Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I'm also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I'll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights was Guy Colwell's new graphic novel this year - his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people's comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He's in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he's a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren't known but aiming to be realistic or plausible - this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it's most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it's about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell's telling, Bosch was a visionary painter - literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell - and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting - more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town - the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That's what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then - in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead - being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It's a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting - Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide - that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time - and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn't overdramatize the conflicts; they're mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell's art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern - a major benefit for this work - and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it's one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it's about. It's a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it's a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

You have to go back to the big books every so often. If you're a middle-aged man - and I am, these days - you may find that's what you mostly do.

So I re-read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel, for probably the first time since...maybe when I was a teenager? I remember reading Chandler, in whatever paperback editions were current at the time - maybe Vintage, but I think my first were mass-markets from someone like Berkley. I remember reading at least one by the side of a pool in Florida, while visiting my father for the summer in 1985 - the closest I could come to the gestalt of Chandler's LA, I suppose.

That was a long time ago. 1939 was even longer ago.

Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, had appeared in a number of stories before this first novel, and his character was already set: all the things that would be clichés later, the man of the mean streets but not himself mean, the tarnished angel, the rumpled knight, incorruptible because there's nothing he wants enough to be used to corrupt him with.

This is the Chandler novel with one death that's not quite solved - all of the others are clearly explained, and the mysterious one is closed by the police with a plausible story, which is better than real life and not bad for fiction. But I gather some mystery readers were snooty about it at the time, and ever afterward. You'd think they'd be mollified by the fact that the book has a butler in it, but they're never satisfied, of course.

I'm not going to detail the whole plot, at this point. Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to investigate a possible blackmail attempt, and absolutely not hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the old man's son-in-law, whom he'd quite liked. The millionaire has two daughters, both in their twenties: the older one is a bit wild, having married several times already and gambling much more than is good for her. The younger one is practically feral, vastly worse and more dangerous to herself and others.

Marlowe does what he needs to do, and what he can do, and bodies start to pile up as others react to what he does, and he sometimes hides evidence of those bodies and sometimes calls in the authorities. In the end, he does find out what happened to the missing son-in-law, which is the core of the book.

And, throughout, Chandler writes magnificently. We read Chandler for the writing - his plots were fine and thoughtful, his characters vivid and specific, but his turns of phrase and random observations were unique and striking over and over again. The best Chandler books - this one, The Long Goodbye - don't just tell a good detective story, but let us see the world in different ways, give us unexpected insights and viewpoints as they roll out a compelling story, too. We read Chandler to see the world through his eyes, and be surprised and excited by what we find there.

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.

Better Things: Lost in the Supermarket

"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.

If there was anyone out there who cared enough to think it through, this one would have been obvious.

Yes, The Clash, of course - given my age and my musical tastes, I of course had a Clash phase.

And Lost in the Supermarket as well, because I'm also clearly a fan of the emotional song over the agitprop. Sure, I really like London's Burning and I Fought the Law and Something About England and Safe European Home and London Calling, but the song that almost edged this out was Somebody Got Murdered.

This is that cliched thing, the song of suburban ennui - but that's what's neat about music, clichés in songs can work a lot of the time if done well. A song often is a cliché, since it needs to be simplified and focused.

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

It's full of specifics, not vagueness. This room, these neighbors, this hedge. A kettle, a bottle. The furniture of one normal life, and the gnawing feeling that it's not enough, that there must be more than this.

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I'll fully admit the time I loved this song most was my teenage years: that time when all of us are at our most cliched and disheartened and alienated. But it still strikes a chord, forty years later, as I live out my own suburban life. There are many days I still feel lost in the supermarket; maybe you do as well.

Quote of the Week: Not Just Foxed, But Absolutely Badgered

The hardest part, though, lies in recording precisely in what ways a book has survived the ravages of time. An entire lexicon of book-related terminology has evolved over hundreds of years for exactly this purpose - terminology that means absolutely nothing to the average observer. It's traditional to adopt this baroque language when describing your books, for two reasons. The first is that the specific language of the book trade allows you to be exceedingly accurate and precise without using hundreds of words, and the second is that the elegance of it serves to dull the blow a little. Most rare books come with some minor defects, but that doesn't mean one has to be rude about it. It's much more charming to describe a book as "foxed" than to tell someone that the pages have developed an unsightly mottling, and that if this were a zombie movie we'd already have taken it out back and put it out of its misery.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, pp.25-26

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK - it's the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that's the actual title.

I don't know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks' 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy. But it's the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She's big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she's been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years - and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn't focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don't know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could - wait, I mean should - lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix - how she's no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing - and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, - and they happened quite a lot - both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it's all Alix's fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and "where this violence came from." Um, one - hockey, and two - sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing...which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg - who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay's boyfriend, though this plot point doesn't really become important - through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and '80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he's never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn't have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra's friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he's only dated boys in high school. (He's actually one of these modern "I don't want to put labels on it" kind of person who is not "bisexual" even though he admits he's attracted to both boys and girls - and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it's impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to like and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There's also an undercurrent of "what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?" Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories - Alix's mom is a "Canadian-famous" sculptor who went strongly against her own parents' wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix's birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra's mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix's mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn't see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents' "it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!" arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother's boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the "he'd be more than happy to kiss her, too" thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there's too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there's not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient - such as Alix's father's location and the ease of contacting him - when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was - maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is - Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well - but there's more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

This book has a clever title that makes it difficult to search for; engines will assume you have made a typo and offer confidently incorrect results. Luckily, the author's last name is much less common, and less likely (in my searching) to be turned into something else.

Oliver Darkshire came into the august London antiquarian bookseller Sotheran's (founded 1761) as an apprentice about a decade ago. A few years later, he took over their Twitter feed - it sounds like he generally took responsibility for the company's social media and maybe website, in the way that very old and very settled companies tend to dump such things on the youngest and most junior employees - and made a notable success of it.

Because of that, he got a book deal. Some Twitter book deals were "the Twitter feed, in book form," but the Sotheran's feed was one part "here's a weird thing we have for sale in the store," one part "here's a weird interaction with a customer" and several parts sparking conversation among other bookstore people and readers - and a lot of that isn't book-able easily. So, instead, Darkshire wrote a memoir.

Once Upon a Tome is the story of his time at Sotheran's - I see from taking a quick peek at the account today that the shop recently moved locations after about eighty years in one place, and that Darkshire is leaving Sotheran's as well, so it's clearly the story of this one chapter in his life, beginning to almost end.

Darkshire is one of those bookish but not university-educated people that seem to be more common in the British Isles than on my side of the Atlantic, for reasons I always assume are class-related most of the time. (Darkshire, though, talks about his narcolepsy in this book, and blames that for his academic failures.) He's witty, and good with a turn of phrase, which is exactly what a reader is looking for in a book about working in a bookshop that sells old random books.

We have an image of such places, I mean. And of the people that work there. Darkshire doesn't make himself a caricature, but he clearly fits into this milieu, and gives us an entertaining and informative tour through the world of antiquarian bookselling, or at least how he experienced it for the past ten years or so.

Look, you probably knew if you wanted to read this book several paragraphs ago. If "witty memoir by a antiquarian bookseller in London" appeals to you, know that Darkshire hits every note of that well. If not, you've probably already moved on anyway.

Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, & various artists

Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns. I know why, they know why - we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I'm just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1 is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology, a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain't much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it - here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people - Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski - drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it's the modern world and we can't have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I'll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it's exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book, for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story - this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together - they're individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell's adaptations, it's very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like "exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns" as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That's entirely valid, too.)

Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall

This is much more of a Volume One than I expected, so I hope to set your expectations more accurately than mine were.

Everything Is Fine is a psychological horror webcomic by Mike Birchall, appearing weekly (during "seasons," three so far) on Webtoon. There have been ninety episodes since the series began in spring of 2021.

Everything Is Fine, Volume One collects the first sixteen episodes, gathered and possibly somewhat updated or rearranged into nine parts and a very brief comics Prologue. 

It's set in suburbia, somewhere - "neighborhood one-four-seven-D." Sam and Maggie are a married couple, living in a house. He goes off to work, she stays at home. They have gigantic cat heads that may be masks. They have a dog named Winston, or so they say to each other. The men in the neighborhood, we learn a bit later, have jobs with boxes - Sam handles paperwork, single neighbor Charlie moves boxes from point four to point five (of at least ten), and Bob works at the box incinerator.

Everything is totally normal, they say to each other in chipper voices. 

But we see surveillance all over, and the local policeman, Officer Tom, is oddly insistent in his questions. And there are clearly teeth in this world, as we see hints as these chapters go on - everything is only fine for those who can follow the rules, of action and demeanor and correct thinking. If you fall out of that, you might as well not exist at all.

This is clearly a constructed society of some kind, but we don't know how or why. Are they being tested, or pitted against each other to see who comes out on top? Is this meant to be permanent - a "perfect life" constructed according to some plan - or is it something that will end?

Most importantly: what happened in the past that they shouldn't think about? The telling line of dialogue is "We need to forget - you know as well as I do." Birchall doesn't explain all of the things they need to forget in these chapters, but it's clear there's a lot: other people, other ways of living, any other possibilities.

Birchall's art is all thin lines, instantly clear, almost generic-looking, like some Flash game. It looks fine, like a world you've seen a million times before, a world that wants to slide away from your eyeballs and hide in the background. It looks like the suburbs of a million other stories, in comics and animation and film. And his dialogue is subtly creepy, full of those insistences that everything is completely normal, that nothing is at all strange ever.

There's no answers here. There are probably something like answers, or at least next steps, in the seventy-plus episodes Birchall has made since these. But there's no end in sight yet. Every reader will have to decide if they're interested in creepy psychological horror with no end in sight - I have to admit it makes me less interested in continuing. But this is really good at the building-horror phase, and people who like that should check it out.

Better Things: All Her Favorite Fruit

"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.

And here's where the series makes its first left-turn into the very idiosyncratic. (At least I think so: the first three songs strike me as solidly reasonable choices, big famous songs by fairly famous bands. But this is all my taste, so you may disagree.)

Camper Van Beethoven had a lot of great songs in a lot of modes - more awesome covers than most bands, with Pictures of Matchstick Men and One of These Days and Interstellar Overdrive, silly songs like Take the Skinheads Bowling and stark powerful late songs like Civil Disobedience, great instrumentals like Skinhead Stomp - but the song of theirs I come back to is a slow, loping, string-drenched monologue of longing.

It's All Her Favorite Fruit, from the 1989 record Key Lime Pie, which for a long time looked like the end of their work as a band. (It wasn't; everyone has a reunion, eventually, if there's any money at all to be had.)

The narrator is thinking about a woman - he's not named, she's not named, the "he" she's currently with isn't named, either. We don't know why they're not together, but the song is this man's vision of what their lives together could be. We don't know if she agrees. We don't know much of anything, frankly: it's all his viewpoint, this one line of thought.

I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay

The song has a languid pace that matches the vision this man has of his potential life with this woman - somewhere "in the colonies," far away from the metropolis they live in. And everything is allusive, fleeting - nothing is said clearly or concretely. There's probably danger of some kind - even in the vision of their life together there's a hint of that:

We'd play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention's distance of the embassy

This is a song of mood and emotion and feeling, I can believe the whole thing takes place in this man's head as he drives home from work, as he says in the first lines. It's a song of nuance and deep emotion, which I love about it.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Difference Between a Mook and a Palooka

Matty Pierce, the acting student who'd had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It's all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath it all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they'd had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy "rugged" good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There's no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who've never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.

 - Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death, p.217

Quote of the Week: The Turtle Manifesto

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind, and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.27 

The Fourth Dimension Is Death by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I didn't expect to re-read the whole "Sam Holt" series in 2024, but I guess I just did. (I am writing this the morning of December 14th, though you are reading it in the future. Hello, future!) It's a four-book series, written by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym in the mid-80s: Westlake wanted to see if he could have a successful new launch that wasn't tied to his existing career, but "Holt" was revealed to be Westlake pretty much immediately, which soured him on the project. He'd already written the first three books - Westlake was always prolific and productive - and cranked out this fourth one to finish up the contract. He'd originally hoped to write more, but the reveal put him off that idea, and so that was it.

The first three are One Of Us Is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, and What I Tell You Three Times Is False. Sam Holt himself, the character supposedly writing and narrating these mysteries, is the former star of a TV action/mystery, Packard, which I like to describe as "what if Magnum, P.I. was Quincy, M.E.?" Holt got rich from the show, which ran five years and is still syndicated now, a few years later. He has semi-palatial houses in New York and LA, with supporting casts in both places, and no worries in life...except that he'd really like to keep acting, for busyness and doing-things-with-his-life reasons, but the entertainment world has comprehensively typecast him as Packard, and he can't get any jobs to save his life. Meanwhile, in the way of the amateur sleuth, murders happen around him now and then.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death has the title least connected with the story of the entire series; perhaps Westlake was already sour at this point. (Westlake was good at souring on things; check out his kiss-off to the SF field from the late '60s for an earlier, even sourer, example - it's available in the fanzine collection The Best of Xero.) This is also the most amateur-sleuth of the four books, though it takes a while to get going.

You see, a regional supermarket chain ran a series of ads featuring a "parody" of Packard, which Holt and the owners and syndicators of the actual show took objection to, and some unpleasant litigation ensued. The actor who played the parody, Dale Wormley, was a hothead who was offended by what he saw as an attack on him and his ability to work, and ran into Holt twice in New York threatening violence but was quickly shut down by ex-cop Holt.

And then Wormley turns up dead, stuffed into a doorway down the street from Holt's New York home. Holt is an obvious suspect...except that he doesn't really have a motive, and has a decent alibi, and we the readers know he didn't do it. Soon after, there's a second, oddly related murder, which doesn't help but doesn't really put Holt in more jeopardy, either.

It all looks like the whole thing will just move to the back burner and never be actually solved - until Wormley's mother hits Holt with a civil-rights lawsuit for depriving her of her son by killing him. (I don't know the legislative or litigation history, though I am dubious about this plot: I suspect there wasn't generally a private cause of action for civil rights lawsuits - it was always something the federal government could bring on a prosecutorial level.) Anyway, the burden of proof for a civil suit is lower than that for criminal, so Holt faces the possibility he might have to settle, or could even lose the case and be tarred in the public's mind as the famous TV actor who got away with murder. (This is about fifteen years before Robert Blake, to be clear.)

So Holt decides he has to investigate the case himself, and dresses up in a goofy disguise to do so. Does he find the real killer? Is this a series mystery? Yes and yes. There's a rushed ending that leaves Holt battered but alive, and the series could have continued, but, obviously, didn't. This is also probably the least successful of the four books, for all the obvious reasons. If Westlake had stayed energized, it could have been better, and he could have written more, but those are solidly counterfactual at this point. So "Samuel Holt" is a short, mostly fun, clearly minor series by Westlake, most interesting for a look at the entertainment biz of the '80s by a writer who did a fair bit of scriptwriting in the '70s and '80s and was writing under a pseudonym to use some of his unkinder ideas and not be tied to them.

Why Are You Like This? by Meg Adams

One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things - single-panels, mostly disconnected from each other - sold them individually to magazines or other outlets, but cartoonists all wanted to come up with a concept they could turn into a strip: a concept that supported a stream of stories, with new entries regularly, probably multi-panel. And some larger organization would back that strip, push it out into the world, gather the money, and keep the whole engine running for decades.

But, these days, even the most successful recent new strips of the 21st century - aside from a very few newspaper launches like Crabgrass - are all webcomics. On the positive side, that means the creator owns it all. On the negative side, the creator has to do it all: build a website, design and source merchandise and reprint books, run fundraisers, set up advertising, and everything else that actually brings in revenue on top of just creating the work.

And it may be a cliché, but cartoonists are not generally known for their organizational skill, entrepreneurial zeal, and eagerness to sell their work to other people. On the other hand, we have been getting a lot of interesting strips from good cartoonists, so the system seems to be working...but I suspect there's an element of "young cartoonist has enough energy and gumption to set it up and run it for a few years, then gets ground down by the lack of stable cash flow and aforementioned late-stage capitalism."

Because I want to see cartoonist have long, complex, interesting careers. If they can do that in high-profile ways, so I don't have to take a lot of time and effort to chase their work down, that would be even better, because I am lazy.

These thoughts are brought to you today by What Are You Like This?, the first collection of the ArtbyMoga online strip by Meg Adams, a talented younger cartoonist from the Pacific Northwest. The book is from Andrews McMeel, the book-publishing arm of one of the surviving major comics syndicators, so she's somewhat plugged into what used to be the big engine of comics success. But ArtbyMoga strips originally appear on Adams's social media, cast out for free into the world in hopes that will lead to engagement and clicks and eyeballs and merch sales and Ko-Fi tips and so forth. (There is something inherently Underpants Gnomes-esque about modern webcomics, particularly those that live on Instagram. To editorialize briefly, it's what happens when you let your economy be dominated by techbros who are really good at making sure most of the potential money in any system comes to them and them alone.)

But I'm supposed to be writing here about Meg Adams comics! She's got a energetic, expressive cartoony style, with big fat confident lines and great faces. Her work is in the roughly autobio area - I won't assume how much the "Meg" and "Carson" in her strips really map to her real self and husband; comic exaggeration is a thing that exists - and her strips are pretty domestic, grounded in the lives of this couple and their various animals (I think two dogs and three cats).

I particularly like how Adams draws herself. She has a conventionally pretty version of her face she does some of the time, for quieter, more normal moments. But she also has a more distorted, cartoony self that pops up a lot - see the cover, with that weird thin nose, distorted eyes, and unsettling mouth. I'm always impressed by humorists (in comics or out of it) who are confident enough to throw a Gookie and make themselves the butt of the joke, and Adams does that really well.

So I want you to support Meg Adams, and cartoonists like her. Read their comics, buy and read their books, buy T-shirts if you can, buy sketches or whatever if it strikes your fancy. Click like and subscribe, as they say. You can start with this book: it's out now, it's very funny, and it's pretty cheap, too. Thank me later.