Books Read: March 2026

Is it really April of 2026? Neither of those things seems plausible. (I also had an AI tool at work confidently tell me it was 2025 several times this past week, which may be adding to my confusion. Maybe 2025 will never end.)

Anyway, assuming a month did just end, and that it was actually March of 2026, here's what I read:

Anders Nilsen, Tongues, Book 1 (3/1)

Peter Kuper, Insectopolis (3/6)

Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell, Elric: The Dreaming City (digital, 3/7)

Jordi Lafebre, I Am Their Silence (digital, 3/8)

Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx (3/10)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies (digital, 3/14)

Osamu Tezuka, Tomorrow the Birds (digital, 3/15)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat (3/15)

Ana Oncina, Just Friends (digital, 3/20)

Max Huffman, Dogtangle (digital, 3/21)

Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (3/21)

Zabus and Hippolyte, Incredible! (digital, 3/22)

Mike Dawson, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One (3/28)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin (digital, 3/29)

Michael Swanwick, The Universe Box (ARC, 3/31)

In April, if this is April, which I'm not sure I'm convinced of, I will read more books.

Quote of the Week: I Tell You This In Confidence

This was a determined-looking young woman in a blue dress and a large hat of a bold and flowery species. Archie happening to attract her attention, she gave him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes, then, as if she did not think much of him, turned to her companion and resumed their conversation - which being of an essentially private and intimate nature, she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a ringing soprano which penetrated into every corner of the lobby. Archie, waiting while the brigand reluctantly made change for a dollar bill, was privileged to hear every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 141

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas

About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey's Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn't entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.

A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald's Happiest Adventures similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure '60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.

The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim's Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn't break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He's also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim's self-portrait in Little Nothings.

But if you're going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently - not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.

Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely - Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge's motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice - but he's not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he's looking for.)

Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters - the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on - as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.

It's a fairly talky story, because it's about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn't have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)

As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It's not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim's point: there's no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.

As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can't quite call off-model but doesn't quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim's long speeches - and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial. 

Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the '60s origin is...how do I put this delicately?...not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I'm sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you're looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure - and why not? it's a fun mix - Donald's Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.

A Billy the Kid Alphabet by Rick Geary

This was a Kickstartered project; you might not be able to get it. On the other hand, Rick Geary has been making books for decades - and comics for even longer than that - so I have to think that he'll have a way for people to buy his stuff. You don't get a career of that length and depth by making it hard for people to pay for your work. My guess is that it will show up on the Books page of his website eventually.

Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books - at this point, I think his output is about one Kickstarted book a year, and he's had probably a dozen or more going back at least a decade - for a while, and I've been backing them to get the books, since I'm a long-standing Geary fan.

The project for 2025, which got to me early in the new year, was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, an abecedary about the man known to history as William Bonney.

And you might be asking "wait, didn't Geary already do a book about Billy the Kid?" That's right: in 2015, he did a more traditional narrative version of Bonney's story, The True Death of Billy the Kid. That earlier book is longer, organized in a more familiar way, has more details, and in general is a better place to start. (Geary also did a book about the related Lincoln County War around the same time.)

But Geary is a fun, quirky creator, and I do enjoy his quirky projects. This is definitely one of them.

Alphabet more-or-less tells Bonney's story, though not in order. Geary has a reasonable word or phrase for each letter, from Alias (covering the names used by Bonney) to Zero (debunking the "he survived his death" rumors), but the stricture of the alphabet means that, for example, the Lincoln County War is referred to a few times before we get to Regulators (the group Bonney was part of during that war) and Tunstall (the landowner Bonney worked for, whose death sparked the war).

So Geary does get to the high points of Bonney's life - that war, his capture, trial, and escape, how he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett - but not quite in the order that they happened in life. This might confuse some readers, assuming Alphabet has readers who aren't familiar with the basic facts already.

Each letter has a left-hand page, with the letter big and the explanatory text for the chosen word, and then a right-hand page, with a Geary pen-and-ink illustration of the thing he's writing about. As always, Geary's art is detailed and particular - he's always been good at 19th century faces, clothing, and surroundings, and Alphabet shows his strengths well.

Again, this is a book that would be difficult to find at this point, though it will probably be available from the author in the near future. If you are a Geary or Bonney fanatic who didn't know about it, I wish you luck in finding it.

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

I might have been in the wrong mood for this book, or maybe didn't read it the right way. But I found Jeff VanderMeer's Acceptance to be too full of too many things, trying to be three novels at the same time and not landing with me as any of them.

(Plenty of other people have praised this, and the trilogy it concludes, since VanderMeer published it in 2014, and I've generally liked VanderMeer's work - so it's more than likely the issue is with me.)

VanderMeer famously put out this entire trilogy in less than a year, but it took me more than a decade to get to it: first Annihilation, then Authority, and finally the conclusion. They're near-future, or maybe alternate-present, horror-tinged science fiction. Something transformed a stretch of coast - VanderMeer never says in the text precisely where it is, but it was inspired by the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in the Florida panhandle - about thirty years before. Area X is full of strangeness, and wiped clean of nearly all signs of humanity. A government agency, "Central," established a division, the Southern Reach, to investigate Area X; it has sent expeditions through the one portal into this transformed landscape regularly over the decades, with minimal scientific results and various horrific ends to many of the people involved.

Annihilation was the story of the "twelfth" expedition - like many things about Area X and the Southern Reach, the initial story is not precisely true - told by "the biologist" through her journals. Authority was the story of a new Director of the Southern Reach, sent by Central after a failed career doing other spy things elsewhere in the world, who was generally just called Control. He spent a lot of time talking to a version of the biologist from the first book, created by Area X and called Ghost Bird for opaque reasons, and some time countering various bureaucratic maneuverings and schemes from longer-serving members of the Southern Reach, with their own agendas.

Acceptance is a direct sequel to Authority - Control and Ghost Bird went through a portal to Area X at the end of that book, and one narrative strand here follows them. It's also a prequel to the whole series, with a major thread about Saul Evans - the only major character regularly referred to by his actual name in the novel - the keeper of the lighthouse that eventually became a focal point of Area X and the only major human-made piece of infrastructure remaining there.

VanderMeer rotates viewpoints - from The Lighthouse Keeper to Ghost Bird to Control to The Director (another major character from the earlier novels, who I've neglected to mention, who also has two names) - and switches timeframes, covering the period just before the creation of Area X with Saul, various times during the Director's tenure running Southern Reach, and the journeys of Control and Ghost Bird back in Area X.

I found each of these threads to be separate from each other, part of the same overall story of Area X but not as resonant with each other as I think I was supposed to. In particular, Saul's story was just sad and pointless: he was manipulated by other people, and maybe the mysterious cosmic or alien forces behind the transformation, so he lost everything and was utterly destroyed in a horrible, unpleasant, creepy way. So, yes: he was mostly happy, and had a man he loved, but then something used him to transform the world, kill millions of people, and bring about Creepy Armageddon. I didn't find that cathartic, or inevitable - just tedious and unpleasant and utterly regrettable.

This was the kind of book where I liked the sentences and paragraphs, appreciated the character insights and wanted to know how it all worked out - but didn't care, in the end. This is a world that has had a Weird Apocalypse, and we still, after three novels, don't know how or why. There's only so much wandering around and talking about different pieces of the elephant I can stand without an actual elephant being revealed. And, I suppose, I've discovered that's two novels worth: I can take two, but three is Right Out.

You may react differently, but, if you've read the first two Southern Reach books and are hoping for a big reveal at the end...well, you may want to recalibrate your expectations.

Kiosco by Juan Berrio

I didn't know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let's see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn't need.

Kiosco is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide panel to a page, originally published in Spain by DIBBUKS in 2014 and published in this edition for the US market by Europe Comics in 2017. It doesn't credit a translator; it didn't need one. Someone wrote the descriptive copy in English, but then I bet someone wrote descriptive copy for this in Spanish, French, and German earlier, and we don't credit those people, either. (No offense: I've written descriptive copy for books, back in my misspent youth. It's a skill, and a necessary function, and I didn't get credited, either.)

The main character is a young man. We see painting apparatus in his apartment, and him working at it, so we think he's an artist. But the way he makes his living, we think, is by running a little coffee-and-pastry stand in a local park, in whatever city this is he lives in. A kiosk, we might say in English. I gather "Kiosco" is the Spanish equivalent.

This is the story of one day. He gets up, gets ready, pokes at a painting briefly, and then sets off on his bicycle to work with a tray of croissants. He opens the shop, the sun rises, and he's ready to greet the day.

But though the park is full of people passing through, no one is spending money at the kiosk. Berrio shows time passing, with some wonderfully expressive pages in soft earth tones - I'm not sure if it's watercolor or colored pencils. He goes back and forth between the hubbub of the passing crowd - different every time, a fascinating array of different faces and body language and gesture, all going somewhere else to do something else - and our main character, standing and fidgeting and cleaning the stand and tables yet again to keep himself busy.

There are a few scenes of someone almost shopping at the stand, but no one actually does. It even rains, to make this a comprehensively bad day.

Eventually, though, he does have a customer. I won't spoil it. It's lovely and bright and happy, and that ends his day in the kiosk and, soon afterward, the book.

I don't know if Berrio typically works wordlessly; I found this book randomly and the only other Berrio book I see available in North America is similarly wordless, for kids. (But he has a long list of previous works on his Spanish site, and wordless comics famously travel the most easily.) This is a sweet little book in a lovely cartoony style, and I'd love to see more of Berrio's work make it over to my side of the Atlantic.

All of This and Nothing: Life Design

"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.

I know this song because I stayed at a hotel. The Hard Rock Hotel in Universal Orlando used to - and might still, for all I know - give away a mixtape to guests, called Sounds of Your Stay. I think it was a roughly annual thing. It was entirely digital even then; it might just be a non-downloadable stream these days.

My family stayed at the Hard Rock, on a big theme-park vacation, back around 2010. I liked some of the music on the collection, and I guess I'm still listening to this song even now.

This is Life Design by the Parlotones. (And I see, right this moment, that the mixtape got the title slightly wrong, and I've been thinking of this song as Life's Design for a decade. But I do also have the record it came from, Stardust Galaxies, which does not have the possessive.)

This is a bombastic song, sung in a register to emphasize that. I do like rock 'n' roll with pretensions, at least some of the time, so that doesn't bother me - it may get to some listeners. But it is big, with vague words that imply a lot more than they actually say, and a theme that, as far as it can be made entirely clear - the point is to be not-quite-clear to be even bigger and more impressive - is about All Of Life.

Again: I like it. It swings for the fences, and I think gets the ball solidly out into the parking lot. I hope you agree.

This is our story, this is our life design

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 28, 2026

One book this week - it actually arrived in the mail a week ago on Saturday, but I didn't have time to post for last Sunday, and no one cares that much anyway.

The book is the recently Kickstarted collection of Mike Dawson's comics, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One, which - like a lot of Kickstarted projects - is probably not actually available generally right now. But I would not be surprised if Dawson has it on a webstore eventually. It collects three issues of his self-published 'zine of the same name, plus (I think) some random other comics from various places. (I've seen Dawson in the NY Times a few times over the past year or two - I think both in that page-two space in the Metropolitan section and in the Book Review - so maybe that material, or short comics from his website, or both, or other things.)

Anyway, this is now a book, I'm going to read it, and you probably can't find it right now if you wanted to - but maybe you'll have a chance later, if you want to make a note.

Also, the final cover is slightly different from the version I have here from the Kickstarter page - all the lettering is hand-drawn and new, with "Fun Time" slightly different and the 3D effect in a darker shade of the purple color.

Quote of the Week: Man's Best Friend

It did not take Man long - probably not more than a hundred centuries - to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or a llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg, or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection. When the first man brought the first dog to his cave (no doubt over and above his wife's protests), there began an association by which Man has enormously profited.

 - James Thurber, Thurber's Dogs: An Introduction, p.799 in Writings & Drawings

Glorious Summers, Vol.1: Southbound! by Zidrou and Jordi Lefebre

This is not autobiographical. The main character is indeed a man who makes comics for a living and lives in Belgium, like Zidrou, the writer of the series. But Pierre Faldérault is a good two decades older than his creator, and is an artist - we see him laboring over his drawing board at the beginning of the story, finishing up his work so the family can go on their summer vacation.

(And it is very much a European summer vacation - they have a month, so they can go somewhat aimlessly and - even more importantly - if they get delayed three days at the start because Pierre is frantically coloring the last pages of "Daddy Clown," that's not such a big deal.)

Glorious Summers is a six-volume series - the first five of which were translated into English almost a decade ago - written by Zidrou and drawn by Jordi Lefebre. They'd done the one-off Lydie a few years before, and apparently worked well together. This first book, Southbound! was published in French by Dargaud in 2015, and this Lara Vergnaud translation came out from Europe Comics in 2018.

I suspect the whole series is told in flashbacks; this one certainly is. We start with Pierre and his wife Maddie in what is probably the modern day - older, settled, happy, as they go to a place where they vacationed many years before. They remember the year 1973, and the rest of the story is told then.

Pierre's career is not terribly stable; he's never had a big hit but does keep getting work from BD magazines. Maddie works in a store selling shoes, and hates it - she notes that she's been moved from one department to another, finding each one worse and worse. She's also on the verge of leaving Pierre, for the kind of reasons that are too big to explain. This, they think, will be the last family vacation - after the summer, she'll take the kids to her mother.

There are four children, all young - the squabbling girls Nicole and Julie, their younger brother Louis with his head always in a Lucky Luke book, and the pre-schooler Paulette. They're fun, quirky kids - each one gets some personality, from the bookish Louis with his imaginary friend Beekoo the Squirrel to each of the three girls - and Zidrou and Lefebre do a great job of showing the ways a family has rituals (we must always get fries when crossing back into Belgium!) and running jokes and just silly standard turns of phrases.

It's a happy family, mostly - the way any family is mostly happy. There is that looming possible separation. And there's also some mostly off-stage drama involving Pierre's brother Xavier, which affects this vacation a lot, in the end.

Southbound! is a story of the day-to-day, focused on the part of life when you can get away from the grind and spend time with your family, the times when memories are made and families are as strong and connected as they get. Zidrou keeps his story mostly mundane - there is the Xavier thread, and the potential breakup looming, but those aren't central. It's mostly about a few days together. And Lefebre draws it all beautifully - his people just a bit cartoony to have energy, but embedded in a realistic world we recognize.

For a lot of European readers, I expect Glorious Summers was an exercise in nostalgia - remembering their own childhood vacations, whether to rural France as here or to some Mediterranean beach or holiday camp or extended family or wherever. Remembering when they were younger, either as kids or young parents, and the memories made then. Americans could easily find similar things to love in it, even if, sadly, we don't get to go off for a month at a time.

Ordinary Victories, Vol.4: Swing That Hammer by Manu Larcenet

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

The publishing consortium Europe Comics - which, as I understand it, is somewhere between a rights clearing-house and a pan-company cooperative project - went through some upheavals three years ago. (He said, understating the case.) See their website for the confusing announcement that they would continue to release a few books a month but would stop all "consumer-facing activities." [1] At the same time, everything from Europe disappeared overnight from the app my library uses, including several dozen things I'd flagged that I wanted to read.

That was sad, but I resigned myself to it, and have been reading other things.

And then I stumbled across a book that used to be on my list, and discovered that, at some point in the past two years, the corpus of Europe Comics had miraculously reappeared on the Hoopla app. I spent some happy time re-flagging things that I probably had flagged before - who can remember, exactly? - and tried to think if I was in the middle of anything at the time.

There was one series that I'd almost finished in 2023: Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, a transmuted memoir about a photographer named Marco, the shipyard where his father used to work, his newish partner and the birth and first years of their first child. It was a four-book series - originally published in French in the Aughts, translated into English once soon afterward, and then again around 2016 for this four-volume edition, in a naturalistic tone I've really liked by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

The first three were Ordinary Victories, Trivial Quantities, and Precious Things. The fourth, final book is Swing That Hammer.

Swing has the same low-key, everyday feeling as the earlier books. It's well-observed, personal, specific - but small, in the way that any one life is small. This book sees a lot of major changes: Marco and Emily's daughter is getting big enough to talk and wander about and ask questions, the shipyard is finally closing down for good to be redeveloped, and an elderly neighbor Marco had befriended is suddenly gone. There's more than that, but those are the major points: like any life, it keeps going, and things keep changing. Swing has less to do with Marco's career than the earlier books; it's more focused on his personal life.

Larcenet's art is still wonderful here, with an ease and grace to his line and characters that are full of life. The whole series is warm and true and real - not quite autobiography, but close to it, an alternate-world version of the real Larcenet's life, told cleanly and with clear vision and a quiet sense of time and space. I recommend the whole series - especially now that they're back - to anyone who likes comics about real people living real lives.

[1] I think I've said this in the past, but, just to be clear: releasing a book is part of publishing. But it's not the most important part. Getting that book in front of an audience - all of those "consumer-facing activities" - are at least as important to the publishing process as shoving content onto pages (dead-tree or electronic). Of course, Europe Comics is not primarily an enterprise aimed at consumers to begin with - it's largely a proof-of-concept for the books it does, and its goal is for bigger companies to buy the rights, so Europe can take down their editions and someone else actually publish the book with a bigger splash. So their change wasn't strange in retrospect, but it is definitely odd if you think of them as a publisher.

Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.

The Complete Neat Stuff by Peter Bagge

I read Hate back in the '90s, like the twenty-something slacker I was then. And I've read most of what Peter Bagge has published since then, more-or-less, eventually. I don't know if you could call me a fan of his work, since I seem to always complain about the same few aspects: the oh-so-nuanced "don't let government spend any money ever" libertarianism that is ludicrous in the context of Bagge's id-driven characters, mostly. Those two elements are both interesting and particular, but they directly contradict each other: in a world of Bagge people, libertarianism is literally insane; his people require major, intrusive government programs just to keep them from blithely and randomly murdering each other on a whim.

But he's a great cartoonist with a particular point of view and usually a knack of constructing interesting stories (if, too often, ones that allow him to grind his very particular axes), so I do keep coming back to the Bagge well to see what he's done that I missed.

And I finally thought that I should go all the way back. Fantagraphics, who was Bagge's first major publisher, did a big two-volume set a decade ago to collect all fifteen issues of his debut series, Neat Stuff, from the late '80s.

The Complete Neat Stuff has almost five hundred pages of comics, featuring Bagge in some of his earliest published work, all rubber-hose arm flailing and screaming and gigantic Big Daddy Roth toothy mouths and other extreme transformations of his characters. He's gotten somewhat more realistic in his cartooning than this since - this is the early, extreme, most underground-influenced work Bagge ever did.

In the underground tradition - and something that Bagge has kept up, mostly, since then - these are regularly very wordy comics, full of people making long speeches (usually at the top of their lungs; they're Bagge characters). Those characters are, almost all of them, horrible people in different ways - this also has been central to Bagge's work from the beginning.

Neat Stuff was a single-creator anthology, with a number of different characters, each in their own distinct stories, all mixed together over the course of five years and those fifteen issues. Any particular issue had stories about multiple characters, but I'll take each strand separately, which, I think, will make it more coherent. The two volumes here, though, present the issues as they originally appeared, in the original story order, with only the covers separated out into a separate section to show them in color.

Probably the nicest character is the sad-sack Junior, a twenty-something guy who does very little but eternally dreams of getting out from under his mother's thumb. (Frankly, his mother is mostly absent in the stories, so she doesn't seem that bad, either.) He's weak-willed and feckless, mousy and unmotivated, good-hearted but utterly unable to do anything productive. And his stories mostly petered out - there was a sequence early here in which he moved out, lived in a rooming house, and started to build a separate life, but then he moved back home and his stories got shorter and rarer, entirely focused on his sad-sackness. My guess is that Bagge realized he could either change Junior into a different character - one who did get out, and what happened next - or he could keep Junior the same. And Bagge characters, in this era (and arguably throughout his career), are about staying exactly the same.

The most realistic characters are the married couple Chet and Bunny Leeway, who - if I want to be pompous - embody late-80s suburban ennui. They're about thirty, and have Bagge's own sourness about anything and everything in the real world - all friends are dumb, transparent phonies; all culture is stupid; all activity is pointless; and life is a harsh grind that they hate but can't think of any way to change or mitigate. All you can do is drink vast quantities of alcohol to numb the pain and make other people interesting enough to talk to, and then - this was the '80s - drive drunk on to your next event. There aren't a lot of these stories, which is good: the Leeways are so comprehensively sour that they work best in small doses. They are the kind of people you want to grab hold of, shake, and say "isn't there anything at all that you enjoy? Why not do more of that?"

But that's, I think, the core Bagge viewpoint. Life is horrible, full of other people who are hideous and inherently wrong, and no one with a brain can be happy for a second ever.

I mostly enjoyed the stories about Studs Kirby, the once-and-then-again right-wing talk radio host. He's in a small city somewhere, probably in the midwest - parenthetically, all of these characters seem to be in particular places, though Bagge doesn't always make that clear. (The Leeways are probably in the Pacific Northwest; the Bradley family is in New Jersey.) Studs is a jerk and a loudmouth, like so many Bagge characters, but the secondary characters in his stories actually realize that and call him out on it. It doesn't help, of course, since Bagge characters are generally incapable of growth, learning, or getting better at anything, but it does tag to the reader that Bagge knows that Studs is an obnoxious blowhard. The stories are mostly about Studs getting into various obnoxious-blowhard situations, first as a former talk-radio guy trying to get back to a regular working-guy life, and then once again on the radio, stirring up shit with hair-trigger anger and the regular Bagge-character aptitude to take everything the worst possible way and escalate massively at the drop of a hat.

Then we get into the oddball, wacko characters, like the '60s crooner turned '80s evangelist Zoove Groover. He shows up in short features, tracing his weird and goofy career, for a few issues and then disappears forever. These are fun, but mostly in flashback mode - there's one or two stories closing out the '80s Zoove, with the bulk about his teen-idol days. They're tonally different from most of this work - almost sweet, in that "look at this crazy character!" style - and don't really connect with anything else in Neat Stuff.

Then comes the big cluster of goofballs: Girly-Girl, Chuckie-Boy, and the Goon in the Moon. Girly-Girl is the usual underground chaos-generator, a supposedly elementary-school girl with an endless well of energy and an equally endless set of demands for everything in the world. Chuckie-Boy is her dumb, loving stooge, there to be abused. The Goon is a middle-aged guy who is their friend (?!) and an alcoholic, and later on becomes a bit of a horndog in stories without the kids. These are the characters who do the most "underground" stuff - murdering each other, screaming & hollering, rampaging about - that kind of thing.

And then there's the stories about the Bradley family, which were some of the longest and most involved in Neat Stuff and led directly into Bagge's follow-up series, Hate. The father Pops is thinly characterized, just a middle-aged guy who wants to be left alone and seems to hate his family. (But then everyone hates everyone in a Bagge story.) Ma is put-upon, and comes across (to me, at least, thirty-some years later) as the closest thing to a reasonable human being in any of the Neat Stuff stories - which of course means she's marginalized and mostly ignored. Babs is a dumb teen girl obsessed with dumb teen girl stuff, and Butch similarly a violent, impulsive grade-schooler - neither one has any real depth.

Buddy, the older brother, is the Bagge self-insert character, explicitly taking what I hope he realized were his worst qualities as a young man and amplifying them - lazy, self-obsessed, unmotivated, thoughtless, grumpy and crabbed and nasty. These stories mostly focus on him, as he ends his high school years and starts an aimless "adult" life - selling a little weed to his friends but not otherwise doing anything at all to further his own life and independence and aims. (Assuming he has any aims.)

I would have liked to see more of Ma, but I don't know if twenty-something Bagge could have given us much from her point of view. Buddy is an annoying twerp - he was still an annoying twerp throughout most of Hate, too, though he did at least support himself financially and become semi-responsible, which were big steps up from the way he appears here.

Neat Stuff was a lot of things, and all of them were loud and brash and in-your-face, just like their characters. I can see why Bagge decided to end it and focus on one somewhat more realistic story - this material goes off in lots of directions and expends a lot of energy in that. That energy mostly covers over the essential sourness - all of Bagge's people are horrible, to themselves and each other, and they're embedded in worlds that are equally sour and horrible. I'd say that's a young man's yawp against the world, except that Bagge's stories have been pretty consistently in that vein for the past forty years: he still is out there making stories about how the world is sour and everyone is a complete idiot. But this is where it started.

All of This and Nothing: Fade Into You

"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.

I'm back to Famous this week - though you may have to be from my generation to know this song. It's not in a sound that's been popular, or major, or central any time in the past thirty years. But, then, it wasn't a lot like everything else in music at the time, either.

This week, it's time to Fade Into You, the most famous song by Mazzy Star, which came as a quiet, calming counterpoint amid a sea of grunge in 1993. 

The sound of the song is quiet and contemplative - that's the way Mazzy Star was - but that doesn't mean the meaning is happy and positive. 

I want to hold the hand inside you
I want to take the breath that's true
I look to you and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth

You may notice there's a lot of "want" at the beginning of this song. As it goes on, there will not be nearly as much "is" or "going to be." This is a song about something that didn't happen, or didn't happen in the right way, that the singer is extricating herself from and looking back at. She knows what happened, even if the person she's singing to doesn't get it at all.

Fade into you
I think it's strange you never knew

This is a quiet, contemplative song - about something broken or gone or lost...or maybe never really there at all, despite what the singer wanted. You can decide which.

Quote of the Week: Hello, Wilbur

General Mannister did not seem to share his enthusiasm. He looked like a horse with a secret sorrow. He coughed three times, like a horse who, in addition to a secret sorrow, had contracted asthma.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, pp.58-59