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.

Barking by Tom Holt

This is a very random Tom Holt book: he's done one something like this pretty much every year for the past forty, and this is the one from 2007. I came to it because I found it randomly and cheaply a few months ago, and I'd read his When It's a Jar equally randomly early in 2024 and liked it.

Barking is...just fine. I found it somewhat less interesting than Jar, though it's a perfectly cromulent humorous fantasy that does everything it needs to do and tells a pleasant story well. I may need to check to see which Holt books are generally considered best and read those first: anyone who does so many books in the same genre is going to have a lot at about the same level of ambition and a few above or below that.

(I might have been hoping for more, since the books by Holt's alter ego, K.J. Parker, have all - at least the ones I've read - been spiky, interesting, smart things. But Holt is much more crowd-pleasing than Parker is, and I get the sense that his books have, not so much a formula, but maybe a recipe to make sure they have the things his audience wants.)

Anyway, Barking is about a lawyer named Duncan Hughes. He works at a horrible London firm doing tedious work, and is what I think is the usual early-thirties sad-sack Holt protagonist, with a failed marriage behind him and nothing whatsoever interesting in his life. But he lives in a Tom Holt world, so he's thrown into supernatural doings.

His old pack of schoolmates have formed a highly successful firm, and their leader, Luke Ferris, is suddenly trying to recruit him, really hard.

I don't want to say all of Holt's books get schematic, but this one definitely does. You see, both werewolves and vampires are real, and both of them run law firms. As far as we see, the werewolves are all men and the vampires are all women, and they are mortal enemies in a very British, fair-play kind of way, not so much trying to kill each other (both groups are very very very resistant to harm) as trying to get one over on the others. Oddly, this doesn't seem to come out in legal ways - Holt doesn't talk about major litigation or complex M&A work to confound the other side.

(Holt himself was a lawyer in Somerset. I don't want to cast aspersions on his knowledge of the field he worked in in his own country, but none of these big high-powered London law firms feel big or high-powered; they seem to be organized like a minor city's second-tier solicitors, and do that kind of work. And none of the lawyers seem to actually be experts in their practice areas the way I'd expect.)

So the werewolves/men are eternally feuding with vampires/women - we also learn that there are other packs of werewolves (one is made up of dentists, so maybe it's just these two firms of lawyers? There's a lot that's vague and half-explained in this world, to keep it light and amusing.) Holt is otherwise resolutely heterosexual here - there's not an inkling that all these furry men who spend all day every day with each other, bonding and running in the woods and doing all sorts of physical activity together, are more than just mates. Although...Luke does very very strongly warn Duncan away from "their sort," and that seems to mean women as much as it does vampires, inasmuch as the book makes any distinction between the two, which is not a whole lot.

There are further complications, of course. But that's the beginning: Duncan becomes a werewolf, becomes a partner in a better firm, turns into a dog in the moonlight to chase foxes with his pack, is warned to avoid vampires because they have cooties, that sort of thing.

He of course has A Destiny because he Is Special. There is a unicorn that signposts this and keeps showing up throughout the novel, which leads into the main plot, which I won't go into great detail about. Of course Duncan wins free in the end, conquers all enemies, and wins the appropriate gorgeous female (who otherwise barely shows up in the book and doesn't have an appreciable personality) as his trophy.

Again, I found this pleasant and entertaining but also facile and obvious. And these lawyers are working at a much lower, duller level than I expected, from doing marketing to actual high-powered lawyers for the past decade. So I may be back for more Tom Holt, but I expect to be substantially pickier the next time.

Better Things: I Want Everything

"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.

Some songs are koans, statements, mileposts. They say what they say in a way you immediately agree with, and take to heart, moving around furniture in your head to make room for them, so they can sit in the place they should always have been.

This is one of those songs for me: I Want Everything by Cracker.

The verses are allusive - I don't know what they mean. The singer is somewhere, thinking about someone. And "someone" is a huge question mark - it could be another person, personified nature, a god, nearly anything at all.

But the refrain is what matters most: that title, over and over. In a voice that doesn't demand, doesn't implore, doesn't whine. It just states: this is what it is, this is what I want, this is where I am.

I want everything

He's singing to someone; he's saying this clearly, powerfully, as directly as he can. Again, it depends on who you think he's singing to what it all means - what kind of everything it means he wants - but it works, no matter who you think it is. No matter how much everything includes or doesn't.

And I agree. I want everything. Not to take from anyone else. Not exclusively. Not in any negative way. Just in that sense of openness, of being part of the world: all of it, here and now and later and forever.

I want everything

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 15, 2025

One book to write about this week, in the middle of cold, snowy February - it's been snowing, where I live, every second or third day for the past couple of weeks. It hasn't been adding up to much - slush and freezing rain and sleet and the occasional nice fluffy snow that almost immediately crusts up into gleaming ice - but it's been coming down from grey skies and keeping everything wet and slick and unpleasant. So why not stay inside and read books?

Jules, Penny, and the Rooster is a new book from Daniel Pinkwater, from Tachyon. They've published his last couple of novels - Adventures of a Dwergish Girl and Crazy in Poughkeepsie, both excellent - and it is wonderful to see a somewhat regular publication schedule from Pinkwater these days.

(My personal theory - based on nothing but his publication dates and a long-running love for his books - is that Pinkwater is just too weird for most publishing companies to be comfortable with in the long run. So they do a three-book deal, or something, and then run back to boring books about kids who eat their Wheaties and have some kind of trendy Problems to entice the award-givers once they realize just how individual and wonderful Pinkwater's work is.)

(It's not what you might call a well-developed theory.)

Anyway - new Pinkwater book!

Jules is a middle-school girl, who has been promised by her parents ("My father has an excellent job in the deluxe shoelace industry, and my mother is a house plant psychiatrist[.]") that they would get a job once the family moved out of an apartment to a house where dogs were allowed.

You guessed it: they have made that move, and still no dog. Jules is somewhat peeved.

So she enters a newspaper contest: the best letter will win a purebred collie dog. As I understand it, she wins the contest, names the dog Penny...and then, when the two start exploring the neighborhood together, they discover the usual Pinkwaterian weirdness happening on the other side of an old stone wall.

It's being published March 11th, and I doubt I'll manage to wait that long to read it. Consider that a recommendation.

Quote of the Week: No Aspersions Meant to My Fine Colleagues at Work

Miss Huskisson, like so many of the female denizens of the Middle West, was tall and blonde and constructed on substantial lines. She was a girl whose appearance suggested the old homestead and fried pancakes and pop coming home to dinner after the morning's ploughing. Even her bobbed hair did not altogether destroy this impression. She looked big and strong and healthy, and her lungs were obviously good. She attacked the verse of the song with something of the vigor and breadth of treatment which in other days she had reasoned with refractory mules. Her diction was the diction of one trained to call the cattle home in the teeth of Western hurricanes. Whether you wanted to or not, you heard every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 253

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 5: The Happy Prince by P. Craig Russell

This is the end of the series - Wilde wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted eight of them into comics format between 1992 and 2012, and it doesn't look like he's going to go back to do "The Fisherman and His Soul" at this point.

I made a little project of reading all of them this year (I'm writing this at the tail end of 2024) - The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket, The Birthday of the Infanta, and The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose.

So now I've come to The Happy Prince, the fifth and final volume. The prose is just as deliberately didactic, as let-me-tell-you-a-story-young-lad, as the previous tales, with that jeweled Wilde prose that comes right up to the line of being too ornate but veers back at the last minute. And Russell still uses great wodges of Wilde prose, as he tends to do in all of his adaptations: Russell, I think, adapts things where he loves the words and not just the underlying story, so he wants to keep the words as much as possible.

The Happy Prince himself is a statue, on a tall column in the center of some unspecified town in Europe. It may be the "now" when Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century, or a century or three earlier; in the usual fairy-tale fashion, a lot is vague. The Prince was once a living person, but he died young and now his soul inhabits the statue, for unspecified reasons but presumably so Wilde can have a plot.

The other main character is a swallow, a migratory bird that is tarrying in this city on the verge of winter for no good reason - he should be going on to Egypt to join his fellows, but was dallying with a reed in a river somewhere. (No, literally, he was flirting, over the course of weeks, with what seems to be one of the few non-sapient entities in a Wilde fairy tale, which is some kind of achievement, though not one speaking to his intelligence or discernment.) Anyway, the swallow swoops into town, perches on the statue, and meets the Prince.

The Prince is sad.

He is sad because some people are poor and other people are rich, mostly. So he induces the bird to take his valuables - first the ruby in the pommel of his sword, then his sapphire eyes, and finally the gilding covering the statue - and give those to specific, deserving poor people so that their lives can be better.

This delays the swallow long enough that he's killed by the frost, and makes the statue shabby enough that it's removed by the authorities and melted down. But both of them ascend to heaven immediately, on the direct orders of God. Yay!

It is just as didactic and middle-Church as the previous stories, as expected. These were improving stories for boys (and maybe girls, though Wilde didn't care much for girls) in the 1880s and 90s, and will always be that, no matter how many years later it now is. If you're in the mood for Victorian improving stories with Wildean prose and Russell art - both of which are gorgeous - there are five books available.

Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo

I think there's more to this story, that hasn't made it to my side of the Pacific yet. But that's nothing new for Trese - I said the same after the first three books, in 2010, when none of them had been published in the US yet. So I can wait, and maybe not expect, but anticipate and hope, to see an eventual seventh volume.

Trese, the series, is about a supernatural investigator: a young woman named Alexandra Trese, from a family intimately connected with the supernatural for generations. So far, so similar to a flood of contemporary fantasy starting in the '90s and plenty of "romantasy" today. But she lives in Manila, and the supernatural world she knows is particular and specific to the Philippines - and so strange and distinct and more fantastic to those of us from other places.

From the beginning, writer Budjette Tan used entirely local monsters and powers: these books, as published in the US by Ablaze, have short text features after each issue-length story to each explain one supernatural race or personage. He also made sure never to explain more than he had to, and kept a noir-ish tone to the proceedings, very appropriate for a place like Manila, a big city full of money and business and corruption and dark history.

And artist KaJo Baldisimo was also wonderful from the beginning, delivering gloriously inky pages of violence and terror and wonder and surprise, lovingly textured and filled with unique faces and (if I may use a cliché) even more unique monsters.

High Tide at Midnight is the sixth collection: there's a 2014 afterword from Tan, but this US edition was published in September of 2023. (Which is what makes me think there are more stories out there, from the past decade.) It picks up on major story threads from the fifth volume, Midnight Tribunal, [1] particularly the figure of The Madame - who is this fantasy world's version of a person many readers will recognize from the real world - and tells one long story in multiple parts, during a particularly devastating typhoon that hits and floods Manila.

In our world, a big storm is a force of nature. In Trese's world, there are powers that control storms - control water, control air, control fire, and so on. So a gigantic storm doesn't just happen: someone made it, for a purpose. And someone is taking advantage of it.

I shouldn't say much more than that. The Madame does get involved. There is a plot by supernatural entities to get more power. There's a new drug that effects supernatural beings in frightening, dangerous ways. Some of the supernatural creatures are very eager to kill humans, as often happens in stories like this. And Alexandra Trese can't handle this massive danger alone. Good thing she has four brothers and other allies - before this book is over, a larger group of Philippine supernatural protectors comes together, some people we've seen before in this series, some new, and go into a massive battle.

This is the biggest Trese story yet, and the series title is even more true: this is not just the story of Alexandra Trese, but of her family as a whole, all of them engaged in the family business, navigating the murky, turbulent waters between the human and supernatural worlds of the Philippines.

I wouldn't jump into the series here, but I do recommend getting here. Start with the first book, and know there's at least this much more waiting for you.

[1] Also see my posts on the earlier books: one, two, three, four.

Schtick Figures by Drew Friedman

Drew Friedman might have run out of themes for his big books of warts-and-all portraits. I say that because this, his most recent book, declares itself to contain "over 150 comedians, writers, humorists, musicians, actors, journalists, cartoonists, illustrators, editors, publishers, one art gallery owner, one magician, one photographer, two wrestlers, and one movie memorabilia store owner."

If that sounds like a coherent theme, I'll eat my hat. And I don't own a hat.

On the other hand, "Drew Friedman portraits" is arguably enough of a theme in the first place, and this book has, as mentioned, over 150 of them. They are miscellaneous, they are arranged in (mostly) alphabetical order, and they are glorious in their fleshy magnificence.

Schtick Figures came out this past summer, from Friedman's long-time publisher Fantagraphics, and I suspect it is the book that collects everything else he's done over the past decade or so - that it wasn't a specific project like Heroes of the Comics or Maverix and Lunatix. The pictures are presented full-page, captioned only by the name of the person - or, in a few rare cases, the project - with a section of short potted biographies at the back for those of us who don't know who (picking a few pages at random) Imogene Coca, Pigmeat Markham or Frank Kelly Freas are. (Friedman puts "Kelly" in quotes for Freas, which is weird and I think wrong, but oh well. There's also at least one entry in the bio section that doesn't have a portrait in the book, and a couple of places where the bio section is in a slightly different order than the portraits.)

The bios also contain occasional notes about the source of the image - there are a few commissions, mostly for the people pictured (which explains some of the weirder ones in the list up top), some covers for Mineshaft (whatever that is), work for Mad and The Village Voice and probably some other publications I don't recall right this second, and a few other oddities. Most are uncredited, which could mean Friedman has forgotten or wants to forget where they came from, that he doesn't have to mention original publication for those, that he drew them for this book, or that they came to him in a vision from the Man in the Moon.

Whatever: 150 Drew Friedman pictures. Mostly of people you will recognize, if you know who Drew Friedman is and have a passing acquaintance with 20th century pop culture. (Especially the odder, horror- and humor-tinged sides of it.) This book is a good thing, and it's fun to poke through. I may wish Friedman was still doing comics rather than single images - as I lamented when I wrote about his book The Fun Never Stops! some years back - but it's better for his health and bank account and probably life in general, so I can't kick too hard.

Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse

I still have a dozen or so Wodehouse books on my shelf I haven't read - and intend to collect the thirtyish more in the Overlook series I don't own - so I think I'll keep reading them every three or four months from now until I run out. Some are surprisingly good - Piccadilly Jim, for example, was a fully-formed mature Wodehouse novel from 1917 with a great impostor plot.

Indiscretions of Archie, from the same era - originally published in 1921 - is somewhat lesser, but still amusing.

Reading it, I suspected it was originally a series of short stories, and I was right - this appeared as eleven stories in The Strand (and most of them also in Cosmopolitan - back in the days when the Atlantic was wider, writers could sell the same material on both sides of it) during 1920 and '21.

Wodehouse rewrote the whole thing somewhat to make it fit more into a novel form, but it's still exceptionally episodic. Our hero is Archie Moffam, a Great War veteran of good family and no money, who arrived in America to make his fortune and found it in Lucille Brewster, the usual beautiful young thing, who he met in Miami and married after a whirlwind courtship.

Lucille's father is Daniel Brewster, the millionaire owner and manager of the Cosmopolis hotel in New York - the self-proclaimed best hotel in town - and Daniel dislikes Archie intensely. (Archie is another one of Wodehouse's dim bulbs, unable to say anything clearly but not quite as prone to self-satisfaction and causing mayhem as Bertie Wooster.) Archie is supposedly looking for his life's work, but makes no effort at doing so at any point in the novel - the premise is not that he's trying his hand at different jobs, with humorous results, but just that he's supposed to be finding himself a career, and not just sponging off his rich father.

But he is: the stories are of Archie helping friends, getting involved in various odd Wodehousian events (there's a pie-eating contest he puts a ravenous teen boy up for, two different unsuitable theatre-connected fiancées for his brother-in-law, an old war acquaintance with amnesia, and a stint with Archie as an artist's model, among a couple of others), and usually annoying his father-in-law along the way. Most of them leave the situation at status quo ante, but, as the book gets into the back quarter, one gets a sense Wodehouse realized he needed to have something like an ending, so Archie wins the role of manager at the new hotel Daniel is building downtown.

Oh, that hotel isn't constructed before the novel is over: Archie never works a day in the book. But he has the promise of a job and a career, and, at the very end, there's also the only Wodehousian reference to a pregnancy I can remember. (It is an exceptionally circumloqutious reference - touching primarily on Daniel going to become a grandfather - and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Wodehouse or to 1921 or both.)

So this has some amusing Wodehouse material, but it's a clump of short stories standing up in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a novel. If you know that going in, it can be quite entertaining, but don't expect anything like an overall plot.

Better Things: The Exploding People

"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.

When I write these posts, I need to turn off whatever music I have already playing, dig up a YouTube link for the song I'm featuring, and get myself into the right mindset.

This time, though, I already have some Cloud Cult playing - their 2022 record Metamorphosis - so I might let it run for a bit as I type here. It probably makes no difference on your end. It's not a thing you would even notice.

Cloud Cult is the most positive band I know. Even better, it's not the flabby usual American positivity, it's a tough, muscular positivity, the kind that fights through jungles to get to that point, the kind that insists that it is going to be positive, no matter what, because it has to. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

There are a few other songs I almost picked - When Water Comes To Life still strikes me as their essential song, the one about why that attitude matters and what the singer went through (and I hate to say it, but I'm slightly tearing up just thinking about that song), and 1x1x1 is compelling and stark and brilliant.

But most of my favorite songs of theirs are from their wonderful 2010 record Light Chasers, which is something like a SF concept record. (Not a whole lot like, I guess, but something like.) And, so, today, I want to feature The Exploding People.

Can't escape from yourself unless you don't run.

That's the Zen koan at the middle I keep coming back to, the triple negative. A lot of Cloud Cult is about that big question: how do you live your life? Again, it's not coming from a place of authority, but one of vulnerability, a voice saying "I keep doing this thing that hurts and I need to stop."

This is a song about death, I think.

You never see the present, cuz you're always looking back.
Or counting down the seconds to your heart attack.
Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.
Do what you do, cuz you can't come back.
And one by one, the people, they explode.

About death in the sense that we all will die, everyone will die, and every moment you have not dead is a moment to use, to live in, to be alive in.

All the best Cloud Cult songs are like that: muscular, energetic, complex tangles of emotion about the big things that are also the personal things, and about failure at those things more than success. About how the singer wants to live, wants to be: what he keeps telling himself in hopes he can actually get there. I appreciate that a hell of a lot. Some days I need it more than others.

Quote of the Week: Rain in LA

Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers that shine like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places. The rain drummed hard on the roof of the car and the burbank top began to leak. A pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain. I struggled into a trench coat and made a dash for the nearest drugstore and bought myself a pint of whiskey. Back in the car I used enough of it to keep warm and interested. I was long overparked, but the cops were too busy carrying girls and blowing whistles to bother about that.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, p.610 in Stories & Early Novels

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I'm also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I'll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights was Guy Colwell's new graphic novel this year - his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people's comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He's in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he's a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren't known but aiming to be realistic or plausible - this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it's most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it's about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell's telling, Bosch was a visionary painter - literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell - and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting - more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town - the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That's what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then - in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead - being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It's a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting - Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide - that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time - and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn't overdramatize the conflicts; they're mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell's art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern - a major benefit for this work - and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it's one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it's about. It's a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it's a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

You have to go back to the big books every so often. If you're a middle-aged man - and I am, these days - you may find that's what you mostly do.

So I re-read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel, for probably the first time since...maybe when I was a teenager? I remember reading Chandler, in whatever paperback editions were current at the time - maybe Vintage, but I think my first were mass-markets from someone like Berkley. I remember reading at least one by the side of a pool in Florida, while visiting my father for the summer in 1985 - the closest I could come to the gestalt of Chandler's LA, I suppose.

That was a long time ago. 1939 was even longer ago.

Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, had appeared in a number of stories before this first novel, and his character was already set: all the things that would be clichés later, the man of the mean streets but not himself mean, the tarnished angel, the rumpled knight, incorruptible because there's nothing he wants enough to be used to corrupt him with.

This is the Chandler novel with one death that's not quite solved - all of the others are clearly explained, and the mysterious one is closed by the police with a plausible story, which is better than real life and not bad for fiction. But I gather some mystery readers were snooty about it at the time, and ever afterward. You'd think they'd be mollified by the fact that the book has a butler in it, but they're never satisfied, of course.

I'm not going to detail the whole plot, at this point. Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to investigate a possible blackmail attempt, and absolutely not hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the old man's son-in-law, whom he'd quite liked. The millionaire has two daughters, both in their twenties: the older one is a bit wild, having married several times already and gambling much more than is good for her. The younger one is practically feral, vastly worse and more dangerous to herself and others.

Marlowe does what he needs to do, and what he can do, and bodies start to pile up as others react to what he does, and he sometimes hides evidence of those bodies and sometimes calls in the authorities. In the end, he does find out what happened to the missing son-in-law, which is the core of the book.

And, throughout, Chandler writes magnificently. We read Chandler for the writing - his plots were fine and thoughtful, his characters vivid and specific, but his turns of phrase and random observations were unique and striking over and over again. The best Chandler books - this one, The Long Goodbye - don't just tell a good detective story, but let us see the world in different ways, give us unexpected insights and viewpoints as they roll out a compelling story, too. We read Chandler to see the world through his eyes, and be surprised and excited by what we find there.

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.