Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I've always been a fan of complication - especially if it's complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood...well, that's the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn't even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they're married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives - no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc's severance from the job he didn't want and Julia's recent grant - where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months - maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami is Cejas's first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer's eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have - Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean "meat" or "bread.")

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of - and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do - and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn't expect. That's a life, and the joy in reading about other people's lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas's careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer's eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

Space Junk by Julian Hanshaw

I suspected Julian Hanshaw was British - even in a SF story, there's details of phrasing and character interactions that are culturally distinct - and I see now I was right. I also see Hanshaw has been making graphic novels for more than a decade, and I've somehow completely failed to notice his work, so perhaps I shouldn't be lauding my amazing powers of perception here.

Space Junk was Hanshaw's new book this year; it came out a few months ago, from the excellent Top Shelf line (which is why I noticed it to begin with, actually). It follows about half a dozen solo books and some collaborative and shorter work, none of which (see above) I'm going to be able to contextualize or compare.

But this book is an interesting thing: the kind of soft SF that's more about the vibe than the world-building, with some frankly woo-woo fantastic elements and a world that doesn't actually make sense if you sit down and think about it in any detail.

We don't see anything like a government, just the Mondo Corp, which runs an extensive mining operation on this unnamed planet, sometime in the medium future. Mondo's operating plan is to hit a world, build what looks like a pretty extensive city, extract a bunch of minerals for a decade or so, and then pack the whole thing off to another planet. Even quirkier, the corporation seems to be organized generationally, with children explicitly part of the workforce but working under their own parents - and operations seem to leave from the top down, so we're now at the point where the population here is mostly unsupervised teenagers, with a few adults left.

This obviously doesn't make much sense in SFnal terms: to make only the first complaint, planets are big and one city-sized operation can no more exhaust the useful mineral wealth of an entire planet in a few years than a mosquito can drain the blood of an elephant. But of course, this is more of a metaphor than an actual world to be taken literally: Hanshaw wants all of that waste and pointlessness, alongside the forced conformity and infantilizing happy-talk of Mondo. This is late capitalism, as seen by alienated, troubled teens: stupid, pointless, broken, something to be ignored or escaped.

There are two main characters: Faith, who has a piece of metal in her head after a childhood accident that her gambling-obsessed parents were too cheap to fix correctly with something flesh-toned, and Hoshi, who has an anger-management problem and an obsession with chickens. Both of them are seeing their required counselor, Pieter Uzmaki, who seems to be trying his best to help them and to actually be decently good at his job and committed to it. There's also a horrible kid, Steve, leader of a group of bullies, who torments both of our heroes and generally causes trouble.

(For a satire of capitalism, Space Junk is surprisingly low-key and easy-going. Mondo is wasteful, but never seems evil, and even middle-management is entirely missing here. There's no company-town shenanigans to keep everyone indebted, invasive surveillance, obviously dangerous cost-cutting, or destruction of native life. The villainy comes from one person, another one of the kids.)

Everyone is obviously supposed to leave. They all have specific shuttles they're booked onto: Faith, Hoshi, and Pieter are all scheduled for the very last one. And, as these last few days are going on, more and more of their surroundings - movie theaters, convenience stores, and so on - are bodily picked up and shoved onto other ships to be sent off to the next planet.

(Again: super-wasteful and ridiculous from a cost-benefit perspective. But metaphorically resonant.)

Faith and Hoshi both don't want to leave, for slightly different reasons. Pieter, we think, is a solid company man, and will leave - he does seem to be trying to help them both come to terms with leaving, and accept the next steps in their lives.

But the reader knows they won't leave: that's the story. They'll meet each other, find common ground, evade the schemes of Steve, and stay behind in the ruins of their childhoods. The fantastic elements come into that, and I won't spoil them, but they are goofy and very soft-SF, while also amping up that central metaphor Hanshaw wants.

This is a thoughtful, interesting book, good at showing character and nuance and self-assured of its metaphorical material. As an old SF hand, I found parts of it difficult to take seriously, but that's on me: this is the kind of book where you grant the premises. And, if you can do that, it has a lot of depth and leaves you with a fine experience in the end.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid by Stan Sakai

Thirty-some years ago, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series ran bi-monthly, and these early collections each gathered six issues. (It looks like the late collections also tend to gather six issues, but I'm not there yet.) So each book is basically a year of samurai-rabbit action: this one has the issues that hit between December 1989 and September 1990, numbers 19-24.

Unlike the previous book (The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy), Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid doesn't have a single multi-part storyline. There is a two-parter, "Blood Wings," which features a clan of ninja bats, but the other four issues are mostly standalone.

Sakai tells all those stories well, and in different ways: he starts out with the straightforward moral-conflict story "Frost & Fire", with Usagi sent to retrieve a dead samurai's swords for that late samurai's haughty wife, only to find he had abandoned her for a lower-class woman. "A Kite Story" is a lighter story of cheating gamblers during a festival, told in multiple overlapping sections with different viewpoints. Then "Blood Wings" provides the major ninja action for this book - and some questions in the reader's minds about how this anthropomorphic world really works: if some of the races of people can fly, that should probably have made a lot of history different in this world than our, right? Right?

The last two stories are related, with Usagi first meeting an aged, dying hero put out to pasture as the administrator of a minor town (and convincing him to finish his work rather than trying to die in battle), and then fighting the semi-parody of the title as a consequence. (There's also the machinations of the usual Big Bads of the series behind that last fight, too - stories with ninjas and scheming feudal lords are really big on the "let's you and him fight" plot.)

The tone and level of the stories is consistent as before: Sakai is telling samurai stories, slightly sanded down, so they're appropriate for American middle-schoolers. I do find the sanding occasionally obvious, and sometimes regrettable, but it's the way he wanted to tell these stories and the audience he was aiming for. His art is crisp and fun, solid at storytelling, even if I don't spend a lot of time trying to decide what kind of animals everyone is.

For new or random readers: you can probably pick up any random Usagi volume, though you'll probably want to pick ones with multiple stories, like this one. He's a rabbit, he's a ronin, it's otherwise Edo-era Japan - that's all you need to know.

Bogart Creek, Vol. 1 by Derek Evernden

Names are not unique: I need to remind myself of that every so often. Today I have a book of comics from a small Canadian publisher called Renegade Arts Entertainment, and, at first I thought, "Renegade? Surely it's not the same one?"

It's not. The Renegade I was thinking of - Renegade Press, the mid-80s enterprise from Deni Loubert - shut down more than thirty years ago. This is a newer company, founded in 2008, that publishes comics, graphic novels and audiobooks out of Canmore, Alberta. So it's mildly amusing there were two comics publishers from Canada with sort-of the same name, but there was a good twenty years between them, and they were from close to opposite ends of that large country.

What I saw from Renegade Arts is the first collection of Derek Evernden's single-panel comic Bogart Creek - from looking at the Renegade site, I see there are two more collections.

The book isn't clear on where these comics originally appear - there is a Bogart Creek site that Evernden runs, but it's mostly a contact-me and buy-my-books operation; it's not a home for new comics. My guess is that possibly there's a newspaper or three where they occasionally appear, and/or that Evernden just posts them on Instagram. In any case: he's been doing this for a few years now, and has built up a body of work.

It's pretty consistent: dark humor with more gore than most of us would expect in a single panel, full of dark wordplay and distinctive ideas. I don't know if I'd say there's anything obviously Canadian about it, but it does seem like the work of someone likely to get stuck snowbound on a frozen dark prairie more than once in any given year.

I do mean dark humor, though: Evernden's jokes are about death, in one way or another, a good third of the time. It's often zippy, amusing moments before the inevitable death that he cartoons about, but, still: death. Lots of it. And plenty of big black splotches where something violent and final just happened.

Bogart Creek is one of the many single panels that follow Far Side - "weird" humor has tended to go that direction for the past two or three decades. It is distinctively its own thing while also sitting solidly in that tradition, if you know what I mean: it might not have existed without Far Side to show that this was a viable medium, but Evernden's ideas and jokes are very different from Larson's.

I hesitate to recommend Bogart Creek widely, but it is funny. Evernden has a distinctive point of view and makes good gags. He's also a working illustrator, and you can see that in his work: his style is mostly consistent, but he mixes up his look a bit to suit particular jokes. If you like dark humor, check out Bogart Creek.

Better Things: The Passion of Lovers

"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've been listening to Bauhaus for almost forty years, I think. That sounds like a long time, but I came to them fairly late - probably in my college years in the late '80s, after they broke up.

That's the thing about the past: there's always more of it. No matter how old you are, there were thousands of years of past before you. And even something you took to fairly young might have surprising depths from before you got there. And Bauhaus - the real Bauhaus, the one that made the songs we still listen to - only existed from 1978 to 1983.

This is not their iconic song, or their most famous song. Many days, it might not even be my favorite Bauhaus song - Bela Lugosi's Dead is always up there, or Swing the Heartache, and I even get into moods now and then when it's Terror Couple Kill Colonel.

But I always come back to this deep, resonant song, and especially the distanced refrain:

The passion of lovers is for death, said she

"She" says it - the song doesn't say it. It's a viewpoint, an opinion. And is that the death of le petit mort - is it a play on words? - or does she mean it for real. It's dark, gloomy Goth music, so I wouldn't lay a bet on there being anything petit about it.

I can't say anything more: the passion of lovers is for death.

Quote of the Week: The Law Is the Law, and We Can't Change It

"But do you remember what my father said about the Law being man's substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats - delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion - the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart's content, and says 'If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I chose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it - the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies."

 - Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, p.173-74

Adulthood Is a Gift! by Sarah Andersen

So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen's comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth, Fangs, Big Mushy Happy Lump, Herding Cats, Cryptid Club, and Oddball. That's always fun - discovering a new creator and reading all the way out to the walls - but, unless the person you suddenly love is Wodehouse or Simenon, there's only going to be so many books, and you'll find the end.

And then you're in the same place as all of the older fans - waiting for the next book.

Andersen had a new book this fall, the confusingly-titled Adulthood Is a Gift! It is not, as I first thought, a gift-book edition of Myth; it's not a repackaging of Myth at all. It's two-thirds a brand-new "Sarah's Scribbles" collection and one-third prose-and-comics retrospective of her career to date. It's somewhere between a tenth and fifteenth anniversary celebration - the first book was in 2016, her first cartoon published online was in 2011. But why should we have to wait for round numbers?

(Parenthetically, as a Marketing Guy, I would have argued against having a book with a title so similar to an existing book, especially with the "crossed-out" title style. My bet is that sales on this one will be slightly disappointing, just because at least some people will be confused and think they already have this. On the other hand, creators typically hate Marketing Guy, and I do understand why.)

The new stuff is prime mature Andersen: goofy gags, largely about cats and introversion and how your body parts start to betray you much, much earlier in your life than you expect. There's about a hundred of those, in her precise minimalist style - seeing her older work later in the book really emphasizes how clean and funny her line has gotten over the years. (Down to the little things: her people's eyes are usually just a little off - too big, absolutely, and also just a hair wall-eyed all the time.)

The older material is presented as "essays and images" - Andersen shows an old comic, and then writes about it. Sometimes it's about who she was at the time, and what she was trying to do; sometimes it's about how the outside world caused trouble, as when she was attacked and harassed systematically by a group of online neo-Nazis in 2017.

So this is maybe for Andersen's fans more than her other books - at least for people who don't mind reading about process and thinking about how art is made. She's got impressive chops, and is insightful at writing about how she got to where she is now, too. So, if you like funny cartoons about Millennials, or hope to someday make your own funny online cartoons, Adulthood Is a Gift! could give you enjoyment and/or pointers.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlee's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist is a very British fantasy novel, set in a small, comfortable land with no major human neighbors and only trade by sea. Dorimare is bordered on two sides by impassible mountains, on one by the sea, and the last by the the almost equally impassable Fairyland. It's small and rural, with one substantial city (Lud itself) that feels more like a regional capital, a center of local commerce and minor maneuvering among the petit bourgeois leaders.

There was an aristocratic past, rule by a line of Dukes that terminated in the flamboyant and erratic Aubrey, but that ended a few hundred years ago, to be succeeded by those fat burghers taking it in turn to be, basically, Lord Mayor of this small nation. The revolution was presumably somewhat bloody, but Mirrlees tells it quietly in deep retrospect, and is more concerned with the myth of Aubrey and the legends of his return than with what he was actually like as a man ruling a nation. There are Laws, there is something of a police/military force, but this is a land ruled by convention - again, very British. Small shopkeepers, small farmers, supposedly important men who are in reality fairly small-scale proprietors of businesses. They venerate cheese, tell the same jokes over and over again, live in each other's pockets, each with their own nearly identical small lives of prosaic pleasure rolling down through the generations.

Fairyland is the potential breaking point of that, always lurking on the horizon. You could say all the Doirmareites cling more tightly to their normalcy because Fairyland, and the Debatable Hills that are its marches, are always visible to the west, always available as an option.

Hope Mirrlees has a somewhat different vision of fairies than most writers, though. These are not small woodland sprites, or Tolkienian sages living through aeons. They are not part of the normal natural world of Dorimare at all. The fairies themselves barely appear in the book at all: they are more of an option, or a metaphor, or a different way of looking at life. The fairies are the dead, at least some of the time - or dead humans are legendarily said to be spirited away and reanimated by the fairies to serve them as slaves in their land. And those former friends and family members are the fairies the Dorimareites think about - their supposed ruler is Aubrey. Were there any "original" fairies? Is it all dead humans all the way down?

This is not meant to be a clear or precise metaphor. Fairyland is the lands of death, but also the wilds of art, the freeing of the human spirit, and several other things all mixed together. And it's not anyone's choice of what Fairyland will be for them: it is, and continues, and will always be.

The main product of Fairyland - again, so typical for a nation of shopkeepers - is fairy fruit. Some kind of sweet product of those far lands, smuggled in at large effort, eaten largely by the lower classes in secret, giving visions and dreams and sometimes unstoppable desires to go bodily to Fairyland. The burghers, we are told, never eat fairy fruit, but it seems to be endemic among the lower classes - you can see that as yet another British touchpoint, that the "better" people will be affected much more strongly and immediately by the touch of the ineffable, and need to guard themselves against it in ways the rougher "simple" people do not.

Mirrlees tells us this story in a wry, distanced tone, writing about a land far away in space and possibly in time. It's not quite a fable, but it is a story, rather than something we're experiencing right now.

So Lud and Dorimare has gotten out of touch with its fairy side, swung too far in the direction of stolidity and mercantile life. Lud-in-the-Mist is how it swings back, and who is caught up in that. There is a villain, but he, in the end, was not at the core of the larger changes - no one is, or could be. Mirrlees means us to understand this is how the world is, and a swing in one direction will bring a return swing inevitably.

The leader of Dorimare is Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, a self-satisfied middle-aged man who runs a business in what seems to be almost his spare time and has read deeply in the Law. He's better than he might be, as we learn eventually. His tween son Ranulph eats fairy fruit - like many things in the book, the details aren't always entirely clear, but it seems to have been secretly fed to him, as a jest or a stratagem. That disorders the boy's mind, which sets in motion much of the rest of the plot.

Somewhat simultaneously, the major finishing school for the young ladies of the burgher class is also fed fairy fruit, and they all simultaneously hare off to Fairyland, including Ranulph's sister. This is not as important to the novel as Ranulph, which is puzzling. Mirrlees' own father died while she was writing this book, and I wonder if there's some element of working out her own feelings and concerns in this tale of fatherly love purely for a son.

This is a fantasy, but not heavily so. There is no magic, there are no wizards or monsters. Just people, and fairy fruit, and a mysterious land of the dead or the inhuman, close enough to see, close enough to visit, but famously not close enough to be returned from. (That will change by the end of Lud-in-the-Mist, like so much else.)

The plot is largely concerned with the Law, and Mirlees repeatedly makes direct comparisons between the things of fairy (visionary, transformative, changing) and those of men's Law (equally all of those things, made up of legal fictions and pretenses to twist the world into whatever shapes the creators want). Nathaniel tries to help his son, then chases a villain, then, in the end, has to make the trip to fairyland to save his son (and, oh, by the way, also his daughter and all of the other girls, though that is clearly not as important).

Lud-in-the-Mist is a writer's book: it's intensely written and narrated, in ways that editors and writers love to trace and anatomize and try to follow in their own work. It's deep and quirky and often opaque, so those writers and readers can make varying interpretations, within a moderately wide framework, that all seem plausible. It's written in rich, complex prose that rewards close reading and deep thought. And it is ambiguous enough that most readers will find something they agree with in the ending.

It is a minor book, of course. But it's the kind of minor book that generations of new writers keep coming back to, and using as a touchpoint, one with wells of interest that seem, after nearly a century, to be close to inexhaustible. And that's pretty good for a minor book.

Camp Spirit by Axelle Lenoir

Elodie is a seventeen-year-old Quebecois on her way to college, the kind of dark, brooding teen we've seen a lot of in media (and may have been, ourselves, if we're the kind of people who consume a lot of media). She likes dark, loud music: this is 1994, so it seems to be largely the louder side of grunge, but there's plenty of metal in the mix, too.

She has plans for this last summer before college, none of which involve being a camp counselor somewhere out in the woods - Elodie is a solidly urban teen, preferring sidewalks and buildings to trees and lakes and canoes. But her mother has other plans, and one of the core experiences of being a teen is doing things you really don't want to do because your parents make you.

So Camp Spirit opens with Elodie first telling her best friend at school about the camp, and then being driven there by her mother: we know there was rebellion, but creator Axelle Lenoir leapfrogs over all of that to get right to the story. It's divided into eight chapters, each the same length - I don't think this was serialized in the English language, but the original French version (Lenoir is herself from Quebec, like her heroine) might have been.

This is a slightly earlier work than Secret Passages, which I saw a few months ago. It's more clearly a work in a genre - stories for teens or tweens, a little romance and more than a little fantasy & thriller, relatable and grounded. (I have to imagine the pitch had the word "Lumberjanes" in it at least once.) It's not quite transmuted autobiography the way Secret Passages was, but Lenoir was a teen in 1994, and she may well have been a camp counsellor.

The fantasy stuff has got to be fictionalized, though. I'm sure of that.

Elodie, of course, has an epically bad mood, and starts off with a massively unhelpful attitude. (I've already mentioned she was a teenager: it's a characteristic of teens that they get in their own way too much of the time.) She gets the bunch of kids - six assorted redheaded hellions in mid to late elementary school - that is the most unruly and challenging. She doesn't want to hang out with the other counselors at the campfire in the evening; she doesn't want to do anything to make this easier, just to seethe and grump and write nasty things in her diary.

That's where she starts: obviously things happen from there. And we get it: this is nothing like what she wanted. But she does sort-of make a friend of another counselor, Catherine, who goes out of her way to help and support Elodie. And she turns out to be a good counselor for the hellions: they love and respect her in the way only a pack of semi-feral girls can care for a sharp-tongued goth teen.

Oh, but also: this camp is weird. The "Chief" is hugely enthusiastic about everything - that's not the weird bit; that's expected - but seems to have secrets, is way too invested in a violent First Nations camp-specific myth he dramatizes to the assembled camp at the beginning of each season, and leads the singalongs with dark, Satanic lyrics. (One might think Elodie would approve that the Chief has similar musical tastes, but he's just so energetically odd that he creeps her out from the jump, and every time she sees him after that.)

I've mentioned there's a supernatural element: the Chief is part of that. Elodie has suspicions and fears as she goes on - she becomes a good camp counselor, worried about her charges, without noticing it - which I won't detail. And I won't explain the supernatural, or how it all comes out.

Because it does all come out: that's the genre we're in. It's the story of a summer, and how it transformed Elodie (and, maybe, almost as much, other people I will not specify). She is a good counselor, at least for this particular group of feral redheads. She learns secrets of the camp. She learns secrets of other people. She learns to be close to other people, one in particular. And she goes off to college at the end, not quite the same person as before but better and more interesting and more grown up.

This is not as pyrotechnic or ambitious as Secret Passages is: it's a bit more than a genre exercise, but it fits comfortably into a genre and does fun things with the outlines and tropes of that genre. I'm still deeply impressed at the colloquial English-language writing - it all sounds crisp and specific, with distinctive voices for the characters, and that can't be easy to accomplish in a second language. Her art is supple, good at story-telling and ready to be weird for the intrusions of the fantastic. Lenoir is a real talent, and I hope to see a lot more of her comics over the coming years.

Nancy Wins at Friendship by Olivia Jaimes

Nancy Wins at Friendship is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy, came out less than a year later - in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things "the kids" buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that "kids these days" are different. So that's not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk deeper into its own dull mix of sappy sentimentalism and incongruous good-girl art, and there was no serious hope that a legacy strip - especially one so closely identified with its creator, Ernie Bushmiller, and his mania for simple, precise gags - would break out of the straitjacket of the syndicate's hand and ever do anything interesting.

We were wrong. Unlike so many things this last decade or so, we we actually wrong by being too pessimistic, so Nancy is one small hopeful lesson for the world. Nancy was rejuvenated by a younger, female, pseudonymous creator - we still don't know who "Olivia Jaimes" really is, though it mostly doesn't matter; whatever she did before, this Nancy is her best-known and probably most-sustained work - first as a big signpost to say "this is going to be different now."

But the "Sluggo Is Lit" era - awesome as it was - settled down. That wasn't what Jaimes was planning to do, long-term: it was more of a clean break from the Gilchrist years, a way to grab attention and draw a line in the sand, to say her Nancy would be over here from now on.

This book shows what Jaimes wanted to focus Nancy on: still smart gags every day - she's enough of a fan of Bushmiller that isn't negotiable - but embedded in a more realistic modern world, with the phones and tech (and, yes, some language from the kids) that the early strips made such a point of. But Jaimes also added a new supporting cast around Nancy in school - friends, teachers supportive and struggling, a rival - to widen out this world.

It's a more grounded strip, as odd as that might seem from the first few months. More grounded than Gilchrist, more grounded than Bushmiller, frankly: Bushmiller was always a minimalist, paring everything down to a single focused gag in each individual strip, and happy to throw away all continuity and consistency to make that day's gag better. Jaimes's aims are slightly different: she still has Nancy as a self-centered, appetite-driven little kid, but the fact that she's smart and clever and good at working out quirky ideas - all traits core to her since the beginning - are more important, and connect to this mostly normal school life.

So Nancy, improbably, became largely a kids-in-school strip, about lessons and robotics club and rivalries with the other elementary schools. This is the book collecting the strips where that largely happened: this is the middle of that twist. It's a good strip, still full of fun gags, though Jaimes is much fonder of the ironic verbal reversal than Bushmiller's more visual eye.

I hope there are more books of Nancy; a lot has happened since the strips collected here. This one is largely a how-do-we-do-school-during-pandemic time-capsule at this point; I wonder why that was the book Andrews McMeel put out in 2023, but I suppose they figured they need to stay in order or the pandemic strips will just be too disjoint to ever use. But there are two Olivia Jaimes collections, which is pretty good: I recommend both of them, in the right order.

Better Things: Welcome to Your Wedding Day

"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.

We start the year with a dark, ominous, swirling song - a protest song more than a decade old, about things we've mostly forgot that we were protesting then. Back when war was the worst thing we were worried about, war on the other side of the world, and what we - that extensible, all-encompassing national "we" - were responsible for.

I hope we're still angry at blowing up weddings in foreign countries. At least some of us. There's a fair number of Americans who I think would cheer. 

This is Welcome to Your Wedding Day by The Airborne Toxic Event - a band named after a dark, ominous element of a great Don DeLillo novel. It's a 2011 song about a news story: this happened at least once, maybe multiple times. During the early war in Afghanistan, the US bombed a wedding party, killing many civilians, including the bride.

The song is full of cold anger, with a near-apocalyptic tone and wall-of-sound effect.

Well it's another fine day of nation building
Let's have. A. Parade.
You can dance on the graves and the bones of the children
If you know what to say

I would have liked to begin the year with something happier, but this is the luck of the alphabet. It won't always be this dark. (That's a good mantra in general, I think.)

Books Read: December 2024

These are the books I read the last month of the year. Links will follow, once posts go live, to make this semi-useful (at least for Future Me).

Julia Cejas, Hanami: You, Me & 200 Sq. Ft. in Japan (12/1, digital)

Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania (12/6)

Samir Dahmani, Seoul Before Sunrise (12/7, digital)

Meg Adams, Why Are You Like This? (12/8, digital)

Donald Westlake Writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death (12/8)

Mike Birchall, Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 (12/14)

Neul Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and various artists, Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 (12/15)

Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome (12/15)

Faith Erin Hicks, Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy (12/21)

John McPherson, The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury (12/22, digital)

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (12/22, in Stories & Early Novels)

Guy Colwell, Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch (12/24, digital)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard (12/25, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie (12/25)

Drew Friedman, Schtick Figures (12/26)

Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight (12/27)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.5: The Happy Prince (12/28, sigital)

Tom Holt, Barking (12/28)

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer (12/29, digital)

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter (12/29)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (12/30, digital)

John Scalzi, Starter Villain (12/30)

Alan Grant and Jon Haward, Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) (12/31, digital)

In the new year, I'm pretty sure I will continue to read books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 4, 2025

Over the holidays, I thought I'd want to read some books - some particular books. So I put some things on hold at the library, forgetting that the wheels of librarianship turn more slowly, as do all of our wheels, during the holidays. So they're not all here yet, even a week later, but some of them are, and I'm listing what has arrived so far today.

I also got a couple of books in the mail this week, and I'll list those below as well.

The Wood at Midwinter is a very small book by Susanna Clarke, set in the same world as her very big debut book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (It's so short, I think it's actually a novelette, not even a novella.) It's also illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, which means the sixty small pages here aren't even all filled with words. I don't mind short books, of course, but this one seems to test the limits of how short something can be and still be bound between two covers. That's exactly the kind of book a library is best for, though: don't spend your own money on it, get it quickly, get it back quickly so others can have a go as well.

Starter Villain was John Scalzi's new novel last year; it's a humorous SF book set in the present day, I think. I read a bunch of Scalzi when I was at the SFBC and soon afterward, which led me to mildly grump about how he wasn't using his talents in the cause of seriousness once or twice - it was a silly complaint, I admit, but between God Engines and Ghost Brigades, it felt like early Scalzi had at least one Big Serious Book in him itching to get out, and I guess I thought I was being encouraging - but I have gotten better since. I missed a big swath of his space opera from the past decade or so, which I may come back to someday. But his quick breezy standalones are just the kind of thing I like reading these days, when time is tight - I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society right around this time last year.

Odin is the first of what I think is a four-book series by George O'Connor, following up his twelve-book Olympians series from the past decade. (Links to my Olympians posts: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares/Apollo/Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, Dionysos.) Like the previous series, this is officially for young readers, but I found O'Connor's Greek mythology deeply researched (with text features in the back), engrossing as stories, and drawn with a great adventure-comics style. So it might be officially for tweens, but there's a lot for adults to enjoy in his work.

And here's what came in the mail:

The Book of Atrix Wolfe, a Patricia A. McKillip novel in a new 30th Anniversary edition from Tachyon. I haven't read this one - I keep saying I should read more McKillip, but she wrote so many novels, and all of them seem to be both pretty good and standalone, that it's difficult to figure out where to start. Having a book drop right into my lap, though, could be a sign from the world that this is the one; let's see if I can get to it. This edition publishes on February 25th in trade paper and electronic formats, but if you had a burning desire to read the book before that, it is thirty years old, so...you know, you probably could.

Egyptian Motherlode is a fantasy novel - I think - set in the musical world, by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman and published by Fairwood Press in October. The main character is called The Prophet, who has, as the back cover puts it, "the ability to warp reality through his music." The book seems to be a Zelig-esque trip through the 20th century in the company of The Prophet, as he meets everybody the authors loved and gets caught up in various plots, schemes, musical movements, and what-not.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Aware of Being Aware

He was emerging, wasn't he? More and more he found himself contemplating, being reflective. He remembered not doing those things. He wished he could make them not happen. The life of a construct was difficult once it became fully self-aware. Ed had seen plenty of examples of that. He did not wish it for himself, Yet there it was. He was doing it now, considering the problem of being able to consider the problem. "Shitfire," he said.

 - Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag, pp.77-78

Quote of the Week: Knockout

Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.69 in Complete Novels