Why Oz?

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum was published in 1900.

It has been adapted for the stage and screen, followed up by dozens of official and unofficial sequels, turned into comics and cartoons, translated and adapted into over fifty languages, inspired songs, analyzed by academics and armchair philosophers, and become a staple of American childhood.

“Wicked,” a revisionist Oz novel by Gregory Maguire tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, archvillainess of the original story.

It has spawned three sequels, a critically acclaimed Broadway musical and a possible TV series.

Perhaps more famous than other adaptions is the 1939 MGM film “The Wizard of Oz,” which often eclipses the original itself.

Elements of the film, such as the slippers being red instead of silver and the witch being green, have become essential aspects of the Oz story in the public conscience.

Why does 114-year-old story still resonate with audiences? What about Baum’s original is so powerful and simple that his work is still so ingrained in the public imagination?

Oz is just that, simple. It doesn’t hide what it’s about. It’s about the importance of home. It’s about self-doubt and self-confidence. It’s about friendship.

It’s a fairy tale, and its simplicity is its strength.

It means what it means and it says what it says, and we can see ourselves in it.

Storytellers can mold it like clay to fit their whims.

Superheroes: The Dark Age

The Dark Age of Comics begins, more or less, in 1986 with the publication of Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns."
The Dark Age was characterized by increasingly edgy characters in violent stories.
The Dark Age began with good intentions. Moore and Miller, among others, crafted some of the first comics to be taken seriously as literature.
Their books deconstructed larger-than-life heroes that hadn't questioned themselves. They asked questions about power, justice and the common man.
Moore, Miller and some of their contemporaries wrote stories that dared to be serious even if they were about men in tights. They wrote stories that pushed the limits of the genre and questioned the genre, the people creating it and the people consuming it.
Their books sold, and the industry took the wrong message.Superheroes were anti-heroes with ethics only a little better than their foes.
Sex and gore splashed across the panels, and the high standards of previous generations of heroes were laughed off the page.
Ultimately, they created stories as ludicrous as any Silver Age goody-two-shoes. Anti-heroes blasted their way from comic to comic with huge guns, inhuman musculature, and costumes covered in spikes.
Bad art and bad storytelling reigned.
The Dark Age came to an end with a boom. In 1996 DC Comics published "Kingdom Come." This story by Mark Waid defied the dark trend of the times.
The book critiques the Dark Age by having the Justice League come out of semi-retirement to face off against a new generation of heroes.
These new heroes, drawn straight from the Dark Age, have killed all their foes and brawl in the streets with no regard for the bystanders.
Ultimately, Waid manages to expose flaws in both the old and new heroes, fusing the thoughtfulness of the best of the Dark Age with the idealism of older comics.

The Greek Alphabet

Most of us are familiar with one writing system. If you're reading this blog you're probably pretty comfortable with the English alphabet.
You might also be aware of a few characters from other languages like "ß" from German and "ñ" from Spanish.
English speakers tend to think of alphabets, but there are several different types of writing systems.
An alphabet uses letters that represent certain sounds, including vowel and consonant sounds.
A character in a syllabic alphabet represents a consonant with a designated vowel sound that can be changed with a diacritical mark.
An abjad is like an alphabet made up only of consonants. In certain circumstances the vowel sounds are indicated by special marks.
A syllabary uses symbols to represent whole syllables in a word.
Semanto-phonetic systems use symbols that have a certain meaning and represent a certain sound.
For more in depth information on these types of writing systems I recommend Omniglot.

As a starting point in learning different writing systems I'll try my hand at a brief lesson on Greek.
You're probably familiar with some Greek characters, particularly the capitals.
Some of these characters are used in our alphabet. Others we're familiar with because of their use by Greek organizations and math.

There are also small forms for all of the letters.

The chart above explains the basics, but there are a few things that need a bit more explaining.
Omicron is pronounced like the "O" in "not." Omega is pronounced like the "O" in "wrote."
Upsilon is pronounced like the double "O" in "food."
Chi isn't pronounced the "ch" in "channel." Instead it's pronounced like the "ch" in "psychic."
Sigma has two small forms. The "σ" is used in the middle of a word. The "ς" is used at the end of a word.
My experience is mostly with biblical Greek, and it is usually all lowercase. Learning the alphabet is just a matter of memorization.

If you're interested in picking up another alphabet I recommend Ryan Estrada's Korean lesson.

A few words on fonts

We are constantly surrounded by words. Billboards, T-shirts, bumper stickers, warning labels, street signs, marquees, logos, newspapers, fliers, instructions, maps and innumerable other things use words to communicate ideas both simple and complex.

Everywhere, at all times there are words vying for our attention.

Fonts help catch our attention. They can alter our mood or affect our attitude toward a message without us ever knowing.

Fonts can remind us of a certain product or place or put us in mind of a certain time period.

A few words in the right font can put us in mind of a Dr. Seuss book or the Star Wars movies.

Fonts also affect how credible we find a source to be.

A font like Baskerville or Helvetica conveys far more credibility than my chaotic scrawl or fonts like Chalkduster and Comic Sans.

Fonts can set the tone in simple ways we might never notice.

A variety of fonts available in Microsoft Word

You can't read just one

Lay’s, the potato chip company, uses the slogan “Bet you can’t eat just one!” The slogan, which actually goes well with some biological research, applies to a lot of things in our culture.

If we like something, you usually want more. Who wants to eat just one chip?

This appears in storytelling, too. We complain a lot about reboots, remakes and sequels.

The Romans borrowed heavily and “remade” Greek mythology.

There have been sequels for almost as long as there have been stories.

Homer created “The Iliad” and its sequel “The Odyssey.” Virgil wrote another sequel called “The Aeneid.”

Virgil’s Aeneid inspired Dante Alighieri to write “The Divine Comedy.”

Alighieri’s poem inspired John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and Milton inspired C.S. Lewis to write “The Great Divorce.”

Originality is important, but we like repeated ideas. They help us communicate.

In storytelling, regardless if it’s on film or in a book, we use ideas shared throughout media or throughout a genre.

Memes, tropes and clichés are a form of communication. If all the villains in a show have red hair we automatically begin questioning the intentions of the casts’ new red.

Most of the time these things come about because they communicate ideas very well.

Language isn’t technically original. The words not created as part of language are called loanwords, and they’re just borrowed from other languages because they convey a meaning that’s difficult to express in English.

German Expressionism, Greek epics and Japanese cartoons

Nickelodeon's "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and Shinichirō Watanabe's "Samurai Champloo"

This week’s post was going to be about Japanese wordplay. However, one link led to another, and I spent an evening researching foreign films and literature and genre.

In a PBS Idea Channel video from January host Mike Rugnetta discusses whether Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise qualifies as anime.

As Rugnetta points out, in the U.S. “anime” refers to Japanese animation, but in Japanese “anime” is just a word for cartoon.

By the U.S. definition, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and its sequel series “The Legend of Korra,” both developed in the U.S., are definitely not anime, and by the Japanese definition, as they are both animated, they are definitely anime.

These standards don’t really help us much. Both terms lack the subtlety Rugnetta seems to be getting at.

C.S. Lewis's sci-fi novel "Out of the Silent Planet" and Shinichirō Watanabe's sci-fi series "Cowboy Bebop"

“The Maltese Falcon” is an American film, not a German film, but it is a part of the American film noir tradition that has roots in German Expressionism.

Film noir uses parts of the visual language developed by German Expressionist filmmakers.

The sonnet, which most of us associate with William Shakespeare, is an Italian invention.

Greek and Latin traditions share stories and styles of telling them. Virgil, a Roman poet, developed his “Aeneid” as a sort of sequel to the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” of Homer, a Greek poet.

This sort of cross-pollination exists in animation.

The Avatar franchise borrows heavily from the visual language and storytelling techniques present in various genres of Japanese animation.

It has at least one example of a beach episode standard to many Japanese cartoons that focus on high school students.

It also uses a stereotypical anime classroom set in one episode and shows Japanese influence to its animation.

Guillermo Del Torro's Spanish "Pan's Labyrinth" and Jim Henson's American "Labyrinth"

So, is it anime? Well, we're really back where we started.

“(500) Days of Summer” references French film, but that doesn’t make it a French film.

Japanese animation itself was influenced by Walt Disney in its early days, but that doesn’t make every Japanese cartoon a Disney picture.

Anime (by the U.S. definition) isn’t a genre in the same way film noir is or fantasy fiction is.

Comics "Astro City" by American author Kurt Busiek and "Watchmen" by British author Alan Moore

If it’s a genre at all, it’s one with numerous subgenres.

Just like American animation includes “Batman: The Animated Series,” Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Guy,” and Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” anime includes a variety of works with different tones and tropes.

Anime includes heartwarming films like Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” sci-fi adventures like Shinichirō Watanabe’s “Cowboy Bebop,” and crass comedies like Yoshito Usui’s “Shin Chan.”

Genre doesn’t rely on country of origin. “Shin Chan” has a lot more in common with “Family Guy” and “South Park” than it does with Watanabe’s “Kids on the Slope.”
“Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” are both fantasy novels. Just because Lewis Carroll was British doesn’t make his work more like Jane Austen’s than L. Frank Baum’s.
So what is Avatar? Well, it could be an early entry in a new genre of American animation that borrows from Japanese animation like film noir borrows from German Expressionism.
It could also be part of a trend of breaking down the American notion of "anime." Years from now the radical difference in animated stories that crops up between cultures might be very diluted as artists reference one another and one visual language affects another. 

American fantasy novelist L. Frank Baum's classic "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and British author Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"

Kaput: From Beginning to End

The remnants of a weekend study session.

I spend most of my time working with words. Four of my five classes revolve around writing or the study of language.
Outside of class I'm a copy editor for the student newspaper.
In my free time I read about language and storytelling techniques.
Most of my study, both for work and pleasure, is fairly standard. I work out the kinks in my grammar or read about good and bad examples of foreshadowing.
Sometimes, though, I like to take a break from the serious stuff and follow an interesting factoid down the linguistic rabbit hole.

For instance, in an excerpt of his book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks" posted to Slate, Keith Houston discusses the origin of the pilcrow (¶).

Once upon a time in Rome a "K" was used to mark the beginning of a new idea in a written work. The "K" represented kaput, the Latin word for head.

You might recognize "kaput" as being a word of German origin that means to be finished or broken.

Considering the huge differences in meaning, I was curious to see if the words were at all related.

One of the tricky parts of studying language is avoiding false friends, words that sound alike but mean very different things. They can trip you up when you least expect it.

I expected a quick Google search to reveal drastically different origins for the word, but I was surprised.

This "kaputt" is ultimately derived from the Latin. It took a very long road to get here and consequently changed quite a bit a long the way.

The German "kaput" comes from the French phrase "faire capot" meaning to be out of tricks in a card game, essentially to be hoodwinked.

A capot is a hooded cloak. In the original French, so is a cape.
From "cape" we can step back into Latin and find ourselves again at "kaput."

It starts off "kaput" or "caput" then changes to "capitulum." Then it jumps to the French "cape" and then to "capot." Then we get "faire capot," and from it we get the German "kaputt." Finally, we arrive at the English "kaput."

From beginning to end, that's how "kaput" got to the English language, and this is how I spend my free time.