Once Upon a Workday by Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz

This is not a War and Peas book. It's closer to the opposite, actually.

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz - sometimes billed in the opposite order - create the War and Peas webcomic. It's usually four panels, usually standalone (with some recurring characters and occasional multi-strip "storylines"), and funny in an often abrasive, modern way.

Once Upon a Workday collects six pieces which are not comics: they're illustrated text, in the style most often seen in picture books. (The first story here has a very strong Dr. Seuss influence, though that tones down a bit in the later pieces.)

This is also much more earnest and positive than War and Peas - the strip tends to be cynical in its humor, but these stories are the kind of things that get called "self-care" or something vague about "mental health."

I tend to think books of positivity bombs like this are aimed at people substantially younger and more diffident than I am - and probably also those who are happier with fairly doggy verse as long as it mostly rhymes. So I did not perhaps engage deeply with this book, or think it is particularly inspiring or inspired.

But it does have six stories, with neat Pich/Kunz art, which give entirely positive lessons to readers, about common everyday (mostly work-life related) issues: disengaging, making the perfect sign-off to an email, creating work you don't hate, and just getting through every day. That has already been of use to a bunch of people, and likely will be to more - you may be one of them. And Pich and Kunz are not love-bombing here: they know modern life often sucks, and say so pretty clearly. This is about how to live through the suckiness.

I didn't personally need these lessons right this moment, but every book has a best time, place, and reader. This could be a really supportive one for the right situation.

Odin by George O'Connor

How do you follow up a decade-long, twelve-book series about the most famous group of gods on the planet?

If you're George O'Connor, you pick what's arguably the next most famous pantheon, and start a new four-book series. (The Olympians series was originally four books, then expanded quickly to twelve after early success, so some people might hope the same will happen to Asgardians - I hate to dash anyone's hopes, but I don't think there's that much underlying myth to work from. So four is what we should expect.)

The Olympians series ran from 2010 through 2022, and was a surprisingly robust, nuanced retelling of Greek myth in comics - a format and style that was not off-putting to middle-grade readers but only made a few allowances (like avoiding direct references to Zeus's tendency to turn himself into an animal and rape any woman who caught his eye) to their younger years. Those books were Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, and Dionysos.

The Norse pantheon is far more doom-laden than the Greek, with the whole Ragnarok thing baked into the story from the beginning, and the existing stories are more focused on blood and sex in ways that might make teachers and parents uneasy (may I mention what happened when Loki turns himself into a mare?) And, as I alluded to above, the corpus of Norse myth is tiny: two books, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, both of which were literary productions from a time when people had mostly stopped believing in these myths as being religiously true. The Greek equivalent would be if we had Hesiod, but nothing else - or maybe a four-century-later retelling of Hesiod, with random quotes from stories that aren't told in full.

But O'Connor is up to the challenge, and Odin - the first of this expected four-book Asgardians series - arrived almost a year ago, to tell the origin myths of the Nordic Nine Worlds and a bunch of myths about Odin. His art is moodier here, I think - not that there wasn't plenty of battle and mayhem in Olympians - and the coloring by Norm Grock subtly differentiates it from the mostly sunnier, Mediterranean feel of the Olympians books.

The framing story involves the Valkyries and Valhalla - the viewpoint is a person chosen on a battlefield and brought to the mead hall, where three mysterious figures tell him how the world came to be, what the nine worlds are, and some of the things Odin, chief of the gods of Valhalla, has done.

So we get the giant Ymir in the void, and the two races that appeared on him - the gods of the Aesir and the Jotnar, sometimes called giants. The Aesir go from Buri to Bor to Odin, Vili, and Ve, who kill Ymir and build their world from his corpse. The Aesir and Jotnar battle a bit, but Odin becomes blood-brothers with the Jotnar Loki. The Vanir appear, and the two pantheons of gods fight before making peace. And Odin seeks more knowledge, particularly of the future, hanging on the tree and learning the runes and losing his eye.

O'Connor drops back to the frame story multiple times, which helps smooth some of those inevitable transitions - Norse myth is a bunch of sometimes disconnected moments (What happened to Buri, Bor, Villi, and Ve? Where did the Vanir come from?), and O'Connor's detailed, interesting backmatter dives into the details of what we know and what we simply don't. The main story reads cleanly and flows well; it doesn't need the backmatter but having it is helpful for the nosy readers like me who want more details.

I find O'Connor's work more organic than what I've seen of the Gaiman/Russell Norse Mythology comics adaptation, which is more Marvel-inspired and tells each story as a separate tale on its own. O'Connor, I think, is trying to tell the whole story of Norse myth, as well as we know it, straight through from beginning to end, with the backmatter notes to explain the things that he has to leap over or guess at along the way. Both are valid approaches, but I appreciate O'Connor's ambition and enthusiasm more.

Sartre by Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Depommier

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre. Take him as he is, or walk away - those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said - maybe it's a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do - because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher - straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography - Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre's, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books' narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn't clear - though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they're always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It's a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be - Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don't focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) "I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too - but let's always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other."

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre's life, thought, and major works, but it's a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Better Things: Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell)

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Power pop is great when it works well - fun and bouncy and energetic. It can sometimes tend to the synthetic or the saccharine, but the best power pop leans into both of those words, to find ways to be loud/brash while still being zippy/accessible. 

I was going to say that the Deathray Davies were really good at that, but, working on this post, I see they had a record as recently as 2021 (after a hiatus after 2005's The Kick and the Snare), so I should instead say they are really good at that. I haven't heard that new record, and I'm not sure I dug all the way back to the early indy end of their career, either, but the middle period is full of great songs like Is This On? and The Fall Fashions and Plan to Stay Awake.

The song I loved best - my kids, too; we played this a lot in the late Aughts and early teens when they were energetic ruffians - was Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell). It's from Kick and the Snare, which I thought at the time was the Davies' best record, so I was hoping they'd go on to do more in that vein over the next few years. (Life continually disappoints me; that's what makes it life.)

I don't quite get the subtitle - it's from Bram Stoker's Dracula, as a quote from the German poet Gottfried August Bürger, and means, more or less "For the dead travel fast" - but it's Germanic and forbidding and scary-sounding, which is just right for a song that's just a catalog of ways the singer could commit acts of mayhem on the listener.

I got a chainsaw at the pawn shop
It looks real nice, chop chop chop 

There's no deep meaning here: this is a song of threats. Probably half-joking, over-the-top, not-meant-to-be-taken-serious threats, sure. But threats none the same. And it's got a killer guitar drone and propulsive beat behind that.

This is yet another great song to have playing in the car as you head out to do whatever.

I'm coming for you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 1, 2025

I ordered a bunch of used books, from various sellers, through ABE Books not that long ago, and they've ben dribbling in over the past week. I haven't checked my original order, but I think everything has now arrived. (If not, I'll have a happy surprise later; I like to leave room for happy surprises.)

Leave It to Psmith, a 1923 novel by P.G. Wodehouse, and, as I remember it, possibly his first really top-rank book. (Not that some of his earlier stuff isn't quite good; it is.) I'm pretty sure I've read this before, but I've never covered it on this blog, and any copy I had disappeared in my 2011 flood - so it's time to read it again, I think.

My Man Jeeves is also an early Wodehouse book, a 1919 collection that I read in 2008. It collects some Jeeves and some Reggie Pepper stories, and I'm pretty sure it's entirely separate from the much later collection Enter Jeeves, which also has some early Jeeves and Reggie Pepper stories. (My sense is that Enter was the stuff that wasn't published in book form at the time, and collected decades later once the copyrights had expired. But I will see.) 

The Mating Season - you may see a theme here - is a 1949 Wodehouse novel about Bertie Wooster. I know I read it, but I think that was in my first burst of Wodehouse-reading back in the '90s (when I read all of the Jeeves & Bertie books, most if not all of Blandings, and a few other things).

And the last of the Wodehouse books in this bunch - I'm trying to collect all of the Overlook series, and am now mostly buying ones I had copies of and lost in my 2011 flood - is Carry On, Jeeves, which is not a mildly racy '70s movie, though that would be an interesting collision of British humor. Instead, it's another early collection of stories, this one from 1925.

Then there's a Library of America Mark Twain book - the only one I didn't have, though again I think I did have it, before the flood - The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It. I've been thinking I want to re-read Roughing It for the past year or so, and realized I didn't have a copy in the house, which made that difficult. But now I do.

Lulu in Hollywood is, I think, one of the classic books old-time Hollywood, by the silent actress Louise Brooks. I've had it on lists of books to read someday, but I don't think I ever came across a copy in person, even in years of wandering through bookstores. So I finally just ordered a copy, in the fairly recent (2000, which is new for someone whose career was in the '20s and who died in 1985) University of Minnesota edition. Looking at it now, I see it is not a single narrative, but eight essays and an epilogue - puckishly titled "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" - that originally appeared in film magazines in the '60s and '70s, with what looks like a long and bloviating introduction by Kenneth Tynan.

And last is the book that actually sparked this buying spree: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, by the folks who made that show in the '90s. I had a copy of this Bantam trade paperback - once again, before the flood - and had half-forgotten that it came out in the hiatus between the Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel eras of the show, so it only covers the first six seasons in depth, with the movie teased (I think this was published as part of the run-up to the movie) and Season Seven covered quickly on one page at the end. The copy I got now is a bit battered, with a lot of spine roll and warping, so I'll probably have to shove it under some dictionaries and hope I can flatten it back out.

Quote of the Week: Winning Celebrations

The partisans at the Sheraton-Charles were predominantly scrubbed, well dressed and earnest, with the look of the dilettante in politics who feels he or she is doing a civic duty. Some of the women, steadying their nerves with whiskey, were already a trifle high. It was the kind of group that seldom has a winner, politics being what they are, and that is almost as astonished as pleased when it gets one.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.358 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings

The Earl of Louisiana by A.J. Liebling

A.J. Liebling was a New Yorker feature writer - he covered politics and WWII and boxing and the media, among some other things - from 1935 through his death in 1963. He's famous enough, even sixty years later, that the Library of America has published two big volumes of his writings.

I've been working through the miscellaneous one - the other covers his WWII writings; authoritative non-fiction about big wars will always command a huge audience among middle-aged dads everywhere - for much of the past year. So far, I've read The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Sweet Science.

This time out, I have The Earl of Louisiana, a 1961 fix-up of New Yorker articles from 1959 and 1960 that were - I assume - supposed to showcase what Liebling thought would be Earl Long's re-election run for Governor of Louisiana. (Louisiana, in those days and maybe still even now, had a rule that Governors could only serve one consecutive term, but Long was planning to resign the day before the primary, roll to victory, and pick back up - in the event, things went differently.)

I'm finding books about the politics of sixty or a hundred years ago weirdly soothing right now: huge swaths of the US were deeply, horribly corrupt, run as fiefdoms by little dictators (like Long, though he's fairly benevolent and his core aims are ones Liebling agrees with), and discussions of politics were nakedly about power and influence. The media landscape is different than now, but there's still cynical big outlets (here the major New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune). And the racism is frankly shocking in the later parts of the book: Long himself, as Liebling presents him, was about the most successful possible left-wing politician in the Deep South of that era, doing that mostly through a kind of verbal judo of racism. One major plank of the campaign - across all of the candidates - was how strongly they all were for segregation and how strongly they condemned the NAACP as evil Northern agitators and tools of the international Communist menace. (I am not exaggerating by a single hair.)

So the US has had absolutely horrible, evil politics within living memory: if your grandparents lived in the South, and were white, they were probably segregationists, just by the law of averages. (And the odds aren't necessarily vastly better if they lived in the North, either.)

Earl starts with Long just getting out of an asylum, into which he was forcibly consigned by his wife and some of his appointees. The rabble-rousing Long gets some great stump speechmaking out of this, talking about being dragged through three hospitals in Texas and Louisiana without "clothes to cover a red bug." That sets the tone for the rest of the story: Louisiana politics was then (and might still be) combative, personal, and full of the same major characters for a couple of decades. In that era, it was dominated by the Democratic party, and organized around a two-primary system: the first had the huge list of candidates, the second just the top two vote-getters, who then schemed to get the followers of the losing candidates through granting favors and promises of jobs. The actual real election was a formality; there were hardly any Republicans at all, and whoever won the second Dem primary was guaranteed to win, in every race. (My sense is that something similar still occurs, in many states, though primarily under the aegis of Republicans these days.)

Liebling was an energetic, lively writer - he was a horseplayer, and wrote about politics like a horse race, which is not just traditional, but worked well for this era of Louisiana. This is a book full of colorful characters, but none more than Long himself. And it's a book of retail, brass-knuckle politics, over the course of one year, with a lot of changes and surprises along the way. The favorite - whichever favorite, at whichever point - doesn't win, and many of them don't even come close. It's a great view of a kind of politics that in these specific details is gone, but the spirit and style of which will always live on, and can help illuminate later iterations.

And just knowing that it used to be like this is oddly comforting: politics can be corrupt, and personal in the worst ways, and nakedly about the abuse of power, for an extended period of time, and that's "normal." There never was a golden age; it's abuses of various kinds all the way down. 

Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get...let me say "fussy"...in his designs - he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I've occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals - it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books - they're books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd's instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book - much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts - and that's the point of the book. It's a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What's Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist's widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the "Wimpy Kid" creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words - or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz's captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It's the kind of work that doesn't get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn't have a formal organizational principle for the book - it's roughly chronological by phases of Schulz's career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there's a lot of ancillary materials - comic books and magazine covers, games and toys - as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn't take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it's harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work - otherwise you just read the work. But if you've dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) by Alan Grant and Jon Haward

This appeared somewhere else first. It's a bunch of short strips - many of them single-pagers, but with longer installments as it goes along. It was collected in this 2012 volume from the small Canadian company Renegade Arts Entertainment, but I'm pretty sure it ran in a comics magazine - I doubt 2000 AD, but probably something British - for a year or three or five previously.

The book doesn't say where or when that happened, assuming it did happen. Well, this digital edition I read doesn't have any previous publication information, but it also is missing at least a few pages in the middle (a multi-part epic about Hercules jumps from Part 1 to Part 3, with some disjoint pages in the middle that might be from Part 2), so it could be missing more pages than that.

So what I have is just the stories, and I'm not confident (see above) I have all of that. Let me assume there's just one clump of missing pages - probably only two or three - and go from there.

Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) is a jokey series about a fat little guy who has the physical appearance we expect from traditional representations of the Buddha, but his personality, especially as the book goes on, is much more of a good-time-loving, pot-smoking, relatively smart Scots layabout.

It was written by Alan Grant, drawn by Jon Haward, and (I think) colored by Jamie Grant - there's a page with author bios at the end, but no clear title page (maybe that's missing as well?) or copyright.

So Buddha - I feel like I should call him Siddhartha, since he's not Buddha because he's not enlightened yet, but the book calls him Buddha throughout - gets annoyed in his meditations under the tree, and decides to wander off  and do other things. He meets the Hare Krishnas, and doesn't like their vibe. He spends a few strips with Jesus, who he gets along well with, but that dude is eventually crucified, and Buddha has to move on. He has a few random one-offs, then dives into a longer series of stories with Hercules. After that, it gets very various: Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, the Mexican Day of the Dead, Shangri-La, Merlin, Elvis, Santa Claus, Prince Harry. (There's a few other things in between as well - the edition I read had fifty-eight pages of comics, and probably several pages missing- and the stories top out at maybe four pages.)

It's all random, with only a vague sense of a sequence. Buddha is in a different time period for almost every story without any clear mechanism, except for a weird time-travel bit to introduce the Elvis strip. The point is to have this slacker pseudo-Buddha character meet a whole bunch of religious, mythological, and historical characters.

He is not very much like any version of the Buddha any of us has ever seen before. He's very little like the traditional image of the pre-enlightenment Siddhartha, either - that guy was a young noble, deeply concerned with the plight of the poor, not a fat bald pleasure-seeker. But that's the joke, here - you buy into that, or you're not interested.

This is all amusing, but it's a lot of essentially the same joke over and over again. If Grant had Buddha meet some ascetics, or maybe Greek philosophers in general, there might have been some tension with Buddha hedonistic world-view, but that's not the vibe he was apparently going for - this is goofy, pleasant humor, stoner-adjacent, with a strong British flavor.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This is a short, funny, inoffensive novel by one of the biggest bestsellers in SF today: it does everything it sets out to do, does that well, and has delighted the author's many fans in the year since it was published. It's light SF adventure, humorous division, of the "what if <insert standard media trope> was actually real, and a normal guy fell into that world?" type.

I intermittently read books like this - just days before it, I hit Tom Holt's Barking, which is a fantasy version of exactly the same thing - and I struggle to say anything interesting about them. I find myself dragged between the opposite poles of pointing out how silly and referential those books are - which is the point of the exercise, and I know that - and just pointing and saying "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like," which is deeply unhelpful.

Anyway: Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It's got a cat on the cover! Cats are important in the book as well, in what I don't actually think was a cynical play for the famously cat-loving SF audience.

Charlie Fitzer is the usual protagonist for novels like this: early thirties, with one career (business journalism) and one marriage (heterosexual, of course) in ruins behind him, living somewhere comfortable that might not be good for him (his childhood home in Barrington, Illinois, after the death of his father), stuck and sad-sack and beaten down by the world. He wants to buy the local pub, as a random next thing to do in his life, but it costs over three million dollars and his only major asset is one-quarter of the house he's living in and not consistently paying his bills for. So the local bank is friendly but not particularly encouraging.

But his uncle Jake Baldwin - only sibling of his mother, who died when he was five - his just died. Uncle Jake, as far as the world knows, owned a large collection of parking garages across the Midwest, and was considered to be a billionaire. (Charlie, since he is a Nice Guy - or maybe just dense - doesn't immediately think, "Hey, I'm possibly the only living relative of a dead billionaire, so there's probably a way I can pry at least some cash loose from his estate, and I might even be an, or even the, heir.")

Luckily, Charlie doesn't have to do anything to chase that estate - because he's not the kind of guy who ever would. Uncle Jake has actually already left something to Charlie, and it turns out to be bigger and messier than "to my darling nephew, I leave the Dyna-Top Parking Complex of Boise and all its revenues," which is what a slightly smarter Charlie might have anticipated.

Uncle Jake, as the title of this novel implies, was a supervillain. Volcano lair in the Caribbean, giant satellite-killing lasers, intelligent spy cats, private bank stuffed with trillions, fiendish plots worldwide - that whole deal. And Charlie - this is before he learns the supervillain thing; I'm condensing for simplicity - is asked to run his funeral in Barrington. Charlie does, and sees a large number of clearly minion-coded thugs arrive, not actually mourn the deceased, and make sure Jake is actually dead. Charlie has to stop one of them from stabbing the corpse, actually, in the first of several very important random events in the novel, all arising from Charlie's immediate reactions to unexpected, usually violent, situations.

(The moral of Starter Villain, if I may be so bold, is "Good Guys will do the right thing automatically, and will be rewarded for it." It's downright medieval when you think about it.)

So Charlie learns about the supervillain thing, is whisked off to the secret lair, gets a whirlwind tour of same and a quick precis of Uncle Jake's vast shadowy holdings and business interests, and then jets off to a conclave of supervillains at a fancy Italian resort. (This is a short, zippy novel full of quips - the plot has to happen at speed, and it does.)

Things escalate from there, as they must, but Charlie several times instinctively does the Right Thing when confronted with sudden violence or other surprises - the Right Thing as defined by Scalzi, of course, being generally nice and positive and pro-humanity, including caring for cats and being in favor of union organizing - which means he is victorious in the end, almost in spite of himself.

I won't spoil that ending, but I will note that I don't expect any direct sequels, which is mildly disappointing. Scalzi set up a world that he could have spun out for more than one book if he wanted to, and then basically blew it up, at least as far as Charlie goes. I also don't believe one element of the very last chapter for a second, but this is a book for cat-lovers, and they will eat that up.

So this is a fun book that does amusing things with a neat and not over-used premise; it's very good for this sort of thing. This sort of thing may seem pretty small to many readers, and it kinda is, but, at this point in my life, I don't discount the power of a funny, short book that hits exactly the goals it has for itself and entertains readers just the way it plans to. 

Better Things: Brat in the Frat

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I was a teenager in the '80s; I grew up in New Jersey; I have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. So obviously I was a fan of the Dead Milkmen.

Sure, they were uneven. Yes, they peaked early, and, like a lot of bands, the ten-year mark is the outer limits of their Good Stuff (and, yes, they kept coming back after that, not all of which I kept up with). But, at their best, they were the snottiest, funniest, punkiest band imaginable, for a particular moment and a particular time.

A lot of their stuff is still awesome forty years later: Big Lizard is almost touching, Life Is Shit actually is touching, Bitchin' Camaro is the quintessence of teen-boy-dom for my generation, Punk Rock Girl is a nearly perfect pop song, and Sri Lanka Sex Hotel a magnificent pseudo-apocalyptic vision.

But snottiness is best in small doses, so the purest Dead Milkmen songs, to me, are the short ones. Stuart can be hard to listen to these days, so I'm going with Brat in the Frat, the outsider's big two-middle-fingers-up at all the assholes in his way.

Hey!
I do not like you college brat
I do not like you and your frat
I do not like you at the shore
I do not like you drunk on Coors

I knew that guy - I hated that guy too. And the Milkmen perfectly encapsulate that youthful feeling of I don't want this; I don't like anything about this. That's what punk is for.

Quote of the Week: I Say, I Mean, I Say, What?

You can send an Englishman cryptic notes, carried by crazed ex-dentists. You can lure him to inexplicable trysts and stand him up. You can shoot at him with silencers and silver bullets. Waste of time, if you're hoping to shattered his imperturbable Saxon calm. The only way you'll achieve that is to try and stick him for six pounds seventy-nine for a coffee, a sausage roll and a slice of caramel shortbread.

 - Tom Holt, Barking, p.221 

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I may be running out of new things to say about the Scot Pilgrim saga with this, the penultimate book.

But it does give me the chance to use one of my favorite words - penultimate, which is almost as good as the sublime "antepenultimate," a wonderfully precise word that is useful almost exactly never. But I see I'm digressing already.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe is the fifth of the six books by Bryan Lee O'Malley (which I read in the slightly newer edition colored by Nathan Fairbairn), in which Scott battles the twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi, as he comes closer to the end of his not-all-that-new-at-this-point girlfriend Ramona Flowers' trail of evil exes.

(One bit of dialogue in this book reminded me of something I'd forgotten - these are Ramona's evil exes, not all of her exes. She dated other people who were not evil. And, presumably, when starting a new relationship in this world, if your new love dated five or six people before you, but they were all, say, Chaotic Good or True Neutral, you wouldn't have to fight any of them.)

The big parallel here between Ramona and Scott - I won't say there's one central parallel in each book, since I don't want to dig to prove that right now, but I'm thinking it pretty strongly - is the double-timing thing. Scott famously started the series dating the teenager Knives Chau, and, when Ramona finally confronts him on that in this book, he notes that he never cheated on her; he cheated on Knives with her. (Which is about as reassuring and adult as you might expect.) And Ramona, as we learn this time out, was dating Kyle and Ken simultaneously but secretly.

So maybe, to pull the threads together, we're all evil exes in our breakups, since we all did shitty things to our partners. Well, when we're in our early twenties and thoughtless, like Scott. I'd like to hope not everyone is a Scott Pilgrim, and possibly even that Scott himself can and will grow out of this phase of life.

Anyway, Kyle and Ken come to town, they challenge Scott, and they send ever-larger robots to fight him, mostly during parties. Meanwhile, the Scott/Ramona relationship is hitting a particularly bumpy patch, over the two-timing thing, which leads to first Ramona kicking Scott out of their apartment and then her disappearing entirely. In other news, the recording sessions are finally over, and Sex Bob-Omb's record is being mixed or something, and might eventually see the light of day.

Of course Scott eventually defeats Kyle and Ken - if he didn't, we wouldn't get to the sixth book - but that doesn't make everything all right, and it doesn't bring Ramona back. If we know the Hero's Journey, we expect this: the lowest point, when everything is lost and the loved one in the hands of evil, is right before the big final confrontation.

That will be the sixth book, which I'll re-read in another month or so. This one ends on something of a cliffhanger, but that's pretty common for penultimate books. You should expect it by now.

(Oh, and here are links to my posts on the first four books, which I didn't mention above: Precious Little Life, Vs. the World, The Infinite Sadness, and Gets It Together.)

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

No one should be surprised: this is a small book, only sixty pages long in a small format with printed boards, like a thousand other small books that sit next to the cash register and promise to be entertaining but not take much of the reader's time. And it does say "a short story" on the cover.

But so many people first encounter books electronically these days. Even if they're getting a physical book to read, they find it on a website and order it to be shipped. As I've said before, online every book is exactly the same size. (They aren't, but taking note of the difference is a knack most people either don't have at all or don't bother to use.)

So plenty of people have been surprised, that a short story - originally written for a BBC Christmas radio broadcast two years ago - is short. They might even be doubly surprised that the last nine pages are an afterword from author Susanna Clarke, meaning the actual story is even shorter than the book that contains it.

The Wood at Midwinter, according to that afterword, is set in the same world as Clarke's big debut novel Jonathan Strange &Mr Norrell. There's nothing in the story itself to prove that, but if the author says so, we have to believe it.

It's the 18th or 19th century, probably - two young sisters are riding in a horse-drawn carriage, in the woods near the city they live in, as the story opens. The sensible one is Ysolde Scot; her sister is Merowdis. (And I think I would be very difficult if the world had saddled me with a name like Merowdis, frankly.)

Merowdis has visions; she doesn't perceive the world like most people and has trouble fitting into society. In a modern context, we'd call her neurodiverse. In this world, there may be a supernatural explanation. She has few life-options in the world she lives in, and none of them appeal: she wants to spend her time with her animals (who talk to her) in the woods. Her sister calls her a saint, and the narrative (and Clarke's afterword) generally agree - or, to be more specific, think that saints are people who don't fit into society, are possibly neurodiverse, and see visions.

She has a dream: she wants a child. But not a human child, and not one, we think, born of her body. She has a vision of the child she will hold one day, in this story. It's so short I won't tell you any details. The actual child is in the future, beyond the story. The story is about learning it will happen, about wanting it and realizing this is a true vision.

Again, this is a short story published as a book. More than that, it's a heavily illustrated short story - the forty-four small pages that contain the story also contain art by Victoria Sawdon, and the art is dominant on many of the pages. (At times, it resembles a picture-book in format.)

It has chilly Clarke prose, a spikily intriguing character in Merowdis, fine atmospheric art by Sawdon, and a seasonally-appropriate mood (I read it on December 29th). As long as you're clear about the size of the whole package, it's a fine little thing.

Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer by Pilippe Coudray

The subtitle explains it: these single-pagers take Bigby, and occasionally his friends as well, off to further-flung regions than their usual mountains and forests.

As far as I can tell, creator Philippe Coudray has been telling stories about this bear for some time - he's called Barnabé in French, and some of his stories were translated as "Benjamin" a few years back by First Second. These three books from Humanoids - I've already covered Vol. 1 and For All Seasons - may collect some of the same material as the First Second volumes, or may be entirely separate. But, either way, this is a world Coudray has returned to over a period of time: this book lists original copyright dates of 2012-2019, and was published in English (translated by Miceal Beausang-O'Griafa) in 2020.

That gets me to Bigby Bear, Vol. 3: The Explorer. It contains ninety-nine single-page stories about Bigby, often featuring Rabbit, who I guess we call his best friend. There are other rabbits, small bears, and other creatures, too: Bigby has a fish and a bird (non-talking, most of the time) as pets who are part of some gags. Bigby's explorations include space, in rocketships sometimes shiny and modern and sometimes rustic and handmade, so there are aliens a few times as well. Oh, and a Yeti. And even a few humans, just in case we thought we had a good sense of how this world works.

I should say that Coudray clearly made these stories originally for younger readers. They're inventive and fun, with a delight in reversals and transformations, often wordless and never very wordy - though Coudray, or maybe Beausang-O'Griafa, doesn't avoid longer, more complex words and ideas; I just flipped randomly to one about an Electroencephalograph. There's also a vague sense of education or learning - the smaller creatures look to Bigby to explain things to them, and he's spending a lot of this particular volume going to new places, in space or under the ocean or just further away than normal.

Coudray has a confident, simple cartooning line, with medium-bright, high-contrast colors - it's not a hugely cartoony world, but it is a somewhat cartoony one, clearly a bit simplified from a realistic view. And his pages here are quirky and interesting - pitched at a younger audience, definitely, but not talking down to them or limited to them. This is an amusing series, on a light, accessible level, full of mild but thoughtful gags and a anything-is-possible attitude.