Quote of the Week: The Work Ethic of Interwar British Writers

Most Englishmen dislike work and grumble about their jobs and writers now make it so clear they hate writing, that their public may become excusably sympathetic and urge them to try something else. I have seldom met a male novelist who enjoyed doing his work, and never heard of one who gave it up and took to anything more congenial. I believe it would have been better for trade if writers had kept up the bluff about inspiration. As it is, the tendency is to the opposite exaggeration of regarding us all as mercenary drudges. The truth I think is this - that though most of us would not write except for money, we would not write any differently for more money.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, p.378 in Waugh Abroad

Infernal Angels by Loren D. Estleman

Amos Walker is an old-school PI, with all the baggage that comes with that. The first novel about him came out in 1980, and his creator Loren D. Estleman is still writing Walker novels; I think the most recent book is 2023's City Walls.

I read a lot of hard-boiled PI books in the '90s and somewhat into the Aughts; I started with the old guys but gradually shifted tastes (partially guided by Maryann Eckles, then the Editor-in-Chief of Mystery Guild and a great colleague, who got me to do some first-reading for her) towards women like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller. And then I tapered off the mystery reading after I left fiction publishing and was no longer reading on an industrial level to begin with.

So there are things I think of as favorites even though I haven't touched them much in two decades; that's the peril of living. I read a big bunch of Walker novels back in 2007, right after leaving that editorial job, and have quietly accumulated most of the novels since then on a shelf without reading any of them between '08 and '24.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years. So I read the 2010 Walker novel The Left-Handed Dollar about six weeks ago, and now I'm back again. No promises, but maybe I'll clean out that shelf, one book at a time, as I rotate through my to-be-read shelves.

Infernal Angels was the 2011 Walker novel; it's a bit more thriller-y than I prefer in my mysteries - I was grumping about this twenty years ago here about Lawrence Block novels, so it's not a new complaint; at least I am consistent.

Walker is a middle-aged man and deeply old-fashioned: by the point of this book he's using a cell phone (dragged kicking and screaming, mostly) but resolutely refuses to understand computers or anything else modern. He's a Vietnam vet whose age hasn't quite advanced as quickly as the thirty years since his first novel, but it's starting to tick up noticeably; he's not quite fifty but it's not far away.

And this novel kicks off when a police contact connects him with a vintage-merchandise dealer - that merchandise seems to be largely big-ticket items; furniture and TVs and large-scale home décor - who just had a burglary. Crossgrain, the dealer, had a shipment of TV converter boxes stolen, and asks Walker to try to track them down.

Walker promises three days from his retainer, and goes off to talk to his contacts. He gets the names of three potential fences for material like this. One is a white rapper (Bud Light) who mostly runs a music store now while he works through a murder charge in Guam from the death of his ex-manager. (Bud claims to be completely innocent; Walker believes him.) The other two are, first, another, more traditional scavenger/fence called Johnny Toledo and, second, Eugenia Pappas, the widow of the scion of a long line of fences and stolen-goods receivers - she claims to have gone aboveboard, but Walker and his contacts never believe anyone goes straight in Detroit.

Things get complicated from there - Crossgrain is murdered the very next night, by someone apparently looking for the last converter box, which he unwisely showed on a TV news story about the break-in. There's another death soon afterward, probably killed by the same person. And the converter boxes turn out to be part of a smuggling operation, with ultra-high-grade heroine hidden inside them.

So Walker is pulled into a cross-agency investigation, with Mary Ann Thaler from the feds and John Alderdyce from the locals. Both were in the previous novel; both are management-level but not tippy-top brass; both are old friends who somewhat bend the rules for him, mostly, I think, because it's that kind of PI novel.

There's a villain behind it - who was in a previous Walker book, though I didn't remember her - and the vaguely racist dragon-lady stuff in the previous book gets a workout here, with her frankly silly (and almost James Bond-ian) rationale for her criminal enterprise. Of course, truth and justice win out in the end, but Walker doesn't have to do a whole lot of serious detecting here: contacting Crossgrain and the three fences set everything in motion, and he just has to survive what happens afterward.

As I said, I tend to like mysteries better than thrillers, and particularly mysteries where cops act like real cops and don't just let a random civilian run around causing trouble because his name's on the book cover. This is much more like the latter; I enjoyed it, and Walker's voice is still a fine classic-PI mixture of grumpy and world-weary, but I might not make it through all of the remaining Walker books if they keep being full of eeevil Chinese masterminds and cops who always bail Walker out.

All the Presidents by Drew Friedman

I still wish Drew Friedman was making comics regularly. Oh, sure, his ultra-detailed stippled style takes an immense amount of time, and I have to imagine it's not great for his health to crane over a drawing table making all of those little boxes for hours on end.

But his comics were something unique, a stew of curdled weird pop-culture and photorealism, all filtered through a unique, funny sensibility - not to mention that magnificent, unparalleled art. His portraits have the same artistic strengths, but the bizarre storytelling of his comics is mostly absent.

The Fun Never Stops! will be probably the last book of Freidman comics; that was almost two decades ago. It now looks like comics is something Friedman did in his early career, mostly the '80s and '90s, before he moved into work that paid better and didn't require the same insane level of back-breaking effort. And, again, I completely understand. My wish is more that the universe isn't different - that comics weren't so remunerative that Friedman had to keep doing them, a few stories a year, and hadn't been seduced by the One Big Head model of drawing.

All the Presidents was right in the middle of Friedman's (still ongoing) One Big Head period, from 2019. It followed the three Old Jewish Comedians books, two books of Heroes of the Comics, and Drew Friedman's Chosen People (covering Jews who were not necessarily comedians, though still largely old). Since then, he's put out Maverix and Lunatix (basically a third Heroes of the Comics, focusing on the underground generation) and the very miscellaneous Schtick Figures.

And Presidents is just what it says it is: full-page headshots, drawn by Friedman in his inimitable, labor-intensive stippled style, of the first forty-five presidents, each opposite a page of their vital statistics. (Just the very basics: dates of birth and death, party, term in office, age at inauguration, and one "fun fact.")

This is possibly the least of the One Big Head Friedman books: most of them, for one thing, have more full-figure portraits throughout, but this is entirely One Big Head. It looks like a review of the money of a slightly sweatier and more disreputable world. Friedman doesn't have a personal connection to most of the Presidents - just JFK on - so it is somewhat a long succession of funny-looking dead guys with various outdated permutations of facial hair and jowls.

It can be amusing to poke through and turn up interesting coincidences - did you know Grant was the youngest President ever at the time? All those 19th century guys looked prematurely old, so it was a surprise to me. But the joys of  Presidents are slighter than the other Friedman books; keep that in mind if you dive in.

Bang! by Matt Kindt and Wilfredo Torres

Stop me if you've heard this one before: James Bond, John McClane, Modesty Blaise-as-Miss Marple, and a gender-swapped Michael Knight are recruited by Philip K. Dick to save the world from a secretive nihilistic terrorist organization...and learn a shocking secret!

OK, it's not literally those characters, for what I have to assume are largely not-getting-sued reasons. But we start off, in the first issue of five collected here, with suave British superspy Thomas Cord of MI-X, who has been many different men over the past seven decades or so as he battles the evil global organization Goldmaze, and is currently a stylish Black man who doesn't look unlike a young Idris Elba. He's sent to investigate mysterious writer Philip Verge, who has written a long series of books - it's not clear if these were actually published in ways most people noticed; that detail seems to waffle back and forth - about Cord, which predicted in minute detail everything about his missions, including his death.

(Don't worry, the death already happened - that was a previous Thomas Cord. We see it happen on the page.)

This is Bang!, a stylish mildly reality-bending action thriller by writer Matt Kindt and artist Wilfredo Torres. It was a five-issue series in 2020, and collected in a single volume the same year. There's material in the book that teases additional stories to come, but, as far as I can tell, they didn't come.

But anyway, issue two follows John Shaw, who keeps getting caught up in Goldmaze terrorist incidents in his bare feet (and, to be skiffier, has a continuing supply of a mysterious set of "inhalers" with designer drugs keyed to his DNA that give him specific superhuman abilities - superhuman in the Captain America sense rather than the Superman sense). At the end of his adventure, he's recruited...by Thomas Cord, who hands him the novel telling the story he just lived through.

Next up is Dr. Michele Queen, a brilliant paraplegic cyberneticist with a skintight exosuit that allows her to not just walk but do the usual spy-style karate fighting, and is mentally linked with the intelligent car BOI. She also fights Goldmaze.

Last is Page Turnier, who was a hot-cha spy babe in the '60s - and teamed up with Thomas Cord then - but is now an old Vietnamese lady who is the smartest person in the world and solves drawing-room mysteries. It doesn't seem that Goldmaze would be doing a lot of murders in drawing rooms, but she's recruited, too.

Once they're all brought together, in the last issue, Verge gives them their orders and sends them out: to save the world! (Or is he secretly behind Goldmaze the whole, time, and this is all a trap for the only people who could stop him?)

Verge is Phildickianly-coded, and had a similar Exegesis-like experience that showed him what the world really was, but he's not quite as wild-hair and particular as the real-world Dick - he's here to be mysterious, to be a writer, and to be ambiguously tied to both the good and bad guys for maximum shocks and thrills.

And there are a lot of shocks and thrills. Torres has a fine action-storytelling style for this story, slick and modern, with inventive page layouts, excellent faces, and well-choreographed action. Kindt keeps it all moving swiftly and keeps it basically plausible, for all that I might seem dismissive above. Again, I think the plan was to have a second Bang! series - maybe more than that; the concept is based on reversals so I don't expect it would ever be an ongoing but it could run through three or four iterations before exhausting the idea - but that hasn't happened and, after five years, is getting less likely by the day. But this is a complete story, for all that it ends on a hook for a sequel - you can absolutely read it as a completed thing, and be happy with that.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 5: F.52 by Yves Chaland

As it happened, this was the last: Yves Chaland published five volumes in his "Freddy Lombard" series in the 1980s, before his untimely death in 1990 in a car wreck. In some better world, he could have gone on to do more of them, over the next three decades - Chaland would only have been in his late sixties now - but that's not the case.

All five of the Freddy Lombard books stand alone, and I think all of them comment or refer in some sly ways to classic bande dessinée stories and tropes, in ways I don't have the cultural knowledge to trace. They also were all historical - not just now, since they're about forty years old, but they were set twenty or thirty years before their publication, in the shiny post-war era of the '50s or very early '60s. The books don't say this very explicitly, except for the fourth, Holiday in Budapest, which has to be 1956 given the events in it.

This fifth and final book, F.52, is not quite as obviously set in the 1950s, but there are strong indications for readers who are looking for them. The title refers to a new gigantic intercontinental jet, flying from Paris to Melbourne in twenty-four hours - the idea of a "giant" airliner and the flight time and the newness of both of those things place it strongly in historical time. The fact that the plane is flying from Le Bourget, which had lost all regular scheduled flights and was purely a business aviation hub when Chaland made this story, would have been a major signpost to its original European audience, too.

Our three heroes, Freddy and his two friends Dina and Sweep, are working as attendants on the maiden voyage of this plane. They are central, but, somewhat like the other books in the series, this isn't entirely their story. F.52 begins a bit languidly, with our heroes having a flat tire in their famously unreliable car, and needing to hitch a lift to make it to the plane on time. (Well, not on time - but not too late to make the flight.) There are some thriller elements, including a Soviet spy taking dirt from a secret site back to his spymasters, and a pair of young schoolgirls switched for deliberately-unclear reasons by a rich couple, but those are part of a larger, workaday narrative of the whole flight, taking only a little more page-space than an nasty purser sexually harassing Dina.

Chaland gives the switched-girls plot real power here - some elements are odd, such as why the rich parents do it at all, and why they thought switching dresses on two girls who look so different would actually work - but it comes across as inevitable, and we see the plane's staff defer to the rich passengers in first class over and over again, so we understand how it could work and how those parents might decide to just do what they want, assuming they will get what they want, this time as always before.

In the end, this is fiction, so it all comes out satisfyingly by the time the plan lands in Melbourne. Chaland's drawing is excellent here, in that mid-century ligne clair style - his people have energy and life, and his spaces look real and clearly of their time. If this had to be the end, if Chaland had to die so young, this is about as good a version of this story we could have asked for to see him off.

Better Things: Eye Witness on the Run

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

Here's another obscure one, I think. (I always hope I'll post something like that and there will be an immediate comment to say "No, man! This song was huge! Sold a million copies, the band is still on a global tour, piling up the simoleons!" We always want the things we like to be liked by everyone.)

My song for this week is the bluesy stomp Eye Witness on the Run, by the band TJ Kong and the Atom Bomb, from their 2012 record Manufacturing Joy.

As far as I can tell, the official lyrics aren't anywhere online, so anything I quote below is me listening to the song and trying to parse it out.

This is one of those songs that starts slow, and gets slow in the middle - I'm listening to the great shuffle-y section at about 3:30 as I type this - and then speeds back up for the lyrics. I don't think it means much of anything; I think this is a "telling the mundane story of a recent day in my life" kind of song.

And that's just fine, when it sounds like this, and the musicians are jamming together so well.

Oh it was late last night
And the Texaco light burned
Like a moon on the map of his face

That's how it starts; that's the way it goes - that kind of imagistic, allusive description of events that were probably fairly pedestrian. But any events can be big and exciting and meaningful with the right music - and this is.

Just let it start to play, that stop-and-start guitar line, the maracas or whatever in the background, and then let the rhythm section kick in. I suppose there are people out there who won't find it compelling, but, man, it must be sad to live like that.

Quote of the Week: Site of a Fete

The village hall stood in the middle of the High Street, just abaft the duck-pond. Erected in the year 1881 by Sir Quentin Deverill, Bart, a man who didn't know much about architecture but knew what he liked, it was one of those mid-Victorian jobs in glazed red brick which always seem to bob up in these olde-worlde hamlets and do so much to encourage the drift to the towns. Its interior, like those of all the joints of its kind I've ever comer across, was dingy and fuggy and smelled in about equal proportions of apples, chalk, damp plaster, Boy Scouts, and the sturdy English peasantry.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.205

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

You can think of The Mating Season as the finale of one of the greatest comedy trilogies of all time - it closely followed the wonderful Jeeves & Wooster novels The Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, and the next time Jeeves appeared, it would be in the Wooster-less Ring for Jeeves.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

I just did, for example: quad erat demonstrandum.

And I have to immediately apologize, because reading a good Bertie Wooster novel puts the old grey matter into Bertie Wooster mode, and I start faffing off in all directions for no good reason.

The Mating Season was the new novel about Jeeves and Wooster in 1949, fifth of what would eventually be twelve novels (plus a passel of short stories, with four major collections and a scattering of others in miscellaneous books). That puts it towards the end of prime-period Wodehouse: he started writing at the turn of the century, got good at humor within a decade and magnificent sometime in the '20s, had a great run in the '30s and '40s that slowed in the '50s, and finished up with somewhat shorter, less complex books before he died, knighted and in his mid-nineties, in 1975. There are roughly a hundred Wodehouse books, just counting titles he published in his lifetime; if you include repackagings and similar things, the total is even higher.

But this is one of the best ones, even with the caveat that all of the Jeeves stories are good - oh, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (the last novel finished by Wodehouse in his life, published in 1974) isn't where I'd recommend starting, but it's just fine about mid-way through. Mating Season, similarly, I'd put a few books in - it builds on the earlier novels, and works better if you know some of the characters already.

Wodehouse worked with a number of common situations and plot devices, something like a formal banquet at a big country-house, so that the broad outlines would be similar but the details and recomplications are specific to the particular book. So this one has Madeleine Basset in it - she's always one of my favorites; so soppy - but mostly at a distance, and only showing up for one major scene. 

Someone has probably developed a schema for all of those Wodehouseian elements, but I haven't seen it. Mating Season is the one where Bertie Wooster, our narrator and hero, is visiting Deverill Hall pretending to be the noted orange-juice drinker and newt fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is also present, pretending to be him. 

(The copy I read this time was missing roughly a signature - probably a binding error, since there's no gap in the pages - and it came right at the point where this switcheroo was explained. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I read Mating Season, and hummed over the rest.)

Along the way, there are four pairs of hearts who are sundered at least once during the narrative and need to be reunited, not least because one of them (the aforementioned soppy Miss Bassett) will attach herself to Bertie if he's not careful. And the reuniting, as always, falls to Bertie, with support from Jeeves.

Anyway, this is a Jeeves and Wooster novel: it's set mostly in a country house, there are impostors, and Bertie sums up the sundered and reunited hearts at the end to put a bow on up the proceedings. Jeeves is absent much of the time, meaning his counsel is not available at important moments and things can go wrong in amusing ways for a while. I still think Joy in the Morning is the absolute best Jeeves novel, but this one has a lot of great material - Wodehouse's writing is particularly amusing and sprightly here, with a lot of good lines in that goofy, slightly confused Bertie voice.

Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty

I've complained, probably more than is wise here, about how I find it hard to read long books these days. ("Long" here meaning "taking more than the time I have available in one weekend to read," so somewhere in the 300+ plus page range, sometimes shorter than that.) And I've also mentioned how middle-aged men turn to non-fiction, like a sunflower following the sun, even when they don't do it intentionally or on purpose.

So even though I want to read long, meaty novels - I was just looking at the Steven Erikson shelf yesterday, thinking of how I really loved the first half of the Malazan series, but I can see no way I'm going to read even one more of those books any time soon, and I read the ones I did well over a decade ago now - it just doesn't happen. And when I do manage to read something longer, something more substantial, a book that took me five days across two weekends....well, it's probably going to be non-fiction.

We are all prisoners of the people we actually are, as we keep trying to be the people we want to be.

Anyway, so I read Brian Doherty's fine history of underground cartooning Dirty Pictures recently. It's one of those tell-the-whole-story books with a super-descriptive subtitle, so let me just quote that at you: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.

I read it in the hardcover edition, from 2022, which I got a year later when it was remaindered. (There goes Gloria Mundy, as I bet someone in the underground world said.) There is also a paperback, which seems to have the identical text; it's not like anything much changed about the comix of the '60s and '70s in 2022.

Doherty has a big cast and a lot of threads to cover: his goal is to cover all of underground comix, with a central focus mostly on the seven Zap creators (with a tropism to R. Crumb, obviously) and a secondary focus on the group that peaked slightly later (especially Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith) and also attention to other clusters or areas of interest, from the women (which seems to turn into Trina Robbins vs. every other woman in comics eventually) to Justin Green and others. He also wants to start from their childhoods, for at least some of these major figures - Crumb, Spiegelman, Robbins, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson, Frank Stack, Spain Rodriguez - to trace their commonalities (Mad magazine and Harvey Kurtzman in general, overwhelmingly) and show how they all ended up "together."

There are seventeen chapters here, which tend to each be about a period of time or a particular piece of the story - distribution troubles and police busts, changes in audience and how undergrounds influenced the other worlds of comics in the USA - with each one broken into smaller sections, to explain what this person or group was doing, and then that one, and so forth.

Doherty has organized a lot of material here - he has an extensive list of acknowledgements at the end, and seems to have spent a lot of 2019-2021 talking to nearly all of the players still alive and willing to talk. He did a lot of original research, as well as having what seems to be a smart, informed look at the existing literature - which, in this case, means nearly fifty years of fan publications, multiple university archives, and just knowing the long and twisted history of undergrounds.

I'd estimate the book hits its halfway point in the early 1970s, which is about right: half the book is childhood and influences and those first five to ten years of ferment and explosion, and the back half is everything that happened afterward: how underground morphed into "indy" and what that meant, what the old underground creators and the next generation of creators most influenced by them did in the '80s and '90s and so on.

I am not an expert on this area; I know a bit, and have been reading underground-influenced stuff for a long time, but I'm a generation too young to have been there, and, as the hippies always said, you don't know the scene if you weren't in the scene. But I found Dirty Pictures to be a thorough, fascinating, well-researched look at a whole universe of comix, doing heroic work to differentiate and describe several dozen creators and their work over four or five decades. 

ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so - kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It's been a durable model, and it's worked quite well, from what I've seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I've covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven't read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And...it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it's reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum. In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don't think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters - whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers - are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it's presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They're not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up - which is what happens here. In the book itself, it's all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But...that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don't want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce's parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that's probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco's last name is Aureliani, which isn't hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian.

Life of Vice by Robin Enrico

I'm pretty sure this is a sidebar. Not that that's a bad thing, just a thing to note.

As far as I can tell Robin Enrico's main series was Jam in the Band, about an all-female rock band - that was collected in 2017. Somewhere in the middle of that big series, he also did a three-issue sidebar story about a secondary character, Becky Vice.

And that was collected in 2018 as Life of Vice, which I just read.

Enrico has a cartoony style, full of confident fat black lines - lots of straight lines, lots of big gestures, characters mostly looking fairly flat and facing forward - talking to the reader even when they're in dialogue with each other. He also does a dialogue thing I haven't seen before: one character's question will be in a normal balloon, but the reply will be lettered large across the background, almost like a sound effect - looks like it's usually something said louder and more enthusiastically than normal, but it also sometimes seems to be internal dialogue, like a thought bubble.

The plot is fairly minimal: reporter Shelby Ambrose (the one with glasses on the cover) tags along with rock star Becky Vice on a trip to Las Vegas, where Vice is hosting the American Pornography Awards. Ambrose is writing for Rocking Roll magazine, whose title Enrico draws so stylized I first thought it was called R.King R.11, and thought it was some weirdo indy downtown thing, and wondered how they had the budget to send a reporter on a major trip like this.

They drive through the desert, stay in a hotel room together, attend the awards ceremony, and go to a big wrestling event the next night where Vice's ex is competing for the title. But, mostly, they talk - about Vice's life, about her various professional activities (music, early sex work, a sidebar career as a sex-advice columnist), about both of their sex lives, and so on. 

The story was originally a three-issue series, and each issue is one day - with a two-page intro for the day before, to set it all up. It's one semi-crazy weekend in Vegas, and the two characters do drink a lot, but otherwise don't do any of the traditional crazy Vegas stuff (no illegal substances, no hookups regrettable or otherwise, no gambling, no run-ins with mobsters, etc.)

So Life of Vice came across to me as cozier and more intimate than I expected from a "reporter spends a crazy weekend at the Porn Awards with a wild child rock star" - it's mostly about dialogue, how these two characters relate to each other. Or, maybe more so, how Ambrose is getting stories out of Vice to write this article - though Ambrose comes across as young, maybe a bit naïve, and mostly along for the ride, just letting Vice talk about whatever she wants and getting it all down on paper.

Better Things: Blood Is Thicker Than Water

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

I really doubt you know what song I'm writing about here. A lot of things have been called Blood Is Thicker Than Water, and this one is, let me polite, not the biggest or best-known.

But it's a great song, from a great record, from an LA band that had at least this moment in 1992 - it was a single, it got some airplay, it made at least a small mark in the world.

This Blood Is Thicker Than Water is by Thelonious Monster - a band whose name I can never spell without checking it twice - from the Beautiful Mess record. It's a song about family, and who you are, and who you want to be. And, more than that, who you end up being despite it all.

Because blood is thicker than water
Oh yeah, blood is thicker than water
At least that's what they say, yeah that's what they say
But I don't know, yeah I don't know

The spoken intro is about the singer's sister, a "born-again Christian" who is "so far away." The first verse is about his father; so is the third. The middle verse is about found family; the friends he insists are better and more important than blood relatives.

But then the chorus comes back, of course.

I swore I'd never ever be like my dad
He smoked and drank and yelled at everyone
I swore I'd never ever be like him
But now I look in the mirror and there he is, yeah

None of us are the people we wanted to be - some of us are closer than others. We're not in the places we want to be. We might not be with the people we want to be with: friends or family or lovers or anyone. We didn't come from what we dreamed about, and didn't get there later, either.

All because blood is thicker than water - at least that's what they say.

Quote of the Week: Cops in Their Natural Habitat

They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and gray like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them, All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.353 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Box by Patrick Wirbeleit & Uwe Heidschötter

Stories for young readers come in multiple styles - some are appropriate for kids of various ages but are also full of jokes aimed at their parents, a la Jay Ward, and some are more purely kid-focused. It's a big spectrum, and there are multiple areas (not just those nudge-nudge jokes that reference politics and other old-people concerns) where material can be more friendly to a wider range of ages.

But, on the other hand, you also have Go, Dog, Go. I love it; I read it a million times to my own kids; I can still quote it years later. (It is not hot here under the house.) The art is lively and fun, the language simple but bouncy - but, when I read it, I was enjoying it on the level my kids did. Some things are just purer that way.

Box isn't quite that kid-focused. But it is kid-focused: it's a graphic novel for kids, not for their parents, and it's towards the purer end of the young-readers world. Writer Patrick Wirbeleit has a long career making books for kids, and I think illustrator Uwe Heidschötter has similarly mostly worked on stories for younger people, in print and animation.

Wirbeleit and Heidschötter are German; it looks like there are four Box books in German - at least that there are four that American Amazon will show me. But only this first one has been translated into English, as far as I can tell, implying that not as many Americans were interested the story of his boy and his magical talking cardboard box.

Matt is the main character: he's a normal boy, probably late-elementary age. Likes to build things. He finds a cardboard box out on the street and decides to use it as part of a project to make a space station - or so he tells his mother. The box talks, and can create tools and materials out of itself - Matt doesn't actually call it Box here as I recall, but we can call it that.

So the two make stuff together. Box is enthusiastic and energetic but not necessarily particularly skilled or knowledgeable; a see-saw he takes the lead on has the minor flaw of not moving up or down. But he is enthusiastic, and we assume this will let Matt take the lead and be the smart, organized one.

This book, though, takes a tangent almost halfway through. Matt lets his parents see Box, despite his new friend's misgivings, and learns that adults freeze when they see Box. It's not permanent - the sorcerer who made Box can bring them back with a magical green powder - but Matt does want his parents back.

They need to head off into the woods and find the sorcerer. Luckily, we already know he's a nice guy - Box left him because he just wanted to do magic all the time, and Box needs a friend who will build stuff with him. But the sorcerer lives way out in the woods, has a lot of scary "keep out" signs around his house, and has gotten into a slightly magical predicament when they arrive, so it's a little more complicated than Matt hoped.

But it does all end up exactly as the reader would expect: parents restored, Box firmly part of Matt's house if kept secret from the parents, friendly sorcerer off in the distance to presumably spark some additional adventures.

Wirbeleit and Heidschötter tell this all in short comics chapters, with quick dialogue and an engaging loose art style full of earth-tones and big faces. It is mostly for kids, especially those who like building stuff, but it's amusing and fun even for readers somewhat older and less fond of swinging hammers.

Quit Your Job and Other Stories by James Kochalka

I haven't read much of James Kochalka's work recently, but that's OK: this book is from before most of the books of his I read anyway!

(Does that make sense? I'm not sure it even makes sense as a sentence, let alone as an argument.)

Quit Your Job and Other Stories collects four Kochalka comics stories that I think are nearly thirty years old now: the copyright page lists 1997, 1998, and 2002 dates. This book is from 2015, which is still longer-ago than it seems.

There are four stories, alternating long and short, and they're all linked, somewhat, sort of. The first, title story is the most separate - the Kochalka-insert character (apparently called Magic Boy, but never named that in the book) is seen as a young man, living a normal life one day in a snowy town, talking to his talking cat and skipping work when he misses the bus. He also finds a magic ring in the snow along the way, though all it seems to be able to do is blow things up when he gestures at them - not one of your traditional "magic ring" properties, and less useful than wishes or invisibility or being able to rule the world if you renounce love. The title, in context, is descriptive rather than imperative - I'd always taken it the other way.

"Primal Brown" is the shortest story, and a connector - Magic Boy, or maybe Kochalka-the-cartoonist, is at his drawing board, and draws or dreams this story, which I suspect is a Peanuts reference. A round-headed naked kid with a single curlicue hair comes out of the water in a jungle, somewhere, and then the cartoonist wakes up.

The last two stories have the Primal Brown character in them, as well as the old-man version of Kochalka's Magic Boy character - again, not called that, but drawn like Magic Boy in other stories so let's assume it's him. The other long story is "Paradise Sucks," which has multiple threads that mostly come together: Brown and some similar people in a jungle, the wizard-looking God who made them (and his insect buddies/helpers) pretending to be nice to the jungle people but mostly teasing them, and old Magic Boy living on dumpster roasted nuts and making abstract expressionist art that urbanized round-headed guys love before suddenly finding himself in the same jungle as God and the primal people.

Last is "The Devil Makes a Man," in which one of the insects - explicitly the devil here, I suppose - makes a robot friend from Brown's rib, but Brown kills it because it's against God's will. (Which...I dunno, I didn't see anything in this story or earlier that explicitly says that, but maybe....?)

The title story is the most straightforward; the others function more on dream or imagistic logic, with scenes that flow into each other and go odd places along the way - they imply or sketch their meanings and purposes more than say anything outright.

This is quirkier, earlier, rawer Kochalka than most of what I've seen - a creator still making comics pages from the thrill of it, and seeing where each ink line takes him rather than planning out a careful journey up front.