Origami Unicorn

1: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Gregory Maguire is undoubtedly most famous as the author of the book that was adapted to produce the Broadway musical Wicked. Wicked itself is a look around the edges of the story written by L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz, but completely reinterprets the original.

Maguire, hopefully made rich by the musical and the potential movie to be made from it, has made a career of taking old stories and seeing them anew. With Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister he has found material apt to his hand, since the Cinderella story has been so often done before, yet he manages to make the story credible and fresh.

The time is the early seventeenth century, and the place is the Netherlands, newly rich yet tight-fisted as of old. A mother and two daughters—the elder huge, slow, and malformed, and the younger slim, quick, and intelligent—make their hungry and penniless way through the city toward their grandfather's house only to find him dead and disinterested strangers where he once lived.

Behind them lies England, where their Dutch mother married and raised two daughters, and where husband and father Jack Fisher lies murdered. His wife, accused of witchcraft, has barely escaped with her life and those of the two girls. There is no going back and no charity offered where they are.

Though the mother, Margarethe ten Broek, is the granddaughter of a grand family, yet the three shelter for the night in the stinking alley behind and ale-house and dine on a few stolen hard pears. When morning comes, the woman stirs herself and her daughters and goes out into the city that, even when it bothers to notice her, wishes she move on, or go away entirely.

Denied the safe homecoming she had imagined, Margarethe tries to barter her family name, and then her skills, and finally her mere willingness to labor, for a place and food for herself and hers. There is nowhere and nothing and the day is growing older.

(to be continued)

On this Day in 1939...

Batman made his first appearence in Detective Comics #27. Bob Kane's Batman Archives Vol. 1, which reprints the originals will be released from DC Comics this year.

The Wonderful Wizard

One hundred and fifty years ago today L. Frank Baum, first author of the Oz books, was born. In 1900 he published The Wizard of Oz. It sold ninety thousand copies in its first year of publication and became a franchise for Baum, who extended the series backwards, forwards, and sideways in time. Baum's complete works, as well as many of those those by his successors, including Ruth Plumly Thompson, are almost always in print and there is an active Oz fan club. Norton is releasing an annotated facsimile edition of the 1900 original of Baum's classic this year.

8: Experimental Online Comics

Bone can hardly be called experimental, and it's far from limited to online anymore, but now that colorist Steve Hamaker has been nominated for an Eisner—click on the picture immediately to the left to see why—it's time to mention this lineal descendant in both style and story of the legendary Pogo.

In the beginning, the three Bone cousins were run out of Boneville, and one had the feeling that Jeff Smith was not quite sure what do with his likeable yet bumbling characters until, a few episodes along, they wandered into an odd valley, populated by animals that could only be called garulous, and a beautiful, mysterious girl...

...with whom the hero fell, improbably and desperately, in love. At that point, the real story of Bone began. The valley is no Eden, for there are unexpected terrors, unexpected friends, and a trip everywhere from low comedy to high fantasy and back. What began as something that looked very like a skillful toying with Walt Kelly's style and strip turned into a work that stands entirely on its own merits.

That's Ted, over there on the right. You'll be meeting Ted. He's sort of a tour guide. Sometimes.

7: Experimental Online Comics

Hardly experimental, given the artist, Michael Cohen, has decades in the business, and also the strip's determined retro look, but certainly one-shot fun: The Zetaville Follies. A Flash Gordon universe where the stars are women who wear those incredible one-piece suits that fit as smoothly as skin yet never reveal too much. Indeed, from a woman's point of view, the twenty-first century has many things to offer, although I don't think Luv-Glo Lip-Glam is among them.

6: Experimental Online Comics

Old spies don't retire, they get sent on missions they don't come back from, is the premise of Kismet: Hunter's Moon. Unfortunately, the drawing is less good than the concept and plot, although the layout—one long page per chapter that you scroll down—works well. You have the feeling that Layla Lawlor, who does a number of web comics, does not spend overmuch time on any one of them. Nonetheless, her style is a relief from the by now almost standard Japanese look, and they always say practice makes perfect. Back from a haitus, I expect this one will become more consistent visually as time goes on.

Doctor Who...

has won an award as best British television series, something no one who started out watching its flickering black and white beginnings probably would have guessed would ever happen. The award was accepted by pop star Billie Piper, who plays the Doctor's assistant. She was accompanied by a Dalek; The audience remained in the hall nonetheless.

The Nebula and Andre Norton Awards

SFWA reports the folllowing Nebula Award winners:

Novel: Joe Haldeman for Camouflage

Novella: Kelly Link for "Magic for Beginners"

Novelette: Kelly Link for "The Faery Handbag"

Short Story: Carol Emshwiller for "I Live With You"

Script: Joss Whedon for Serenity

And Holly Black received the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Fiction, for Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie.

10: The Phantom of the Opera

Part of the reason for the great success of The Phantom of the Opera is that it came at a time when there was a wave of interest in horror in general and vampires in particular. Although he is no blood-drinker, the Phantom closely resembles the threatening yet elegant vampire of modern fiction, an idea which began with the recasting of older legends by Bram Stoker in Dracula.

Also, The Phantom of the Opera is, like My Fair Lady—with which Webber compares his work—a romantic story. In the case of Phantom, the story also resonates with the complicated relationship between husband and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and wife and singer Sarah Brightman, that, some time later, ended in divorce.

Phantom should be compared to My Fair Lady for a better reason: It, too, is a variation on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Indeed, George Bernard Shaw named the play which was used as material for My Fair Lady, Pygmalion, and it, unlike the musical derived from it, could not be mistaken for a romance between the creator and the created.

Liza, we are told in an afterword, marries Freddy, and it takes time and money before the pair of them become successful business people, running a flower shop. The musical ends with Higgins calling to the returned Eliza, "Bring me my slippers," which most members of the audience chose to take as evidence of a romantic attachment, but Lerner and Loew, knowing the source material, deliberately made the ending ambiguous.

For Shaw, the outcome was obvious, and he sums up his analysis of what would happen thus, "[Eliza] likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable." Perhaps the Angel of Music was doomed from the beginning to lose his creation, Christine's singing career, which she gives up without a backward glance to become a wife and a mother.

One final note: Although Andrew Lloyd Webber has been successful with several quite different lyricists, his great strength lies, not in his music, but in the skills of an impresario. He can draw forth astounding results from the many kinds of people needed to make a stage production. In the very end, I suspect that he and whoever writes the words for his musicals may never reach the heights of a show where the song critics thought the weakest begins, "I have often walked down this street before..."

John Cullen Murphy...

would have been eighty-seven today. John Cullen Murphy's best known creation was Big Ben Bolt. One interview with him appeared in The Comics Journal, issue 253, and another is online at Keefe Studios, which includes more art, including some dailies from "Big Ben Bolt," which was about a college-educated young boxer who later became a sports reporter.