of straw.)

Truly Revolutionary Reading

2009-06-22T15:09:00.004-05:00

A Facebook group called "Literacy Is Revolutionary" is recruiting people to read to a child on 25 July. Its pitch starts: "Did you know that World Literacy halved from 1970 to 2005? Let's do something about it!"

Actually, world illiteracy was cut almost in half over that period, according to UNESCO. And that happened even though literacy is defined by context; knowing how to read has become more important in more societies, so the literacy bar got raised.

I'm all for reading to kids. But this is not a good example of careful reading.

[ADDENDUM: Since this posting, the Facebook page has been changed to read: "Did you know that World Illiteracy halved from 1970 to 2005? Let's do something about it!" Which is more accurate, though normally we "do something about" a problem, not a good trend.]

From 1 to 2

2009-06-22T09:15:00.000-05:00

At the start of the month I mentioned Sterling's contest for Richard Scarry books, celebrating his ninetieth birthday this month. I couldn't find much on the company's website about the contest for non-librarians and non-booksellers, but I tooks my chances and sents in my contact info.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy of Richard Scarry’s From 1 to 10, published by Sterling last year. This board book reuses some of Scarry's art to, well, count to ten.

The book is now with a toddler. Her grateful mother is from France, and her father from America. I think Scarry, who was born in Boston and lived much of his life in Switzerland, would have approved.

What’s So Funny About Robin?

2009-06-21T09:11:00.007-05:00

This weekly Robin carries on from “Reason for Robin, #8: Comic relief,” analyzing how the first decades of Batman comic books mixed humor and the character of Robin.

I've previously mentioned Robin's early tendency to fall down at inconvenient times (Reason for Robin #5), enabling the Batman writers to turn their plots into roller-coaster rides. But those writers never used Robin's stumbles for humor. Nor did anyone make fun of his bafflement at the mystery of the month, which was so useful for showing Batman as a master detective.

This was a contrast to how the 1940s Batman magazines and comic strip used Alfred's foibles as he stumbled into catching crooks; readers were expected to laugh at the eager butler's errors and good luck. And the difference is even starker when we compare how sidekicks appeared in other superheroes' stories. Robin made jokes, but he was very rarely the butt of jokes.

(Two exceptions were the few moments when Batman made Robin dress in female clothing and when both Batman and Robin were caught up in a comic story.)

I link that pattern to Reason for Robin #3--younger readers were supposed to identify with Robin. And no one likes people to make fun of him.

I see another interesting pattern emerging when I look at the early Superman stories, which showed the Man of Steel serving out wisecracks with his punches. When the immensely strong, nearly invulnerable Superman did those things, he came across as a bully (and a product of Jerry Siegel's unresolved anger issues). The jokes made him seem less likable, and eventually faded.

In contrast, part of Robin's character is being the littlest guy in the fight. That stature let him get away with adding insult to injury as he attacks grown-up crooks. Yes, he's still a bit of a bully, but he's not a big bully.

The latest Batman comic books, appearing this month, feature a new Robin, Damian Wayne. And he changes that dynamic. Scripter Grant Morrison has established Damian as a well trained and potentially sociopathic little assassin. Robin's smaller than ever, but he's no longer the least dangerous, most vulnerable, or most innocent person in the fight.

Not surprisingly, the humor has changed as well. Damian's attempts at jokes are few (Morrison doesn't give him many, other writers just a few snarky insults). And the scenes encourage us readers to laugh at this little Robin's excesses. Our sympathies are still with Dick Grayson, but now he's the one in the batsuit.

A third pattern in how the Batman writers found humor in Robin: he tended to spout puns of the lamest sort, based on whatever was visible nearby. In many of those panels, we can sense the desperation of writers on deadline.

Robin's puns were so obvious, in fact, that within a few years of his debut in 1940, other characters were commenting on that habit. And once wordplay became an explicit part of his characterization, other writers had to continue the pattern.

Thus, in the 1960s Batman TV show Burt Ward's Robin spouted "Holy —————!" exclamations. (Here's a whole passel of them.) And that trait was carried on with Casey Kasem's Robin in the 1970s Super Friends cartoons. Even as the comic-book writers tried to move away from that self-parodying characterization, they couldn't leave Robin's sense of humor behind.

NEXT WEEK: So they found deeper meaning in it.