-verses

I've been intrigued by the idea of the Amazon Kindle Singles (basically, 99 cents for a piece roughly akin in scale and ambition to a substantial New Yorker feature - sorry to put it that way, but that's the long and short of it!), and I've just readDouglas Wolk's funny and moving contribution to the series, Comic-Con Strikes Again! I do not know that I will ever attend Comic-Con myself, though you never know with these things... - at any rate, this gives a very good glimpse of it. Definitely recommended.

Friday musings

This would make a good premise for an urban fantasy novel!

My Bookforum piece about the risks and rewards of saying that literature has something to tell us about life...

I had a rather good evening at the theater last night: G. and I saw Spider-Man! It was considerably better than I expected; the first half is a bore (why, oh why do they feel the need to include the de rigueur school bullying scene?!?), but the second half really picked up focus, and some of the sets and stage effects are really lovely, particularly the perspectival shifts that see you suddenly looking down from the top of the Chrysler building. It seemed to be warmly received by those in the house - I would think it has the potential to stick. (The music is truly mediocre.)

Chipping away at BOMH revisions, but laboring under a painful lung ailment (I've been sick for almost two weeks now) that is making me very seriously worried about whether I'll be able to race next weekend. Doctor's appointment Monday late afternoon will be an initial stage of decision-making. I was sucking on the cough drops at last night's show, and desperately coughing up junk whenever there was a loud part to cover the sound....

D.O.N.A.L.D.

Susan Bernofsky has a fascinating piece at the WSJ (link courtesy of Marginal Revolution) on the history of the German obsession with Donald Duck:

When the Ehapa publishing house was founded in 1951 to bring American comics to German kids, it was a risky endeavor. Ehapa’s pilot project, a monthly comics magazine, bore the title “Micky Maus” to capitalize on that icon’s popularity. From the beginning, though, most of the pages of “Micky Maus” were devoted to duck tales.

Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.

Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”

"Where's the secret code?!"

The secret grammar of comics. I loved this one - it made me think about how accustomed we grow to the conventions for presenting dialogue in regular old prose fiction, and how useful it is now and again to look at them as though one has come from Mars and knows nothing about human story-telling conventions...

(Who knew that thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years and been largely replaced by narrative captions?!? Interesting...)

Via BoingBoing.