Betty Blues by Renaud Dillies

I have two ways I could start with today's book, neither of which has much to do with the book itself. I could mention I read another graphic novel by Renaud Dillies a decade ago, Bubbles & Gondola, and only vaguely remembered it when I saw a thumbnail image of the B&G cover at the back of this book. Or I could point out that the title is not the same as a certain smutty French movie from the 1980s, and reminisce that I saw that movie at college, and that the first line of the movie provoked one of the best, rippling, unexpected crowd laughs I've ever experienced. [1]

None of that gets us much closer to Renaud Dillies' bande dessinée Betty Blues - copyright 2003 in France, published in this edition in the US in 2013, translated by Joe Johnson and colored by Anne-Claire Jouvray. I could mention that Bubbles was the story of a novelist and Betty is the story of a jazz musician, so I can assume that Dillies has at least a small tropism towards telling stories of the creative life.

Betty Blues, I learn from Lambiek, was Dillies's first book, and won him the best debut award at Angoulême that year. And that does somewhat explain the ways that Betty is a bit too earnest, a bit too constructed, with some lines that read like Johnson is trying to take a very specific French idiom, probably a bit too high-toned for the immediate scene, and put it into the closest approximation to idiomatic English he can. Betty at times feels like a book stretching, reaching for something - meaning, purpose, universality - and getting very close but not quite selling it all in the end.

Little Rice Duck is the main character; he's a jazz trumpeter in a band, playing at night, slightly drunk, in some bar as the book opens. We think he's been doing this for a long time; we think he's very good at it. We also know there's very little money or prestige in it. But we think he was happy.

Was. He had a girlfriend, Betty, sitting at the bar, as we guess she did most nights. This night, a rich guy, James Patton, sits down next to her, plies her with champagne, and whisks her away. Rice is broken when he finds out, and goes on a drunken bender, throwing away his trumpet and declaring he's going to give up music forever and move far away. The possibility that Betty could possibly come back, or that there might be any other woman in the world he might someday be happy with, is clearly not on the table.

The rest of the book follows two major threads and one minor one. The minor one is a married couple, Peter and Susan - he was injured by Rice's falling trumpet and they get through some surgery and deciding to sell the trumpet. The two major threads are, of course, Rice and Betty. He travels as far away as he can get, takes a job at a sawmill, and gets caught up in industrial action. Betty, on the other hand, is basically kidnapped by James, who doesn't let her get away or do anything, but pampers her for a while until she finally gets fed up with his obsessive rich-guy nature and walks away when he has her as arm candy at a public event.

Both Rice and Betty are pretty passive, Betty even more so than Rice. They're mostly dragged into situations and don't do very much to change their lives - their lives are changed for them by others.

We think this will probably be some sort of circular story, that Rice and Betty will reunite, or at least meet, after all they've been through. They might not get back together, but it's the kind of story that looks like it should end that way.

It does not: Betty Blues is much more French than that. I won't spoil the ending, but it does have a quintessentially Gallic shrug at the end.

Dillies' art is glorious, though - great smoky-jazz-club ambiance, with lots of organic, scratchy, quick-looking lines in his square six-panel grids. The art looks great, and sells the emotions of its anthropomorphic characters, even if the dialogue is sometimes a bit stilted and oddly-phrased.

I tend to be a grump about stories of artists and about people who do things for insufficient reasons, so I may not be the best judge of Betty Blue. I did see a lot of strength and life to it, particularly remembering it was Dillies' first book-length project.

[1] The movie is Betty Blue. The scene is, as I recall, a tracking shot that comes in from outside a house to show the two main characters very energetically fucking...on a kitchen table, maybe? And the line is "I had known Betty for a week."

Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell & Rachael Smith

Lyndsay Grockle works at a small boutique hotel, the Lakeside, in northern Wisconsin [1]. She's the newest member of staff, described as an intern - I don't think hotels usually work like that, but OK. There's an odd convention that shows up every year, and, this time, she's going to run the whole hotel solo for the weekend while that happens. (Again: even a five-room B&B will have three or four people working over a weekend, and this hotel seems to be big enough to hold about a hundred guests. But that's the story, and it's set up immediately: in fiction, you take the premise as given, though it may sometimes be a lot to swallow.)

As Lyndsay quickly learns when the guests start to check in on Friday, this is the annual convention of the mysterious creatures of the world: mythologicals, cryptids, lake monsters, and so on. Mummies, selkies, fairies, bigfeet, stink apes, Jersey devils, firebirds, Baba Yaga - only one of each (except the fairies, who are more-or-less the hosts and may have an extensive larger society we don't see), because each of them is a singular thing. Notably missing is the Hodag, who probably could have walked to the event, but it doesn't seem like this is supposed to be everyone: just the ones who are more clubby and decided to come this year.

OK, so that's weird. And they seem to just want her to be quiet and stay away from their function spaces: they don't need food from the hotel, or anything else. (No one preps these rooms for the panels? Or cleans up afterwards? The hotel staff doesn't turn on lights and check the grounds and all of those other things? I suppose I'm still having trouble buying the "only one person" part of the premise.)

So Lyndsay is a little grumpy and out-of-sorts, particularly since this makes her remember her ex-boyfriend, a  massive conspiracy theorist who does not come across well in a few flashback pages, and wonder if he was right. (I don't think so: he's a flat-earther, among other stupid ideas. He could have been more nuanced, but that's not the way he's presented.) But then one of the attendees wakes her up in the middle of the night with the news that the title has already spoiled: the Loch Ness Monster is dead.

Murdered.

And only Lyndsay, the outsider, can investigate and find out Who Killed Nessie?

She's pulled into this investigation by the Beast of Bodmin Moor - Bob for short - who woke her up, gave her the scoop, explained how this group works, and started introducing her to the rest. Bob - like many of these creatures, Bob's appearance is variable, partially because of personal choice and partially because of human expectations, which means Bob uses pronouns at what seems to be random whim - also speaks in a somewhat old-fashioned Cornish dialect that comes across to Lyndsay (and the reader) as if he's trying to talk like a pirate.

Lyndsay talks to a whole lot of the attendees, learning about their disputes and personal clashes and polymorphous perversity: they're all shape-changers, and see above about variable appearance and pronouns. She gets a few solid suspects, travels to the underworld with the aid of a very puppyish Cerberus, and, eventually, declares that she knows who the killer is and will reveal that in the traditional "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here" speech.

I'm not quite sure if Nessie is meant for young readers or not - some aspects seem to aim that way, but the whole polymorphous perversity thing - even if it's kept vague and off-page, creators Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith make it very clear one major reason for this convention is for various creatures to get freaky with each other in ways a lot of school systems and library boards would be deeply uncomfortable with if they learned about it.

Well, that's for librarians and teachers to worry about. For the rest of us readers, it's an amusing story with a lot of colorful, quirky characters, and only a few hiccups in the worldbuilding (that I've already wasted enough time on). Cornell has written a lot of comics and TV; he shows an ease at maneuvering what could have been a large, unwieldy cast so that it's clearly a big group but the narrative focuses on just a few important people. And Smith's line is light and flowing, with a lot of energy and life to it. keeping the whole story towards the cozy side of murder.

Who Killed Nessie? is a solid play-fair fantasy mystery in comics form: it aims to do several complicated things simultaneously and does them all pretty well.

[1] The first page says the Lakeside is fifty miles north of Turoga, which doesn't seem to exist. That hotel also seems to be on Lake Champlain, which is not particularly close to Wisconsin. I suspect this book's British creators have as detailed a knowledge of American geography as I do of that of the Midlands.

Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh

I had never thought to ask "How much of Scoop is actually true?" I had assumed that a satirical novel set during an abortive African war would be almost entirely untethered from the actual facts of the Abyssinian/Italian war of 1936.

And then I read Waugh in Abyssinia [1], the book Evelyn Waugh wrote immediately before Scoop, a non-fictional account of his time as a newspaper reporter covering that war - well, mostly the early period, when it looked like there would be a war but it hadn't quite started yet, with a late coda covering a short second visit, more than six months later, to see the Italian occupation. And I was amazed to see how many of the bizarre, goofy details of Scoop were straight out of the actual war and Waugh's own experiences.

I don't know of any edition that brings the two books together, but that could be a fascinating thing, especially if there was a scholar who could draw out the comparisons and who knew the real (messy, complicated, not necessarily explicated perfectly by Waugh) history, too.

Abyssinia is an interesting, fascinating read in any case - Waugh is particularly good on the weird contingent atmosphere in a corrupt society on the brink of a war that hasn't quite started yet - but it's particularly strong for a reader who has recently read Scoop, which, by random coincidence, I had.

On the other hand, Waugh mostly suppressed this book - and his other three pre-war travel books - post-WWII, publishing a "good parts" version of all four under the title When the Going Was Good and declaring nothing else in those books was worth reading. In the case of Abyssinia, I suspect his glowing accounts of Italian road-building and civilization-bringing in the closing chapter - with some language that shades far too close to "these fascist chappies really know how to run a society, and we should follow their lead" in retrospect - was the big issue.

But Waugh was always moderately racist, and Abyssinia under Halie Selassie was, by all accounts, deeply corrupt, badly run, and full of factions who kept just this side of actual open battle. I'm finding Waugh's travel books' strengths are largely related to how weird and complex and irrational the places he visited were - and Abyssinia, just before the war, was about as weird and complex and irrational as any real-world place ever could be.

Waugh is not writing about the larger geopolitical context here, but it was certainly in the back of his mind, and the minds of his readers, in 1936. Europe was stumbling towards war - medium-sized ones, like the Spanish Civil War, and the Big One that came a few years later - and Abyssinia could be a microcosm of that. In that context, Waugh's hopeful note at the end - that this war was quick, and the conquerors seemed, in the early stages, to be competent and doing productive things - could be seen as optimism, or self-delusion, or a dozen other things on that spectrum, depending on the reader.

Abyssinia also has a lot of excellent Waugh sentences and thoughts; I dog-eared more passages here - and it's a short book - than I usually do. Waugh was grumpy, misanthropic, and, at this point in his life, more than slightly flirting with fascist sympathies - but he was also a fine thinker and observer, sometimes because of his prejudices and sometimes in spite of them.

[1] I read it in the big '90s omnibus Waugh Abroad, which collects all seven of his travel books.

The Baker Street Peculiars by Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsch

Sometimes I wonder if Roger Langridge secretly yearns to make comics about the normal modern world, but is foiled at every turn. I mean, his work is mostly either pseudo-vaudeville in comics form (in his creator-owned work) or updates and modernizations of old properties in similar categories, like Betty Boop and Popeye and The Muppets. But what if, my imp of the perverse asks, what he really wants is to tell a techy thriller or sweet rom-com with utterly up-to-the-moment main characters?

It's probably not true. But I find it amusing to contemplate: so now it's in your mind too, to do with what you will.

This came to mind after reading The Baker Street Peculiars, a 2016 four-issue comics series Langridge wrote for Andy Hirsh to draw for Kaboom!, the kids' imprint of the Boom comics empire. It is not precisely a modernization of an older piece of IP, though it is a 1920s-set story related to the Sherlock Holmes mythos, as the title implies. Unlike a lot of Langridge, there's nothing theatrical about it - well, the very first page takes place in the theatrical district, with an audience on their way to shows that evening, but none of the characters are actors or comedians, and the action never goes into a theater.

Instead, a lion statue comes to life and terrorizes those passers-by. Three plucky young people - Molly, a Jewish orphan raised by her grandfather; Rajani, a Bengali orphan raised by a street thief; and Humphrey, a schoolboy from a wealthy family dumped at a posh public school and accompanied by his valet/dog Wellington - happen to be there, and chase the statue trying to stop it.

They don't exactly succeed, but they do help, and meet each other along the way. They also run into a figure that claims to be Sherlock Holmes - we the readers quickly learn this is not precisely true, but it's as true as is possible in this world - who ends up hiring them as assistants in this investigation. Fake-Holmes firmly believes the statues are not actually coming to life; that this is all a trick by some miscreant for an as-yet-unknown purpose. But this Holmes wants the kids to dig around and learn more.

Meanwhile, reporter Hetty Jones is investigating for her newspaper and local bobby Constable Plank is whats-all-this-then-ing about as well - the latter chasing our heroes for a few pages, since they're out at night after curfew, hem hem hem.

Also meanwhile, we readers see the actual villain and learn his nefarious scheme: Chippy Kipper, a golem made by local Brick Lane merchants to protect them from the ganglord Dickie Kipper. Unfortunately, Dickie knew how golems work, and added some additional instructions to Chippy's shem, the scroll that gives him life. Also unfortunately - for Dickie - his instructions were insufficiently specific, and the golem murdered Dickie and took over his business. Chippy is now diligently using shems to animate the statues of London, gathering them in a warehouse for an upcoming huge spree of crime and mayhem.

It takes a while, but the kids do learn this, and do foil the plan. Chippy loses his shem, and all of the purloined statues are eventually returned to their proper positions. Fake-Holmes's secret is learned by the kids, who agree to continue assisting in further cases (of which, I think, there haven't yet been any).

Hirsh draws this all in an energetic, slightly cartoony style, right in the mainstream of adventure stories for younger readers. Fred Stresing does the color, including some nice work on the glowing-golem eyes throughout.

Like a lot of Langridge projects, I liked it while still wondering how he managed to pitch it in a way that made it happen. I don't think a young-readers audience was champing at the bit for a Sherlock Holmes story, even a decade ago, and even less for for one set thirty years after Holmes's heyday. And adult Holmes fans might be put off by the fake-Holmes here. So, like most Langridge projects, it's quirky. Luckily, I enjoy quirky a lot. If you do, too, check out this book, and especially look for more of Langridge's work.

Better Things: Growing Old

"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.

This song has the best damn rock 'n roll kazoo solo in the whole fucking world. I will die on this hill.

As I come to write about it, I realize that The Terrordactyl's 2007 EP Mike Bowers was all covers - all from the band The Pharmacy, who I don't know at all. (I know very little about The Terrordactyls to begin with - I got this EP, the record just before it, and a handful of random songs of the same era, and that's it.)

But it doesn't matter who wrote Growing Old. I love this version of it, and, if I now run off to see what the original sounded like, that's not going to change anything.

(Along the same lines, Hallelujah the Hills' massive Deck project, and their two-cover-songs-a-month output on their associated Patreon, introduced me to a bunch of songs I like now, at least in their versions, most weirdly Lana Del Rey's There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard.)

Growing Old is a weird manifesto, a bizarre declaration, a goofy jaunt:

Every step is one towards death
Every word and every breath
One thing to keep in your mind:
The more you live the less that you die

It's got a odd rhythm, a unique soundscape - did I mention that kazoo? - and a singer high in the mix, singing just a bit higher than his normal voice, insistent and urgent.

And there's something magnificently optimistic about it, with a line that will live rent free in my head as long as I'm still growing old:

 Spent the first hundred years of my life
Growing old, growing old

I love that "first." I'm inspired by it. It makes me wonder: how will I spend the second hundred years of my life?

Books Read: October 2025

I do this every month, mostly for myself. This is what I read last month. I'll add links once the posts go live. As usual, I do it largely because I've been doing it for a long time: it's somewhat useful and very familiar, and I guess that's good enough.

Robin Enrico, Life of Vice (10/4)

Art Bathazar & Franco, ArkhaManiacs (10/5)

Brian Doherty, Dirty Pictures (10/5)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 5: F.52 (digital, 10/11)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season (10/11)

Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, Bang! (10/12)

Drew Friedman, All the Presidents (10/18)

Loren D. Estleman, Infernal Angels (10/18)

Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, George Sand: True Genius, True Woman (10/19)

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (in Complete Novels, 10/19)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 2: The Luminous Incal (digital, 10/24)

Zach Worton, The Disappearance of Charley Butters (10/25)

James Thurber, The Last Flower (in Writings and Drawings, 10/25)

Manuelle Fior, The Interview (digital, 10/26)

Dino Pai, Dear Beloved Stranger (10/27)

Kim Newman, Something More Than Night (10/27)

In November, I will continue to read books, and, if I'm not hit by a bus, I'll list them here in time.

Quote of the Week: The Younger Generation

For one spring term Bech, who belonged to the last writing generation that thought teaching a corruption, had been persuaded to oversee - it amounted to little more than that - the remarkably uninhibited conversations of fifteen undergraduates and to read their distressingly untidy manuscripts. Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. Living off fathers they despised, systematically attracted to the outrageous, they seemed ripe for Fascism. Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters like Miller and Tolkien and away from those austere, prim saints - Eliot, Valéry, Joyce - whose humble suppliant Bech had been. Bech even found fault with them physically: though the girls were taller and better endowed than the girls of his youth, with neater teeth and clearer skins, there as something doughy about their beauty; the starved, conflicted girls of Bech's generation had distinctly better legs.

 - John Updike, "Bech Takes Pot Luck," in Bech: A Book, p.57 in The Complete Henry Bech

Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that's possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig's Last Kiss: Casual Fridays. It's a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 - much like Sex Day, which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you're interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it's a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well - there's a big cluster of "women hate cooking" jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight - not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book - and the previous one before it - from my library app, which is how I'd recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you're thinking about "owning" it, but, as a 68-page book, it's a higher per-page cost than I'd be comfortable with.

Bech: A Book by John Updike

This is the first John Updike book I've ever read. (I'm mildly surprised: I would have expected I'd grab a random book of his essays first instead.) I also have the big fat Rabbit omnibus on my shelf, but, instead, I pulled down the slimmer omnibus of novels about a very different main character.

Bech: A Book was published in 1970; it collects seven stories [1] about the literary (and fictional) writer Henry Bech, in his forties and the world's Sixties, the first three of those stories concerned with an extended government-sponsored trip behind the Iron Curtain. Bech is a Jewish writer, more Bellow than Roth but somewhere in that vague territory, with a big famous first novel (Travel Light), a disappointing short second one, an attempted epic third that landed oddly at best, and close to a decade of silence at the time these stories are set.

I'm pretty sure Updike knew in 1970 that would not be enough to sustain an income and a "grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment," but the Bech stories are closer to satire than to realism, so readers have to assume that writing a few books that are lightly taught and generally well regarded from the '50s are enough to sustain life for a grumpy man and his succession of mistresses in the late '60s.

And, yes, I said mistresses - that's the word Updike (or perhaps I mean Bech) uses. He's not married and has never been married, so it's not the world I'd use, but I suppose in 1970 "mistress" clearly implied that he fucks them in ways that "girlfriend" might not have.

Bech is not a particularly admirable person, in that traditional literary-novel way: he's self-obsessed and windy when talking about literature, treats women in ways that were reasonably enlightened for his day but come across as deeply sexist now, and has trouble getting out of his own way (or his own head) most of the time. He's not bad, though - or, at least, I didn't find him so. Bech is not a "look at this horrible person" book; it's more "it's this kind of guy, you know the type, and let's see what amusing things he'll get up to this time."

So Bech visits Russia and "Rumania" (it was 1970) and Bulgaria; summers on an unnamed "Massachusetts island" with his current mistress and her younger sister, his next-in-line mistress; spends a few days at a Virginia all-female college as a feted visiting writer; goes to London for a launch of a new collection of his work and takes up with a woman who turns out to be a newspaper columnist; and, finally, is invited to join an august body of litterateurs that he had respected and worshipped in his teen years.

Updike's prose is amusing and fun - he tends to write in long, convoluted sentences and paragraphs for this project (I don't think he did that generally, but, again, this is my first Updike) that struck me as appropriate for Bech and probably a light parody of specific real writers of that kind. Bech is not so horrible that the reader doesn't like him - at least, I should say, a male reader who is old enough to remember the world Bech lived in, which may be an important caveat - and the things he gets up to are all literary-world interesting, if from a very different era.

[1] The introduction by Malcolm Bradbury has a lot of words, but nowhere does he talk about where or if the stories were originally published separately. My guess is not; that this was created as a novel in stories. But Updike did write short fiction, and there was a thriving market for it in the '60s, so maybe these were in Playboy or Esquire or places like that.

Drinky Crow Drinks Again by Tony Millionaire

I've apparently never read a collection of Tony Millionare's Maakies comics. (Back in the early days of this blog, I posted about The Adventures of Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts, but never the main stream of Millionaire's work.) I know I read Maakies in the New York Press during the years when alt-weeklies were a thing and I was regularly in Manhattan every week, but that was also a while ago.

But Drinky Crow Drinks Again, his 2016 collection, was available in my library app, and I thought it had been too long since I looked at his amazingly detailed, filth-filled, neo-Victorian, pseudo-classic-Sunday-comics art. (Millionaire is yet another artist whose work should be presented on larger pages than my tablet can handle - the modern digital world is convenient, but at the cost of being just that bit shittier and less pleasant than it used to be. That's not far from a Millionaire idea, actually.)

Drinks Again collects what seems to be the previous three or four years of Maakies - it's a horizontally-formatted book, with two strips to each page most of the time, but a few pages with single strips. There's also a lot of related illustrations presented full-page - roughly one after every six pages of strips - which could be new to this book or could have been various editorial, website, or other illustrations during the same period.

Maakies is not a strip concerned with continuities, so it doesn't really matter where everything appeared or what order they are in the book. This is probably roughly the end of print Maakies - Millionaire pulled the plug in 2016, as the last few alt-weeklies were dying slowly and painfully, though he later revived the strip online.

The main characters are a drunken monkey (Uncle Gabby) and a drunken crow (Drinky Crow), who are intermittently 19th century sailors of some kind and intermittently in the modern world, more or less. Each strip or drawing is a moment, a tiny story of its own - there are a few places in this book with a very light continuity from one strip to the next, but mostly in the occasional stories Millionaire tells of his younger days (generally the 1970s). There's a lot of scatology, which tends to follow from the massive amounts of drinking, and also a lot of violence and death (aimed outward or self-inflicted), also usually following from massive alcohol intake.

(I am not surprised to learn that Millionaire now is in recovery as an alcoholic; that was something of a gimmie.)

As always, Millionaire's style and substance are often jarringly incongruent: lovingly detailed depictions of landscapes and wooden ships filled with grotesque characters shitting themselves. That's the point, though: that's what Millionaire is doing. If you can enjoy that - preferably both sides, but at least one - you'll find things to love in Maakies.

Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet

Comedy duos have to be contrasts - the wacky one and the one that tries to keep it together, for example. The optimist and the pessimist. It doesn't have to be a gag man and a straight man, but that's pretty common.

Thijs Desmet's collection of linked comics stories Smoking Kills is about two characters in some kind of afterlife. Ghost is depressive, grumpy, dismissive - spending his time smoking and drinking. Skeleton is lighter, happier, questioning everything and looking for a way out or something new to do. This isn't a straight comedy, but they fall into those patterns - these are stories about two characters, so it's how they bounce off each other, annoy each other, contrast with each other.

Skeleton seems new to this environment - they meet when he walks up to Ghost on a train platform, sits down, and starts talking. Ghost tells him that both of them are dead: Skeleton either actually doesn't believe it or really strongly pretends not to. That sets the pattern for most of their interactions: Skeleton is active, interested, inquisitive, looking to know why and to do things, to find a way out of this world or more people or just explanations.

Ghost wants to be left alone to drink and smoke.

They wander through this mostly empty world, doing what they can where they are in their own ways. The landscape is lightly urban or near-suburban, with playgrounds and woods and standalone houses - Skeleton and Ghost live together in a small house later in the book - all empty of real people, because, as Ghost says, they're dead and in the afterlife.

It's not quite that simple, though. When Ghost smashes a bunch of bottles in a grocery store, there's a commotion nearby, and they run away. They interact with a group of children telling stories around a midnight fire towards the end of the book. So Desmet is presenting this in a somewhat traditional way: they are haunting the real world, on the same streets and buildings as living people, but are separated, in a different version of that world, most of the time.

It's not laugh-out-loud funny; it's not aiming to be. It is amusing and light, most of the time, though Desmet's usually straightforward, jammed-together panels (with only thin black ruled lines separating them) occasionally iris out to larger visions, especially in a tour de force section where Ghost talks about how the universe works. It raises more questions than it answers - I don't know if that means Desmet is planning more stories with these characters (this book was originally published in Dutch in 2018; this English edition, translated by the author and Ria Schulpen, came out last year), but I hope so. Or that Desmet does something else that gets translated into English: this is interesting and distinctive and specific, and I want to see more comics like that.

Better Things: Mercy

"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'm a child of the '80s - those were my formative, teen years. So a lot of the random odd music I love and remember comes from that decade; it's only natural.

This song is pretty random: the title song from an ex-Sex Pistol's first solo record, a decade later and miles away from punk. It's sweet and tender and true and yearning, in that hard-rock-ballad '80s style that can be a cliché but is lovely when it works.

This is Mercy by Steve Jones.

What I love most about it is the sound: that distinctive guitar line that launches us right in and continues throughout, the muted background chiming in the chorus, Jones's world-weary, growling voice attempting a croon throughout.

Where is the love I've lost
Where is the mercy and trust?

It's not a complicated message, it's not told in a complicated way. But Jones's voice and guitar work embody the weariness - you can feel all of the miles that led up to this, even if it's all packaged in a very radio-friendly '80s idiom.

I think this was Jones's biggest single, which means it charted a bit, somewhere, briefly. That's another thing in its favor, oddly, all these years later: this song questioning the point of the world, in a style that Jones hoped would be huge, turned out to fizzle itself...just like the world itself.

Quote of the Week: Household Dangers

[My mother's] greatest dread, however, was the Victrola - we had a very early one, back in the "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" days. She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up,. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity,. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison's dangerous experiments.

 - James Thurber, "The Car We Had to Push," My Life and Hard Times, p.151 in Writings and Drawings

The Seal in the Bedroom & My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber

I've got the big Library of America Thurber volume, Writings and Drawings - I find the way LoA books have such obvious, bread-and-butter titles endearing - and want to read it. But it's a thousand pages, and it includes some complete books but a lot more excerpts, both of which aspects don't line up well with the way I read and write about books these days.

(First: I like relatively short things, so I can actually finish them. Second: I like to read actual books, not bits and pieces of different books.)

So what I'm going to do is read a wodge in Writings and Drawings, a wodge that includes at least one actual full book, and use the full book as my post title, and then just hit any other random material along the way. It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Also, a note - I'm pretty sure I read this big Thurber omnibus once, back in the late '90s when it was published. But I lost my first copy in my 2011 flood, and it's been nearly thirty years, so I have no solid memory of any of it.

Writings and Drawings is in chronological order, which is standard for books like this. So it starts out with two chapters from Is Sex Necessary?, which Thurber wrote with E.B. White. (As I understand it, they wrote discrete chapters separately, and pulled them all together.) I reviewed the whole book back in 2018, so I'll just direct any interested parties there.

Next up is two pieces from the 1931 book The Owl in the Attic. "Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort" is an amusing story of a man left in an isolated country house and overrun by nerves when his wife has to run back to the city. Even more Thurberesque, and magnificently so, is "The Pet Department," a question-and-answer column (both sides written by Thurber) about various animals, all illustrated with his drawings. It is goofy and quirky and a lot of fun.

The Seal in the Bedroom was Thurber's first book of drawings and cartoons - most reprinted from The New Yorker, where he was a fixture - and it appeared in 1932. It's got a lot of funny stuff in it, but I was most struck by its organizational structure: this short book is broken into eight sections, a few of which (especially "The Race of Life") are sequences of drawings that function something like strip comics. The rest are thematic sections, from "Women and Men" (obvious) to "Miscellany" (very honest) to "Tennis" (well, it was the Thirties).

Thurber was nearly blind, which makes the fact that he was a popular cartoonist amusing in an odd way. His line is shaky and all the same weight but very distinctive - he's a major example of the cartoonist who is technically weak but works within his abilities to do great work.

And then My Life and Hard Times was Thurber's autobiography, written when he was just under forty and two decades before he died. It has ten chapters, each telling a separate, distinct story - not unlike his other pieces, in fact - from his youth, and ends, as Thurber explains, with him as a young man, because everything after that is too new. Each chapter is a gem, and, if it doesn't really add up to a full autobio, well, we should have expected that from Thurber, shouldn't we?

I like this LoA package so far, and think another 3-4 chunks about this size will see me through it. With luck, I can take a run at it every few months, and look back in amazement at '90s Andy, who just read the damn thing straight through in a few days. I miss being that guy, more than a little.

The Heavy Bright by Cathy Malkasian

I'll confess up front: I really don't like it when a work of fiction has a glorious past Golden Age, and explicitly says the point of the world is to get back to that Garden of Eden-ish state. Some creators try to do that in a way that doesn't immediately push all of the reactionary buttons, and Cathy Malkasian certainly tried here, but it inherently reinforces that old sour human sense that everything always gets worse, so there's no point in ever changing or trying to make anything better.

Cathy Malkasian specializes in long, fabulistic comics stories, set in quirky, unrealistic worlds, full of Improving Lessons and buffoonish, obvious villains. She also has a weird aversion to writing about adults, people in the middle of their lives: her protagonists often skip from young to old, and that's very obvious here.

The Heavy Bright was her 2023 book; like all the Malkasian books I've seen, it's not quite a formal allegory but tends in that direction. In the Glorious Before Times, all people lived in peace and harmony and talked with their dead relatives so much that they hadn't even invented writing. (Everyone also, apparently, had perfect memories and the dead are explicitly said to be unable to lie, because we're doing the fuzzy origin myth thing.)

But then a bunch of glowing eggs fell from the sky, amplifying everyone's emotions, but then turned black and fell to the ground, which brought evil into the world. Malkasian never gives a reason or source or point to this: it's a thing that happened, and it ruined the world. Presumably, other equally bad things could also happen at any time - maybe next time there's a rain of tetrahedrons that make everyone greedy.

A group of people who come to be called the Commanders witnessed this, and grabbed the eggs, which allowed them to wipe out entire villages with the power of aggression and anger - the mechanism isn't the same as in Temperance, but it's a very similar thing. These men - they're all men, and I'll get into the sexual politics later - use their power to foment chaos and death to gather political power, which goes on through an unknown number of generations.

We get this story from the dead Commanders, who lose their gender - this is a big deal for Malkasian in this book; there's a lot of talk about "groins" not being important at the same time her main character is explicitly a lesbian in a world hostile to them - after they die, and also, maybe, come to see that the system they devoted their lives to is horrible and evil. There's one woman in this afterlife - Old Bird, who discovered the first egg, way back when, and is on the one hand the keeper of all of the things the Commanders forgot or destroyed and on the other hand the main driver of the plot. Old Bird has realized that the "heavy" black eggs can be converted back into "bright" glowing ones by being whacked with objects with emotionally resonant memories tied to one's ancestors (or something like that), and she recruits a living human to do this.

Arna is the main character, though we don't meet her until after a long introductory Old Bird section. She's the tween daughter of an itinerant puppeteer; they travel around, tell stories to get some coin, and move on. She's not exactly pretending to be a boy now, but as she grows up she's going to have to - girls are commodities in this world, sold cheaply. But then they next place they come to has a Commander lurking about, which means random pointless violence and death. Arna survives; her father does not. And, almost randomly, she finds an egg and tries to eat it with a spoon she keeps on a chain around her neck, an old thing with a long history. This transforms the egg back to brightness - it doesn't seem as if anything can subsequently change it back to dark again, for no stated reason - and also seems to make it go away, out of the world or at least the narrative.

Old Bird has a long conversation with Arna in the afterlife, saying it's now Arna's mission to transform all 100 eggs - whack them all with her spoon, which each time makes her fly into the air briefly and kills the Commander associated with that egg.

Arna sets off to do this, and soon meets another young woman she falls in love with, Sela. Old Bird tells her not to reveal any secrets to Sela, but Arna wants to include her. Now I need to get back into the very particular sexual politics - and the way that Malkasian very deliberately excludes adults from this book.

Arna and Sela are on the verge of adulthood - Arna "buds" (has her first menstruation) when she meets Sela; that hasn't happened to Sela yet. As often with women in oppressive male-dominated societies, Sela dreams of never "budding," of staying just as she is. We don't see men that are young and strong - no obvious warrior types. The Commanders are older, and the trading of women is explicitly by "old men" - both in this section and later in the book. Women in their fertile years are talked about, but don't really enter the narrative.

To be blunt, Heavy Bright is a book about controlling women's fertility that fanatically avoids showing any women in their fertile years, and also has a mania in its afterlife scenes (and elsewhere) about insisting that "groins" - the difference between sexes - are utterly unimportant. It comes across almost as if there's something icky about sexuality - maybe just heterosexuality - and that everyone would be better off either as pre-sexual children or post-sexual menopausal women.

Anyway, what happens is that Sela "buds," which sweeps her up into the sky with a gigantic clamor and Close Encounters-esque light. This ends a section; the action shifts to several decades later.

Arna is now menopausal - again, we don't see her as an adult in the book. First she's a child, and then has her first period just a short time before the end of that section. Then we return to her after her menses have ended, thirty or so years later. Again, for a book about controlling women's sexuality, the women who are actually controlled are never present in their own story - our heroines are all children or post-fertile women.

Anyway, Arna is now chasing the last few eggs. Society has changed somewhat, though it's still lousy and sexist. All women now disappear, like Sela did, at their first period. Girl children are sold like animals, I suppose because everyone knows they'll disappear before long. Violence is much less common - in this world, the eggs initiate violence, and it might not be possible without them. But there's a sexist philosophy that's popular among men, and adult women divided into fertile (good "vessels") and infertile (bad). Although, after thirty years with no young women, I find it hard to believe there's been much fertility recently.

Arna does destroy the last eggs, after some more quirky scenes, and the world is then perfect and special - people can laugh (apparently they couldn't before? Malkasian didn't mention that earlier in the book) and talk with their ancestors again, and Arna is reunited with Sela and her dead father.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon. It has goofy, broadly-drawn characters, as might be expected from a creator who spent decades making children's animation. Its allegory is at least muddied, but it has its heart in the right place, more or less. (Though it does seem to have an bone-deep aversion to sex and sexuality that is also somewhat congruent with children's animation.) And Malkasian's pages are lovely and organic, with her usual soft watercolors.

I can't tell you it means anything coherent, but even a vague message of "be nice to other people" and "women are also people" and "remember your past" and "violence is bad" is worth hearing.