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.

Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2

The first volume collecting the Miller/Janson run on Daredevil included fifteen issues of the title series, plus two "try-out" issues of a Spider-Man comic Miller drew before that. Daredevil was published bi-monthly in those days, so that was a longer swath of time than comics readers these days realize: issues dated from February 1979 through July 1981.

This second volume, with the meat-and-potatoes title Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 2, is slightly shorter, collecting issues 173-184 of Daredevil, exactly a year's worth of issues from August 1981 through July 1982. But Miller, writing and laying these comics out, was still changing and transforming his work; there's almost as much difference between the first and last stories here as in the first volume.

The captions, and the overwriting tendencies of 1970s comics in general, is ebbing - only slightly in the first couple of issues, but noticeably towards the end of this stretch. There's at least one very good multi-page action sequence that takes place entirely wordlessly. Oh, everyone still talks too much, and says the same things too much, and the captions are dull and obvious fairly regularly - but you can start to see daylight through them, like a massive overcast that's starting to break up. We know, eventually, there will be entire stories written with a lighter hand and an ear for how people actually talk.

(And then that would all go away again, if we're talking about Miller specifically. He is a fascinating example of a creator who started off in a standard, deeply artificial mode, managed to become close to naturalistic for a while, and then dove deeply into an even more clotted, personal, tediously artificial mode later on.)

The art looks a bit blander and stiffer to my eye in the first couple of issues, with an off-model egg-headed Kingpin and an Elektra just slightly off as well. I don't know if it was Miller switching up how he worked - looser, tighter, different tools - on the way to his mature blocky style, or if the difference is mostly from Janson's finishes. (I'm never sure how to take their "art" and "finishes" credits here - did Miller pencil these stories, mostly, or did he just lay them out? Did he do the initial work on the boards, or send Janson thumbnails? And did that working mode change over the course of the years they worked together?) 

This is also the soap-opera era of Marvel, so each issue has a vaguely separate story, but they run into each other - Elektra comes back to do some international-assassin-ing in New York, the Gladiator is tried and reformed, Kingpin schemes and hires Elektra as his new fixer, Bullseye comes back again like a bad penny. There's a political campaign, in which Kingpin's hand-picked mayoral candidate is likely to beat a glimpsed and unnamed Ed Koch unless Daredevil's reporter buddy Ben Urich can dig up more useful dirt without getting himself murdered.

There's a bit of vague Orientalism, but the ninja are mostly just mooks in funny suits at this point - they're called ninjas, and we can assume they're Japanese in origin, but that's about it. Miller would appropriate much more, later on.

Like most monthly comics, this isn't a single thing: it's a thing in the middle of transformation, eternally. One story bleeds into the next, ideas work their ways through and conclude, art shifts and changes over time even when the team remains the same. It's still getting better here, which is exciting and invigorating: captions getting shorter and more precise, art getting more dynamic and layouts more visual. It's still assembly-line adventure comics for young readers, don't get me wrong, but Miller and Janson had ambition and ideas, and they were aiming for the top of their particular genre - and that's something to be celebrated, no matter what the genre is.

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

It had been six years since we last saw Philip Marlowe as The Little Sister opens. The world had changed, a war had ended and upended a lot of things: it was now a shiny new 1949 post-war world.

Marlowe, though, hadn't changed. He doesn't seem to be six years older - still somewhere in his late thirties, another one of those detectives who don't quite age as quickly as the calendar turns - and he's still living in furnished rooms and working alone in a small office in a cheap building. That's how hard-boiled detectives are, a lot of the time: their books don't really change them; they are who they are for the course of the series.

Little Sister has that traditional hard-boiled plot, the lying dame who hires the detective to find someone for reasons that aren't quite the ones she tells him. It's fairly traditional that she comes across as a naïf, as well, either honestly or schemingly. See The Maltese Falcon for one of the famous examples of the scheming sort; Orfamay Quest here is not quite as much of a naïf as she plays at, but she's, I suppose, over on the honest half of the scale.

Orfamay is looking for her brother Orrin, who worked an an engineer in Bay City but recently stopped sending letters back home to her and their mother in Manhattan, Kansas. She claims to be worried about him, and just wants to know he's safe.

She doesn't mention her other sibling, a sister who has a burgeoning career as the rising starlet Mavis Weld. Or that Orrin had been in touch with Mavis. Or their connections to a club owner named Steelgrave, who may have been a mob figure back in Cleveland under a different name.

Marlowe investigates Orrin's former rooming-house, discovering a marijuana-packaging operation (which he doesn't care about) and stumbling upon a murder, which is more of a problem for a private detective. As is traditional for PI novels, it's only the first murder - Marlowe finds at least two killed by ice-pick, which strongly suggests a connection.

Marlowe talks to the police, but doesn't tell them as much as he should - this is common in a lot of the novels of the series; it's one of the major ways Chandler manages the plot and the flow of information. Along the way, he learns of Mavis and goes to visit her, also meeting another rising starlet, Dolores Gonzales. And he gets the material that the murders were committed for: a picture of Mavis and Steelgrave in his club, with a newspaper proving it was on a day Steelgrave was supposedly held in jail and a mobster was murdered.

So Marlowe knows this was a blackmail scheme, and thinks that Orrin took the picture - was blackmailing his own sister. He tries to get through - to keep his license and protect his client and maybe even see justice done.

I found the very last chapter to be almost tacked on - it does close the last few loose ends, but it also felt like an editor - or maybe Chandler's internal voice - wanted someone to pay for the crimes of the novel, and this was the only way he could figure out to make it happen. If I'd been his editor - twenty years before I was born; so this is purely blathering - I'd have urged him to be parallel: start with the little sister, and end with the little sister. But he's Raymond Chandler, and I'm not, and maybe I want things to be too neat.

I found Little Sister to be even more quotable than the novels immediately before it - it has that famous "you're not human tonight, Marlowe" sequence, and a half-dozen other lines and thoughts almost equally powerful and true. Hard-boiled fiction doesn't get better than Chandler - and that's not primarily because of his plots, or even his people, but because of the insights into the world he gets to along the way.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)

Better Things: Infected

"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.

Another song from the depths this week. I was in my teens in the '80s - meaning that was the era when I was listening to more music, and was maybe more in tune with the music of the time, than ever before or since. So a lot of the quirky, particular things I still listen to come from that era.

I think The The was more of a dance band than I usually listened to. I don't know how popular they ever were. But I liked this song a lot. I mean, I still like it a lot. But I liked it a lot then, too.

In the annals of creepy metaphors for love in popular song, Infected has got to be way up at the top of the list.

I can't give you up, 'till I've got more than enough
So infect me with your love.
Nurse me into sickness. Nurse me back to health.
Endow me with the gifts of the man made world.

"Your love is a disease that I don't want to recover from" is certainly a take. And Matt Johnson - at that time, and for much of the time, the only member of The The - sells it here, through the very '80s relentless drum-machine sounds that propel the song forward.

It's just that one idea, worked out in several verses and that great chorus. Just that stark metaphor, and that techno-ish dancefloor beat. And that's all it needs.

Quote of the Week: Journalistic Ethics

There is a slight difference, I discovered, in the professional code of European and American journalists. When the latter will not hesitate, in moments of emergency, to resort to pure invention, the former must obtain their lies at second hand. This is not so much due to lack of imagination, I think, as lack of courage. As long as someone, no matter how irresponsible or discredited, has made a statement, it is legitimate news, but there must always be some source, 'which has hitherto proved satisfactory', on which the blame can later be laid.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.627-8 in Waugh Abroad

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.