Wild That We're Alive by Lauren Haldeman

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We're Alive is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It's not anything at all like that description would make you think it is - some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka - because that's not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet - with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don't just mean "someone who has written some poetry" - a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she's the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman's husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they're all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue - one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically - maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? - with herself central in most of these comics. They're about what's it's like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn't always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They're all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won't be mentioned.

Wild That We're Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall - she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don't see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I'm not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there's only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful - not "poetry" in the old academic "study-this" sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider - similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that's good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

All of This and Nothing: Jackson Leftfield

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

OK, I've finally hit the point where my "Obscure" songs are so obscure that I can't even find a version of them online to embed here. Which somewhat ruins the point of the post, I guess, but let me do what I can in the circumstances.

Boxer the Horse is [1] a band from the Canadian Maritimes; their debut EP was The Late Show in 2008. The music website Fingertips featured a song from that record; I downloaded it, liked it, and ended up buying the band's full-length French Residency when it came out a couple of years later. (They seem to have had another full-length in the middle, which I missed.)

That first song, the one I heard in 2008, is Jackson Leftfield, which has very little trace on these here Interwebs. YouTube has a live version, but the album version doesn't even seem to be on Spotify anymore. The Fingertips link is long-dead. No lyrics exist anywhere I can find.

It's a loose-limbed, harmonica-fueled, electronic-organ-infused romp - Jackson is a girl the singer is talking to, though I think she's a friend or acquaintance rather than the object of his affections. Whoever is after her, though, she's not having it:

She said get your damn hands off me man
Do you have any idea who I am?

It's an energetic, fun song from a band that seemingly has been forgotten even by the people who knew they existed in the first place. The world is full of songs like that, unfortunately - or fortunately; it means the world is full of great stuff - and this is one I really liked and wanted to remember...if only I could find it to share it.

[1] Probably "was," I don't see any activity post-2014. But let me be optimistic.

Books Read: May 2026

So, yeah, another month down. We're all that much closer to death, I suppose. But, while we're waiting to die, we can at least read good books, right? Here are the ones I finished this past month.

I'm not claiming they're all "good," though maybe they were. You always hope they will be when you pick them up.

Links will be added sometime later, once the posts go live.

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 (5/2)

P.G. Wodehouse, French Leave (5/2)

Jeff Lemire &Teddy Kristiansen, Black Hammer: Spiral City )digital, 5/3)

Justin Feinstein, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (ARC, 5/3)

Seymour Chwast & Steven Brower, Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World (digital, 5/8)

Zidrou & Jordi Lefebre, Glorious Summers, Vol. 2: The Calanque (digital, 5/9)

Geof Darrow, Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek (digital, 5/10)

Catana Chetwynd, Still Smitten (digital, 5/16)

Ellin Stein, That's Not Funny, That's Sick (5/16)

Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 2: The Return (digital, 5/17)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Hate, Vol. 1(digital, 5/22)

John Updike, Bech Is Back (in The Complete Henry Bech, 5/22)

Evelyn Waugh, The Holy Places (in Waugh Abroad, 5/22)

Peter & Maria Hoey, The Shadower (digital, 5/23)

Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (in Waugh Abroad, 5/23)

Mathieu Sapin, Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu (digital, 5/24)

Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller, Sailing Alone Around the World (digital, 5/25)

David Kantrowitz, Rats, Demons & Dayjobs (digital, 5/30)

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (5/30)

Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer, The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures (digital, 5/31)

In the coming month (which is already this month, since time never stops), I will continue to read books, and probably to blather about them here. If you keep coming back, I don't know what to tell you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 6, 2026

I had my annual visit to the eye doctor this week, which means - since she's in Manhattan near Union Square - taking a whole day off work and using that opportunity to do some shopping at the Strand. I still miss the review-copy bonanza that store used to be, but all things decline into the West, I suppose, and it's a big, pretty-good standard indy book store these days.

Here's what I found on this trip:

I am about three decades late starting to read Christopher Brookmyre - is he even still writing these days? - but I've vaguely thought about his stuff pretty much all that time. This trip, I found a copy of his first novel Quite Ugly One Morning, which is a short humorous thriller, and I figured I will have a better chance of reading it if it's on the shelf.

Tom Gauld had a new book of science cartoons late last year: Physics for Cats. I'm a big fan of Gauld; he's one of the few cartoonists whose books I still buy in actual physical form and keep, so take that as a glowing recommendation.

I'm still a couple of books behind on Nick Hornby, but I seem to be catching up: I grabbed a copy of Just Like You, his 2020 novel. I'm pretty sure it's a story about middle-class English people with love trouble: this one is about a fortyish woman who becomes the December in a May-December relationship - I think, from hints in the back-cover copy, that the chap she picks up to be May is also Black, or similarly "clearly unsuitable" for her.

Somehow I also got behind on Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, which I was reading consistently for twenty-plus years. I think Blonde Faith is the first one I missed - there are several more, including one more I already have - so I may be able to catch up.

I saw the movie made of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, way back near when it came out., And I've read several of his other books of reportage. But I never read this one - now I can.

And last is a collection of miscellaneous travel pieces by Paul Theroux: Sunrise with Seamonsters. As far as I can tell, he's had a book like this for roughly each decade of his career - this was the first one, starting with short pieces from the late '60s.

Quote of the Week: Fairy Stories

The peasants of early Modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. That is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

 - Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p.29

Be That Way by Hope Larson

First off, this book is not autobiographical, as creator Hope Larson says on the first page of Be That Way. She's about two years younger than her heroine, for one thing. But it is a book about a young woman with artistic talent, growing up in the same town Larson did (Asheville, North Carolina) at about the same time, and apparently includes a lot of the real-world locations young Larson knew herself. So it's memoir-adjacent, at least.

Second: it's not "comics," exactly, as you might expect from Larson's prior work. It's a mixture of prose and illustration, with some comics sections. That's a format that has become pretty common - and very popular! - for younger readers, with Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and so on. But I don't think there have been many books for teens in this format, so Larson is staking out new ground that way. It's an interesting, flexible format - good for both introspection and imagistic moments - and it works well here, where Larson is presenting the story as the diary kept by her main character over one tumultuous year.

Christine is our narrator: that's her on the cover. After a brief intro at age 13 in late 1993, the book settles into her 1996 diary: she wants to be more "shiny," now that she's sixteen - she recently broke up with her first boyfriend Dave, and wants to basically do all the high school things: get a serious boyfriend, do well in school, have great friends, be part of something fun.

The last is already mostly there: Christine has been writing for the school paper, the Cougar Chronicle, since freshman year, and one of her two best friends, Paul, is also an editor there. Paul is dating Jennifer and has been for a long time; Christine resolutely declares she has no romantic interest in Paul and never will; he's just a great friend. Readers can decide for themselves where and how they've seen that before.

Christine's other best friend is Landry, who is the outgoing, gorgeous, more-than-a-little-wild counterpoint to Christine's mostly quiet and contained nature. This is another major thread of the novel, the push-pull of this friendship, with Landry always being big and dragging Christine along with her on her escapades, especially in the middle of the book, where's she's dating a college boy, Jason.

Another, more buried thread, is Christine's home life. She doesn't focus on it - what sixteen-year-old would? - but she's clearly living in a fancy neighborhood of rich people, like Landry and her next-door-neighbor Whit, and her family isn't rich.

Or isn't rich anymore. Her doctor father died in what seems to be early 1993, six months or so before the introduction. Her mother went back to work as a nurse, and the family doesn't seem to be doing badly - they just don't really fit into the neighborhood anymore, and their old friends seem to have quietly fallen away. Christine, as the oldest, has to take on some caring for her younger siblings, Brandon (about 12) and April (probably 2-4 years younger than that). We don't really see her younger siblings, because this is Christine's story, but they - and her mostly-at-work mother - influence how she lives and the space she has available for that life on every page.

Larson tells this story naturalistically, through Christine's diary entries. First the end of her junior year, then the summer, and then into the first half of senior year. She fights with Landry, deals with her relationship with Paul, gets her first job, has another boyfriend for a few months, and just goes through life: working on the school newspaper, doing assignments for art class, seeing movies, hanging out with the friends I've mentioned and others that I haven't.

In the end, Christine is in a good place, and we're happy for her - not just on the relationship side, which will be a big draw for the teen readers of this book, but also in thinking about what she wants to do with her life, where she can take her desire to draw and write things, what will come next as she looks on towards college.

I suspect there will be two main audiences for this book: first, the obvious one, teens, especially girls, especially girls who are interested in art and writing, who are in a spot like this right now or see it coming in a year or two. The other is women who were teens in the mid-90s, who can look back to this time in their lives, and feel the parallels strongly - Larson has a lot of emotionally resonant details here, some of which are Asheville-specific but most of which are just teenagery. I think this book will be familiar to a lot of people - a lot of it was resonant with me, and I'm a decade older than Larson, the opposite gender, and grew up a few thousand miles away.

If either of those things describe you, or describe someone you know well, you might want to take a look at Be That Way. Larson has been making excellent comics for a couple of decades now; this is something bigger, quirkier, and more interesting, but just as excellent.

The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

The influential and stylish French six-book space opera bande dessinée series named after its McGuffin, the Incal, moves into its second half with this book. By this point, series hero John DiFool still has some distinctive characterization - mostly of his negative traits, but we'll take what we can get - while most of the people around him have been smoothed out and perfected by the ongoing fate-of-the-universe plot. As always, it's written by moviemaker and international goofball Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by French master cartoonist Mœbius; the whole series originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the '80s, with the current edition having gone back to the French original to strip out some emendations made by Marvel in their earlier English-language reprinting. This volume was translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, who do the best they can do with Jodorowsky's bombastic, silly dialogue.

To catch up on the background quickly: in the previous three books (The Black Incal, The Luminous Incal, and What Lies Beneath) John found that Incal, a sentient, glowing super-powerful thingy destined to bring balance to the galaxy in much the same way that Anakin Skywalker would in his own universe a couple of decades later. In typical mystical-space-opera fashion, everything was a duality: there were dark and light Incals, which needed to merge; two women who are sisters and guardians of the two Incals; a Great Darkness threatening the human empire that is opposed to the combined Incals; and so forth. John did the hero's-journey thing, turning enemies into allies, going on a dangerous journey to the heart of his world, where the Incals merged and turned into a super-cool spaceship - this is an '80s space opera - and one of the minor characters was subsumed into the Incal gestalt.

John and his allies are in that spaceship as The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above begins. The evil Techno organization - I'm not sure what the overall name is; the Technopope is dead and their headquarters habitat of Technogea is run by the Techno-Centreur and the Cyclic Council, so they're the Techno-somebodies - has taken over human space and is proceeding with their evil plans to seed the universe with Shadow Eggs, semi-living manifestations of the evil Great Darkness. Those shadow eggs will eat all of the stars and then...I'm not really sure. Probably kill everyone; it's that kind of ha-ha-ha evil plot. It's not clear why the Technodudes want to do that; I suspect it's mostly that Jodorowsky assumes techno-anything is evil, and is attributing to them everything he doesn't like in life.

The Incal-starship has powerful weapons, but they can only break shadow eggs into pieces, which then re-form. They need a more organic solution to defeat Techno-ness and Darkness.

So they fly off to the prison planet Aquaend, where the minor character Raimo of Kamar and his crew have already been exiled, discovering a hidden undersea city Vitavil H2O where the locals live in harmony with the native gigantic medusas. (Medusa in the French-language sense of a jellyfish rather than a lady with a stunning gaze.) Those medusa somehow have the power to envelop and destroy shadow eggs, because gigantic sea-dwelling semi-sentients clearly have the power of space-travel, and so the giant wave of Techno shadow eggs is met by and destroyed by a wave of human-guided space-traveling medusas.

Vitavil H2O is also the current home of the human empire's semi-deposed Emperoress, thought dead. But no, he/she fled and is ready to re-take control of the human worlds once the little matter of the Technofellas is resolved.

That gets us about halfway through the book, so it's time to switch gears. The alien Berg race - from the next galaxy over, and invading human space intermittently over the past three books - is about to have its Five Thousand Year Games, in which a few hundred members of some alien race are gathered to fight to the death in the inevitable sandy arena. The single winner of the Five Thousand Year Games gets the honor of impregnating the Berg's Protoqueen - who may be immortal; this isn't clear - and then being disintegrated. After 24,000 such games, legend says, the Bergs will "enter the golden age of eternal prosperity."

This is, of course, the twenty-four-thousandth Games. The competitors this time are all humans. And John must compete - and win! - the game to fulfil the Incal's plans, fucking the giant bowl of goop that is the Protoqueen. (She first extrudes a body that closely resembles John's love Animah, to make the fucking somewhat more palatable.)

In the end, John does not avoid his inevitable post-coital disintegration, but he gets better with the help of his friends. Technogea is attacked and conquered by the forces of righteousness and Incal-hood. Our heroes seem to be entirely triumphant, with two books left to fill, but - shock! horror! - they learn that the Emperoress has been infected by the Great Darkness through a "psycho virus" and is now the new focus of its aims. This is our ending cliffhanger.

Mœbius's art is lovely and muscular; I still have the lurking suspicion that the people who really love this series first saw it before it was translated and don't read French. Jodorowsky's writing is full of super-science and mysticism in almost equal proportions, any distinctive characterization has mostly retreated by this point so his characters can explain the convoluted plot to the reader. I may seem dismisive, but it is definitely fun on a space opera level, full of bizarre ideas, weird technology, and shocking reversals. And there's still two books to go, as it gets bigger and crazier in the usual space-opera way.

The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton

The full title of this book, I should note quickly, is The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's by the historian Robert Darnton, originally published in 1984, and I am surprised to find that Darnton is both an even bigger deal than I expected (Philips, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, National Book Critics Circle Award, Harvard Librarian) and is still alive.

And here I will point out that no one who reads this blog will care what I say about this book, and few (any?) even care about its subject. But this blog is a weird, capricious thing - basically a reading notebook I keep in public for odd, contingent, it-just-happened-that-way reasons - so I read whatever I want to read anyway, and then try to write something about it. I do appreciate you, dear readers - both of you - but I don't essentially care that you're out there.

The Great Cat Massacre is an early work in cultural history, which at the time was a somewhat established stream in French historical thought, but was less well-known in the English-speaking world. Darnton's specialty was then, and has been throughout his career, 18th century France. He's also done a lot of work on the history of the book, and seems to be a deeply textual historian - some are more data-focused, some have other interests, but Darnton's core analytical process stems from close reading of particular texts, which I appreciate.

This book presents six loosely related essays, or chapters. Each one looks at a specific text, and digs into the question of what that text tells us about the world it came from - how is that world different from our own, what is strange or surprising, what is distinctive and particular in that text and how that compares to other things we know or read. A long time ago, my own college thesis was vaguely in the same tradition - titled "Infratextual Structures in Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft" when published in Lovecraft Studies #21; I think my original title didn't have the author names - so this is something I am inclined to be interested in (and, likely, boring about).

So Darnton first looks at fairy tales - in a very structured, research-driven way, comparing versions collected from the oral tradition with the more literary versions from particularly Perrault (since Darnton's focus is on France) but also the Grimms and other retellers across Europe - to, at first, debunk some very Freudian fairy-tale interpretations that were popular in the 1970s. The fairy-tale essay is the longest, and extends much farther than that initial focus; its goal, which Darnton admits is ambitious and declares can never be entirely complete, is to understand the cultural context of these stories. Who told them, to whom, and how were they understood at the time? If they are cautionary tales, what were they cautioning 18th century children against?

Darnton moves on from there to a printers-apprentice's account of that titular cat massacre, which, in his compelling telling, was mostly a sideways attack on the power and prestige of his master and especially his master's wife. Let me quote from his conclusion (on p.262) a passage that helps explain the mindset and point of the entire exercise of these essays:

As I tried to illustrate in explicating the cat massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin, the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry to an alien mentality, And once we have puzzled through to the native's point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world. To get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is a first step towards "getting" the culture.

Darnton is an academic, but writes in a reasonably clear style within that form. He does hedge his points, always being clear what he's willing to claim and what is speculation, and has a massive number of endnotes giving further reading, which I mostly skimmed.

The later chapters include one about the Encyclopedia, one on Rousseau, one on the reading life of a somewhat typical small-city bourgeois, and one on what looks like a fascinating treasure-trove of dossiers and documents from a police inspector tasked around 1750 with keeping track of the literary world of France, mostly because many of them were considered subversive. Darnton's methods are serious and, again, inherently academic, but he does seem to be one of the first to think about doing such close reading and implication-hunting in documents like these for an English-language audience.

And, of course, Darnton's topics are mostly about the world of books and reading - who read what, what lessons they took from it, how writers were seen by the authorities, what folktales "meant" to the people who retold them, and similar things. So those of us inclined to geek out on bookish topics are more likely to enjoy a book of Darnton's than one by another historian who concentrates, for example, on the lives of flax-weavers.

(Note: I have no clear idea of what flax is, nor whether it is possible to weave it.)

This is a forty-plus-year-old book; I found a used copy randomly a decade ago, and it's probably only vaguely in print, if that. I have no illusions many other people will want this particular book. But I do hope the kind of people who would read this blog are interested in the intellectual history of reading, in the question of how people in different times understood the world, and how we can understand people who are very different from us. In all those areas, Darnton has much to say.

Goes Like This by Jordan Crane

I like reading short stories much more than I like writing about them. And I don't read short fiction all that much, so maybe I don't even enjoy even reading them as much as I think I do. That's complicated math, so I'll leave it there.

Jordan Crane has been making comics for thirty years, but I only noticed him with his magnificent graphic novel Keeping Two a few years ago. (Insert the usual disclaimer about the world being huge and full of interesting things, so no one can see all of it they want to.) Since making comics is time-consuming, his next book was Goes Like This, a collection of shorter works - and a lot of prints, actually - originally published from 2002 to 2022.

It is visually inventive, especially the prints, which are eye-popping and stunning. The stories are varied, from wordless one-pagers to longer dialogue-filled full stories. They tend to be sad or depressive at their core, with a surprising amount of death piling up, especially early in the book. (The first two long comics stories, if I remember correctly, sandwich a bunch of prints that all seem to be people falling to their deaths with their mouths open, so I wonder if Crane had a period in his work that was particularly doomy.)

His art style is somewhat malleable - this collection does span twenty years - but it's all in a crisp, indy-comics storytelling mode, his people just a little soft and rubber-hose, their faces expressive with their usually-narrow eyes and other features defined with a few bold lines.

Without diving into individual stories, there's not that much more to say: it's a compelling collection of strong work. The stories stand alone, aside from the first two numbered chapters from a project that I suspect might have been an early attempt at what became Keeping Two. Those stories also tend to have simpler palettes - usually black and white or a few tones - while the prints are often overlaid with bright, jangling patterns. They almost seem to come out of completely different creative impulses in Crane, though you can see some continuity in his people and the situation they're in: the prints are occasionally static, but, especially early in the book, they depict moments, out of context, where something is happening that would not be out of place in his stories.

There is a lot of death in it. Even the stories that don't have on-panel deaths tend to be thematically about things dying or sickly, a relationship or a way of living. Crane does not seem to be a cartoonist of happiness: this is what I'm saying. That's somewhat expected in indy-comics circles, admittedly, but know that Crane goes deeply to that well, both in narrative and in imagery, in this collection.

All of This and Nothing: Under Pressure

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

It's a two-fer this week - maybe even a three-fer. Two famous artists, with one song that you probably already know.

"How well do you perform under pressure?" they ask.

"Well, I'm OK with the David Bowie part if you can do Freddie Mercury." is what you're required to answer.

Under Pressure was a one-off song, with David Bowie joining Queen - apparently because he lived nearby the studio in Montreux where they were recording - and almost being part of multiple songs on what eventually became the 1982 Queen album Hot Space. 

Almost being the important word there.

This one song came together, credited to the four members of Queen and Bowie equally.

And it's been a cultural touchstone every since, a unique amalgam that fits into the work of both artists while having its own quirky specificity.

(It's also one of the great videos from its early era - odd images, smash-cuts, synchronized to the music, with no sign of any of the people who made the music.)

The lyrics are banal and general - this is a song driven by the voices and the sound rather than what they say. 

Under pressure that burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Yeah, pressure is tough, isn't it?

People on streets
Ee da de da de
People on streets
Ee da de da de da de da

This song is a major example of how the best songs can have the silliest-looking lyrics, when you write them out. Songs are gestalts, combinations of sound and emotion, and the words are only one small part of it. This is a wonderful one, and I probably don't have to tell you that.

But I do have to ask: How well do you perform under pressure?

Quote of the Week: Facts and Facts

I knew - and I was pretty damn sure that Captain Alessandro knew too - that Mitchell wasn't alive, that he hadn't driven his car to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, but somebody had driven him there, with Mitchell lying dead on the floor of the back seat.

There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.

 - Raymond Chandler, Playback, p.847-48 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I'm still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it's a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I'd say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that's something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is Sears' new book this year; it follows 2021's Young Shadow and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say "can be considered," because it doesn't reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn't in this book - so maybe it's a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty - mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops - than the typical Big Two character. And he's still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids - a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow's organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he's leaning more heavily into the lefty thing - follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn't, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think "Young Shadow & the Watchdogs" is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it's definitely not that. But it's not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There's only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers - but it's comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids - the term of art used in the book is "prep school jerks" - in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they're going to have a big practice to make sure they're ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids - maybe middle school, maybe late elementary - but no one even mentions school. They're out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don't seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural - signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place - and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don't want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That's another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I'd still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what's the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis by Philippe Riche

I can't tell if Philippe Riche made any comics after this one. He did the two Bad Break books about 2003, this two-book series in 2006, and nothing since. But he also seems to be the same Philippe Riche who works in animation, and that Riche is credited with directing a movie released this year - so he might have just gotten busy with other things.

(This might be a quirk of mine, but I always want to find that creators I know - not even that I like, just anyone whose work I'm even aware of - continued their careers and did interesting or great or exciting things. I worked in publishing for more than a decade, and saw how many creative careers fizzle out after a couple of projects or a short decade. I hate that; I hate living in a world where that's the norm. So I'm always hoping for the opposite, for everyone.)

Be that as it may, this is the back half of the story. The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis continues and completes the story started in the first book, Sapiens, still focusing on the three main characters from Bad Break. Their roles shifted a bit from Bad Break to Alliance - Ernst-Lazare no longer seems to be immortal, or quite as unknowable; Rebecca X is not mentioned as working in porn; and Simon, well, Simon, in this book, seems to have become much dumber and less focused.

We do get a bit more explanation of the backstory, though that mostly fills out the outlines of what we  knew or guessed from the first book. The three heroes have that jeweled Neanderthal skull, and are still looking for an old man, a possibly mentally-ill tramp named Griffon De Martel.

Griffon is both the heir apparent to the (vacant, of course) throne of France, from the medieval Carolingian dynasty, and the last living Neanderthal, the final product of a millennia-long secret society living among modern humans and interbreeding - presumably, exclusively among themselves.

Because of the first aspect of his lineage, he will disinherit Louis, the dissolute Bourbon pretender, due to some complicated hugger-mugger involving something called the Order of Saint Louis. And, because of that, three young blonde women called the Cocaine Sisters - Louis's lovers or friends or enablers or all three - are on a rampage to find and kill Griffon, with high-powered automatic weapons.

Because of the second aspect, as we eventually learn near the end of this book, Griffon is trying to get back to the secret crypt of his people - which is, of course, beneath Paris - where he will reunite that jeweled skull with its body. They both belong to the legendary first leader of his people, forty thousand or so years ago, who made them go underground in human society when the mammoths got hunted to extinction. (I swear I am not making any of this up.) And, legendarily, if the skull is placed on its body by the last Neanderthal, all of the dead Neanderthals will rise and take back the world that is rightfully theirs.

Simon and Rebecca and Ernst-Lazare are mostly bystanders or witnesses to this plot; they're trying to figure out if the skull is valuable, and, if so, to whom. They get shot at by the three women, try to find Griffon to talk to him about this whole bizarre situation, and come out of it all basically the same way they did in Bad Break. They do manage to keep their clothes on this time, which I suppose is an improvement.

It is all very Dan Brown, in that are-you-willing-to-believe-this? style. Riche has nice atmospheric storytelling art here; his people are angular, like a world full of high-fashion models, and his colors are moody. He has a lot of dialogue, to explain this oddball story, and it it all basically makes sense and is believable in the reading, which is all one can expect for a conspiracy-theory book like this one.

I don't think we got, or probably will get, any more comics from Riche, since he's spent the last twenty years in the animation mines. But who knows? Doing animation means he's probably still drawing regularly, so maybe he'll come back - with another tale of these three or something else. I'd like to think so. These books are just weird and specific enough that I feel like the world should have more of them.

Playback by Raymond Chandler

This is the last and least of Raymond Chandler's novels, written after the death of his wife Cissy and published the year before his own death. It's also, uneasily, a sequel to Chandler's previous (longest, best) novel, The Long Goodbye, which can make Playback feel even smaller and less impressive by comparison.

So Chandler didn't do himself any favors with this book. It's still Chandler: there's plenty of strong moments and descriptions and ideas in it, and the detective-plot, though not as robust or resonant as his better books, still works and is at the center of the novel. Playback is not a bad PI novel; it's just disappointing, since we know how much better Chandler could be.

It's about eighteen months after The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's series hero, is still mooning over Linda Loring, the rich heiress who got away in that book. Mooning more obviously here than he was in the previous novel, actually, which I (and many other critics before me) attribute more to Chandler's loss of Cissy.

Marlowe is hired by "Claude Umney, the lawyer" - that's how he inevitably answers his phone, and Marlowe does make a smart remark about it, but it doesn't take - to follow a certain person and report back. Umney is working, he says, on orders from unnamed but powerful forces "back East." The person to be tailed is, of course, a gorgeous blonde woman: Betty Mayfield,  traveling under an alias. Marlowe watches her arrive on the Super Chief train, hang about in the train station for a few hours, and then continue on to San Diego. He follows her there, and to the small community of Esmeralda.

Marlowe finds Mayfield attractive, and thinks she's being blackmailed - she was clearly confronted by a man in the LA train station - so he doesn't just report her location to Umney and finish up the job. Instead, he snoops about, pretending to be her jilted husband to the desk staff at the motel where she's staying, and eventually meets and talks to Mayfield.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with some femme fatale business from Mayfield, a potential murder or death by misadventure but no corpse, the question of the whereabouts of that blackmailer, another PI sent by possibly the same "back East" people, and Mayfield's growing connection to the ex-gangster who owns half of Esmeralda. There's also some mostly-honest cops, and a tough hotel detective, who wander through near the end.

All the materials are there, but Chandler doesn't use them as effectively in 1958 as he did earlier in his career - the Kansas City connection between the second PI and the ex-gangster, for example, is mostly just shrugged aside as coincidence. In the end, Marlowe lets a murderer get away with a stern talking-to, and is rewarded for his bravery by a phone call out of the blue by Linda Loring, the One True Love of his life, who will come back to LA for him if he wants her to.

It's an incongruous ending that feels more like undoing and redoing Long Goodbye than doing up Playback. It might have worked if Chandler had done some work in the middle of the book to contrast Mayfield and Loring - though, frankly, they both seem to be to be cut from the same standard Chandler blonde-dame cloth.

Readers will likely take Chandler's novels in order - there's only seven of them to begin with. You can stop after Long Goodbye is you want to; it's enough of an ending for Marlowe anyway. Playback doesn't retroactively ruin anything, but it is a smaller and lesser thing to come at the end.

Brain Drain, Part 1 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

This much is true: when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain was removed by the pathologist, divided into 240 sections, and, over the next couple of decades, somewhat divvied out to researchers. This only became widely known in 1978. There is, inevitably, a Wikipedia article about it.

Pierre-Henry Gomont's bande dessinée series Brain Drain tells a fictional version of that story. The first half of the story - published as Brain Drain, Part 1 by Dargaud in 2020 and apparently translated into English the same year by Edward Gauvin - sees Gomont getting a little cutesy with those facts. He changes the names slightly - the dead luminary is only called "Professor Albert" and the pathologist, actually Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, is here called "Stolz." And the ghost - or something - of Einstein is a major character. Gomont also diverges from the true history - more so than just having Einstein "alive" and commenting on the action - by making Stolz a horndog for a cute blonde neurologist and introducing rather more drama and running-about than I think the real Dr. Harvey saw.

Well, let me just point to that cover, which seems slightly (and oddly) a Fabulous Freak Brothers homage - that sets the tone for the whole exercise. Gomont has a aggressive line with a lot of mid-century influence in it, matching cleanly-drawn but lumpy people with slashing but precise backgrounds and objects. He also has an equally aggressive narrative tone: this is a story, and he's going to tell it to us, in a clear, detached, omniscient voice.

So "Professor Albert" dies, and "Stolz" performs the autopsy and announces the results to the assembled media. So far, so normal - but Stolz also, on what Gomont presents as a whim or a mania - or a way to get into the pants of that blonde neurologist - removes the brain and hides it, just before the body goes to be cremated.

(The real Dr. Harvey also removed Einstein's eyeballs and gave them to the dead professor's ophthalmologist. Stolz in this book does nothing similar. The historical Dr. Harvey also seems to have been substantially less secretive, making the whole thing more of a conspiracy among doctors, or just a "we doctors know best how to handle these things; we don't need to consider the patient's wishes" attitude.)

After the cremation, an older man shows up at Stolz's house, with the top of his head missing. It is, of course "Professor Albert." He seems to be physical and real in every way - he takes up space, drives cars, is seen by other people, and so on. He's also something like Stolz's Jiminy Cricket, and something like a canary in a coal mine about the state of the removed brain (which, in this book, is sitting in a glass jar, in some kind of liquid - formaldehyde, maybe? purified water? some manner of alcohol? - inside a box, in Stolz's basement).

Anyway, It Is Wacky. Stolz tries to connect with the executor of Professor Albert's estate - it seems to be widely known, or suspected, that Professor Albert's brain is still floating around - but has no luck there. Then large men in suits, who claim to be some kind of government investigators, come nosing around, and Stolz has to flee with the brain and Professor Albert.

This book is only part 1, so it ends with them on the run. Presumably, the second half will wrap up the story, though I don't see how it can reconnect with the actual historical record at this point. (The actual historical record is mostly "Dr, Harvey gave out pieces of the brain to his colleagues, and nothing much happened for twenty years," which is pretty boring in a BD.)

I would not read this hoping it will tell you the real history; it will not. But it is an energetic, goofy story told with a clear voice in a distinctive tone, with wonderful art, and I think Gomont has a point that he's driving the story to. So if the story of the removed brain of a famous historical figure doesn't squick you out, you might want to take a look.