Here’s an interesting wrinkle about international copyright protections:

The classic novella “The Little Prince” fell into the public domain this year in much of the world but remains under copyright in France because of an exception that grants a 30-year extension to authors who died during military service in World War I and II.

There’s a logic to that provision, I suppose. If a society bases copyright terms on an author’s life, but an author dies before his or her time while fighting for the society, then the society extends the copyright term to about what it would otherwise have been. Still, I wonder what specific cases gave rise to this exception.

That passage comes from a New York Times story on a dispute over the copyright of Anne Frank’s diary as originally published. That copyright is the main asset of a foundation, which wishes to extend its term by calling Anne’s father a coauthor of the text. Other institutions, hoping to make the diary more widely accessible and/or mindful of Holocaust deniers’ claims that Otto Frank invented the story to begin with, are resisting that move.

By the logic of the French law, the term of Anne Frank’s copyright could be extended based on what her natural lifespan would have been—meaning even longer protection than basing the term on her father’s lifespan. Of course, few countries follow France’s example.

Meanwhile, the foundation already authorized the editing and publication of a more complete version of Anne Frank’s diary, which has its own copyright term based on the life of the scholarly editor.

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There’s a lot to like in the new Supergirl television series, but there’s one detail in the introductory voiceover that I don’t like at all.

That line repeats a detail from the pilot, which shows Kara’s family sending her from Krypton to Earth. Her mother is a judge, showing how Kryptonian women could exercise authority.

In those scenes, Kara is about thirteen years old. Her cousin Kal-El is still a little baby. And their parents know that when the kids arrive on Earth they’ll have extraordinary powers—the yellow sun, you know.

But the women don’t tell Kara that she’ll have to be careful, or that she can be a hero. They say her job is “to look after your baby cousin, Kal-El.”

Kara replies, “I won’t fail Kal-El, or you.”

The grown-ups don’t tell Kara that she should do this “because you’re older, and he’s just a baby.” They don’t say she should do this “until he can look after himself.” They present this as her one and only mission in life.

The credits go on to explain that Kara’s spaceship was knocked off course, causing her not to arrive on Earth until her cousin has already grown up and become Superman. But she’s still in her teens. The series picks up a few years later when she’s in her early twenties. (Most comic-book versions of Supergirl are in their teens, but there is some precedent for a twentysomething.)

At first Kara says, “I didn’t have a mission anymore. But even though I had all the same powers he did, I decided the best thing I could do was fit in. After all, Earth didn’t need another hero.” Over the first couple of episodes, she decides to discard that attitude and be a superhero as good as her cousin.

Comics writers have gotten a lot of stories out of Supergirl’s wish to match her older, established cousin’s heroism. I have no problem with that being a big theme in this series. But here that theme is tied on the notion that her job was to look after the family’s sole surviving male.

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Smart analysis from Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore College:

What’s being called appropriation in some of the current activist discourses is how culture works. It’s the engine of cultural history, it’s the driver of human creativity. No culture is a natural, bounded, intrinsic and unchanging thing. A strong prohibition against appropriation is death to every ideal of human community except for a rigidly purified and exclusionary vision of identity and membership.

Even a weak prohibition against appropriation risks constant misapplication and misunderstanding by people who are trying to systematically apply the concept as polite dogma. To see one example of that, look to the New York Times article, which describes at one point a University of Washington advice video that counsels people to avoid wearing a karate costume unless you’re part of the real culture of karate. But karate as an institutional culture of art and sport is already thoroughly appropriated from its origins in Okinawa, and it was in turn an appropriation of sorts from Chinese martial arts–and no martial arts form in the world today is anything even remotely like its antecedents in practice, form or purpose. Trying to forbid karate costuming to anyone but a truly authentic “owner” of the costume is a tragic misunderstanding of the history of the thing being regulated. It’s also a gesture that almost certainly forbids the wearing of a costume that has a referent that is not wholly imaginary. If a karate outfit is appropriation for anyone but a genuine Okinawan with a black belt, then so also are firefighters, police, soldiers, nurses, doctors, astronauts and so on. Even imaginary characters are usually appropriations of some kind of another, drawn out of history and memory.

It is precisely these kinds of discourses about appropriation that are used by reactionaries to protest Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall, or to assert that a tradition of a particular character or cultural type being white or male or straight means it must always be so. It might be possible to configure a critique so that appropriation from below is always ok and appropriation from above is never ok, but that kind of categorical distinction itself rests on the illusion of power being rigid, binary and fixed rather than fluid, performative and situational.

What I think many activists mean to forbid is not appropriation but disrespect, not borrowing but hostile mockery. The use of costumes as weapons, as tools of discrimination. But it’s important to say precisely that and no more, and not let the word appropriation stand in for a much more specific situational critique of specific acts of harmful expression and representation. “Appropriation” is being used essentially to anticipate, to draw a comprehensive line proactively in order to avoid having to sort out with painful specificity which costumes and parties are offensive and which are not after the fact of their expression.

I’ve been trying to remember Halloween costumes from my years at Yale. I don’t remember the types of costume that the administration felt compelled to warn students against this year. In fact, I have a hard time imagining anyone in that period thinking variations on blackface would ever be appropriate—and I do remember clear moments of racism and other bigotry. But maybe I just didn’t go to those parties.

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Here’s another view of the map of Oz as issued by Reilly & Lee. Can you spot two big differences between it and the map shown last week, from David Maxine’s Hungry Tiger Talk blog?

One difference is that this is a later reprinting of the map that first appeared in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). As David discussed, the compass rose originally put east on the left and west on the right, contrary to the usual approach. At some point in subsequent decades, the publisher changed the labels so “E” was on the right as usual.

Of course, that change also meant the map showed the Winkie Country to be east of the Emerald City instead of west, as all of L. Frank Baum’s books described it. But his successors Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill started to state that the Winkies lived to the east, conforming to the reprinted map and its conventional compass.

Another difference is that the version of the map above is a broadside while the image David showed was scanned from an early copy of Tik-Tok of Oz, where it served as the endpapers. And that highlights a feature I find really interesting from the perspective of book design.

This map had to look good both as endpapers, when a thin strip of its middle would be concealed in the book’s binding, and as a poster or broadside lying flat. The artist accomplished that by making sure that almost no sites and no lettering fell within that central strip. Some large labels bridge the strip, such as the word “GILLIKIN” in the top quadrant—but there’s a little extra space between the second I and the K that could disappear into the binding.

The Emerald City was a challenge because Baum was clear that it’s in the middle of Oz—and thus in the middle of this map. How to keep it from vanishing into the gutter? The artist’s solution was to depict the city as a horizontal oval, with the word “Emerald” on the left and “City” on the right. (David Hulan once pointed out that the oval approximates an “emerald cut” in jewelry.) Then when the central strip of the map is hidden (look back on David’s map), the city appears as a circle and its full name remains legible.

On the accompanying map of Oz and surrounding countries, shown below, the Emerald City is safely off-center. And it appears as a circle, as it would appear in the endpapers form of the Oz map. This time the artist tried to keep other labels and locations out of the central strip. In the image from Wikipedia below, you can see where that got tough.

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Here are nice quotes from reviews of Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder, edited by Kristen L. Geaman and published this year by McFarland.

John DeNardo, Kirkus Reviews:

“Dick Grayson, aka. Robin, Batman’s young sidekick, [has] been around nearly as long as the caped crusader but rarely sees any media attention. That is, until now, with this collection of scholarly essays. Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing and Batman is an interesting collection that features critical analyses and essays about the most overshadowed sidekick in comics. Also included are interviews with the Boy Wonder’s past and current creators Chuck Dixon, Devin Grayson and Marv Wolfman. Collectively, these essays examine Robin’s place in comics and his evolution across the decades—all within various contexts like trauma, friendship, feminism and masculinity.”

Nick Smith, ICv2 (4 Stars out of 5):

“Some outstanding work . . . for anyone who wants insights into the detailed history of Dick Grayson, as Robin and as Nightwing, and into the creative processes that have guided the character over such a long time, this is a valuable work, well worth reading. It should also be of interest to anyone interested in writing any company-owned character, because the history and interviews may prevent career-threatening pitfalls. Its price may keep it out of the hands of some fans, but it belongs in most libraries, at the least.”

As I wrote last week, the preview function on Barnes and Noble and Amazon websites offers an overview of the book and a good chunk of the first essay, by me.

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The news that there’s a deal for a television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is very intriguing for us fans. It also shows how the economics of special-effects adventure dramas have changed in recent years.

In 2007, New Line’s adaptation of The Golden Compass cost an estimated $180 million to make. But that movie just didn’t capture the books’ magic, earning only $70 million in the US. That was so little that New Line’s parent corporation restructured the division the next year, bringing it under the control of Warner Bros. (The film made more overseas, but most of that money went to distributors, not the studio.)

Now television shows like Supergirl can afford digital visual effects on the same level, despite having a lower budget. And miniseries have become quite lucrative. So it’s possible to conceive of a His Dark Materials adaptation that’s not only visually stunning but tells the complete story of the three books.

Philip Pullman is part of this new deal. So is New Line, perhaps because it still holds the dramatic rights, and Scholastic. The production company, Bad Wolf, is new, without any completed projects, but its founders have brought on the BBC, their former employer. They also have ties to HBO, which would be a prime customer for the series in the US. All that makes me feel a little more hope than usual that this announced deal will lead to an actual show.

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At the Hungry Tiger Talk blog, David Maxine has been presenting his research into the many maps of Oz. In his latest, he shares information about the map that appeared in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), as shown above.

David quotes material showing that L. Frank Baum:

• sketched a map of Oz for a young reader while working on the musical that became Tik-Tok of Oz, according to his composer, Louis F. Gottschalk.
• sketched a supplemental map depicting the adventure in The Lost Princess of Oz (1917) based on the first.

He thus reaches the convincing conclusion that Baum himself sketched the preliminary version of the Tik-Tok map.

The main mystery of that map is why its compass is reversed, with east shown on the left and west on the right. Baum’s texts are consistent about east and west—the Winkie Country is always to the west of the Emerald City, for example, and traveling west in the Winkie Country takes one to the edge of Oz. Likewise, the Lost Princess map is consistent with the earlier Tik-Tok map, with west on the right. But if one were to hover in the air over Oz in a balloon facing north, would it look like that map?

For David, the consistency suggests that Baum actually pictured Oz that way, with east to the left and west to the right. I'm not so sure that’s the only explanation.

Even in its early years, the Reilly & Britton publishing firm seems to have been a bit slapdash in how it assembled the Oz books. A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the art program for The Patchwork Girl of Oz, which included reusing many of John R. Neill’s illustrations, including at least one that Baum had rejected.

I therefore think there’s a possibility the Tik-Tok map ended up with a reverse compass because no one noticed that mistake till all the hand-lettering was done. Then, with the book ready to go to the printers, everyone (including Baum) just decided to live with the oddity. As for the Lost Princess map, Baum clearly based that off the earlier one, and it would have been much easier for him to maintain its orientation than to redraw the borders in reverse.

Unfortunately, correspondence between Baum and his publisher during the time when the map was created appears to be lost. We therefore don’t know what Baum asked for or settled for. But it’s clear that he accepted the map as published, with its unorthodox orientation.

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On Saturday, 7 November, I’m going to moderate a panel of new children’s-book authors at Wondermore’s “What’s New in Children’s Books” conference at Lesley University in Cambridge.

The panelists are:

• Elaine Dimopoulos, YA author
• Megan Dowd Lambert, picture book author
• Marika McCoola, graphic novelist (Marika’s Baba Yaga’s Assistant just won the New England Book Award for Children’s Literature)
• Dan Moynihan, picture book author and illustrator

We’re going to talk about their paths of publication, favorite childhood reading, and advice for young creators.

This conference is designed for teachers, librarians, and other professionals who help kids learn to read and enjoy books. Other speakers include author-editor Anita Silvey, author-illustrator Rebecca Bond, bookseller Terri Schmitz, and school librarian Christian Porter. The presentations start at 9:00, and are scheduled to finish in early afternoon.

(Wondermore used to be known as the Foundation for Children’s Books. It’s now focused on bringing books and book creators to urban schools.)

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Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder is a collection of serious essays about the sensational character find of 1940, published on the occasion of his 75th anniversary.

The book’s editor is Kristen L. Geaman, a medievalist, and many of the other contributors are also academics. Most don’t specialize in comic books or popular culture but are long-time fans of Dick Grayson in his various roles in the DC Universe. They combine rigorous scholarship with affection for the character. And one of those contributors is me.

In fact, my essay is the first in the book because I volunteered to cover the first thirty years of Dick Grayson stories, from his debut in 1940 to his departure for college in late 1969. I discuss the storytelling advantages of a sidekick, the emotional depth that Dick brought to the Batman saga, and Dr. Fredric Wertham’s complaints about the Dynamic Duo’s relationship.

On both Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s website, it’s possible to read a good chunk of my essay through the preview feature. Check it out and see if you want a copy of the whole book in print or digital form.

(Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder doesn’t contain any illustrations from the comics, and it wasn’t authorized by DC Comics—hence the non-trademark-conforming costume on the cover.)

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Elements of Oz is a new stage/video show that seems to combine an homage to the MGM movie with Ozma’s Magic Picture. (Which, as we all know, can show you any place or person you ask to see.)

Here’s a taste of the review in today’s New York Times:

At “Elements of Oz,” having its premiere as part of the Peak Performances season at Montclair State University here, viewers are encouraged to use smartphones or tablets during the performance. . . . You download a special app that instructs you to put your phone in airplane mode until the show starts. The app then provides access to various elements that enhance the production, primarily nifty filters that, when you point the phone at the stage, add new layers of imagery to the action. When Dorothy’s house in Kansas flies skyward, for example, you can hold up your phone and see a real corker of a tornado and slashing rain that isn’t apparent to the naked eye.

Directed by Marianne Weems, “Elements of Oz” was jointly created by James Gibbs and Moe Angelos. Ms. Angelos is also one of the three performers, alongside Sean Donovan and Hannah Heller. A loose, loopy and enjoyable seminar on the making of the movie and its influence on pop culture, the production combines live video and performance — several famous scenes from the movie are more or less filmed anew before us — with anecdotes about its production and other random arcana about the film and the book it was based on by L. Frank Baum. . . .

The live re-creations of scenes from the movie are technically marvelous; the digital video (by Austin Switser) is dazzlingly pristine, and it’s fun, at least for a while, to watch the wry comic impersonations of the performances in the movie. . . . But ultimately these sequences don’t provide enough comic stimulation to justify their length. It begins to feel a bit too much like a draggy day on the back lot, and you might find yourself tempted to escape the app and fire up the real movie on your phone…

The performers, who each play multiple roles, all get praise, as does Bert Lahr.

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Today’s New York Times offers Laura Collins-Hughes’s review of The Woodsman, an hourlong play inspired by The Tin Woodman of Oz:

A movement piece with puppets, James Ortiz’s “The Woodsman” is an elemental reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s world of Oz. The spectacle is handmade, infused with breath and light.

This is the Tin Man’s back story: how a regular human named Nick Chopper (Mr. Ortiz) came to be a rusting pile of metal in need of a heart. The story, laid out in a spare spoken prologue in this largely wordless piece, involves the witch who rules this part of Oz. Her only apparent vulnerability is an aversion to sunlight.

When Nick falls in love with her barefoot slave Nimmee (an appealing Eliza Simpson), the witch schemes to prevent their union. She enchants an ax to cut off chunks of Nick, one by one. With prosthetics to replace them, soon he is wholly made of tin. Without a heart, he can no longer love. . . .

Mr. Ortiz’s puppets are fanciful and gorgeous: the witch, with her pinched face and dowager’s gown; the crows, whose wings in motion are all taffeta susurration; a fabulous golden-eyed monster, a cross between a tiger and a bear. (Oh, my.)

That would be a Kalidah, shown above.

Alas, Collins-Hughes concludes, “With so many pieces well in place, it seems churlish to complain, but one significant flaw holds ‘The Woodsman’ back: The storytelling isn’t clear enough. The visual language can be muddled, and important bits are sometimes rushed.” She obviously hopes a future staging will improve.

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According to Officer Darren Wilson, after his first brief exchange on 9 August with Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson about walking in a Ferguson, Missouri, street, he backed up his police vehicle and confronted them again because one of them was wearing a black T-shirt.

In an interview on 10 August, the day after the shooting, Wilson stated: “I heard on the radio that there was a stealing in progress from the Ferguson Market on West Florissant. I heard a brief description of a black male with a black T-shirt.”

In his grand jury testimony several weeks later, Wilson repeated that: “I was on my portable radio, which isn’t exactly the best. I did hear that a suspect was wearing a black shirt and that a box of Cigarillos was stolen.” That description confirmed for him that he’d come across the two suspects from the store robbery: “I did a doublecheck that Johnson was wearing a black shirt, these are the two from the stealing.”

However, earlier this month the police radio dispatches from that day were released.

The dispatcher said, “it's going to be a black male in a white T-shirt.”

An officer confirmed, “Black male, white T-shirt.”

Four minutes later, another voice added: “He’s with another male, he’s got a red Cardinals hat, white T-shirt, yellow socks and khaki shorts.” That was an accurate description of what Michael Brown was wearing.

Officer Wilson couldn’t have heard anything about a “black shirt” on the radio. The radio calls, as recorded and released, mention only Brown’s “white T-shirt.” Three times.

How much did Wilson, consciously or unconsciously, massage his memory to conform to what he saw after shooting Michael Brown dead?

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One easy diagnostic test for OIP Derangement Syndrome is an abiding belief in conspiracies and secrets surrounding the fatal attack on the US consulate and CIA outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

In my personal experience, the people who say they’re most concerned with digging out more facts about that event also have a lot of trouble keeping the existing facts straight, such as how the US had no embassy in Benghazi.

There have been multiple investigations of the attack. In fact, the “Asked and Answered” website not only answers common right-wing questions and claims about Benghazi but also a list of how many times those questions have already been authoritatively answered.

Today, two weeks after the national elections, the House Intelligence Committee finally released its report on the event. And that bipartisan but GOP-controlled body came to the same conclusions as the previous inquiries.

As the Associated Press reported:

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people. . . .

In the aftermath of the attacks, Republicans criticized the Obama administration and its then-secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016. People in and out of government have alleged that a CIA response team was ordered to “stand down” after the State Department compound came under attack, that a military rescue was nixed, that officials intentionally downplayed the role of al-Qaida figures in the attack, and that Stevens and the CIA were involved in a secret operation to spirit weapons out of Libya and into the hands of Syrian rebels. None of that is true, according to the House Intelligence Committee report. . . .

Rice's comments were based on faulty intelligence from multiple agencies, according to the report. Analysts received 21 reports that a protest occurred in Benghazi, the report said—14 from the Open Source Center, which reviews news reports; one from the CIA; two from the Defense Department; and four from the National Security Agency.

The AP also noted that this report “was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week,” despite how much importance some Americans have attached to the subject in recent years.

Sadly, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have already taken steps to feed those people’s delusions further. Earlier this year it commissioned a special House committee to conduct an eighth government investigation. Based on this one’s schedule, we can expect its report days after the 2016 election.

(Shown above is the cover of a book that supposedly exposed some of those lies and conspiracies about the bengahi attacks. It was featured on Sixty Minutes, then pulled by the publisher when the author was found to be lying. Note how the cover twice uses the word “embassy”—that should really have been a clue about its accuracy.)

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Another of Paul Levitz’s observations about the publishing industry last week was that book publishers have usually operated like bankers. They extend interest-free loans to authors in the form of advances, to be paid back (they hope) in royalties over succeeding years.

And like bankers, those companies are quicker to loan money to people who don’t need it: authors who are already earning a fine living off past books or in other fields. New or unknown authors, especially in fiction, have to do most of their work before they see any money, and then they don’t see much.

(That of course reflects that publishing advances aren’t exactly like loans. They’re also bids on properties, and in any business what looks more like a sure thing commands a higher price than an unproven quantity.)

Levitz suggested that publishers will have to become more like venture-capital firms, investing earlier in authors’ careers and projects. And, presumably, offering more guidance and control over their creations, as venture capitalists watch over the start-ups they invest in. Hollywood studios work closer to that model, paying earlier in the process to develop projects with a larger payoff.

I see a couple of problems for authors with that model. First, Hollywood studios are notorious for the number of projects they abandon: scripts in turnaround, TV pilots shot and never aired, and so on. Likewise, venture capitalists know that many of their investments won’t pay off, and they pull the plug a lot. Right now authors who get as far as a publishing contract are usually sure that their books will eventually see print, even if they’re marketed even more weakly than usual.

Hollywood studios are also notorious for getting involved in the creative process with script notes, personnel ultimatums, recutting, and so on. All to make the final stories more entertaining, of course. But does that work?

The screenwriter and novelist William Goldman famously wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade:

Nobody knows anything. . . . Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

What’s more, writing a book is a far less collaborative process than making a movie, or creating a tech company. How much solid advice can publishers offer to authors early in the creative processs? How many experts can they bring on board, or how many systems can they put in place, when the whole enterprise consists of one person and one keyboard?

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Last week I sat in on a discussion with Paul Levitz, former President at DC Comics, at MIT’s Media Lab. (The door to the building said I had to have an MIT identification to enter, but I rode up the elevator with Levitz and helped him find the auditorium, so I figured I deserved to stay.)

Levitz started at DC Comics as a sixteen-year-old freelance writer and editor, and is still scripting comics. From 1976 to 2009 he took on increasing internal responsibilities, spending the last seven years as President. Having long functioned as a big part of the corporate memory, he recently wrote a gigantic history of the company.

Among other observations at MIT, Levitz said that “geek culture” has overtaken “pop culture.” That reflects the popularity of videogames and of superhero and science-fiction movies and TV shows, of course, but it also speaks to a certain style of consuming entertainment.

I asked Levitz for his thoughts about one paradoxical aspect of “geek culture.” On the one hand, that form of fandom is very interested in seeing the process of storytelling:

• comics collections often include early sketches, scripts, and creators’ discussions of roads not taken. We rarely see that in novels.
• DVDs feature deleted scenes, commentary tracks, outtakes, and other peeks into the creation of the movies or TV shows they document.
• TV “show runners” are becoming celebrities with their own following.
• the moviegoing/viewing/reading/gaming public follows the creation of a new piece of entertainment earlier than ever; news that used to be restricted to the industry is now spread everywhere.

In sum, it’s more obvious than ever that those stories we like are artificial creations designed to entertain us and earn our dollars. And we enjoy the reminders of that.

And yet “geek culture” is also marked by a fervid, sometimes rabid, protectiveness about those stories and the characters in them, as if they were real or deserved to be. Fans want to guard their favorites from the very companies and people who have the assignment of keeping them alive.

Levitz could only reply that part of his job as a DC executive was to warn people adapting the company’s properties to other media when they were straying too far from the characters’ “core.” He found that he couldn’t define in advance what would raise most fans’ protective responses, but he knew it when he saw it. And that emotional attachment remains, still hard to map but perilous to cross.

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In 1957 Ralph Ulveling, director of the Detroit Public Library, received nationwide criticism for remarks he was reported as having made about the Oz books.

I’ve been looking into that story, and this is part of one of the documents from it: Ulveling’s counterattack in the October 1957 American Library Association Bulletin.

Ulveling went on to accuse the Michigan State University Press, of all people, of ginning up the controversy to sell books.

And you know, he might have been right.

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DC Comics executive Dan DiDio told USA Today that the company’s “Convergence” crossover event for next spring will return to older versions of its primary characters. “We’re picking up at points of their lives where we left them and finding out what’s gone on with them since then,” he said.

Closer examination at Comic Book Resources confirms that these stories hearken back to the company’s continuity before the “New 52.” But each tale seems designed to return its hero to a happy high point popular with his or her following. Back in June, the gossipy site Bleeding Cool heard from a creator that the upcoming project would be “a love letter to DC Comics fans.”

Thus, Wally West is not only the Flash once more, but he’s married to Linda and both their kids appear to have superpowers. (After 2010, only their daughter had powers.) In another nod to the domesticity of about eight years ago, Superman and Lois Lane are expecting a child.

Stephanie Brown will be back at Batgirl, with Tim Drake in his first Red Robin costume and Cass Cain as the Black Bat. That also reflects their situation in about 2010 (though we didn’t see much of Cass back then). Damian Wayne, who appears to be coming back in some form in the regular continuity, might well show up in one of these miniseries without ever having died.

“Convergence” thus gives DC a chance to “correct,” at least temporarily, recent developments that many fans vocally disliked, such as the murder of the Atom Ryan Choi and Roy Harper’s loss of both his arm and his little daughter.

Indeed, in some way, these series “correct” the entire “New 52” as they show the heroes fending off attacks from “Flashpoint versions” of other heroes; Flashpoint was a 2011 crossover presenting dystopic versions of the world which led to the “New 52.” The characters or versions of characters that disappeared in that transition have, the summaries suggest, been living under a protective “dome.”

I have particular questions about the Nightwing/Oracle title, to be scripted by Gail Simone. The teaser for the first issue says:

Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon reevaluate their relationship under the dome (wedding!), but Flashpoint Hawkman and Hawkwoman attack, and everything changes.

For many fans, Dick and Barbara are meant to be together. But the last time they were talking marriage in DC’s regular continuity was back in 2006. So are they reevaluating from that perspective, or after all the events that happened between then and Flashpoint? If the latter, that means Dick has become Batman, and no one has successfully penned his decision to go back to being Nightwing. At least not yet.

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The New York Times coverage of the new picture book for frazzled parents, You Have to —— Eat, reminds me of why I didn’t see the first one as worth noticing.

There’s this thing in verse called metre. If you’re going to write parody picture books, you should get to know that.

This quoted passage from the new book starts out anapestically enough but stumbles in the second line.

The sunrise is golden and lovely,
The birds chirp and twitter and tweet,
You woke me up and asked for some breakfast,
So why the —— won’t you eat?

And the third. And the fourth.

These books come from a small press that hasn’t specialized in the form, so perhaps its editors don’t notice the problem.

The sunrise is golden and lovely,
The birds in their nests chirp and tweet,
You woke up and asked me for breakfast,
So why in the hell won’t you eat?

But it’s really not that hard.

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Back in early October, The Hill reported:

Congressional Republicans are outraged that President Obama may take executive action on immigration reform after the mid-term elections—perhaps by deferring deportations and providing work authorization to millions of unauthorized immigrants with strong family ties to the United States. However, past Republican presidents have not been shy to use the White House’s power to retool immigration policy. In fact, Obama could learn a lot from presidents Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s executive actions to preserve the unity of immigrant families, and move past Congressional refusal to enact immigration reform.

After President Reagan signed the 1986 immigration reform law, people noted that it could apply to some members of certain families but not all, thus putting the US government in the position of splitting up families. Advocates like the US Catholic bishops argued that the government should take care to prevent that, but bills went nowhere in Congress. In 1987, therefore, Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner announced the agency was “exercising the Attorney General’s discretion” to defer deportation for many illegal immigrants.

Immigrant advocates worried that still left many families at risk. Legislation once more stalled in Congress. In February 1990 President Bush used executive action to implement the provisions of a bill that the Senate had passed overwhelmingly and the House hadn’t acted on. Bush’s INS commissioner explained the “family fairness” policy by saying, “we can enforce the law humanely. To split families encourages further violations of the law as they reunite.” The administration estimated that action would affect 40% of the illegal immigrants in the US at the time.

Today the Obama administration faces very similar challenges: keeping families intact, not coming down hard on children, bringing productive members of American society out of the shadows, a Congress too divided to act. The US people granted President Obama executive power in the 2008 and 2012 elections, which clearly includes the Reagan and Bush administration precedents. So far Obama has issued fewer executive actions than his recent predecessors.

And yet top Republicans in Congress are now saying that if President Obama uses the same executive power as Presidents Reagan and Bush to address the same problem, that would justify either shutting down the federal (again) or impeachment (again).

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In 2001, Elmore Leonard published an essay in the New York Times’s “Writers on Writing” series headlined “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle”.

Leonard offered advice like:

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

Eventually that article was the seed of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

Last August, when Leonard died, the comics scripter Brian Michael Bendis featured that on his Tumblr site. In the way that Tumblr works, the scripter Kurt Busiek quoted it on his but added these comments:

I disagree with almost all of Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing, largely because any time someone says “never do X,” I immediately try to think of times it works.

But all of his rules are worth thinking about, and can be extremely useful in thinking about whether to use them. If you decide not to use a rule because you’re aware of the hurdle Leonard’s warning of but have overcome that hurdle another way, then the rule was still useful, because it got you to think about how to avoid the problem.

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In The Marvelous Land of Oz, L. Frank Baum introduces the character of General Jinjur, leader of an army of girls. She aims to depose the Scarecrow as ruler of the central part of Oz. Why? “Because the Emerald City has been ruled by men long enough, for one reason,” she says.

Jinjur is thus a comedic version of turn-of-the-century suffragists. And soon she succeeds in conquering the Emerald City. When the Scarecrow returns with his friend the Tin Woodman and others, they find domestic society turned upside-down:

As they passed the rows of houses they saw through the open doors that men were sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing.

“What has happened?” the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby-carriage along the sidewalk.

“Why, we’ve had a revolution, your Majesty as you ought to know very well,” replied the man; “and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I’m glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City.”

“Hm!” said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. “If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?”

“I really do not know” replied the man, with a deep sigh. “Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron.”

At the end of the book, Glinda conquers Jinjur and crowns the young princess Ozma. As for the conflict between the genders, Baum writes:

At once the men of the Emerald City cast off their aprons. And it is said that the women were so tired eating of their husbands’ cooking that they all hailed the conquest of Jinjur with Joy. Certain it is that, rushing one and all to the kitchens of their houses, the good wives prepared so delicious a feast for the weary men that harmony was immediately restored in every family.

Baum was on record as a supporter of woman suffrage, and had even written about a female US President by the 1990s. His mother-in-law, Matilda Gage, was one of America’s most radical feminist authors. Without that history, however, I don’t know if people would be so quick to read this prt of the book as a gentle parody of feminism rather than a dismissal of it.

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Lindsay Moore, a Boston comics writer who has had several stories published in Hellbound, In a Single Bound, and other local anthologies, and who has shepherded her own pop-music superhero-pop comic The Quartette into print, has announced the formation of Hellcat Press to publish horror comics.

Hellcat’s first anthology, scheduled for publication next fall, will be titled Dark Lady. From the press’s Facebook page, here are extracts from that call for submissions:

Dark Lady is an all-female horror anthology. If you’re a woman with a horror story to tell, then Hellcat Press wants to read it!

All stories must fall under the horror genre. That being said, the horror genre is vast and all-encompassing.

Can I adapt a pre-existing short story (such as “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe) into comic-book format?
No. We are looking for original work.

If my story is accepted and published, can I still print minis and sell them at conventions?
Yes.

If my story is accepted and published, can I still submit it to other anthologies?
Yes.

What will I get out of this?
In addition to having your work published, you will receive one (1) free copy of the book and ten (10) dollars. As of right now, ten dollars is all that Hellcat Press can provide. You may receive more depending on sales.

What are the specs?
The book will be printed in black and white. The pages are 8.5 x 11 inches (standard magazine size). Keep all type 1/4" away from the edge to ensure that no text is cut off. Please keep your stories ten pages or under.

Is there a submission process?
Yes, there is! Please email me with your pitch before February 1, 2015. Please send in either a detailed outline/synopsis of your story or a full script (if you have one). Anything submitted after February 1, 2015 will not be considered. If your proposal is accepted, you will be notified as quickly as possible.

What is the deadline for finished artwork?
August 1, 2015.

Where will you be selling this book?
Hopefully, at all the conventions that the Boston Comics Roundtable attends (Boston Comic Con, MECAF, MICE, Hartford Comic Con, New York Comic Con, etc). I also hope to get it into a few local stores (Comicazi, The Million Year Picnic, The Outer Limits, Comicopia, etc). Once Hellcat Press’s website launches, we will also sell copies online.

Can you pair me with an artist/writer?
I cannot guarantee anything, but I will try.

Future collections may feature male artists and writers, or other themes.

Here are the technical specs for people preparing files to submit, an announced on the email list of the Boston Comics Roundtable:

The book will be printed in black and white. The pages are 8.5 x 11 inches (standard magazine size). Please keep your stories ten pages or under.
Safe image area: 8" (width) by 10.5" (height)
Full bleed: 8.75" (width) by 11.25" (height)
Trim size: 8.5" (width) by 11" (height)
NOTE: Keep all type 1/4" away from the edge to ensure that no text is cut off.
Please deliver files as .pdf files at 300 dpi, grayscale, at the final size. Please flatten your files before sending them.

These long wintry night are a fine time to start working on stories for next year.

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In articles derived from her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore has been talking up that comic-book heroine’s place in superhero history.

In Smithsonian:

Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long.

In The New Yorker:

Superman débuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, Wonder Woman in 1941.

Who’s missing from this discussion? “The Sensational Character Find of 1940,” of course.

Dick Grayson has appeared in stories for nearly three-quarters of a century, about a year and a half longer than Wonder Woman. He’s been a major character in two movie serials, a television series, and two feature films. Plus, half a dozen television cartoons have featured some version of Robin.

I suspect Robin is a pop-culture reference as recognizable as Wonder Woman. In fact, the name “Dick Grayson” might be better known than Wonder Woman’s occasional alias, “Diana Prince.”

Of course, Robin has always been a sidekick to Batman, and thus a supporting character or one in an ensemble instead of a lead. Though he appeared on more comic-book covers in the 1940s than Batman, not until the 1990s was there a comic book with the Robin name in its official title. In contrast, there’s been a Wonder Woman magazine since 1942 (with a yearlong break in 1986-87), and she’s usually worked on her own as well as with the Justice Society and Justice League.

So I’m not arguing that Wonder Woman is less prominent than Robin, just that he qualifies as a famous, long-lasting comic-book crime-fighter on the same level.

(And I won’t even mention that Archie Andrews made his debut in comic books in the same month as Wonder Woman, so those two comic-book characters have lasted the same time.)

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Someone else considering the workings of serial fiction this week was Linda Holmes, writing for NPR on the public-radio-related podcast Serial, reinvestigating a murder.

Holmes notes how many listeners are trying to view the podcast through the lens of the recent limited television series True Detective, Fargo, and Lost. In other words, they’re asking for a clear conclusion even if (as in two of those examples) it ends up disappointing a lot of the audience.

Holmes writes:

What’s good about this wrinkle, and what seems healthy about it, is that it raises the question of what stories are for. Must there be a lesson or a moral? Must we sense a particular idea about life at the end, and can it be futility? If you raise a question, do you have to answer it? In real life, of course, Chekhov’s gun need not come to anything in the third act just because it was shown in the first. If this makes a good true story but would not make a good piece of dramatic fiction, why is that?

Assuming people do find the [Serial] ending satisfying despite what almost must be its messiness, is it possible that a piece of serial crime reporting with no conclusion will point to the idea that we've perhaps become overly obsessed in judging an entire piece of storytelling on whether we get the perfectly symmetrical, flawless, balanced, wry, doubt-drowning ending we deserve?

I find it telling that Holmes’s essay doesn’t mention what until recently was the necessary name-drop in any article on quality television: The Sopranos. That show famously ended without resolution, just a sudden black screen. And people were pissed. So it fits right into Holmes’s thesis.

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As you can see, Americans thought much worse of the Republican Party, and yet favored its congressional candidates by a slight edge. Which is what we saw in the mid-term election this week. And enough slight edges across the country’s competitive districts turn into a strong run of victories for those unfavored Republicans.

But as to how voters can reconcile those attitudes in their minds, that’s a mystery. Part of the answer is turnout. Part is that we the electorate are almost evenly divided, making slight edges more crucial—this is the fourth of the last five election cycles that swung sharply against the previous vote for Congress.

And part might be underlying OIP Derangement Syndrome, in which some voters, sensing a problem in the national government, blame President Barack Obama despite agreeing in the abstract with his policies and methods.

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