To say that he beamed at the girl would be too much. A man who has lost his favourite hat, and is contending in the lists of love against a butler who might have stepped out of a collar advertisement in a magazine, does not readily beam. But his gloom perceptibly lightened. A moment before, you would have taken him for a corpse that had been some days in the water. Now, he might have passed for such a corpse at a fairly early stage of its immersion.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.39
I start there because, otherwise, there's absolutely nothing new or interesting or distinctive about Asterix and Cleopatra, the 1965 sixth entry in the bande desinée series originally (and at this point) written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, but continued, more recently and after their time, by other hands.
Oh, there's nothing wrong about A&C, or bad about it. But the Asterix series, I'm coming to think, is deeply formulaic. Asterix and his buddy Obelix - the usual much-stronger-than-he-is-smart sidekick - go to some new corner of Roman Europe, are enlisted to Do a Thing, and they Do It very easily, despite the efforts of various nefarious figures, usually Roman, to foil them, and It Is Funny. Sometimes other Gauls come with them - in this book, the druid Getafix is along - and they support the action, and sometimes (especially if it's the horrible bard Cacofonix) they are Also Funny.
Oh, and the names are all very music-hall nudge-you-in-the-ribs style. Well, maybe not "music-hall" specifically, since this is French, but some rough equivalent.
In this one, Cleopatra - whose nose is a major topic of conversation, in that background-sexist '60s way - has a fight with Caesar and says she'll build him a palace in three months, as part of a bet to keep Caesar from invading and subjugating Egypt. (This is also part of the mid-century comedy gestalt - people make weird wagers, and always live up 100% to their commitments in those bets.) She tells a local schlubby architect, Edifis, to do it, and he immediately takes ship to find and enlist the help of Getafix, without whom he would have no chance of getting it done.
(Now, of course, traveling by ship from Cairo to the Gaul village - famously at the very northwest tip of Brittany - would probably take close to three months all by itself . This is the moment when I decided not to sweat the details.)
Edifis brings back Getafix, who brews magic potion for the Egyptian workers, which makes construction go super-fast. Edifis's rival Artifis tries to sabotage the project, as does Caesar's forces once he realizes the Gauls (Asterix and Obelix came along, of course) are there. None of that works; our heroes foil every problem quickly and without much trouble. All moves smoothly towards the standard happy ending, with the usual jokes along the way.
So this is a lot like the previous books - I read the first three in the current omnibus edition and then the fourth book, Asterix the Gladiator. I might be giving up here, though: all of these books are the same, and I'm not eight, so I'm not getting a whole lot from them. Uderzo's art is fun and energetic, admittedly, but the utter lack of tension and reliance on very dull, hoary jokes more than makes up for that.
My Perfectly Imperfect Body was her new book last year; her earlier books - at least the ones I've seen; I might have missed something - were (most famously) Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, Book Love, Happily Ever After & Everything in Between, and Everything Is OK.
And I'm leaning into taxonomy and background here, as I often do, when I hit an interesting, good book that is just fundamentally not for me. Tung is a British woman, still (I think) relatively young, and she writes for other young women about topics core to that experience - from the outside, I tend to think of it as the cluster of issues around particularly introverted women living in a world and a society that pushes women to be pretty, decorative, accommodating, and outgoing. Tung's books are very particular, about what happened to her and how she dealt with it, but they're open and welcoming, pitched in a tone that says "if you're like me, you can do the same; you can have a great life, get a little better at this stuff, and still be the person you are."
This is the one about disordered eating, telling the story of Tung's teen years. And I come to it as a person who never had any kind of eating disorder and definitely wasn't ever a teen girl. I have struggled with weight, like so many other people, and lost about a hundred pounds over a six-year period not long ago after twenty years of yo-yo-ing. So my eating issues have been close to the opposite of Tung's.
More centrally, my discomfort here is that I'm a middle-aged man writing about a book entirely about a teen girl's concerns about her body. I want to say that I have no opinion about any teen girl's body, past or present, unless she specifically asks me a very particular question. (Like, maybe, "is this a wasp sting between my shoulder blades?" - I'd be OK answering that.) I want to avoid having any opinions about teen girl's bodies, in general or particular, or to pay attention to those bodies more than nominally, because that would be creepy.
So I came to this book with a mix of wanting to see what Tung would do next - I enjoy her positivity and her conversational comics, with soft tones and realistic gestures - and not wanting to question or focus on the body stuff. And the book is all body stuff.
Tung had the sadly common kind of mother who focused on her body and eating habits, and I think Tung also has habits of thinking that makes her susceptible to spiraling - see Everything Is OK how that turned into depression for her, a few years later - which meant that puberty meant anxiety about her body. Tung here tells the story of those years: she had some kind of eating disorder, though she doesn't here say whether she was ever diagnosed with anything specific or even saw a medical professional to help her get better. She ate less than she should have, and exercised relentlessly, with some notable negative health impacts while not getting to the body she thought she wanted. (Because - and she implies this - that "thought she wanted" was a moving target: it's always that bit slimmer than right now, always a vision and never a reality.)
Like her other books, Perfectly Imperfect is mostly a story of how she got better; how she realized this was a problem and took steps to get out of it. That's a lot of what makes her work so positive: there's an underlying central idea of "I had this problem, and realized it; I may not be perfect but I'm getting better - and you can too!" in most of her books.
If you're more like Tung than I am, you may get more out of it, but even I found it inspiring and (there's that word again!) positive, a welcome flash of can-do in the sometimes dour world of misery memoirs.
This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.
It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.
Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.
Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.
Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.
Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler.
The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.
There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.
It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.
But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.
Asher Perlman's first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me. It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.
The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It's Me Again, featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, "hey, this is a sequel!" is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.
Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the "real" Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.
In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.
The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine - it's possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman's weekly "batches" over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)
As always, it's difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I'm the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.
If you weren't one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you'll like this one are solid - give it a try, won't you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it's your civic duty.
"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.
This is the first "Famous" one in this year's series; that will alternate with "Obscure" for the rest of the year. I hope that's not too fiddly or precious.
The New Pornographers are of course a well-known Canadian supergroup - and, in the way of supergroups, they're I think more famous than the individual bands that the various members were part of originally. But then I tend to think no one famous is actually happy about why and how they became famous - that they all think, maybe secretly, that they're famous for the wrong thing. So, in my mind, that's how supergroups work: they're almost as much shackles as wings.
My favorite New Pornographers song is My Rights Versus Yours, from their 2007 record Challengers.
It begins magnificently, which might be one of the reasons I love it - that quick chiming guitar strum, the quiet first verse, with lovely harmonies along the way...and then the rest of the band drops in, chugging along and building as the song goes on.
It's probably about a divorce, but it's the kind of song where the words are complex and allusive - allowing a listener to make up their own story if they want to.
Courts knew this and nothing more
Now it's my rights versus yours
That's the way of life, isn't it? What's yours, what's mine, how they conflict - what we can get out of it, how we can negotiate or fight through that.
The truth in one free afternoon
A new empire in rags
She placed the tray in the middle of the bed between them and around it they played little games with each other's rudest parts. Then, before it got too cold, they drank their tea. It was Monday morning and neither of them cared. The time passed delightfully.
- D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.233
Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is structured like a cookbook, in chapters that include a "recipe" for making the dish that Hayden tried (and often failed) to cook in the preceding pages. Each chapter is a bit of memoir, from various times in Hayden's life, and all are about the preparation of food. As the title implies, Hayden's never been particularly good at cooking - and doesn't seem to have ever wanted to be, though she definitely resents that making meals is her responsibility mostly for she's-the-wife-and-mother reasons. So there's a lot of complicated emotions tangled up in her relationship with cooking - and, as readers of My Tits know [1], Hayden is really good at navigating through her complex emotional states.
I've been poking around her website, and goofing off in other windows, as I try to think about how to talk about how interesting and specific and strong this unique book actually is. I'm a man, and not the main cook in my family, so I don't have an obvious, direct way into this wonderful book about feminism, gender roles, family expectations, and that mix of anger, regret, bitterness, resentment, and just a bit of hope that comes out when Hayden finds herself in the kitchen, yet again, with a hungry family expecting her to feed them.
I can point at the things Hayden does well, even as I suspect I'm more like her husband "Jim" in the book: mildly clueless, wandering in when the work is mostly done, wanting to be helpful but never offering to actually do the difficult stuff. My own wife is the main cook in our family, and I think she falls somewhat farther on the "I want to be good at this" spectrum than Hayden does - but there's still the core cultural expectations: that the wife/mother makes all the meals, is responsible for taking care of the family, is the domestic goddess or the angel at the hearth or whatever depersonalizing term you want to plug in there.
Each chapter here combines both a story from Hayden's life, ranging from her own childhood, through the childhood of her two kids, up to her present empty-nest life. They're not in chronological order: Hayden hasn't structured Smoke in any obvious way, so it comes across as a cluster of stories she's telling us: they're all related, and each one leads naturally into the next one until she tells them all. Along the way, she gets into how her relationship with cooking was influenced by her own mother, and how that has changed over time - but keeps the focus on herself, on what she does in her own kitchen and how it makes her feel.
There's a lot to experience, to unpack, and to make the reader think about how they cook themselves (or don't, and let other people do it for them). Hayden has a wonderfully immediate cartooning style, mostly in four-panel grids, full of lines and color and action in every panel - it could all be too much, except that's the point, that cooking for Hayden is doing a dozen things at once that she never wanted to spend her time on. She wants it to be simpler and easier, but it never is - even in the few cases where everything goes right, it's always complicated.
(I will say one detail reminded me a lot of my own life - Hayden shows how her kids, when young, would get called out when dinner started inevitably burning to open all the windows and doors and flap their coats madly to disperse the smoke. We never did anything quite like that in my house, but whenever steak gets cooked, the smoke detector goes off - and I'm the one who gets to stand under it waving a big book or something until it stops beeping.)
I want to say something like "if you cook or eat, you'll find a lot to love here." I think that's basically true, actually. But if you're a woman, and particularly one who has been responsible for keeping the rest of the people in your house alive, I think it will be even more resonant and strong.
[1] Sorry not sorry, but I love being able to refer to a book that way. And it is appropriate in this case.
A dozen or so years ago, I covered Ludovic Debeurme's engrossing but dark bande desinée Lucille. At the time, I praised the story of two young doomed lovers, noted that a sequel Renée had already been published in France, and expressed some hope that, given the sequel, they were not perhaps as doomed as they seemed to be.
Reader, I was wrong. They are much more doomed than I thought. And many other people are also doomed, in this larger, multi-threaded story of violence, despair, unhealthy love, and generational trauma.
Debeurme tells the story of Renée much as he did Lucille - thin-lined, vignetted drawings, floating on his large open pages without borders, with minimal words for the first hundred or more pages of the book. (It's unpaginated, but looks to be three hundred pages or so.) He doesn't name most of his characters on first appearance, and some of them not at all - but we do learn, by the end, the names and connections of all of the major characters, if we pay close attention.
There are basically four strands: two women and two men. Lucille and Renée, Lucille's now-incarcerated boyfriend Arthur (who was Vladimir in the first book, and there's a brief explanation of that here) and an unnamed boy with a twisted face.
Parenthetically, Debeurme makes a lot of his characters - mostly just minor background people, though - exceptionally ugly in this story. There's a whole imagistic section in the middle about that, in fact. Occasionally at the Basil Wolverton level, with some creepy transformations and images mostly used as transitions, but most of the time recognizable normal people in a normal world, who are not attractive in the slightest bit in any way.
Debeurme moves among these four strands constantly, back and forth. For close to a hundred pages, the reader isn't really clear on who any of them are, and how they all connect doesn't come clear until the very end. And, again, their names appear only sparsely, generally later in the book. But here's who they are, and what they're dealing with:
The strands overlap and combine as the book goes on: Renée and Lucille meet very late in the story, Arthur gets a new cellmate who is related to another character, which leads to another moment of shocking violence for him.
It all comes out badly, for nearly everyone. I don't know if Debeurme is always a storyteller of despair and death and hideous grotesques and broken people lashing out at each other, but that's what you'll find in Renée, and, as I remember, Lucille was much the same. If that's what you're looking for, at this darkest time of the year, this is exactly that.
This man has bad eyesight: he wears glasses sometimes, contacts sometimes. One day, he finds a flyer about eye correction - a local clinic is offering a two-eyes-for-the-price-of-one deal, with the testing upfront thrown in free and satisfaction guaranteed. He puts the flyer away, but remembers it when, the next morning, he accidentally steps on his glasses, breaking them.
So he goes to the clinic, which we readers see is shadier than he realizes. He's tested, has the operation. He seems to stay in that clinic, just lying on a table recuperating, for many days, and eventually goes home, his sight hugely improved. But he has floaters - more than before, sometimes overwhelmingly so. (As someone who has had his optometrist say to him "you have a lot of floaters" basically every yearly visit for two decades, I sympathize but also think he's over-reacting. But I think his deal is to over-react.)
Things escalate; the man, as we may have expected, tends to be paranoid and subject to conspiratorial thinking...and may also be right.
This is Laser Eye Surgery, the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Tate works in thin lines, tightly defined and precise, almost mechanical but with life and energy to them. His writing is laconic and minimal; the story told mostly through images.
The defining image, in fact, is of this man, striding at pace - often away from the viewer, usually at an angle. Always without eyes - either his face is turned away or Tate just doesn't draw that level of detail. His eyes show up in close-up, and drive some imagistic sequences where the floaters wander about and proliferate, in a way we think the man considers deliberate.
Tate tells this story quietly, with an assurance that the reader will pick up the nuances and connect the dots - there's no narration, and minimal details. This is a book about seeing, and so the reader must see it. I don't know if I got all of the things Tate was trying to say, but I'm impressed by the power of his images and by the confident way he constructed this story; I want to see more of his work.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is one of those books: a 1974 near-future SF novel by the British writer D.G. Compton, published in the US as The Unsleeping Eye and filmed a few years later as Death Watch. It's set in the media landscape of the time, so some elements are old-fashioned - TV shows are broadcast at a particular time, and only seen in whole on big screens, for one major issue - but the depiction of a type of reality show, and how the public reacts to it, is true and prescient and starkly crisp. And its psychology, as Jeff VanderMeer notes in the introduction in the edition I read, is deep and nuanced and masterful.
Continuous has two main characters; I'll get to the title character second. Roddie is a reporter for the major outlet NTV in near-future Britain. He's recently had a major operation to install a TV camera in his eyes; we don't get the exact details, but it captures everything he sees and somehow transmits back to his company. He has additional tech for capturing sound; how exactly it works is not important. This is new technology, and a secret: NTV hopes to launch it in the world with a spectacular new series of some kind. Roddie is a rising star, and narrates his sections in first person.
Katherine is seen in third person. She's a middle-aged woman working in publishing - for Computabook, more-or-less creating complex AI prompts and then editing the output into a stream of romance novels that will be published under house names. This world has the usual '70s contract marriage with specific terms; her first marriage ended after the initial five-year term, and she's now remarried to Harold Clegg.
The time period is fuzzy: let's say two generations after it was written, but with no details of the geopolitical or even the UK-governance situation. Call it 2024 if you want; that's reasonable. It's not our 2024, because it never is in fiction. In this world, phones are still corded '70s tech and computers have somewhat enhanced capabilities but are still floor-filling '70s mainframes. But biotech has advanced much further, as we see with Roddie's eyes. In fact, it's advanced so far that it's vanishingly rare for anyone to die of any reason besides old age - diseases and syndromes and conditions can pretty much all be managed and cured, other than a tiny handful of exceptions. (Presumably, violent death, from accident or deliberate action, can't be guarded against in the same way, but Continuous isn't about that kind of death, so we don't learn the details.)
Katherine is called in to see Dr. Mason, her usual doctor. Behind a one-way glass are Roddie and his boss, Vincent Ferriman, a powerful producer at NTV. She's told that she has a terminal disease, that there is no possible cure. The details are a bit fuzzy as Compton tells it - a long list of symptoms he mostly glosses over, and an overall description that, frankly, read to this reader like bullshit. (Later in the novel, there's a reason for that - I won't explain further, but it does sound like bullshit, and that's on purpose.) She has perhaps four weeks to live, and might rapidly decline during that time.
Ferriman wants to give Katherine a contract; she'll make a small fortune by being the center of a "Human Destiny" TV show for as long as she lives. Roddie will film it; at some point they'll explain his eyes but maybe not at first. Ferriman intends to reach out to her later that day; he does contact her husband Harold before she even comes home from work for the day. He also - we infer from other things - leaks this story, with a garbled version of Katherine's name, which makes other media outlets start nosing around Katherine almost immediately. "Terminals" are media sensations: we don't get a good sense of how many there are, or how often, but they seem rare - one or two a year, perhaps, so surprising and novel and exciting every time.
Continuous is broken into eight sections, each named after a day, from Tuesday to Tuesday. We follow Roddie and Katherine, first separately and then eventually together, as they live through the media frenzy and navigate their changing lives. The world is fairly utopian, but we see mostly the underside of it - rapacious media packs, the "fringies" who have dropped out of normal life, protestors and youth gangs and sex cults.
Katherine doesn't want to sign with NTV - to sign with anyone, since it's basically a given (at least from the media companies) that she will sign an exclusive contract with someone to broadcast the details of her dying. She wants to stay private, not to be splashed all over the media. And her actions are mostly driven by trying to subvert that expectation, to get away from the camera eye and the public scrutiny, in a world where all of the forces push the opposite direction.
Roddie is more conflicted. He wants to make a great TV show, but he also wants to present "the true, continuous Katherine Mortenhoe" - to show her as she is, in context of her whole life, in a way she would recognize and agree with, and yet also be a big media splash in the way the audience wants. The reader might suspect Roddie can't possibly get what he wants, and might not like or trust him, particularly as he meets Katherine and doesn't tell her who is is or how his eyes work.
But, in the end, they do meet. Katherine does run away. It does all get televised. And it does end, for both of them, strongly and inevitably. Continuous is a novel about people, the kind of SF book where the technology is there to heighten the human drama, to make choices and options starker and crisper, and a book that does a great job of delineating those people, making them real and true, conflicted and contingent, specific and particular.
"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 don't know who Andrew Deadman is. I half-suspect that's a stage name, or otherwise not the name he was born with - but I don't know. The world is large and contains multitudes.
I got his record Santa Monica Airport 1987 around when it was released in 2019 - probably as a publicity thing. (Yes, I get music for publicity purposes. I find it hard to believe myself; I can't see how I've ever been useful in the slightest to publicize anything.) It's a solid record, atmospheric and discursive, all supporting Deadman's tense, cracking voice.
My favorite song from that record is The Driver, the story (true or false or fictionalized) of one ride in a car, from somewhere to somewhere. Like a lot of the obscure songs I like, this year and previously, the lyrics don't exist anywhere online I can find.
So I'm sitting here typing, listening to the guitar solo at around three minutes in, wondering how much I want to try to transcribe lyrics myself. Maybe just the chorus; that's always a good thing. Maybe that's what I want to leave you with.
Driver please
I'm too young to be bleeding
Dead on the side of the road
And I'll take what you give me
I will take what you give me
As long as I live 'till I'm old
As always, this is mostly an index, mostly for me, and not-particularly-useful until the posts actually go live and I come back and update this. (And that will be roughly six weeks from now; I'm running about that far ahead.)
René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix and Cleopatra (12/6)
George O'Connor, Asgardians: Loki (12/7)
Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye (12/11)
Wiley Miller, The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance (digital, 12/13)
Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, The Joy of Snacking (digital, 12/14)
Ana Ocina, Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story (digital, 12/20)
James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (in Writings & Drawings, 12/20)
John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt (digital, 12/21)
Jason, Death in Trieste (digital, 12/24)
Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716 (in Alastor)
Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier, Criminy (digital, 12/25)
Jeff Lemire, Fishflies (digital, 12/26)
Edward Welch, ed., Captain Cuttle's Mailbag (12/26)
Sergio Aragonés, Louder Than Words, Actions Speak (digital, 12/27)
Gilbert Hernandez, Lovers and Haters (digital, 12/28)
Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law (in Waugh Abroad, 12/28)
Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death (digital, 12/29)
Kenji Tsurata, Wandering Island, Vol.2 (digital, 12/30)
Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho (digital, 12/31)
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 12/31)
I plan to keep reading books in 2026. Not all my plans come true, but I'm pretty sure that one will.
So this notice is actually a week late, because I've been busy being on vacation the past week or so.
The book is Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History, part of a larger series of books about notable TV shows from the Rowman & Littlefield publishing house. This one is written by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson, both academics who seem to specialize in TV and TV-adjacent studies. It sounds a lot like The Worst We Can Find, a different history of MST3K I read in mid-2025, so I suppose I should get to it quickly enough that I can compare the two in my head.
How many histories of a basic-cable comedy puppet show does the world need? As with anything else: it's not a question of need, it's about who wants to do it and if they can get it published. And at least these two did - I bet there are several more, too.
Hugo Gernsback? That son of a bitch. I never dealt with him, not with the rates he paid. Every time I see someone being awarded a Hugo I see the biggest fraud, swindler, chickenshit fucking scoundrel ever in the business. He's the only editor I've ever known, or known of, who so fully deserved these understatements of mine.
- E. Hoffman Price, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.9
