Book-A- Day 2018 #98: Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

I should probably stop writing about Saga through the lens of my own expectations. I want it to be a single story that started with the birth of one child in this space-fantasy universe, and to have it end well in a way that wraps up that story. But it's becoming more and more clear that creator Brian K. Vaughan instead sees Saga as a universe to tell stories in, and that those stories will all be somewhat related to that central family.

So I'm looking for a unity that isn't here, and will never be here: Saga will run as long as people keep buying it (or until artist Fiona Staples decides she wants to do something else; I can't imagine this continuing without her), and it will be a normal comic-book, full of issues that are separate stories or add up to an "arc" of three or six issues. Eventually, it will stop, for whatever reason, but the whole of Saga is not a single story and there's no way to make it one at this point.

I'm sad about this, because there are enough serialized adventures in comics already and not enough stories, but no one asked me. I do hope I can draw a line under than thought here, and leave it buried: it's not a useful framework for looking at Saga going forward from here. (And I see I keep saying a variation of the same thing every time I write about Saga, which must be tedious on your end: see my posts on volumes one, two, three, four, five, six, and especially seven for my repeated cataloging of pointless objections.)

So: here's Saga, Vol. 8, collecting another chunk of six issues. The first of these even seems to be an attempt at an introduction for new readers, that old standby of serialized comics. Let me just note that "new-reader friendly" is only important in a medium where going back to the beginning is infeasible or impossible: Netflix has built a big business on letting people binge from Season One Episode One.

Anyway, this volume is the story of an abortion. Well, it's described as an abortion, repeatedly, but the baby is dead in the womb -- in a mystical, woo-woo kind of way that means that child is also a ghost running around nearby -- which means the medical procedure is actually quite distinct from an abortion. One suspects Vaughan might be trying to make points, or just be provocative for the sake of being provocative. The big events at the end of the last volume left that child dead in the womb, and apparently it's not simple to just get him out. (If anything were simple, it wouldn't be Saga.)

I find it harder and harder to write about the Saga volumes at this point: I'm trying not to give away who needs an abortion, even though that's blindingly obvious to any semi-serious reader of the series. But I feel like the plot details of part forty-three of an umpty-ump part story shouldn't be splashed around; I think most readers will want to get here under their own power. And, more seriously, Saga is becoming more and more soap-opera-ish with each issue: I forget precisely which TV-head is the guy running around in this issue (Count something? the Duc of NBC? Crown Prince Cyborg MCMLXXVI?), and I can't remember where Lying Cat got to (she's not in here at all), and I'm only vaguely invested in the some-other-horrible-person-has-captured-The-Will-and-has-now-learned-our-heroes-exist-oh-woe plotline.

Look, these are sturdy, well-built characters. They inhabit a big, complicated universe. Staples can draw any damn thing Vaughan can throw at her, and make it look both real and retroactively obvious. Many of the relationships here are ones readers care about and are invested in. But Saga seems to be still proliferating, and the initial burst of energy that was so enticing is slowly expanding into that big universe, like the Big Bang, and is cooling and becoming less excited as it goes.

Hmm. I guess I can't stop talking about the same issues with Saga every damn time. Oh, well. Saga has gone from being a thunderbolt of energy and passion to a solid, entertaining space adventure comic. It's still very nice, but it's not what it was.

Book-A-Day 2018 #371: Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

If you know anything about Saga, you know there's a big change at the end of this book, and that the series is now on a longer hiatus than usual. If you know nothing about Saga, you might just have been living in a hole for the last seven years, and nearly anything I could say would be a spoiler for the first fifty-some issues and nine volumes.

But that's always the issue with writing about a long-running media thing: there are the people who follow it passionately, who know everything you could possibly tell them, and the ones who have ignored it, who won't get any of the backstory. What I try to do is write down the middle -- for the people who know the thing exists but aren't uberfans, who might be caught up or might not, since life is complicated and this media thing isn't going to be everyone's biggest priority.

That brings me to Saga, Vol. 9 today. It's written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated -- pencils, inks, colors, the whole deal -- by Fiona Staples, as all of the issues to date have been and all of the issues to come are supposed to be. If you want to remind yourself of how we got here, you could check out what I wrote about the previous books: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

It's a soft-SF epic, set in a a universe influenced by Star Wars but full of its own quirks and specifics. Two soldiers from opposite sides of a very long-running war -- their people are set up to be opposites in as many ways as Vaughan could manage -- met before the series began and fell in love. The first issue depicted the birth of their daughter Hazel; Saga is meant to be her story, and she's been narrating the comic more and more as she's gotten older. Now she's somewhere in the middle of what we'd call her elementary-school years -- maybe six, maybe eight. She and her parents, and various helpers, have been on the run her entire life, and have been chased by various others, on and off, the whole time. There are a lot of moments of peace, but the war is always in the background: both sides would very much like to capture and/or kill both parents, and do that or worse to Hazel.

Vaughan and Staples have been clear from the beginning that Saga is Hazel's story, not that of Marco and Alana, her parents. But she was a baby for the first twenty or thirty issues, so that message wasn't as clear as they might have thought. And, frankly, even now she's not old enough to have a story really separate from her parents and keepers -- the emphasis on Hazel in the interviews around the most recent issue and hiatus seem to me to be signposts to say "Saga is going to run for a lot of issues -- well over a hundred," given how long it's taken to get Hazel to this age and how little agency she has had so far.

I don't mind long stories, as long as they are stories. Saga has a lot of serial comics in its DNA, but I think it still has the bones of a single story. I wouldn't be surprised to see Saga come back after the hiatus with a time-jump, bumping Hazel up to an age when she really can affect events. Maybe not, though: maybe I'm just trying to hurry along something that will continue to go at its own pace.

Saga is still a very strong, humanistic work of SF, a story of people in danger and how they react to various stresses and demands and threats. Not all of them do what we'd hope they would, just like life. But they're all real, and they're what keep Saga worth reading.

Book-A-Day 2014 #200: Saga Vol. 1 by Vaughan & Staples

There are two mutually exclusive ways I could go forward with this review, and I'm vacillating between them. On the one hand, I could moan about how I've seen a lot of mediocre to crappy SF in comics form lately, and then gush about how wonderful it was to see Saga dive straight into smart space-opera territory, make no excuses for itself, explain no more than it had to, and charge forward to tell a great story that also was very good (if also very soft) SF. But the other hand remembers how I was equally thrilled and energized by writer Brian K. Vaughan's series Ex Machina, back when it started in 2004, and how that whole machine trundled on too long, wandered down too many blind alleys, and ended with a deflating, side-stepping whimper.

What I'm saying is that I'm almost excited enough to forget that Vaughan got me this excited once before. There's all kinds of metaphors for that feeling, nearly all of them inappropriate. But I'm cautiously optimistic that Saga won't fall into the snares that hobbled Ex Machina, and that Vaughan both has a real ending in mind this time and will get there.

Anyway, Saga, Vol. 1 collects the first six issues of the series of the same name -- the biggest success in comic-shop comics of the past couple of years, more or less, and definitely so if you use a "not Big Two" special pleading. It's written by Vaughan, who'd been away from comics writing things with real people standing in front of cameras for a while. And the art is by Fiona Staples -- no one else is credited, so I believe she laid it all out, drew all of the lines, and chose the colors as well. (It's a modern standard comic, so the palette is large and flexible -- unlike the image of old newsprint comics in garish four-color.) Staples' work is entirely exemplary: she reminds me just a bit of Mark Buckingham on Fables, with an equal ability to visualize anything Vaughan throws at her, making it look real and solid and entirely part of this world from the instant it appears.

Saga is a space opera, set in the middle of a galactic war. The combatants come from a world and its moon -- I don't think Vaughan means the echo of The Dispossessed, but I could be wrong -- but their battle has spread across countless stars and involves millions of troops. On the planet Landfall, the regular folks all have wings and the nobles are TV-headed humanoids with "Robot" in all of their names. (Again: Vaughan may explain everything eventually, but for now he's telling a story, so things are as they are, and the reader has to pick up hints and put the bigger picture together himself.) On the moon Wreath, everyone has horns, and they seem to mostly use magic rather than science. (Another thing to make me uneasy, but so far Vaughan is using it for color and atmosphere rather than some metaphor about science vs. magic.)

In a hard SF story, Vaughan would have to explain how both worlds could send ships outward from their home system -- there does seem to be something like a truce for ground combat at home, but, still, I would expect major space-naval battles on a daily basis -- but this is very far from hard SF. There are two neighbors fighting a proxy war across the galaxy, or perhaps a hundred thousand smaller proxy wars. In the middle of all that, on a planet named Cleave, somehow a girl with wings named Alana met a boy with horns named Marko: two soldiers on opposite sides, conditioned to hate each other forever. Instead they fell in love, and the first page of Saga has Alana deep in labor with their daughter, Hazel.

For reasons Vaughan never quite specifies -- probably because he can't blatantly say "it makes for a better story" -- both societies want their respective deserters dead or worse, precisely because they made a baby together. So Alana and Marko are on the run, at first on a world where both sides are fighting, with a newborn in tow. (Alana, even for a highly trained soldier in excellent shape, is ridiculously active in this period.)

What's brilliant about that is that Vaughan jumps over the whole Romeo-and-Juliet moony phase: his protagonists are a family with a baby to protect, not just star-crossed lovers. To hammer that home, the narrator of the series is Hazel herself, looking back from some as-yet-unspecified point in the future. (Though Hazel's narration does sometimes introduce events that it would be difficult to explain how she knew about -- Saga's central focus is on the family on the run, but a secondary focus is on the various people chasing them.)

So we have a big, exciting universe full of wonders and strangeness -- most of the characters so far are Star Trek-y humanoids who could be created with makeup and prosthetics, but not all of them -- and a good-sized cast of engaging and interesting people, including an intriguing "freelancer" (bounty hunter) named The Will. It is more than a little derivative of Star Wars, certainly -- but derivative of the early Star Wars, where there were more questions than answers, not the stuffy and dull Star Wars of the last decade. Vaughan claims to have a real ending in mind, and I have no reason to doubt him. I just hope he can keep the story as simultaneously grounded and high-flying until he gets to that ending.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Saga Volume Seven by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention.

Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina series with artist Tony Harris, and I've been giving each of his projects the side-eye since then, watching to see if the same thing would recur. That's probably not fair, and it might have made my posts on the earlier Saga books -- volumes one, two, three, four, five, and six -- less useful than they could be.

But there's an essential tension in a standalone, ongoing comic book: is this one story, or is it a series of stories? Most comics tell several stories in a row: sometimes simply, with a story in each issue, and sometimes complexly, across dozens of issues of dozens of titles for two months to then abruptly stop and pick back up with the next big crossover. But Spider-Man or JLA or Marvel as a whole is not a story -- they're walls made up of separate but interconnected stories.

Saga, though, has always presented itself as a story. A story told by a grown-up Hazel, some time in the future, which presumably explains how she can tell us things that happened in secret far away to other people. A story with a single through-line: how this family got through a galactic war and (we hope) found peace. So we're expecting more than just twenty-some pages of action each month; it all has to add up to the story of this family.

And the longer a story goes on, the bigger the ending has to be to suit it. (Ask George R.R. Martin.) With the issues collected in this Volume Seven, Saga is now forty-two issues long -- that might be half of the whole, or more, or less. We don't know. The debt of that ending is continuing to grow, and will grow until we get to it.

Is it a good sign or a bad one that this volume collects a complete arc, with a definitive shape? (Does that make it a story, or a chapter?) This is some of the strongest work in Saga since the beginning, as if Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples cracked their knuckles and said "OK, we got the family back together -- now it's time to fuck shit up." That's a good sign, whichever way you fall on the story question.

In the end, I think I land on a slightly different set of questions: is Saga still compelling? is it still moving in the same direction? does it seem to have not just a vector but real velocity on its path? are these people still real and true to themselves?

And, from these issues -- or this chapter, or this Volume Seven, call it what you will -- the answer to all of those questions is still yes. So I'm still on board, though I would like to have a sense of how big the story will be overall. All stories have to end, even the good ones. Even this one. Stories that don't end aren't stories, they're just things that happened.

And I want Saga to be a story. It has the potential to be a great one.

Book-A-Day 2014 #267a: Saga, Vol. 2 by Vaughan & Staples

It is a joy to see natural, unforced storytelling in an adventure comic, with a story rolling out in carefully measured moments, informed by both precise flashbacks and knowing narration from some unknown number of years later. The format is so often used for retrofits and clumsy transitions, with editorial demands whipsawing characterization and plots back and forth, tacking to find that elusive bit of fan-favorite wind that will keep the clumsy ship floating for a few months more. So we get used to the latter, and forget that the former -- what happens with a team allowed to tell the story they want -- is even possible.

Saga is the good kind of adventure comic: writer Brian K. Vaughan obviously has a long-term plan for the series, and has been writing comics long enough that he's excellent at turning each issue into a story capsule, moving forward both his main story and his flashbacks, with little hints of the frame story. (And I shouldn't forget about artist Fiona Staples, who is the Ginger Rogers here: all she has to do is draw every idea Vaughan throws at her, turn it into compelling story pages, and make it look effortless.)

Saga, Vol. 2 collects the second cluster of six issues; it's not really a plot arc, since Vaughan isn't writing for the trade. Each issue of Saga ends like a chapter, and so this volume ends the same way -- it's satisfying enough, since we all know there will be more along the way. It's the story of two lovers in a dangerous space opera universe: Alana and Marko are soldiers from opposite sides of a huge cold war, whose respective civilizations have been fighting each other for generations, first directly and then through proxies across the galaxy. But they met in a prison camp, where one guarded the other, and fell in love, and ran away, and had a baby.

That baby is Hazel: she narrates the story, from sometime in the indefinite future. In the main story, she's still an infant -- the first volume got the young family off the war-torn planet where Hazel was born, into an tree-based starship, and off to either find a safe place to be or just to wander in obscurity and stay alive. Because both of those battling empires want Alana and Marko dead, with a zeal that is, so far, vastly outmatching the actual injury that the escaping lovers pose. (There may be a Secret Reason why their betrayals are considered so heinous, but I think it's just an obvious and natural source of narrative tension.)

So there are hellhounds on their trail, figuratively. A "freelancer" -- one might call him an assassin -- was sent by one side, and is joined by Marko's ex-fiancee in these issues. And the other side has sent a high nobleman of the Robot Empire -- which I think is one of the many client states mentioned in passing, though Vaughan is admirably not explaining every little detail of his universe, but allowing it to be big and confusing and complex like a real world -- with similarly murderous aims.

Even worse, the first volume ended with Marko's parents appearing suddenly on our lovers' ship,and this volume continues that thread of the story as well. But I'm getting a sense that the theme of Saga will not be so much "one family against all" but "building a family despite the odds." In the first volume, they gathered a ghost teenage babysitter, and Marko's parents find their own place in this group. I'm quietly hopeful that will continue to grow -- not, probably, to the level of a resistance movement, since that would be too much like Saga's model Star Wars, but maybe a few more people every few issues, and some safe places along the way.

Saga is a big, heady, complicated, multi-genre stew: it's the kind of space opera that thinks nothing of throwing in blatant magic, ignoring the inverse-square law, and playing fast and loose with every other law of nature. It's not a book to read with your Hard-SF hat on, but to enjoy as an adventure story filled with wondrous and terrible things, in a universe where nearly anything can happen, with characters as vivid and real as any in literature.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Saga, Vol. 6 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

I originally hoped Saga had a plan to tell a single large story across some medium-sized number of comics issues -- say thirty or fifty. On the other side, my worry was that it would get dragged out for as long as it was still popular, since the set-up could lead to endless one-more-damn-thing complications.

(Why? Well, Saga is a single story: how Hazel grew up and found a peaceful place to live, and possibly how she and her parents brought peace to the galaxy, if we're being massively optimistic. Single stories can be complicated with side-plots, but do have to end. Contrast that with set-ups that can generate multiple plots from the same cast -- Fables is a good recent example of the type. Those could run nearly indefinitely, as long as there are more stories to tell or new characters to bounce around. But a single story can't be spread too thin, or it will break in the middle. Vaughan's Ex Machina badly broke in the middle, for example.)

Saga, Vol. 6 collects issues thirty-one to thirty-six of the still-popular space opera series by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples, and I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.

On the positive side, the splitting-the-party issues in the last book have mostly been resolved, and Hazel is growing up noticeably. That tends to show that the story is moving forward, with an end somewhere (even if distantly) in sight. But we are deep into the mid-thirties, nearly five years into Saga's run, and even Hazel's hints about the future state in which she's writing the narration are pretty non-specific, leading to dark thoughts that Saga could be aiming for a hundred issues, or more, or no specific number.

I'm not going to talk about plot, because that's pointless in a long serial like this -- either I get into the minutiae of specific events in these pages, which are opaque to anyone who isn't caught up and tedious to anyone who has, or I try to drop back to the very beginning and explain everything up to this point, which is tedious to everyone (particularly me). Here's what I've written about previous volumes, in case you want to dig in or find something to yell at me about: one, two, three, four, five.

The only recommendation I can give is that I will be back for volume seven. At this point in a series, that's what counts: do you want to move on to the next piece, and see what happens next? I still hope there's a real ending somewhere out there, and not just five more years of middle, but I do appreciate that the comics-buying audience mostly disagrees with me.

Descender, Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

We will never get away from the image of the killer robot, despite all of the hard work by Isaac Asimov during his long career. We will always assume, deep down, that any mechanical man secretly wants to kill and destroy, his metal hands running red with our blood. Why should a robot be any better than us, after all? And don't we secretly, in our heart of hearts, have that list (short or long) of people we'd gladly slaughter if we could?

Jeff Lemire turns to writing science fiction for the ongoing comics series Descender, the first six issues of which are collected in the recent Vol. 1: Tin Stars. This is an ongoing series -- clearly modeled somewhat on the Vaughan-Staples Saga, because success always breeds similars -- and so there are only building mysteries, introductions and plot hooks here; any endings or climaxes will be far off in the future if Descender runs like its creators and publishers hope.

And, yes, it is about killer robots. The other kind, too, but let's be honest: murderous robots are more interesting than the mild law-abiding sort every time. (I love Sladek's Tik-Tok in a way that Asimov's Robbie could only dream of.) The main character of Descender is TIM-21, a boy robot in a medium future interstellar society that was mostly peaceful and prosperous under the United Galactic Council...until a fleet of mysterious planet-sized robots [1] later dubbed "Harvesters" devastated that society, killed billions, started a many-sided violent scramble over the cooling ashes, and launched a galaxy-wide pogrom against all of the more normal-sized robots.

TIM-21 wakes up on the remote mining colony where he lived as the companion to a human boy, to find all of the humans dead and the robots torn apart. But wait! His human "brother" might just be alive, somewhere out there in the universe, and so Descender has its first plot spine. (Possibly second, if you grant "what the hell is the deal with the giant killer robots" primacy.) And he's quickly on the run, because his waking up sent a signal to all sorts of people that here is an interesting robot -- some of them want to help him, some of them want to study him, and a lot of them want to destroy him immediately or sell him to other people who want to destroy him.

Luckily, some of the helpful ones get to him first. Well, first-ish. But that doesn't last too long, and by the end of this volume TIM-21 and his set of companions -- grumpy terse destruction machine, once-great robotocist fallen into despair over his Big Secret, blue-skinned female Hard As Nails military type and her brick of a sidekick -- are in the hands of the faction that most hates robots in the whole galaxy.

So this is moving pretty quickly, at least in the sense of events adding up. But a galaxy is a big place, so I'm sure Descender could find planets and mysterious habitats and giant killer robots enough to keep TIM-21's adventures going for a long time.

This story is a departure from what I know of Lemire's work -- giving the big caveat that I've never read his superhero stories, just his generally depressive indy-comics stories -- and shows clearly the Saga influence. The characters are crisply drawn and only slightly cliched, and they have a big, complex universe to bounce around in. Lemire also is willing to damage his characters early and often, which isn't seen in big adventure stories like this, so I expect the status quo will change repeatedly and radically as this goes on.

I'm less familiar with the work of Dustin Nguyen, who illustrated this book -- to my eye, he's working directly in paint, with a watercolor look and only limited ink-work underneath or on top. He's clearly got chops, though, and depicts all of the strange things that Lemire throws at him and uses his color washes to convey mood and time well. His work isn't quite as supple and distinctive as Fiona Staples on Saga, but he could get there before too long, and his style gives him a lot of technical advantages in telling a story like this.

Descender is soft SF, of course -- comics never touch the hard stuff -- but it's smart and knowledgeable for comics SF, and is telling its particular story well. I look forward to seeing what else TIM-21 can find in his big galaxy.


[1] Who are not at all like the Celestials, so forget that entirely. Also, is there a size at which a humanoform mechanical being stops being a "robot" and starts being a spaceship, or space station, or or something else? Because the size of a planet seems really close to that line, if not over it.

Incoming Books: Christmas!

So I got stuff for Christmas. I bought myself Just Cause 3 from the Steam sale and wrapped up a printout of the store page from "Santa" -- because when you have teenage boys, you need to buy yourself the things you want for any chance to actually get them. And one of the books below is similarly from me to me; I bought it to get an Amazon package up to "Add-On" size to get some cables as part of my frantic effort to install a video card in Thing Two's computer last week. [1]

The rest of these books were gifts, and I'm going to list them all here, because that's what I do.

Get in Trouble is the first new collection of stories by Kelly Link since 2006's Magic for Beginners. Link is one of the best short-story writers of all time, and has been relatively quiet the last few years. (I think the fact that she had a young child in that span did a lot to cause that; I hope she finds a way to be a bit more prolific in the next decade.)

SuperMutant Magic Academy is the book version of the now-ended webcomic of the same name, by Jillian Tamaki (also half of the team behind the excellent graphic novels Skim and This One Summer).

Saga, Vol. 5 continues collecting the excellent space-opera comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. (By the way, does anyone out there know what Staples did before this, and if any of it is worth digging up? She does great stuff here, and -- though I don;t usually follow artists -- she has such a great storytelling sense I'm thinking it might be worth bending my rule here.) Also, see my review of Vol. 1 if you've been living under a rock and have never heard of Saga.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 finishes up the big publishing project, organizing and putting out a series of dictations Twain made at the end of his life. I still haven't read the first two volumes -- well, I did read thirty pages or so of the first one, when I got it five years ago -- but now I could read them all straight through if I feel like it.

B.P.R.D: 1946-1948 collects three "historical" stories from the Hellboy universe written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, with art by a whole bunch of people and colors by Dave Stewart as always.

And then there's The Complete Cul de Sac with the full five-year run of Richard Thompson's great comic strip in two volumes encased by a slipcase. I think I discovered this strip after it ended, or right as it was about to end, so it will be fun to read it all straight through. And, no, it's not that Richard Thompson. (It's one of those names -- I know, since I have one myself.)


[1] Said efforts ended with my taking that computer to the local shop first thing in the morning on Christmas Eve, and picking it up right as they closed at noon. But I did manage to fix the sound problem that resulted from the installation of that video card, so my tech-support score this month is a respectable 1-1.

All the Awards in the World

Or at least it feels like that many. These are the recent award announcements that I've missed pointing out here -- many (most? all?) of you will have heard of some or all of them already, but I hope there's something new or surprising below:

2012 Shirley Jackson Awards

This is a new award -- so new, in fact, that it popped up after I lost my SF job, so it confuses me every year. It's an award for literary horror, more or less -- creepy/uneasy/weird stories written well, in the vein of the award's eponymous writer -- and there's a site for it here. This year's winners are:

• NOVEL: Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)
• NOVELLA: “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)
• NOVELETTE: “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)
• SHORT FICTION: “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)
• SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION: Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
• EDITED ANTHOLOGY: Exotic Gothic 4: Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)

Congratulations to all of the winners, and just one question to the organizers -- do you really have to specify an "edited" collection? I'm not aware of any spontaneously published anthologies out there....

(via Tor.com)

2013 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards

This is a long list -- I grumbled about the number of categories when I was a judge, a few years back, and the categories have only proliferated since -- so I'll just give a few of the biggies.

• BEST CONTINUING SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST NEW SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- NEW: Building Stories by Chris Ware (Pantheon)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- REPRINT: King City by Brandon Graham (TokyoPop/Image)

(via Comics Reporter, though every other comics site has it somewhere as well)

2013 Prometheus Awards

These are given by the Libertarian Futurist Society each year to, as far as I can tell, the book that they really like that will most confuse the people who look at "Libertarian" in their name and go extremely literal. There are two awards: one for a new work, and one for an old one:

• BEST NOVEL: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books)
• HALL OF FAME: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

 These awards will actually be given at LoneStarCon 3 at the end of August, so, if you see Cory or Neal in the meantime, keep it quiet, OK?

(via Science Fiction Awards Watch)

Science Fiction Awards Watch also updated with several other awards -- I'd call them minor, but I'm trying to be tactful here -- like the Seiun (the Japanese Hugo, though the name means "Nebula"! Ha ha ha!), Scribe, and Sunburst. But my fingers are getting tired, so I'll just link 'em.

Read in January

Hello, and welcome to February, the typically dreariest month of the year (if you live in my hemisphere). I don't know if this will help, but have a list of books that one random middle-aged man read last month.

Edit, in early March: OK, I'm raising the white flag, and admitting that these books won't get full posts. But I'm backfilling something about them here, so I can get them off the corner of my desk and onto shelves, where they should be. (I find my own expectations and routines are my worst enemies.)

Jillian Tamaki, SuperMutant Magic Academy (1/4)

The acclaimed webcomic collected in one book -- Tamaki was telling one story, and ended it, so this is all they'll ever be. (Until twenty years from now, when she is enticed to do SuperMutant: The Next Generation for a huge pile of money, we should all be so lucky.) If you're not sure who Tamaki is, she was half of the team on Skim and This One Summer -- and you've read (or at least heard of) those, haven't you? Also: it's a webcomic; just read some of it, and then buy the book. Simple!

It's episodic, as a webcomic will inevitably be, but that works well to show the pace of life in this vaguely Potter-influenced boarding school of oddballs and wizards and mutants and others. Tamaki has some great characters here: specific and quirky and contradictory and very much teenagers. I hope she does some other solo long-form work very soon, or at least starts up another webcomic.

(And I do have to comment that the title keeps amusing me: since I've been playing a lot of Fallout games over the past year, "Super Mutant" has a very different image in my head!)

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, Vol. 5 (1/5)

I always have trouble reviewing a chunk of middle, and serial comics are nothing but middle. Saga isn't that bad -- I get the sense that there's an overall story arc already planned out, even if it will take three or five more years to get to the end of it -- but this particular volume is very middle-y, full of the people we already know running around in different directions at high speed to add plot complications. (This is also the book where Vaughan officially splits the party, always a bad sign in gaming or sagas.)

I'm still enjoying Saga, but this particular chunk feels closer to rote to me, as if Vaughan has some cool stuff he wants to get to, but wants to spin his wheels for a while first to make the story longer. (Which was pretty much exactly my problem with his earlier Ex Machina.) In any case, if you've been reading this, you know if you'll continue. If you haven't been, the words you want to read are my review of the first volume, which is much more apropos.

John Allison, Bad Machinery: The Case of the Lonely One (1/6)

Allison is a mad genius of comics, and everyone should read his books. Now!

OK, so you might want more than that. I guess. This is the fourth case investigated by a gaggle of British schoolkids (secondary school; they're roughly high school freshmen at this point) in Allison's odd and interesting village of Tackleford. All of the cases are vaguely supernatural, and Allison's plotting is amusingly non-linear; things wander around in what can seem an aimless manner until they all come together at the end. And his characters are wonderfully witty, with great individual voices.

For a general Allison overview, see my review of four volumes of his Scary Go Round series. For the prior Bad Machinery books -- oh, and, by the way, Allison is still getting better, so Bad Machinery is smarter and funnier and more solidly plotted than even the wonderful Scary Go Round was -- see volumes one and two and three. And then go buy everything he's ever done.

M.K. Brown, Stranger Than Life (1/8)

The good news is that this book contains most of M.K. Brown's idiosyncratic output from 1970 through 2013, which is wonderful for those of us who remember her lovely colors, quirky sense of humor, and amusingly disjointed line from the National Lampoon and other places. (And offers a great opportunity for those who don't remember her work to discover it as well.) The bad news is that there's just this one book, and that the world has not provided more opportunity for Brown to make her great comics, as it was supposed to.

(Stupid world.)

But we do have this, with single-panel cartoons and longer strips, surreal moments and comments on passing fads, strange people doing strange things strangely, all drawn in Brown's inimitable style. She's even got comments and notes throughout, explaining some of the things that can be explained.

Alex Robinson, Our Expanding Universe (1/11)

Robinson makes smart, deep graphic novels about real people that don't easily boil down to a quick Hollywood-style description -- particularly when you're trying to remember them two months later. This one is a about a group of male friends, hitting that age when the group of friends is no longer the most important thing in life, with babies on the way or already here, secrets kept, and career hiccups.

So it's like a real novel, the kind with just words, only it has pictures, too! Seriously, Robinson could have been the Nick Hornby of a world that likes a different kind of comics. He's smart and fun and accessible all at once, and makes great stories. They're just difficult to write about, particularly with my current handicaps (no time, read a while ago, etc.)

Ben Towle, Oyster War (1/12)

John Layman and Rob Guillory, Chew, Vol. 3 (1/13)

John Layman and Rob Guillory, Chew, Vol. 4 (1/14)

Walt Kelly, Pogo, Vol. 3: Evidence to the Contrary (1/14)

John Layman and Rob Guillory, Chew, Vol. 5 (1/15)

Sean McMullen, The Time Engine (1/15)

Kate Beaton, Step Aside, Pops (1/29)

Vanyda, The Building Opposite (1/20)

Lemony Snicket, "Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?" (2/22)

Mike Grell, The Complete Jon Sable Freelance, Vol. 1 (1/25)

Mike Grell, The Complete Jon Sable Freelance, Vol. 2 (1/26)

Mike Grell, The Complete Jon Sable Freelance, Vol. 3 (1/27)

Mike Grell, Jon Sable Freelance: Bloodtrail (1/29)

Charles Portis, Norwood (1/29)


There are no links yet; these books are sitting in a stack on the edge of my desk. I do hope to turn them into links sometime in the near future. But, even without links, it's a list of interesting books, which ain't nothing.

Descender, Vol. 2: Machine Moon by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

"Writing for the trade" sometimes only delays the worst impulses of serial fiction, instead of replacing them with the worst impulses of longer fiction. (And sometimes it can just multiply those worst impulses, but we all try not to read those books.) In particular, serial fiction loves the cliffhanger. In a traditional serial, there can be a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. Is it an improvement to hold off for a big cliffhanger at the end of each arc-slash-book-collection?

Descender, Vol. 2: Machine Moon has a cliffhanger, the same way the first volume (which I reviewed here) did -- and that makes me worry that every volume will have a cliffhanger going forward, as if the creators (writer Jeff Lemire and artists Dustin Nguyen) are worried that we readers won't keep going without that visceral pull.

When I wrote about the first volume, I called out the influence of Vaughan and Staples's Saga -- big soft-SF universe filled with conflict, a small group of heroes on the run and hunted by several factions -- but Descender is plottier and more filled with obvious hooks than Saga is. In the end, Saga is about a family that wants to find a safe place to be a family, in a galaxy that plots against them at every turn. Descender, on the other hand, is about a boy robot looking for something that may not exist (the kid he was created to be the best friend for) and about the secrets underpinning that boy robot and a host of other robots.

TIM-21 and his (allies? friends? traveling companions? captors?) escape from one set of nasty enemies early in this book, and fall in with another group that may be equally nasty -- to at least some of them -- but are not precisely enemies, certainly not to TIM-21. Complications continue to pile up, in the forms of another TIM-series boy robot with his own agenda and, in scenes set far away, of the grown-up boy that TIM-21 is searching for. Is it giving anything away to note that ex-boy has changed in the time TIM-21 was powered down? Or to say that reunions rarely go as expected?

Machine Moon is all middle and increasing complication, though if the story keeps up this pace, the original plot line might complete within another two volumes or so. There's certainly enough story-space to keep going from there: it's a big galaxy, and permutations of our current cast of characters could have adventures in it, or seek to transform it, for dozens of issues to come. But there may be something like an ending not too far in the future, and not just an endless stream of cliffhangers for as long as people keep buying the book. I hope so: I like stories that have endings. It makes them stories.

Book-A-Day 2014 Post-Mortem

I finally managed to do a Book-A-Day that exactly matched a given year, after two more idiosyncratic prior runs here. (2006-2007 was 200 days, roughly September-February. 2010-2011 was exactly a year, but began in early February.)

The first time out, I had a Post-Mortem, to corral everything into categories. I think I was too exhausted in February 2011 to do that the second time, but this Book-A-Day ends in the middle of an epic end-of-year vacation, when I have nothing but time and nervous energy.

So here's how those books break down, for anyone as fascinated with tidy little categories as I am. Note that some of these are arguable cases, but this is how I score 'em. This post may also be most useful for people who only want to read in a particular category at the moment, and so happy hunting to them.

Fiction: Fantasy & SF (16, 4.4%)

• London Falling by Paul Cornell
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman 
• The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
• The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud
• The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkowski
• Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
• The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White
• Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis
• The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow
• The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross
• The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde
• The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde
• Hawk by Steven Brust
• A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
• Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones
• The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud

There was a time when I "read" -- sometimes just the first fifty pages, the last fifty pages, and a skim of the bits in between -- two to four books in this category every single week. I vaguely miss that: at least, I miss the books I made time to read all of, not the shelf-fillers that I skimmed so I could sell them myself.

Fiction: Mystery & Thriller (2, 0.5%)

• The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons by Lawrence Block
• The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black

I haven't read giant piles of books in this category for a long, long time, but two is awfully low for a whole year.

Fiction: Mainstream (10, 2.7%)

• The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman
• Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
• Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
• Dancing in the Dark by Janet Hobhouse
• The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuaine
• Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks
• Cathedral by Raymond Carver 

Not bad, considering I'm only getting through about one "real" prose book a week on average. This should rise in the coming year, since the Vintage Contemporaries project is ongoing; I'm reading at least one book a month in this vague category.

Non-Fiction: Narrative (22, 6.0%)

• Uncle Boris in the Yukon by Daniel Pinkwater
• One Summer by Bill Bryson
• How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff
• Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
• The Revised Vault of Walt by Jim Korkis
• Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby
• How About Never -- Is Never Good For You?: My Life In Cartoons by Bob Mankoff
• Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones
• Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn
• The Folklore of Discworld by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson
• The Baby Boom by P.J. O'Rourke
• Dance of the Reptiles by Carl Hiaasen
• The Imperial Way by Paul Theroux with photos by Steve McCurry
• You Can Date Boys When You're Forty by Dave Barry
• My American Revolution by Robert Sullivan
• Is That a Fact? by Dr. Joe Schwarcz
• Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
• Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier
• What Were They Thinking? by Bruce Felton
• A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett
• The Getaway Car by Donald E. Westlake
• Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff

This is a fairly vague category: everything basically true that's meant to be read through as a book. And it's very varied, with a lot of collections of miscellaneous stuff. My reading could clearly be substantially more serious than it is -- but it probably won't move too far in that direction.

Non-Fiction: Lists & Frivolities (10, 2.7%)

• An Uncommon Scold edited by Abby Adams 
• The Literary Companion edited by Emma Jones
• The Economist Book of Business Quotations edited by Bill Ridgers
• Good Advice from Bad People by Zac Bissonnette
• The Bathroom LOL Book compiled by Jack Kreismer
• Wretched Writing by Ross and Kathryn Petras
• The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2015 by Bob Sehlinger and Len Testa
• Frommer's EasyGuide to Walt Disney World and Orlando 2014
• The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide by Terry Pratchett and the Discworld Emporium
• Overheard in New York by S. Morgan Friedman and Michael Malice

These are mostly books for a particular purpose, and that purpose in most cases is wasting time in the smallest room in the house. I used to read poetry books there; maybe I'll go back to that at some point.

Comics: Strip & Panel Collections (38, 10.4%)

• American Elf by James Kochalka
• You're All Just Jealous of My Jet Pack by Tom Gauld
• Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
• Menage a 3, Vol. 1 by Gisele Lagace and David Lumsdon
• The Amazing Cynicalman, Vol. 2 by Matt Feazell
• Heck by Zander Cannon
• Menage a 3, Vol. 2 by Gisele Lagace and David Lumsdon
• Menage a 3, Vol. 3 by Gisele Lagace and David Lumsdon
• The Complete Peanuts, 1987 to 1988 by Charles M. Schulz
• The World of Charles Addams
• Young Lovecraft, Vol. 1 by Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres
• The Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse
• Pearls Falls Fast by Stephan Pastis
• I Love Led Zeppelin by Ellen Forney
• Bad Machinery, Vol. 1: The Case of the Team Spirit by John Allison
• Crater XV by Kevin Cannon
• Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories by Ben Katchor
• Feiffer: The Collected Works, Vol. 1: Clifford by Jules Feiffer
• Willie & Joe: The WWII Years by Bill Mauldin
• Booth Again! by George Booth
• Ray and Joe: The Story of a Man and His Dead Friend by Charles Rodrigues
• Penny Arcade, Vol. 3: The WarSun Prophecies by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulic
• ..I'm Pretty Sure I've Got My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere! by Sam Hurt
• Young Lovecraft, Vol. 2 by Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres
• Betsy and Me by Jack Cole
• Attitude Featuring Andy Singer "No Exit" 
• What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck by Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West
• Amphigorey Too by Edward Gorey
• Bad Machinery, Vol. 2: The Case of the Good Boy by John Allison
• Alone Forever by Liz Prince
• The Potpourrific Great Big Grab Bag of Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley
• Bad Machinery, Vol. 3: The Case of the Simple Soul by John Allison
• Omnibooth by George Booth
• Diesel Sweeties: There Is a Cat on the Internet! by R Stevens
• Soppy by Philippa Rice
• Strong Female Protagonist, Book One by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag
• Strip Joint by Carol Lay
• The World of George Price    

The first of several comics categories; this one corrals books that collect work that originally appeared elsewhere and is mostly in individual strip (or panel) form. "Elsewhere" is vague enough to cover both print and digital; I don't make a strong distinction between distribution media, since I mostly like to read traditional strips that translate well to book publication. (And not Scott McCloud-esque infinite canvases.)

Comics: Floppy Collections (71, 19.5%)

• Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons and Before Watchmen by various (5 volumes)
• Johnny Hiro: The Skills to Pay the Bills by Fred Chao
• Bandette, Vol. 1: Presto! by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
• Gumby's Spring Specials by Bob Burden, Steve Purcell, and Arthur Adams
• Cursed Pirate Girl (Vol. 1) by Jeremy A. Bastian
• The Ghastly Ones and Other Fiendish Frolics by Richard Sala
• DC Comics: The Sequential Art of Amanda Conner
• The Complete Peanuts, 1989 to 1990 by Charles M. Schulz
• Sex Criminals, Vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
• Girl Crazy by Gilbert Hernandez
• Drawn Together by Aline and R. Crumb
• Hellboy in Hell: The Descent by Mike Mignola
• Queen of the Black Black by Megan Kelso
• Art d'Ecco by Andrew and Roger Langridge
• The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius by Judd Winick
• Black Cat Crossing by Richard Sala
• The Fish Police, Vol. 1 by Steve Moncuse
• Zoot Suite by Andrew and Roger Langridge
• Welcome to the Dahl House by Ken Dahl
• The Irredeemable Ant-Man by Robert Kirkman, Phil Hester, and Andre Parks
• Skin Deep by Charles Burns
• iZombie, Vol. 1 by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred
• The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy by Stan Sakai  
• Fatima: The Blood Spinners by Gilbert Hernandez
• The Little Man by Chester Brown
• The Shadow: Blood and Judgment by Howard Chaykin
• Milk and Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad! by Evan Dorkin
• Tales of the Fear Agent by various
• Dead Boy Detectives, Vol. 1: Schoolboy Terrors by Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham
• Black Science, Vol. 1: How to Fall Forever by Rick Remender, Matteo Scalera, and Dean White
• Miracleman, Vol. 1: A Dream of Flying by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, and Alan Davis
• Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
• Love's Not a Three Dollar Fare by Terry LaBan
  
• Chew, Vol. 1: Taster's Choice by John Layman and Rob Guillory
• Rocket Girl, Vol. 1: Times Squared by Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder
• The Auteur, Book One: President's Day by Rick Spears and James Callahan
• Rocky & Bullwinkle, Vol. 1 by Mark Evanier and Roger Langridge
• I Kill Giants by Joe and JM Kim Niimura
• Hellboy, Vol. 12: The Storm & The Fury by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo
• Itty Bitty Hellboy by Art Baltazar and Franco
• B.P.R.D.: 1948 by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Max Fiumara
• Lobster Johnson, Vol. 2: The Burning Hand by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tonci Zonjic
• Abe Sapien, Vol. 2: The Devil Does Not Jest by Mike Mignola, et. al.
• Minimum Wage, Book Two by Bob Fingerman
• Special Forces by Kyle Baker
• Apocalypse Nerd by Peter Bagge
• Welcome to Tranquility by Gail Simone and Neil Googe
• The Best of Milligan and McCarthy by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy
• RASL by Jeff Smith
• The Star Wars by J.W. Rinzler and Mike Mayhew
• Mind MGMT, Vol. 1 by Matt Kindt
• The Shadow Master Series, Vol. 1 by Andrew Helfer and Bill Sienkiewicz
• Let Us Be/Perfectly Clear by Paul Hornschemeier
• Thirteen "Going On Eighteen" by John Stanley with Tony Tallarico  
• Fables, Vol. 15 & 16 by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, et. al.
• Chew, Vol. 2 by John Layman and Rob Guillory
• Saga, Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples 
• Trillium by Jeff Lemire
• B.P.R.D.: Hell On Earth, Vols. 1-3 by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Guy Davis, and Tyler Crook
• Jack of Fables: Vols. 8 & 9 by Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges, Tony Akins, and Andrew Pepoy
• Minimum Wage, Vol. 1: Focus on the Strange by Bob Fingerman
• Finder: Talisman by Carla Speed McNeil 
• Cinderella: Fables Are Forever by Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus
• Concrete Park, Vol. 1: You Send Me by Tony Puryear and Erika Alexander
• B.P.R.D.: Being Human by Mike Mignola, et.al.
• The Squidder by Ben Templesmith
• The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 1: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
• Undertow, Vol. 1: Boatman's Call by Steve Orlando and Artyom Trakhanov
• The Complete Multiple Warheads, Vol. 1 by Brandon Graham
• Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
• Satellite Sam, Vol. 1: The Lonesome Death of Satellite Sam by Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin

And these are comics reprinted from individual issues, more or less -- I may have forgotten nitpicking details of publication of some of these several dozen books, so my categories are not to be taken as gospel. This tends to be the more traditional comic-shop end of the comics industry, though, which is something worth marking off as its own thing.

Comics: Originals in Book Form (106, 29.0%)

• The Hive by Charles Burns
• Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez
• Crogan's Loyalty by Chris Schweizer
• The Elwell Enigma by Rick Geary
• Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis
• How to Fake a Moon Landing by Darryl Cunningham
• Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen and Faith Erin Hicks
• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff
• Aesthetics: A Memoir by Ivan Brunetti
• Bad Houses by Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil
• Genius by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen
• Boxers and Saints (2 volumes) by Gene Luen Yang
• The Advance Team by Will Pfeiffer and Germain Torres
• Giants Beware! by Jorge Rosado and Rafael Aguirre
• Americus by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill
• We Can Fix It! by Jess Fink
• Madison Square Tragedy by Rick Geary
• Taxes, the Tea Party, and Those Revolting Rebels by Stan Mack
• Upside Down by Jesse Smart Smiley
• Battling Boy by Paul Pope
• Everything Is Going to Be Okay by Bruce Eric Kaplan
• A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached
• Daisy Kutter: The Last Train by Kazu Kibuishi
• The Rime of the Modern Mariner by Nick Hayes
• Recess Pieces by Bob Fingerman
• NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette by Nathan W. Pyle
• Explorer: The Lost Islands edited by Kazu Kibuishi
• The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg
• Three Fingers by Rich Koslowski
• Aphrodite: Goddess of Love by George O'Connor
• The Pro by Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti
• Mush! Sled Dogs With Issues by Glenn Eichler and Joe Infurnari
• The Complete Don Quixote by Cervantes; adapted by Woodrow Davis
• Red Eye, Black Eye by K. Thor Jensen
• Happy! by Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson
• Woman Rebel by Peter Bagge
• This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki
• Zita the Spacegirl (3 volumes) by Ben Hatke
• Liar's Kiss by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano
• The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell
• Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke
• Creature Tech by Doug Ten Napel
• Dogs and Water by Anders Nilsen
• Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba
• JLA: Earth 2 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
• Chester 5000 XYV by Jess Fink
• Andre the Giant by Box Brown
• Monster on the Hill by Rob Harrell
• Hellboy: The Midnight Circus by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo
• New School by Dash Shaw
• The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Hamlet by Ian Lender and Zach Giallongo
• All Star by Jesse Lonergan
• At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft; adapted by I.N.J. Culbard
• Picture This by Lynda Barry
• The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew
• Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
• The Property by Rutu Modan 
• Batman: Hong Kong by Doug Moench and Tony Wong
• Ringworld: The Graphic Novel, Part One by Robert Mandell and Sean Lam
• Spiral-Bound by Aaron Renier
• The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell
• Blue by Pat Grant
• Celluloid by Dave McKean
• The Undertaking of Lily Chen by Danica Novgorodoff
• The Wrenchies by Farel Dalrymple
• Nobrow 9: It's Oh So Quiet edited by Sam Arthur, Alex Spiro, and Ben Newman
• An Age of License by Lucy Knisley
• The Rise of Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin 
• Sisters by Raina Telgemeier
• Amulet, Vol. 6: Escape from Lucien by Kazu Kibuishi
• The People Inside by Ray Fawkes
• In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
• The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, and Becky Cloonan
• Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Archer Coe: "The Thousand Natural Shocks" by Jamie S. Rich and Dan Christensen
• Fran by Jim Woodring
• August Moon by Diana Thung
• I Was the Cat by Paul Tobin and Benjamin Dewey
• Lost Dogs by Jeff Lemire
• Bumperhead by Gilbert Hernandez
• Tomboy by Liz Prince
• Pistolwhip by Matt Kindt and Jason Hall
• The Best American Comics 2014 edited by Scott McCloud
• Howl: A Graphic Novel by Allen Ginsberg and Eric Drooker
• Grandville Noel by Bryan Talbot
• Henni by Miss Lasko-Gross
• Kinski by Gabriel Hardman
• Escape from "Special" by Miss Lasko-Gross
• Cypher by Brad Teare
• The Truth Is a Cave In the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell  
• The Dumbest Idea Ever! by Jimmy Gownley
• Shackelton: Antarctic Odyssey by Nick Bertozzi
• Through the Woods by Emily Carroll 
• The Wolf Gift: The Graphic Novel by Anne Rice and Ashley Marie Witter
• Jane, The Fox, and Me by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault 
• The Graveyard Book, Vols. 1 and 2 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and various artists 
• Hearts of Gold by Milt Gross 
• A Most Imperfect Union by Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz 
• The Harlem Hellfighters by Max Brooks and Caanan White 
• Loverboys by Gilbert Hernandez
• The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins
• Sugar Skull by Charles Burns 
• Bumf, Vol. 1 by Joe Sacco
• The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis 
• Ricky Rouse Has a Gun by Jorg Tittel and John Aggs 
• Here by Richard McGuire 

The very largest category, unsurprisingly: I like comics, and I like reading things in book form, and I like my stories to be shaped to a particular purpose rather than grown like Topsy or just allowed to wander from one fight-scene to another. There is a lot of good stuff here: 2014 was a strong year for book-shaped comics.

Comics: Translated From Japanese (and other Asian languages) (47, 12.9%)

• Pink by Kiyoko Okazaki
• Tropic of the Sea by Satoshi Kon
• Helter Skelter by Kiyoko Okazaki
• Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 3 by Satoko Kiyuduki
• Blood Cross, Vol. 1 by Shiwo Komeyama
• Sickness Unto Death, Vol. 1 by Hikaru Asada and Takahiro Seguchi
• From the New World, Vol. 2 by Yusuke Kishi and Toru Oikawa 
• Wolfsmund, Vol. 3 by Mitsuhita Kuji
• Sakuran by Moyoco Anno
• No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular, Vols. 1 and 2 by Nico Tanigawa
• Stargazing Dog by Takashi Murakami
• Inu X Boku, Vols. 1 and 2 by Cocoa Fujiwara
• Insufficient Direction by Moyocco Anno
• Sunny, Vol. 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto
• No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 3 by Nico Tanigawa
• Inu X Boku SS, Vol. 3 by Cocoa Fujiwara
• Bloody Cross, Vol. 2 by Shiwo Komeyama
• Triage X, Vols. 1-5 by Shouji Sato
• Sunny, Vol. 2 by Taiyo Matsumoto
• What Did You Eat Yesterday?, Vol. 1 by Fumi Yoshinaga
• No Longer Human (3 volumes) by Usamaru Furuya
• La Quinta Camera by Natsume Ono
• Wolf Children Ame and Yuki by Mamoru Hosoda and Yu
• Bloody Cross, Vol. 3 by Shiwo Komeyama
• Triage X, Vol. 6 by Shouji Sato
• Princess Knight (2 volumes) by Osamu Tezuka
• Cardfight!! Vanguard, Vol. 1 by Akira Itou
• Cromartie High School, Vol. 2 by Eiji Honaka
• High School DxD, Vol. 1 by Hiroji Mishima
• Is This a Zombie?, Vols. 1-7 by Sacchi
• In Clothes Called Fat by Moyoco Anno
• Fallen Words by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
• Is This a Zombie?, Vol. 8 by Sacchi 
• Triage X, Vol. 7 by Shouji Sato
• No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys's Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 4 by Nico Tanigawa
• Korea As Viewed by 12 Creators
• Sorako by Takayuki Fujimura
• Barakamon, Vol. 1 by Satsuki Yoshino
• No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 5 by Nico Tanigawa
• Ubel Blatt, Vol. 0 by Etorouji Shiono
• Alive by Hajime Taguchi
• Void's Enigmatic Mansion, Vol. 1 by JiEun Ha and HeeEun Kim
• Good-bye Geist by Ryo Hanada
• VS Aliens by Yu Suzuki
• Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki
• Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga, Vol. 1
• Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano 

This year I ended up mostly reading manga rather than manhwa or manhua, probably because that's where the big conveyor belt is aimed for the North American market. It's a mixed bag of crowd-pleasers and more artsy stuff; my personal taste tends to aim to the artsy, but the others can be fun as well. (Blatant fanservice, in particular, can be very amusing.)

Comics: Translated From French (and other European languages) (28, 7.7%)

• Lost Cat by Jason 
  
• Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Levy
• The Initiates by Etienne Davodeau
• Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet
• A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting by Guy Delisle
• Goddam This War! by Tardi
• Last Days of an Immortal by Gwen de Bonneval and Fabien Vehlmann
• Isle of 100,000 Graves by Vehlmann and Jason
• Bubbles and Gondola by Renaud Dillies
• Monster Christmas by Lewis Trondheim
• Blue Is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh
• Ralph Azham, Vol. 1 by Lewis Trondheim
• The Sky Over the Louvre by Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carriere
• Hey, Wait... by Jason
• Sshhhhh! by Jason
• The Iron Wagon by Jason
• Harum Scarum by Lewis Trondheim
• The Hoodoodad by Lewis Trondheim
• The Adventures of Herge by Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Stanislas Bartelemy; translated by Helge Dasher
• How the World Was by Emmanuel Guibert
• The Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, Vol. 1 by Jacques Tardi
• Paul Joins the Scouts by Michel Rabagliati
• Athos in America by Jason
• Isaac The Pirate, Vol. 1 by Christophe Blain
• Bigfoot by Pascal Girard
• Blacksad: Amarillo by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido
• Beauty by Kerascoet and Hubert
• Weapons of Mass Diplomacy by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain

This is almost all what I called "artsy stuff" above, and mostly from continental Europe. (There are a few books from Francophone Canada, but my sense is that community looks to France and Belgium for a model much more than they look domestically or to the USA, so it feels reasonable to lump them in here.) That said, some artsiness works better than others, and several of these books -- Blacksad, Isaac the Pirate, Adele Blanc-Sec, etc. -- are explicitly in adventure-story modes.  

Art Books (8, 2.2%)

• Blown Covers by Francoise Mouly
• We Are Indie Toys! by Louis Bou
• How Are You Feeling? by David Shrigley
• I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me by Trevor Paglen
• One Eye by Charles Burns
• The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme by Joe Sacco 
• Everybody Dies by Ken Tanaka and David Ury  
• Co-Mix by Art Spiegelman 

A vague category, yes, but it's basically things that exist to be art themselves or to showcase previous art. Some of them are physically too small to really be "coffee-table books," but that's another decent way of corralling them.

Books for Children of Various Ages (6, 1.6%)

• Odd Duck by Cecil Castellucci and Sara Varon
• Jedi Academy by Jeffrey Brown
• Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan
• Star Wars: Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan by Jeffrey Brown
• Hansel and Gretel by Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti
• 29 Myths on the Swinster Pharmacy by Lemony Snicket and Lisa Brown

Not including novels for pre-adults, which I treated as plain novels in the above categories. (That line is so fuzzy that I don't believe it makes sense to patrol it in one's own reading. For bookstore categories and suggested-reading lists, definitely: age bands can be very useful in helping people find books they will appreciate and enjoy.) Another very mixed bag of stuff.

Playscripts (1, 0.3%)

• The Underpants by Carl Sternheim and Steve Martin 

No poetry this year, so this is as odd as I got.

It came out to a total of 392 books reviewed, in 365 daily posts. I hope, if you made it to this post, that it at least introduced you to one book that you liked.

Any time I do a Book-A-Day run, it inevitably is dominated by comics and art, since those are the books that can be read consistently in a single day. But I think I hit a decent balance this year, even if I didn't dig into any really long or complex books. (I semi-abandoned Paul Theroux's travelogue Dark Star Safari around the end of October, because it was going so slowly -- I hope to get back to it in 2015.)