Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing by Michael Sweater

Michael Sweater makes comics about stoners and losers, in an art style inspired or influenced by graffiti and tattoos. His work is funny and appealing - I don't know if I should say more so the further you are from that kind of life, since that feels like piling on (onto Sweater or his characters, not sure which).

Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing collects the first six issues of his recent Everything Sucks series; it was published earlier this year by Silver Sprocket and is probably still the most recent Sweater thing available in the market. I've previously looked at his books Please Destroy the Internet, Please Destroy My Enemies, and This Must Be the Place; Sweater has been making comics for about a decade and has an established style and tone, even if the characters have different names and specific relationships in each project.

Everything Sucks is vaguely anthropomorphic: Sweater draws his characters as animal-people, more-or-less, purely visually as far as I can tell. They don't talk about the issues between the dog-people and the cat-people or anything like that: it's just how he draws characters.

Noah is the main character, the young man who wants to be an artist but spends too much of his time watching movies and smoking. (He's also got a lousy job at a sandwich shop; it's lousy in part because he makes it lousy - and we get the sense that he likes having a lousy job to complain about.) His best friend is Calla, who doesn't quite live with him but is often there - he seems to rent a small house, which seems beyond the means of a part-time sandwich-shop loser, but we'll allow it for dramatic license - who is not an artist, as far as we see, but is even lazier and less motivated than Noah is. They have a friend Brad, who they don't seem to like, who lives in a van and wanders through the sewers looking for stuff to reclaim.

And the six issues collected here have stories about the three of them, in whatever small city or large town they live in, wherever it is. They hang out, complain, bicker, go out for food, get locked in a bathroom, argue, mostly avoid doing anything constructive, and squabble.

There have been a lot of comics about lovable, funny losers over the years, often in this kind of mode: a small group of young people, sometimes inspired by the creator and their friends, who hang out and do goofy stuff because they are young and aimless and unhappy with the world. It's a kind of story I tend to think a creator can do for about a decade or so: after that, it's just sad and not funny anymore. Michael Sweater works in that mode, and he's good at it - his art is gnarly and fun in that tattoo-ish way, giving it some visual pizzazz - but I wonder if the window for this kind of project might be starting to close. The characters in Everything Sucks talk more than a bit about being thirty, which is a big milestone for aimless young people. You can stay aimless your whole life, but you're really not young and full of potential past thirty. Then you're just aimless and slowly turning into a permanent loser.

I'd like to see what Sweater does next; I'm seeing small indications here that he might need or want to shift to something slightly different, as he and his characters age, and I'd like to see what comes next. For now, though, Everything Sucks is a fine look at three low-lives, doing what they can and getting by in amusing ways.

The Left-Handed Dollar by Loren D. Estleman

Way back in the early days of this blog, I caught up on Loren D. Estleman's private-eye novels - his main character is Amos Walker, of Detroit - in a big batch of posts in August of 2007.

Well, time flows on, and Estleman kept writing about Walker, and I put those books on a shelf, perhaps hoping to do the same thing again. But it's now been more than fifteen years, and there were nine books on that shelf - not everything in the series since 2007; I missed a few - so I figured, let's try to read one book; surely I can do that?

The Left-Handed Dollar was the new Amos Walker book for 2010, and the next book in the series after I caught up in 2007; my copy still had a publicity letter in it. (I've already dropped it into the recycling bin, to stop myself from profusely apologizing to whatever publicist sent it to me those fifteen years ago with the vain hope I would publicize the thing at a time when it would have been helpful.)

Walker is a little bit of a clichéd old-fashioned male gumshoe - Estleman doesn't give him a specific age, but the novels started in 1980 and Walker is a veteran of Vietnam, so in 2010 he had to be at least mid-fifties, and possibly a decade older - with an aversion to cellphones and computers, a network of now-aging (and often getting pretty senior) contacts in various law-enforcement forces, and, in best Detroit style, a car that looks battered and old but is actually powerful and responsive.

This time out, he's hired by a lawyer, Lucille Lettermore, a defense attorney often in the news for high-profile cases (as Walker puts it on the first page, she defends "Communists, terrorists, Democrats, and other enemies of the social order"). Her client is an ill, aging mobster, Joseph Michael Ballista aka "Joey Ballistic," who's facing a third-time-unlucky rap - but "Lefty Lucy" thinks she can unravel some of his priors and put the kibosh on the worst of the current prosecution.

(Lucy also complains a lot about RICO, although nothing Walker investigates in this book or that Joey Ballistic is accused of doing seems to fall into things that are only illegal because of RICO. As often happens with detective novels, there's an element of editorializing from the narrative voice about what is Good and Right in society and how to get rid of the Scum that Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. Since most of the characters are white this time out - there's some gratuitous Orientalism around a couple of secondary characters, for spice, but it's quick and easy to skim over - it doesn't get into anything particularly racist, but it does make me wonder what's coming up in later novels.)

Anyway, Joey was convicted, around twenty years before, of planting a bomb that nearly killed Walker's best friend, the investigative reporter Barry Stackpole. Lettermore wants to hire Walker to shake that tree - to find the police informant who fingered Joey, to see if he can poke any holes in the official story. Walker agrees once he has a meeting with Joey himself - Walker has a massive confidence in his ability to tell if people are telling the truth to him - and gets himself punched in the face by his old buddy Stackpole for being involved.

Walker chases down the detective who did the arrest, now retired and running a bait shop out in the sticks. From a chance phrase in that conversation, he thinks the informant was a woman, and so chases after Joey's ex-wife, two mistresses from that era (one of whom is now the receptionist in the ex-wife's interior decorating business), and, somewhat later, a dragon-lady type who ran the Chinese heroin connection in those days.

But, in the middle of that legwork, the bodies start popping up: first one of those old mistresses, then an ex-cop, whose body is discovered by Walker himself. The Detroit cops, in the person of Inspector John Alderdyce, an old acquaintance of Walker's, pull him in for questioning and put him on the usual short leash.

There's more complications and running about, but Walker does solve the case - there's a shootout at the end with the current perp, and Walker also learns the truth about the old case. Walker's voice has a lot of potshots at the then-current Mayor and administration - mostly for being lazy, vain, and useless, not for actual malfeasance; I have no idea if it's related to a real person but it feels like a fairly standard list of complaints from the right to balance Lettermore's even more obvious lefty complaints.

This is a solid mystery, only slightly creaky with the weight of accumulated genre expectations and told well in a distinctive voice. I don't know that I trust Walker quite as much as he trusts himself, and I'd need to read a few more recent books to get a good sense of how much Estleman trusts him, but I still like the way these stories are told, and Estleman keeps it all modern enough and full of telling details. 

Bad Break, Chapter #2 by Philippe Riche

I still don't know what "Bad Break" means, exactly. At times in this book, it seems to be the name of a person, in flashbacks. It's also the last word spoken in the story, in the metaphoric sense, as a zinger that demands to be punctuated by a David Caruso CSI: Miami meme. I suspect creator Philippe Riche doesn't care all that much: he's going for style and energy and vibes here, not so much a story that's completely coherent, consistent, and satisfying.

(See the cover? Notice how all three main characters are naked? You probably wonder why. They spend most of the middle of this book naked, actually. It's not a good reason, but I won't spoil it here. But, if you are putting naked + French + adult + comics together and getting anything that = sex, I sadly inform you that you are completely wrong.)

On the positive side, Bad Break, Chapter #2 [1] is actually stylish and energetic. It adds more depth and detail to the three characters we met in the first book - they even get names, Ernst-Lazare and Simon and Rebecca X - as they chase three old tattoos that will, we learn here, lead them to something vague and secret from the god Patakyuku. Patakuyuku was the creator-god of wherever the antagonist gang of head choppers are from: somewhere tropical and fairly "savage" fifty or so years ago, probably in the French sphere of influence. Mythologically, Patakuyuku bequeathed his seven major powers to his sons, but then took those powers back, and his sons' heads, when they fought each other. Those seven actual heads - whether divine or just dead-human is never clear - are the McGuffin that Ernst-Lazare is looking for, or rather the biggest piece of the Patakuyuku legacy that he thinks he'll find all in one place.

Riche keeps a lot of this vague, so we don't know what Ernst-Lazare thinks he can do with the heads. He may think those supernatural powers will be available to him, and, within the story, may even be right - even though, if his story is correct, those heads sat in a random tribal village for thousands of years without giving anyone any superpowers. Or, since he's a dealer in "antiquities," which seems to be mostly human remains, he may just think he can display and/or sell them.

Anyway, our three main characters chase up the third tattoo, get naked for an insufficient reason, have to flee the head choppers naked, and come back to where the story started for the big ending, all the while Ernst-Lazare tells stories of Patakuyu and flashbacks about the three old men that had the tattoos. They do steal clothes, among other things, along the way. And they do find what they were looking for, more or less...but it's a "bad break."

YEAAAAHHHHHH!

Bad Break is yet another object lesson that it's much easier to start a noirish, stylish story than to finish one successfully. It's not bad - don't get me wrong - but it's a bit unsatisfying, vague, and confused by the time it's done. The fact that Riche draws two of the characters in the flashbacks to look exactly like Simon and Rebecca X never becomes important, either - are they reincarnations? Does that matter, in some way? (There's no other hint of reincarnation anywhere in the story.) Or is it just the way Riche draws that kind of character?

We also seem to quietly forget in this book that Ernst-Lazare is immortal, and don't learn any explanation for that. Are we mean to assume he is Patakuyuku, who lost his powers to his sons and is questing through the ages to get their heads and retrieve his godhood? Again, Riche will give a lot of style and a lot of vibes, but somewhat less in the way of detailed explanations of what happened and what it all means. But, if you want a twisty, flashback-filled French crime story drawn in moody tones and featuring three people who spend a lot of time naked, go check out Bad Break.

[1] Online catalogs tend to name this book as Vol. 2, but the cover clearly says it is "Chapter 2."

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I think this is the first half of the story - there is one more volume out, and there's not a lot of plot in this one, so I find it hard to believe it runs much longer than that. Also, creator Kenji Tsuruta is only intermittently a maker of manga - he also works as a very in-demand SF illustrator - so his solo comics projects tend to be few and separated by years. Wikipedia says it ran in serialization in Japan from 2011-17, and the two collections were published in English - translated by Dana Lewis - in the fall of 2017, but does not say the story is complete or ended...but Wikipedia has also not been updated since then.

So this is definitely a beginning, but I can't say if there is an end. I guess I'll find out.

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 is a very Miyazaki-influenced story, about a young woman, Mikura Amelia, who runs a floatplane package-delivery service down the sparsely populated Izu and Ogasawara archipelagoes, which stretch from just south of Tokyo harbor down hundreds of miles to the south. As the book opens, her partner in the business, her grandfather Brian, has just died - from that point, it's a one-woman operation. (Unlike Miyazaki, there is not a plucky mechanic character - Mikura seemingly does all of the maintenance herself.)

There are a few other characters in Wandering Island, but they've very secondary - people Mikura interacts with, people she delivers packages too, her parents glimpsed quickly once or twice. The pages focus on Mikura herself, her cat Endeavour, her classic Fairey Swordfish plane, and the landscape around them. I didn't make a count, but at least half of the pages are wordless - this is a largely a story of emotion and image, driven by Mikura's grief over her grandfather.

In her grandfather's papers, Mikura discovers references to Electric Island, a mysterious place she's never heard of before, and a sealed package to deliver there. This island moves - how is never explained in this book - following the North Pacific Gyre, and coming close to Japan every three years.

Soon after her grandfather's death, she sees the island, and tries to land near it, but her plane crashes. She wakes up on a rescue vessel, some time later, the island nowhere in sight. Tsurata skips some amount of time - later in the book three years have passed, and Electric Island should be coming by again, but he doesn't give details of when those years passed, and Mikura looks no different at any point. Her plane also gets repaired somehow between scenes.

Mikura becomes obsessed with Electric Island - perhaps because her grandfather was, perhaps just because this is a book about an obsession, so one must develop. She neglects her business to the point where her electricity is cut off at least once - again, this is during the middle stretch of the book where three years pass somehow, so it's hard to tell if this was a week or a month or two years of mania and obsession.

At the end of this volume, Mikura has gotten some clues, and thinks she's mapped Electric Island's path this time. She sets out in her plane to find it again, to land and investigate, and, presumably, to deliver the package. That's where the volume ends - on her flight out to whatever.

Tsuraua puts Mikura in a bikini most of the time, which seemed reasonable for what seems to be mostly a hot climate and a woman mostly alone. I do see that his work has been criticized as male-gaze-y more than once - the skimpily clad girl and her cat seems to be a repeated motif - so it might not be quite as matter-of-fact as I gave it credit for. Other than that, he has a slightly scratchy line that I appreciate, and falls towards the detailed, even cluttered, side of manga, with lovingly-drawn airplanes and topographic maps and landscape seen from the sky.

This is a lovely book, but, as I said up top, it's not particularly plotty. It moves slowly, and most of what happens is in Mikura's head, as she pulls together clues and hints to figure out where this island has been and will be. The motifs may be Miyazakian - floatplanes, mysterious islands, plucky girls running their own businesses - but the tone is less so. 

Better Things: Goin' Southbound

"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.

Several times this year, I've mentioned that Better Things has given me an opportunity to revisit favorites under slightly different names - solo acts instead of the main band, things like that. (See Richard Thompson and Kristin Hersch, for examples.) This is another one of those.

I had Wall of Voodoo in This Year - I picked two songs for 1982 and none for 1981 to bend the list enough to fit Call of the West in; that's how important and major that song is to me. But their singer and main songwriter Stan Ridgway also had a fine solo career, with a number of great story-songs - besides this one, Drive She Said is just as propulsive, Harry Truman is dark and foreboding, and Don't Box Me In (with Stewart Copeland) is a spiky wonder - over a couple of decades after he left Voodoo.

The song I want to talk about today is Goin' Southbound, from the 1989 record Mosquitos. (And you can definitely hear the '80s in the keyboards in this song - I think it adds to the atmosphere; you can make your own decision.)

Ridgway was mesmerizing in his this-guy-talking-to-you songs; this is one of his best, with a driving beat to back up the compelling situation. The speaker is recruiting someone - you the listener, if you like - to take a package. It is definitely not legal.

It's a strange weight from an exotic locale
Don't worry about the cops, 'cause they're in on it, pal
Just pick it up no later than tonight at three o'clock
And bring it to the warehouse––here, put this in your sock

I love songs that tell stories or set up situations - the ones filled with details and words - and this is one of the best, told smartly and tautly by a singer/songwriter at the height of his power.

You've got this job
But you don't know how
And everybody does
What nobody will allow

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 11, 2025

And this is the third weekly installment listing books I bought from a clearance sale from Midtown Comics a few weeks back - so not "the mail" this precise week, but in the mail not too long before. This time, I have the last five books that were in that big box, the end of the alphabet:

When I do orders like this, I tend to pick odd things I don't know much about - works that strike me interestingly, that look like something distinct. So I often say things like "I have no idea who this creator is" or "this book is about something, but I don't know what." For example: Dear Beloved Stranger is a Xeric Award-winning graphic novel from Dino Pai, published in 2013, which is probably autobiographical, somewhat fabulistic, and otherwise mysterious to me.

From the German cartoonist Ulf K. comes the wordless collection of strips Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007, all about a little man in a hat who works in some sort of an office and I bet has various travails.

A big biographical comic from two French creators is next: George Sand: True Genius, True Woman, written by Séverine Vidal and drawn by Kim Consigny, about (of course) the 19th century feminist novelist and playwright.

Next up is a book for younger readers, translated from the German - Box by Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschӧtter. The kid on the cover, I gather, meets that magical box, and then they build stuff - I imagine it gets more complicated from there.

And last - for today, and overall - is Zach Worton's 2015 graphic novel The Disappearance of Charley Butters, which I saw on some best-of list around that time and had on my "buy this if you see it" list since then. I don't think I ever saw a copy of it in person, but I've got it now...now what (besides the disappearance of the title character) is it actually about? I guess I'll have to read it to find out.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: More Policeman Than You Expect

The policeman touched his cap. He was a long, stringy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit neatly into the general scheme. He had large, knobby wrists of a geranium hue and just that extra four or five inches of neck which disqualify a man for high honours in a beauty competition. His eyes were mild and blue, and from certain angles he seemed all Adam's apple.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor, p.13

Quote of the Week: Talk of War

There was a blare of heated rage mingled with a certain expression of intentness on all faces. Many of the men were making low-toned noises with their mouths, and these subdued cheers, snarls, imprecations, prayers, made a wild, barbaric song that went as an undercurrent of sound, strange and chantlike with the resounding chords of the war march. The man at the youth's elbow was babbling. In it there was something soft and tender like the monologue of a babe. The tall soldier was swearing in a loud voice. From his lips came a black procession of curious oaths. Of a sudden another broke out in a querulous way like a man who has mislaid his hat.

 - Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, p.113 in Prose and Poetry

The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm sure this novel originated in someone talking about "a small bachelor apartment," which got Wodehouse into thinking about who would obviously live in such a place. Well, actually, The Small Bachelor was originally a 1917 musical comedy by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton before Wodehouse novelized it a decade later, so it might have been Bolton who had that thought.

But you know what I mean: someone made that leap, saw a title in it, and, after the writing mills had ground sufficiently, first the play and then the novel emerged.

The novel was serialized in Liberty magazine in 1926 and published in book form a year later, so it's nearly a century old. Some of the details - that was the era of Prohibition, and a raid on a restaurant that provides illegal libations is prominently featured in the climax - are a bit outdated, but Wodehouse's love stories and his broadly-drawn characters are as close to universal as anything is in this world.

The titular bachelor is the timid George Finch, a young man from Idaho who inherited a pile of cash from a relative and moved to Greenwich Village to become an artist. We don't see him paint or interact with models; the narrative and several characters declare he's a lousy artist, but his career (or lack thereof) is mostly a signpost rather than a plot element. He lives in a small penthouse on top of the Sheridan Apartment Building, well-provided with a sleeping porch that will be important to the action and with a fire escape that leads down to the aforementioned restaurant, the Purple Chicken.

George, in best Wodehouse manner, saw a young lady (Molly Waddington) on the street and fell in love with her. Luckily, she reciprocated almost immediately; she's been looking for a small cuddly man who gets flustered when she smiles at him.

Unluckily, Molly is provided with a formidable stepmother and a formerly rich and now henpecked father, Sigsbee H. Waddington. Both have odd manias: Sigsbee is obsessed with The West (as in the romantic image of cowboys from Zane Grey novels and Tom Mix movies), and Mrs. Waddington is hellbent on getting her stepdaughter married to a young English nobleman, Lord Hunstanton. She also takes against George immediately, mostly because he's an artist and so (she assumes) both poor and licentious - neither of which are even close to true. 

Also: there's nothing really wrong with Hunstanton, and he doesn't get a lot to do in the novel - he's not a villain, just the wrong guy for Molly.

That's not nearly enough complications for a Wodehouse story, so George's valet, Frederick Mullett, is also a reformed burglar affianced to a very successful pickpocket, Fanny Welch. A policeman who wants to be a poet, Garroway, also figures prominently. The glue bringing most of these characters together is the successful self-help writer J. Hamilton Beamish, who lives in an apartment downstairs from George. Oh, and also Mrs. Waddington's favorite medium, Madam Eulalie, who Beamish falls in love with and also coincidentally comes from the same small Idaho town as George. Also important, very Wodehousianly, is a sheaf of stock certificates in a motion-picture company which are currently valueless and which Sigsbee wants to unload on someone, as well as a supposedly very valuable pearl necklace, meant to be part of Molly's trousseau, which Sigsbee had replaced with a cheap fake in order to get the funds to buy those stock certificates.

About midway through the novel - I'm going to guess to be the big scene before the intermission when this was a play - there's a Long Island wedding, at which Fanny Welch is hired by Sigsbee to pretend to be an abandoned love of George's and steal the necklace in the ensuing confusion. The wedding doesn't happen, of course, and the action shifts for the rest of the novel to primarily that small bachelor apartment and nearby environs, where policemen are assaulted, gossip columnists are plied with salacious details of the busted wedding, various characters hide under beds or are locked in the apartment, the Purple Chicken is raided by a large number of brawny policemen with several major characters present, windows are used for illegal entry and hot soup is very nearly stolen.

In the end, Sigsbee regains a fortune, Mrs. Waddington is humbled, and George heads off into wedded bliss with Molly. Along the way, Mullett and Fanny have already married, and Beamish and Eulalie are on their way to the registrar as well - I can't recall a Wodehouse book with such a blizzard of wedding rice at the end.

This is not one of Wodehouse's very best books - there are a number of elements that aren't leveraged as well as they could have been, and others that a maturer Wodehouse would have made more out of - but it's a solid B- Wodehouse, funny and quick and amusing, particularly for being a century old.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition - it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo, from Mirage - but, within the story, there's no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn't reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when "long-running" was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn't manage to publish any collections - this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there's been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That's the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death, which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn't say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress - there's no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don't directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who's solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, "Shades of Green" and "Shi," are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more - the wordless "The Lizards' Tale" and the flashback "Battlefield" - are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, "Jizo," "Usagi's Garden," and "Autumn," are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit - a kit, I suppose - learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it's always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, "Shades of Green."

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that's how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn't "the end" - Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I'm not sure that he isn't still adding more on, even now) - but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it's pretty successful artistically - as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Writing about a book you last read at the age of about fourteen feels like returning to book-report days. Maybe even more so when it's clear why that book is given to so many fourteen-year-olds: it's short, focused entirely on one character, and its themes are so high in the text even relatively dull readers can identify them and, one hopes, write semi-coherently about them.

I picked up The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's most famous bit of literary output, largely because I'd just read a batch of Ambrose Bierce stories about the Civil War, and this Crane novel - in the form of the Library of America omnibus Prose and Poetry, which I think is basically the complete Crane - was on the next shelf. Secondary reasons include the fact that it is short - and I'm all about short books these days, to keep myself motivated - that I hadn't read it since the mid-80s, and that I'd been vaguely thinking about reading a recent graphic-novel adaptation, so it was already in my head.

This is the story of one young man, Henry Fielding, during two days of an unnamed battle sometime towards the end of the US Civil War. Crane is remarkably vague - I should probably say deliberately non-specific, but it often comes across to the reader as vague - throughout, with Henry consistently called "the youth" and other characters named once or twice at best but regularly tagged as "the tall soldier" or "his friend." I assume Crane did this to maximize the Everyman-ness of Henry and universalize his experience; it came across to me, reading it as an adult, as well-meaning but a bit clumsy and convoluted.

Red Badge is also from that 19th century stream of writing that tried to present colloquial speech through typography and spelling, which was a valiant effort but can lead to things such as this (on pp.198 of the edition I read):

"Well, sir, th' colonel met your lieutenant right by us - it was damndest thing I ever heard - an' he ses: 'Ahem! ahem!' he ses. 'Mr. Hasbrouck! he ses. There, Flemin', what d' yeh think 'a that? 'Who was th' lad what carried th' flag?' he ses, an' th' lieutenant, he speaks up right away: 'That's Flemin', an' he's a jimhickey,' he ses, right away. What? I say he did. "A jimhickey,' he ses - those 'r his words. He did, too. I say he did. If you kin tell this story better than I kin, go ahead an' tell it. Well, then, keep yer mouth shet...."

A little of that goes a long way; the part I quoted goes on for another fifteen lines. Red Badge is a short book, but every time one of its enlisted-man characters speaks - the officers have dialogue that's a bit easier to follow - it's like that.

But Red Badge, again, is not difficult to read: the dialogue does take some getting used to, but it's straightforward and mostly clear. Once a reader realizes "the youth" is our hero, and that term is always used for him, Crane's prose is close enough to the modern American idiom that even those legions of fourteen-year-olds can understand it all without too much effort.

Crane runs his hero through a lot of experiences in those two days, back and forth both alone and in company, as the army moves forward, engages the enemy, pauses, fights again, and maneuvers some more. Henry runs away from battle once - that's the great theme and motif and concern of the novel; how a fighting man can know, before the fighting first starts, if he's brave enough to stand up or if he will run away. (Crane, I think, was trying to show all sides of the story, so Henry both runs and is brave, in turn: that may be the point, of course, than all men run away sometimes and stand up other times, and the difference between those times may not be clear or explicable to anyone.) So there is a lot of both activity and philosophizing, as Henry waits for things to happen, and engages when they do happen, and thinks, all the time, of what he should and will and did do. His psychology is also modern and specific enough that a teen reader of today or the 1980s will understand what Henry is worried about and why.

I don't know if Red Badge is a great novel, in world-historical terms. It's a pretty good American novel of its era, tied to a major event in national history (though written three decades later by a young man born after the war), with a lot of hooks that makes it easy to teach and useful for pedagogy. So I expect it will continue to be served up to fourteen-year-olds for quite some time: it's not a novel most Americans of the past couple of generations needed to go out of their way to read; they'd get it, whether they wanted it or not.

Murderburg by Carol Lay

I thought this book collected Carol Lay's single-page strips - the "Murderburg Chronicles" that have been running in her weekly strip Lay Lines for at least the last year or two. And those pieces are a lot of fun, but they're a bit dense, so I didn't get to the two-hundred-and-fifty-page Murderburg quite as quickly as I expected - I almost read it a couple of times, but put it down for something I thought would be zippier.

Reader, Murderburg is actually a collection of six comics-format stories about the inhabitants of Murderburg. It is zippy and fun and just a bit dark, and I wish I'd jumped and read it as soon as I heard it was published in March. So if you're waiting as well, stop reading me right now and go grab Murderburg instead.

Lay published these stories in various places - the book doesn't say where - during the 2010s, under the overall title "Murderville." (A Netflix series has since jumped up and taken that name, forcing a slight rebrand.) It's set on a bucolic island off the coast of Maine - actually named Muderburg, after the founder, but nick-named Murderburg over the years, for various reasons.

The stories all center on Mayor Leo Scazzo and his family: Leo was a mobster but has semi-retired, or perhaps gone into hiding, depending on how you look at it. Many of the other inhabitants of Muderburg have similarly complicated pasts - the current strips Lay's doing for Lay Lines get into that, one person at a time - and Muderburg is both a somewhat sleepy town dependent on the flow of tourists and a pit stop for "retiring" ne'er-do-wells who need new passports and faces and such.

Leo is central to all of the stories, with his wife Antonia and teenage vegan daughter Isabella also taking major roles in some of the tales. The younger kids, twins, are mostly hellions running about and getting underfoot. Muderburg has plenty of other colorful characters - again, see Lay Lines for many of their backgrounds - from a coroner and a lighthouse keeper to a ferry operator and a B&B owner.

Not all of the stories see the locals needing to actually kill from-aways, but it happens more than once. And some of the worst offenders are from the richer, less pleasant town Snobunquit - Lay is wonderful with names - which is right on the mainland near Muderburg, sending pretentious yuppie-types who annoy Muderburgers and wreak havoc on their landscape.

Interestingly, the postulated retiring-mobster pipeline in Muderburg doesn't come up directly in any of these stories; Lay has saved herself some story material for a sequel if she wants it. The wonderful map - tucked in between the first and second stories - also includes a number of places that could be triggers for additional stories if Lay wants: Lost Girls Island, The Downfall, Folly Ledge, Devilled Rocks, Widow's Walk.

So read and/or buy Murderburg: it's by Carol Lay, which means the art is stylish and precisely cartooned, the writing is pointed, the dialogue is sharp and amusing, the world capacious and interesting, and the stories energetic and amusing. Let's make this so much of a success that Lay is inspired to do a Murderburg II.

Better Things: History Never Repeats

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I don't know if this is my favorite Split Enz song - there's a part of me that will always hold out for Dirty Creature, far darker and starker - but it's a wonderful bouncy pop song that's just about perfect.

History Never Repeats was a hit, I think - maybe more in their native New Zealand than over here in North America - and gave a title to at least one of their greatest hits records. And, like so many of the songs I've been writing about, it's largely a break-up song - the history that will not repeat is that

There was a girl I used to know
She dealt my love a savage blow

The song is straightforward from there: a fine pop sound, circa 1980, with a video (linked below) even more of its time, in all of its splendor.

Good pop music is like a soap bubble: shiny, shimmery, floating on its own power, gorgeous to look at and even more exciting the more light plays on it. But poking at it will only make it burst and disappear. So I think I'll leave it there, with this very very early-MTV video, that I have to imagine all of the participants now look back at and regret:

Books Read: September 2025

I do this every month, and it's boring this time as always before. This is what I read; once the posts go live, I'll add links. I don't know if this is actually as useful as an index to the blog as I say it is, but it's a thing I do consistently, and I'm old and set in my ways enough to be very fond of consistency.

Cathy Malkasian, The Heavy Bright (digital, 9/1)

James Thurber, The Seal in the Bedroom (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

Thijs Desmet, Smoking Kills (digital, 9/6)

Tony Millionaire, Drinky Crow Drinks Again (digital, 9/7)

John Updike, Bech: A Book (in The Complete Henry Bech, 9/7)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Casual Fridays (digital, 9/13)

Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsh, The Baker Street Peculiars (digital, 9/14)

Evelyn Waughh, Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad, 9/14)

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie? (digital, 9/20)

Renaud Dilles, Betty Blues (9/21)

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 9/21)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/26)

James Kochalka, Quit Your Job and Other Stories (9/27)

Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschötter, Box (9/28)

Next month I will probably read more books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 4, 2025

This is the second of three weekly posts listing a big box of comics-format stuff I got from Midtown Comics about two weeks ago now. I'm breaking them into five-book chunks to keep me from typing for too long on a sunny Saturday morning and just because I can. This time, I have the middle of the alphabet, authorially:

I have two things written by Matt Kindt; I've mostly read the stuff he draws, too, but I gather that, like a lot of people in comics, he does other kinds of projects to make money and keep a career going. (Throwing no shade there: my own career wandered away from a "creative" field into  a deeply dull, B2B end of marketing that pays nicely but no one cares about.) First up is Apache Delivery Service, where the art is from Tyler Jenkins and the colors by Hilary Jenkins. This is some kind of thriller or horror story, set in the jungles of Vietnam (the war as well as the country, as I understand it), with two men (soldiers?) searching for a lost treasure.

The other Matt Kindt-written thing is Bang!, where the art comes from Wifredo Torres, and the colors are from Nayoung Kim and Bill Crabtree in various permutations. This is some kind of spy thriller thing, though I think each issue might start from a different starting place, and some of the storylines might be fictional within its overall world. Anyway: looks twisty and complex, and the quotes are mostly in the "this is awesome!" mode without giving details, so I suspect Big Reveals and Shocking Twists starting pretty early.

I had James Kochalka's Quit Your Job and Other Stories on my list of books to get for a long time - so long that I don't remember why, exactly. This is the 2015 edition - possibly expanded, or at least with a new introduction - of a book Kochalka originally published in 1997. My guess is that this was "adult" Kochalka - or maybe I mean a Kochalka book from before he started doing so much specifically for young readers, not that it's necessarily anti-kid - and I wanted to dive into that end of his work. I guess I'll see.

I thought Be That Way was a graphic novel, but it isn't, exactly: this 2023 Hope Larson book mixes comics pages, longer prose sections (in what look like a lettering font), spot illustrations, and some design-y pages to tell the story of one teen girl's life in the early '90s through her diary. So it's denser than I expected: good for depth, possibly not as good if I wanted to just read it quickly.

And last for this batch is Graylight from Naomi Nowak. I read one of Nowak's books back in the Aughts, and reviewed it for ComicMix then. This book is from the same era, so I decided to check it out. From a quick google, it looks like Nowak is mostly making paintings and jewelry these days, rather than comics, but I count "making art the way you want" as a win, no matter the form. Maybe she'll come back to comics, or some other narrative form, eventually. The description of this book is very vague, so I have almost no idea what it's about - which is also a good thing on occasion.