Monday, March 18, 2024

Portions for Foxes: Cordero

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I didn't plan it that way, but last week I had a song about bad sex - or, at least, sex with someone who's all wrong - and this week I have a sexy song that I have to believe is about good sex.

It doesn't quite say it that way, but...

Come on dear lay down on me
I fear I’ll harm myself.
Come on dear just hold me down.
I’ve lost my fear of death.

This is Come On Dear by Cordero. I don't think the band as they existed then are still active, but it looks like bandleader Ani Cordero is out there making music. Back in the early days of this century, she formed her namesake band, fusing a bunch of disparate musical influences and bouncing back and forth between English-language and Spanish-language songs. 

They did a lot of great music; I still listen to their records. This peppy, sexy, compulsive song - Ani Cordero started as a drummer, and this is very much a drum-driven song, full of quick beats - is one of their best.

Come on shake me you can’t break me I need to feel something else.
Why don’t you hold me down.
Please won’t you hold me down.

Sex songs are usually about metaphors - this one is more direct than most, but still subtle enough to miss if you don't think about it. That's what makes it a song and not just a demand, what makes it sexy rather than just a record of sex.

Punchy, smart, fast-paced, just loud and fast enough - it's a great song. Hope you enjoy it.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Quote of the Week: Insanely Insane

Let me tell you what Silicon Valley is like: the mountain edges of the valley rise up like the lip of a great big copper-bottomed frying pan of overpriced Revere Ware, and on the high heat of burning money everything and everyone in there melts into a boiling, spattering, frenetic stew. Boston is like a nicely arranged four-food-group meal on Sunday china, and Seattle is a huge hunk of Microsoft barbecue with a few thawed peas rolling off the paper plate, but Silicon Valley, California, is not just a stew, it's a stew that never comes off the gas heat. The juices meld, and the histories intertwine, and it's spiced up with high achievers from every nook of the world. Heat waffles off the ground, distorting it all into an earth-toned prism. Entangled superexpressways pass over industrial megaparks and shady 3BR/2BA ranch-style homes and provide occasional vistas of scorched tan acreage protected as natural habitants for scrappy, trash-can-scrounging coyotes. The tallest landmarks are power towers and phone poles. The real work is done in silence, sitting in cubicles, staring at screens. Everyone is attempting to make things that have not existed before.

 - Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Last Shift, pp.214-215

Friday, March 15, 2024

One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka

It's tough to be a fan of someone when you're not quite sure what aspect of their work you're a fan of. I read a big bunch of Osamu Tezuka books, mostly published by Vertical, more than a decade ago - MW, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, Apollo's Song, a few others - and liked them all a lot. They were smart, sophisticated, serious books for adults, with a striking depth of expression and focused imaginative power.

Vertical might have published everything Tezuka did in that vein; I really don't know. But I haven't seen anything else similar from Tezuka in my scattered reading since then. The latest attempt was One Hundred Tales, originally published in Shonen Jump magazine in installments in 1971 under the title Hyaku Monogatari and translated by Iyasu Adair Nagata for this 2023 Ablaze edition. (It was part of a series called "Lion Books" that some awkwardly-worded backmatter in the this book attempts to explain, but doesn't do a great job of - they don't seem to have been "books" in the first place, but multiple-segment manga stories published in SJ; the narrative slides from talking about this series to other manga projects to anime projects without a whole lot of clarity; and there's no explanation of what "Lion" is meant to mean in this context.)

Tales is, I think, part of the main flow of Tezuka's career, the huge flood of stories mostly for teen (and younger) boys that he created for so long at such volume. There are elements that resonate with adults, but it's mostly an adventure story with minor pretentions of philosophical depth, with the usual random Tezuka comic relief and contemporary cultural references thrown in willy-nilly.

The title makes it sound like a retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it's actually a loose retelling of Faust, set in a vaguely historical-fantasy Japanese setting. The main character is a mousy accountant/samurai (shades of "Office? Submarine!"), Ichiru Hanri, sentenced to commit ritual suicide for his very minor role in a coup plot against his feudal lord. He doesn't want to die, and offers his soul if he can survive - so a demon (yokai, more accurately) in the form of a beautiful woman, Sudama, offers to buy his soul in exchange for three wishes.

Ichiru wishes to live his life over again, to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and to rule his own country and castle. And so the episodic story moves forward - first Sudama makes Ichiru young and handsome, then he visits (in his new face and under an assumed name) his horrible wife and lovely young daughter, then he chases his choice for most beautiful woman (Tamano no Mae, a powerful yokai) with no good result, then has the requisite training montage to become a stronger and better sword-fighter, and finally spends the back half of the story working for another minor feudal lord, massively enriching that lord and then overthrowing him.

It's all pretty zig-zag. It does add up to a coherent story, but it only maps to the wishes fairly loosely. Sudama is also vastly more "helpful attractive supernatural woman" than she is "powerful scary demon" - the Faust parallels are mostly superficial, and drop away for the required happy ending.

Tezuka was an energetic cartoonist - sometimes too much so, to my eye, since this book starts off with Ichiru in full comic-relief mode, all goofy panic and silly faces, and the tide of comic relief comes in several more times as the book goes on. But, if you think of this as an adventure story made very quickly for publication in a massive weekly comics magazine for boys - which is exactly what it is - it's admirable and pretty accomplished in that context.

Whether that context is enough to overcome the negatives is up to every reader to decide. Tezuka is a world-renowned creator of stories in comics form, but his standard mode is very idiosyncratic and very tied to the specifics of the Japanese market and audience at the time.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson

Books can't just stay on to-be-read shelves forever. Each book has a shelf-life, a time when it's relevant, and if you don't get to it during that time, it turns like milk.

If I were more ambitious, I'd lay out some kind of mathematical formula for that shelf-life - with variables for when the book was published (brand-new books generally age quickly; books older than you can last forever, like Twinkies) and its topic (non-fiction ages faster than fiction, in most cases) and so on.

But I'm not.

So, instead, that is why I read this book. A twenty-five-year-old pop non-fiction book about the first Silicon Valley boom, published in 1999, is still vaguely relevant now, but it's receding into the distance. Our world of rapacious tech billionaires is not at all the same as the early days of scrambling for a mere (but oh-so-coveted) $20 million. But I thought the blinkeredness, that intertwined drive for massive profits and massive disruption, the obnoxious workaholism, and endless neophilia - all of that would probably be roughly the same.

So I finally read Pro Bronson's first non-fiction book, The Nudist on the Late Shift. I have long been a huge fan of his first novel, Bombardiers - it's as close to a "Catch-22 for business" as we're likely to get - but I've mostly avoided his later books, which seemed to be very touchy-feely life-coach stuff. This was the last book before he went full goo-goo, so I've long wanted to take a look at it. And I finally did.

It's a pretty typical reported "check out this scene" book, divided into eight chapters, each one focusing on a subset of Silicon Valley people. Bronson went to Stanford; his first novel was about San Francisco finance and his second about tech companies; he'd been writing for Wired and other outlets about Silicon Valley for a few years at this point. So he was plugged in: he knew enough people to get introductions to other people, and was in about the best-possible position to write a book like this. And, in retrospect, writing mostly in 1998 to publish in 1999 is close to the perfect time, too - sure, pushing it back a year or eighteen months, to the edge of the eventual crash, might have been even more extreme, but no one can time a market peak like that.

Bronson is positive and optimistic throughout, as if he really believes all of these men working eighteen-hour days to code a new Java-powered widget and get Microsoft to buy it for multiple millions are doing something worthwhile and useful. Oh, sure, some of this benefited people other than the ones getting the truckloads of money backed up to their garages - but not all that much. And it all fell apart as everyone outside the bubble knew it would.

So this is a book about, mostly, crazy optimists who are mostly in their mid-twenties, mostly have never failed at anything in their lives, and mostly have never seen a problem they couldn't just solve by working harder. It comes across as at least slightly naïve now, but this kind of book always does: the "line always goes up!" story is only plausible when no one has a memory of line going way down, suddenly.

But it's amusing, and full of fun stories, and Bronson was, as ever, an engaging and exciting writer on a sentence level (though he's less pyrotechnic here than in Bombardiers). My schadenfreude wishes there was a twenty-fifth anniversary edition updating all of these people, but that probably would be a parade of dead, selling Acuras in Burbank, dead, retired at thirty and running an obscure futurist thinktank, major VC player, mid-level manager at Intel, disappeared during Burning Man in 2006, in federal prison for financial crimes almost no one understands.

And who wants that? The whole point of a book like this is the dream - that we can believe that they all hit it big, all got their dreams, all made the Brand New Thing and cashed out and were awesome at everything. Leaving it a time capsule preserves that dream.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Nina Simone in Comics by Sophie Adriansen and various artists

Nina Simone was a prickly, complicated, contradictory person - like all of the best, most interesting people. She lived a long life, through lots of turmoil, and made great songs for decades. Most importantly, she grew up poor and Black in the Jim Crow south, though she was somewhat insulated from the worst of that as a young child by her clear talent and drive. But, then, the shock of reality when the insulation drops away is even sharper, isn't it?

Nina Simone in Comics is a hybrid of an old-fashioned illustrated biography and a modern comics biography, written by French comics scripter Sophie Adriansen and featuring art from nineteen different European artists and colorists. It's organized into twenty chapters, covering all of Simone's life: each one starts with a vignette in comics form, a scene or sequence of events, and then a text section follows to explain that part of her life in more detail. Anne Royant provides the first and last chapters, but most artists only show up once here.

It should be clear from that structure that Nina Simone is a lot wordier and denser than the reader would expect from a book with "in comics" in the title - a positive if you want more details about Simone, possibly a negative if you just want to skim something for a quick seventh-grade book report. It also has extensive notes on sources and Simone's recording career: it is a fabulous way into her life, providing multiple paths forward for any reader interested in learning more or just starting to listen to her music.

Simone was born Eunice Waymon in 1933 in Tyron, North Carolina, to a family that already had five children and was anchored by a deep religious devotion: her mother became an ordained minister of the AME Church during her childhood. Young Eunice quickly showed a talent for music and particularly for piano, which was nourished by lessons from local teachers - which in turn had to be paid for by a "support fund" raised from her family's neighbors and friends and apparently repeatedly replenished throughout her childhood.

The family moved north after her high school graduation as valedictorian, probably partially to support Simone's ambitions to become a classical concert pianist - though Black families were moving north before and during the '40s and '50s for all kinds of reasons anyway; my guess is that was one thread but not the whole reason. She studied at Julliard in New York, and auditioned for a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, and was rejected. She kept studying and taking lessons, but also began playing jazz music in clubs both in Philadelphia, where she lived at the time, and over the summer season in Atlantic City. That's where the "Nina Simone" name came: her family didn't like popular music, and she wanted to save her real name for the real, "serious" career she still expected to have.

But it didn't work out that way. Adriansen wasn't quite clear if she applied to Curtis again later, though she definitely had tutors who thought she was very qualified. But her jazz career got momentum quickly, as Adriansen presents it, and she signed with a record company and recorded her first album.

Teasing out the sequence further: her failed audition was in April of 1951. Her first summer playing in Atlantic City was 1954. That first record, with the very late-50s title Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was recorded in one day and released in 1959. She clearly spent nearly a decade practicing music, playing music, taking and giving music lessons, as her ambitions shifted from the concert hall to the jazz club.

Nina Simone was immediately a small success in her musical career, in the way Eunice Waymon wasn't. Simone herself seems to have thought implied racism was a large part of that, and it's very plausible: it was clearly much easier for the world to see a talented Black singer and piano player as a sultry jazz icon rather than a high-culture interpreter of Bach.

From there, it's the usual story of a creative life: problems with agents and managers and spouses and lovers and record labels - sometimes several of those wrapped up into one big problem - and shifts in creative energies, sometimes popular and sometimes not. In particular, Simone became known as a "protest singer" in the mid-60s and never shed that label afterward. But, again, she was committed and Black, friendly with Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes: it's hard to see how anyone like that would not be politically active and loudly in favor of the core rights of her own people.

Her life got more complicated from the 1970s and onward, which is also the point where a biography - any biography, including this one - tends to start skipping years and covering entire creative phases in a short paragraph. Lives are long, and the early shiny moments are the most enticing: the long tedious race through middle years rarely provides as clear or exciting a story. She had a daughter, she had several failed marriages - one of which, to her manager at the time, seems to have severely damaged her career and finances right at the time the market was turning against her protest music.

She moved away from the US, eventually settling in France for the last twenty years or so of her life. (Finally explaining, to me at least, why she was the subject of such a big, ambitious book by such a French group of creators.) The end of Nina Simone in Comics mixes personal turmoil - she had some chronic issues, including what seems to be often-untreated bipolar disorder - with a series of musical comebacks, giving a mixed picture of the mostly comfortable but probably not mostly happy later years in the life of a major, transformative figure.

Every life is a tragedy, since it ends in death. But people who lived well, who accomplished a lot, are smaller tragedies: so it was with Nina Simone.

Nina Simone in Comics feels mostly like an old-fashioned biography, since the "comics" pieces here don't tell her life story by themselves. They illustrate and illuminate, in a variety of energetic, eye-catching styles, with the text features forming the core of the book. But Simone's was a long life with a lot of events to cover; I can't fault the choices here, and this book is deeper and more detailed than any pure-comics bio I've read. I have to count that as a big positive; that's the whole point of a biography.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Falconspeare by Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

I know that the books about the Mignola-verse - or maybe we should call it the Hellboy-verse? - have continued to pile up, even after its main character died a decade ago and the second main pillar book, B.P.R.D., ran through a fairly comprehensive and long list of apocalypses. But I am not sure what is going on there, since I seem to have missed a bunch of those books.

Thinking that I might want to get back in, I looked for a place to dip my toe. I found something that looked standalone, that was definitely short, and took a leap.

Falconspeare is a 2022 book credited to Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell - they previously did Mr. Higgins Comes Home (which I saw, back in 2018) and Our Encounters With Evil (which I have not, but will now look for) together. But when I checked the credits more carefully, Mignola did the cover and the whole thing is "based on characters created by" him and Johnson-Cadwell. Otherwise, Johnson-Cadwell wrote, drew, and colored the whole thing, with letters by Clem Robins.

Also: it's set (as was Higgins, which I had forgotten) in a vaguely Victorian world, a bit quirkier and nonspecific than the core Mignolaverse - oh, definitely full of vampires and other mythological monsters that need to be dealt with, but without, as far as I can see, the whole dude-from-hell and otherdimensional Lovecraftian gods and multiple-apocalypses thing.

So this was not, in the end, a way back into that universe, but is just fine on its own.

A group of intrepid vampire hunters had a heyday fifteen years ago - signposted by captions saying exactly that - but it is now fifteen years later, and one of them, the title dude, has been missing for a while. The others are summoned by a mysterious message to the usual Balkan landscape, meet their long-lost comrade, and hear his strange and compelling story.

There is a twist at the end, of course. And it's all in a quirkier register than the regular Mignola books -not quite as odd as I recall Higgins being, but just a bit pantomime, as if we all know how this story is going to go, so we can just sit back and enjoy it without worrying about anything.

Johnson-Cadwell has a much looser line than usual for Mignola collaborators: again, this is not unserious, but it's not overly serious the way most Mignola books are. I compared Higgins to Eurocomics, in particular the Dungeon books, and I still see that similarity here, that same viewpoint and style.

It's probably not for readers who want hardcore mythology and megadeath from Mignola - it's mostly not Mignola, after all - but for a lighter, more amusing read, it definitely hits the spot.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Portions for Foxes: Stephie Coplan and the Pedestrians

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I sometimes wonder if I'm digging up half-forgotten or completely-abandoned careers with this series of posts - the bulk of the songs I'm writing about are from ten to fifteen years ago (when I was either paying more attention to popular music or popular music was clicking with me more strongly; take your pick), and that's long enough for all the members of a band to completely hate each other and solo artists to have run through two or three entirely unrelated careers afterward.

But the whole point of art is that it's there. It doesn't depend on the artist any more, once it's out in the world. I don't want to go full death-of-the-artist, but released work has an escape velocity; it goes on to its own life.

My song for this week was part of a burst of creativity from one woman and her band - she had a series called "Yes, I'm Really Writing A Song A Week" back in 2013 - and, like every burst of creativity, it eventually ended. But it happened, and there's a fun cluster of songs from it.

The band is Stephie Coplan and the Pedestrians. The song is, if I have the orthography right, JERK!

It's yet another "this person is so wrong for me" song, more angry than despairing, more loud than lamenting, and it rocks out so much.

But what's fun about it is how visceral it is. Coplan doesn't get into body parts, but this is very much a song about a guy that's fun to fuck, but no good for the narrator in any other way.

Make it count, make it loud, make it real, make it sick, make it good
Let it scream, let it roll, let it roar, let it hurt like it should
Sh-sh-shake it like a soda with a pop top ready to explode
Come on, baby, keep it coming 'til you toss me like a gum wrapper stuck on the road

The voice isn't totally happy with this - who would be? - but there's an attraction she can't deny, even as the song is set in that post-coital disgust for the whole thing.

Coulda been your eyes
Coulda been your smile
Coulda been your I-don't-give-a-fuck style
Coulda been your anger
Your jaded middle finger
But you're the jerk who just keeps turning me on

A song like this could easily turn into "how could I do something so stupid," but Coplan keeps the focus on the Jerk. He's horrible in a sexy way, and the whole song is charging headlong into that twisted cluster of emotion, that core moment of doing something you know you'll regret - that you're already regretting as you do it - but the moment is so compelling that you just do it.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Quote of the Week: A Better Version of the Problem

He knows where I live. And Momma, too.

Squib was marked and he knew it.

I gotta sort this out, he thought. I gotta get out from under that dragon.

Which is not a problem most people have to solve in their lifetimes,. In general, most folk who get to meet a dragon only get to think about it that one time for about five seconds.

 - Eoin Colfer, Highfire, p.82

Friday, March 08, 2024

Highfire by Eoin Colfer

I never know how to write about books that I found perfectly fine but didn't really love. You know how sometimes you find that you have to force yourself to go back to a book, telling yourself things like "it's fun to read, isn't it? You like that element, and the narrative is zippy, and you can finish it quickly, so why don't you want to get back into it?"

Highfire was like that for me: good at what it does, energetic and colorful and specific, set in an interesting place with quirky characters, but I just want to pick at the narrative voice and how it organizes the story in ways that I'm not as fond of.

(To be blunt: there are three major characters here, and I think, in the back of my head, I really wanted the multiple-first-person narration version of the story, to get deeper into the characters. Instead, this is told in an omniscient third-person that has quirks of language and seems to have a viewpoint, but stays a voice rather than becoming a person. It's also a breezy, somewhat surface-y voice - great for the story being told, but not quite what I was looking for.)

Those are all Me Problems. I'll try to sidestep them as much as possible.

Highfire is billed as an adult fantasy novel: it's written by Eoin Colfer, best-known for the YA "Artemis Fowl" series. I found that it had elements that might keep it - in my memory, realizing that I've been out of SFF publishing for sixteen years now - from being published as YA, but it centers on a teen protagonist and the tone and style had a YA flavor to me.

The three main characters are:

  • Everett "Squib" Moreau, a fifteen-year-old guy living in a small Louisiana swamp town, without a whole lot of distinctive characteristics. He's fairly smart but not interested in school, he has one close friend who is mentioned a lot but never appears on the page, he's talky but Colfer doesn't let him spin yarns. He's the reader stand-in, I guess: a normal guy at the middle of weirdness.
  • Regence Hooke is the villain, a deeply corrupt, probably sociopathic local constable who wants to get with Squib's still-hot nurse mother Elodie, wants to supplant his mobster semi-boss, Ivory Conti, and somewhat wants to get rid of Squib as well. He's bad news in every possible way, smarter and nastier and better-prepared than his type often is.
  • "Vern," a three-thousand-year-old dragon whose real name is Wyvern, Lord Highfire. He's possibly the last of his kind, living quietly in a shack way out in the swamp, with a local quirky character - Waxman, who is another variety of mythological being - as his only point of contact with the human world. He's a "dragon," but Colfer presents him as roughly human-sized and shaped, able to use normal furniture and wear normal clothes. (I never got a good mental image of what he actually looks like, or how his wings work, or anything like that.) His overwhelming desire is to stay below the radar, to keep humans from knowing about him, and to just keep on - and he's entirely happy to barbecue or otherwise vanish anything and anyone that threatens that.

The action kicks off when Squib semi-accidentally witnesses Hooke murdering someone for Conti, one late night way out in the swamp, and then flees right into Vern's lap. Squib manages to convince Vern not to kill him, and eventually becomes Vern's new go-between to the human world. But Hooke is still out there, and knows someone witnessed the murder. And Hooke has other plots that intersect Squib's world, most notably his pursuit of Elodie.

Action setpieces pop up every sixty to eighty pages, mostly with Vern breathing dragonfire and/or flying to destroy things. Squib gets battered nearly as much as a Tim Powers protagonist. Hooke is sneaky and tricky and full of plans and has access to all manner of exciting and exotic weaponry, but never quite feels evil for some reason.

There is a happy ending, as there has to be. Along the way, lots of things blow up real good, there's a surprisingly large body count that Colfer mostly mentions in passing, and only fairly small bits of New Orleans get trashed by a dragon. It didn't quite grab me the way I was hoping it would, but it's fun and pretty much exactly what it's billed as: a kick-ass dragon/crime story in the modern world, by a hugely bestselling YA writer.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Tank Girl Full Color Classics, Vol. 3: 1993-1995 by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin

The thing about Tank Girl was that it was obviously a goofy lark - something that could be an anarchic entry in a larger comics anthology (Deadline), a few pages of craziness each month, with punk attitude to spare and only the most minimal respect for normal narrative rules and norms. That each month would be whatever the creators - at the very beginning, just Jamie Hewlett, but soon including Alan Martin to letter, write and/or script, and sometimes with other hands on art here and there as time went on - had in their heads at the time, thrown down on paper in a rush to meet the deadline and even more Tank Girl for any resulting incoherence and randomness.

But then Tank Girl got hugely popular, and had to be in every issue of Deadline. And her stories got reprinted first as comics issues and then as books, as if there was a coherent narrative through-line and consistent story to them all. But there wasn't. There never was in the first place, and the impulse to create one sent Hewlett and Martin even further away from narrative consistency.

It didn't seem to matter, though: the stories stayed popular, and a movie deal materialized. Even more surprisingly, the movie actually happened. Hewlett and Martin spent some time on set - in the American southwest, which may be one clue that an American adaptation of two very British guys' piss-take on a fantasy version of Australia might have been stretched far out of recognition.

These are the stories that came out just before the movie - the ones that know, in some sense, that there will be a movie - and are the height of that initial anarchic popularity. There was nowhere to go from here but down, and the reaction to the movie sent it all down very quickly.

The current reprint series of Tank Girl was recolored and reissued about five years ago - clearly, the series is still selling well, since it keeps getting reprinted and repackaged; books don't stay on the market if they don't hit an audience. But I think this is still basically the same material: a little nicer package, coloring that looks much more 2018 than 1993, a bunch of on-set photos from the movie and other sketches and ephemera to bulk up the package, but still the same core stories.

I read the first two Tank Girl collections right around the time of this most recent repackaging, in the previous (mid-Aughts?) editions: Tank Girl and Tank Girl Two. That first book is still the core Tank Girl experience: frankly, if there had never been anything else it would have been fine. That was A Thing, and Hewlett and Martin did it well. The second book is weirder and more random, which is fun in its own way, but about as self-indulgent as a thing can be.

Tank Girl Full Color Classics, Vol. 3: 1993-1995 reins in a bit from the pure randomness of the second book - perhaps someone pointed out to Hewlett and Martin that the movie was in-process, so they should do stories actually about Tank Girl most of the time, not their own childhoods - but it's still pretty nutty and random, with several stories in which a TG-looking person either wakes up at the end or appears once to comment on the action. They do all generally at least feature versions of the other main characters, though - Booga or Jet Girl will be the center of those odder stories.

I'm not going to describe the stories: they're mostly "Tank Girl goes somewhere, engages in loony violence while quipping, and then gets out," but there are many layers to that style, and one of the biggest ones here is random references to then-famous (or, even worse for this American, previously-famous) very British figures who are used as running gags or plot supports. There will come a time when a lot of Tank Girl stories require annotation for the average non-UK reader, and that time may be basically now.

I guess what I'm saying is that this is Baby Bear Tank Girl: the first book was hot, capturing lightning in a bottle, as good as these stories could ever be. The second book was very cold, going off in random directions and doing a lot of interesting things despite the massive self-indulgence. This one pulls back into the middle: it's more lukewarm, with plots that are mostly coherent for the length of their six or eight pages, characters who are mostly consistent, art that's always awesome but is occasionally cramped to get it all down on a page, and an eye on a bigger prize glittering in the Arizona desert.

It wasn't much of a prize, in the end. Tank Girl the movie was a famous flop on all levels. But that's how it goes, sometimes.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Making Friends: Together Forever by Kristen Gudsnuk

I'm pretty sure this is the real end. But any series that has run four books already could always have more, so I'll make that an assumption rather than a declaration. Kristen Gudsnuk will probably move on to do other wonderful, goofy, jokey graphic novels - for adults or middle-graders or who knows what audience next - but the "Making Friends" series is solidly wrapped up here.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about: Making Friends: Together Forever, as I implied, is fourth in a fantasy GN series from Scholastic, aimed at middle-graders. First was Making Friends, followed by Back to the Drawing Board and Third Time's a Charm. Gudsnuk is also the author of the excellent supervillain adventure Henchgirl, which I still recommend as the best place for an adult reader to start with her work.

Making Friends is about Dany: when the series started, she was just going into seventh grade and feeling lonely, in a new middle school where her old friends had completely disjoint schedules. And, when she got a heirloom sketchbook from her recently deceased Great-Aunt Elma, she started drawing in it - and discovered that anything she draws there pops into the real world.

So she drew a best friend: Madison Fontaine, just moved from NYC, cool and good at all of the things Dany thinks she's bad at. And things got complicated from there. Three books worth of complicated, which is more complicated than I can get into here. Let me also note that Gudsnuk, as a creator, does not shy away from complication but instead revels in it and builds it up to fantastic, wacky, amazing heights.

You may have an image in your head of how a GN about "girl is sad in middle school, then creates a best friend" might go. I would bet large sums of money that image is not nearly Gudsnukian enough. She has a humorously skewed point of view, the love of complication I just mentioned, and a bone-deep sense of just how silly she can push any situation - every last bit of this series is right up to the red line of cool/silly, without ever going over.

OK, maybe examples would help. There are two different artifacts of Dany's world in the early pages of this book I low-key want for myself. On the second page, there's a poster of a unicorn in sunglasses, in front of a rainbow, burning a dollar and saying "Stop buying stuff, you corporate stooge". And Dany slightly later wears a shirt that says "Race for The Cure" with a caricature of '80s-era Robert Smith. (Honestly, I would wear that right now if it existed.)

Together Forever, like the previous books, is full of little asides like that - one other example, which is actually thematically important, is the Toy Story-equivalent movie series, which is about sippy cups and is just as goofy (but actually funnier) than you expect.

Anyway: reality has been saved and rewritten and damaged multiple times already, by the notebook itself and by other forces looking to repair the world, or conquer it, or something in between, in the previous three books. At the end of the third book, Powerful Forces imposed a new order on reality, which seemed to be overall a good thing, to keep world-altering plots and crazy fabric-of-reality-destroying magic controlled, but it did leave Dany with only a tiny scrap of the notebook and stuck in a new world where no one else remembered what had happened. (Oh, and she has an alien impostor for a mom, to keep an eye on her.)

Worse, Madison was whisked away by those Powerful Forces, so Dany was back - somewhere in the winter or spring of a seventh grade that just would not end - somewhat lonely and wanting to change. But then Dany sees a new TV show, My Magical Best Friend, that stars Madison and seems to be based on her actual (pre-reality changes) life.

Dany wants her best friend back, and she's annoyed at the way this TV show presents her life. So she's going to use that tiny scrap of notebook in one last crazy plan to save Madison, get away from alien impostor mom, and become the Dany she knows she can be. (Possibly one full of "Le Existentialism" from reading Jean Paul Blart.)

It all goes goofy and complicated from there: this is a Kristen Gudsnuk book. And, as the jingle for the annoying TV show goes, "with magic and friendship anything is possible!"

There's a real ending, which closes out the series well. There's a lot of great dialogue - some heartfelt, some deeply goofy. And, like the previous three books, it's aimed at tween girls without being limited to them - if you ever were a goofball who wasn't sure how to fit into life, and wished you had magic to fix things, the Making Friends books are for you.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it's personal; for others, it's public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it's both, intertwined.

Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town where she and her brother were  the only people at all like them. Her mother Rose is mixed-race, born in tumultuous 1950 Shanghai to a Swiss diplomat who had already run back home before the birth and a Chinese journalist, Sun Yi, who thought she could weather any storm.

Hulls tells the story of all three women, over the last hundred years, in Feeding Ghosts, a magnificent, impressive first graphic novel all about the ways Tessa and Rose, and Sun Yi before them, are haunted by history.

Hulls is the one telling the story, and that frames it all: she has those core American concerns of "who am I?" and "where did I come from?" Making it more complicated, she's here exploring her Chinese identity as the daughter of two generations of Chinese women who had children with European men, and as someone raised in America entirely in the English language.

One more thing: one very big thing. Sun Yi was moderately famous: she escaped China for Hong Kong in the late 1950s, when Rose was a child, and wrote a scandalous memoir of her life under the Communist upheavals of the previous decade. She got her daughter, Rose, accepted into a very highly regarded boarding school in Hong Kong, despite not really having the money to pay for it. And then she mentally collapsed. Sun Yi spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals and was eventually cared for by her daughter in America starting in 1977, when Rose was 27. Rose spent her teen years in that boarding school, alternately worrying about her mother's care and being molded to be part of an internationalist elite. And then Rose fled to America, first for college, then for a brief nomadic freedom that her daughter would eventually emulate.

Let me pull that all together: Tessa Hulls, whom a lot of Americans would cruelly call "one-quarter Chinese," grew up in a town with no other Chinese people. Just a mother, quirky and specific and tightly controlled, the kind of mother who has Rules for everything that are rarely said explicitly, never explained, seemingly arbitrary, and core to her concept of the world. And a grandmother, trapped in her own head, scribbling every day as if she was eternally re-writing that famous memoir, and speaking only the smallest bits of broken English. That mother and grandmother spoke a different language together - I think mostly the dialect of Shanghai - which they never taught Tessa. "Chinese" was that language, that mysterious past, the symbol for all that was hidden and frightening and different for Hulls growing up.

Hulls has a lot to get through in Feeding Ghosts: a lot of family history and related world history, a lot of nuance and cultural detail that she learned as she was researching her family's past. She tells it all mostly in sequence, after a brief prologue, but "Tessa Hulls" is present throughout, our narrator and filter, the voice telling us how she learned the story almost as much as she tells the story itself. This is a story unearthed and told, not something pretending to be purely dry and factual. It's not an exaggeration to say it's primarily about Tessa's journey, how she decided to figure out this tangled knot of her family history, to do it with her mother as much as possible, to reconcile the two of them and try to come to a place here they could better meet and understand each other.

Hull's pages are organic, specific, inky. She uses swirling white outlines on a black background as a visual element regularly - the pull of all of those ghosts, if you want to be reductive - to open and close chapters, and more subtly in the backgrounds of fraught moments.

One of the hallmarks of a great big book is that it leaves you wanting to know more. I was enthralled by the stories of young Sun Yi and Rose, and how Tessa learned what they did and what it meant. (The latter is the more important thing, in an ancient, rule-bound, formalistic society like China - maybe even more so in a time of such transition and upheaval as the early Communist years.) But I felt that she was less forthcoming about her own youth. This is very much a story of these three women, but I wondered about other figures: Hulls's father is almost entirely absent, signposted as a British man with a thicker accent than Rose and seen only a handful of times. And Tessa's brother, just one year older, growing up in this same house and environment, is even less present - did he feel any of these pressures? Or was this so much a matrilineal thing, tied into those cultural assumptions of what men and women do, that he was able to "be American" in ways more closed to Tessa?

But that's not the story Hulls is telling. And every story casts shadows: the story that-is dimly showing flickers of other stories that could have been, or might yet be. The brightest, most brilliant stories cast the clearest shadows - that may be why I wonder so much about Hull's father and brother; they're dark, mysterious shadows just outside the circle of these three women, brilliantly illuminated and seen in depth.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Portions for Foxes: Elizabeth Cook

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I've written about a lot of bad-love songs. They tend to be serious, even heartbreaking. But bad love can be fun in its horrible way, in the way a carwreck can be exhilarating if you come out of it untouched.

This week, I have a song by Elizabeth Cook, all about the very wrong guy at what must be the right time:

I know this guy; he's all wrong for me
He wears shirts that are trippin' on LSD
I must be high as a kite on diesel fumes

This is El Camino, a funky, funny little ditty about a '70s throwback who has a hell of a lot more game than the narrator of this song expected, so she's just going with it for now...but "for now" might not be all that long.

I told him your car is creepy man
But in a perv kinda way
And not in a gangsta kinda way

But even the wrong person can be fun.

After Saturday matinee roller derby
We went parking and things got blurry
I thought man I can't get much hotter
And then I caught a whiff of pina colada

Cook has a great smile in her voice as she sings all of this, that sense of "hey, can you believe this?" as the narrator semi-questions why she's doing any of this, but goes along with it anyway. It's a wonderful song for anyone who can remember the 1970s, or who wishes they could.

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Books Read: February 2024

Here I am again: this is what I read last month. Links will follow as always.

Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Falconspeare (2/3, digital)

Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts (2/4, digital)

Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift (2/4)

Osamu Tezuka, One Hundred Tales (2/10, digital)

Zerocalcare, Forget My Name (2/11, digital)

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (2/11, in Library of America Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin (2/17, digital)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: The Selfish Giant / The Star Child (2/18, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally (2/18)

Kristen Gudsnuk, Making Friends: Together Forever (2/19, digital)

Elizabeth Pich, Fungirl: You Are Revolting (2/24 digital)

Jeffrey Ford, Out of Body (2/24)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (2/25, digital)

Grant Snider, The Art of Living (2/26, digital)

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2/26)


Next month will see more of the same, as long as I have any say in the matter.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

Quote of the Week: A Metaphor, if You Want It

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was skeptical about things? Unusual behavior for a horse, wasn't it? An unusual horse perhaps?

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was nonetheless a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

 - Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, p.4