Starting Point: 1979-1996 by Hayao Miyazaki

This might have been a gift; I got it long enough ago than there's no record on this blog. (One thing this blog does is serve as my external memory, particularly for the questions "when did I read that book?" and "how long has that one been on the shelf?") It's also the kind of bits-and-pieces collection that's difficult to "review" succinctly: I expect I'm going to be short and breezy here.

Starting Point: 1979-1996 collects various writings by and interviews of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki originally published (in Japanese, various places) during the years of the title, and collected as a book (again in Japanese) in 1996. The English translation is credited to Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt, and was published in this form in 2009. I think I got this copy soon after that; it's been on my shelf for a long time before it moved into the smallest room in the house to be read in the traditional way of a book made up of lots of short pieces.

(There has been a follow-up second volume, covering roughly the next decade. My cynical nature leads me to believe the publisher is expecting to do a third, but is waiting for Miyazaki to die, so it can be definitive.)

Starting Point is organized into a half-dozen sections: each one is a rough area of concern for a filmmaker and animator, and pieces are roughly chronological within each section. So it starts with "On Creating Animation," the most base-level, "what-I-do" pieces, then moves into opinions on other people's work in "On the Periphery of the Work" and some views of co-workers and friends and inspirations in "People." There's a section of short Miyazai comics, first the color story "Dining in Midair," then a more miscellaneous section called "My Favorite Things."

The back half of the book gets into specifics of his major movies, and is what I expect most readers will gravitate to. First is "Planning Notes; Directorial Memoranda," which seems to be actual documents from the production of his movies from Nausicaä to Princess Mononoke, and is fairly short. Then comes the much longer section "Works," which has interviews with Miyazaki and essays by Miyazaki about what seems to be all of his works from Future Boy Conan and Lupin III up to Mononoke. Many of these seem to have been originally published in fancy heavily-illustrated guides to the movies, published around the time of their release, so they were fairly "official" from the beginning.

Also included is a foreword by John Lasseter, an afterword by Miyazaki's longtime collaborator Isaeo Takahata, and a detailed "Biographical Chronology" from Miyazaki's birth in 1941 through 2009. (Did he say he was retiring in 2009? He's retired a couple of times and I can't remember when, exactly.)

Miyazki is a cranky, opinionated workaholic - this comes out most clearly in Takahata's afterword, but it's pretty clear throughout. But you can be a cranky, opinionated workaholic when you make great work, and Miyazaki definitely has, especially in this period. I would not want to work for or with him, but it's interesting to see how he thinks about his movies, often in very technical or production-focused ways that don't match at all a viewer's expectations. But he is cranky, and cranky about vastly more things than any random reader would expect - you should realize that going in. He's not going to be happy and positive about...well, just about anything, actually.

The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960 by Charles M. Schulz

I have an uneasy relationship with re-reading books: it feels like cheating, sometimes, to someone who spent a couple of decades in the book-mines. (If you're not at the coal-face digging out new material, what good are you?) On the other hand, there's a lot of things I read long ago and don't remember well: the old Heraclitian thing about steps and rivers is true. On top of that, I don't want to repeat myself here, and I write a post about every book I read, for complicated flaw-in-my-character reasons.

Anyway, I have a couple of random Complete Peanuts books on my to-be-read shelves; I had them before, read them, and lost them in my 2011 flood. Am I trying to rebuy the whole series? I don't think so. But ask me again in ten years if I keep filling in the gaps.

So I just reread The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960, relatively early in the fifty-year run of that strip, entirely and famously by creator Charles M. Schulz. I did have a post on this book way back in the early years of this blog, but I'm happy (?) to see that it was just a signpost, the way I often did in those days. I'll also link to the posts on the first and last volumes collecting the series, which in turn link to lots and lots of others.

Reading these two years of strips this time, I thought how purely it encapsulated that era of Peanuts - an era I haven't written about as much. The very early Peanuts strips are electric and punchy, with that famous "How I hate him" first strip, but they quickly change tone and the character of Charlie Brown shifts to his permanent form. Later in the life of the strip, there was the era of long continuities and persistent sadness, from the '60s through the mid-'70s, which was followed by the much sunnier Snoopy-centric era that continued, with changes and more new characters, through the end of the strip in 2000.

1959 and 1960, though, are in the age when the continuities are starting to expand, but haven't hit their full extent yet. Lucy is a pest sometimes - she's already started yanking the football away every year - but is still a little kid, and hasn't entirely transformed into the avatar of Schulz's first wife that many commentators assume she was later in the '60s. The world is just starting to expand outward at this point: Snoopy is getting odder and quirkier, but he's still a dog, albeit one who can sleep on the top of his doghouse. Linus has his crush on his teacher, Miss Othmar - who, of course, we never see, like all Peanuts adults. He also comes up with The Great Pumpkin in 1959, and suffers the first of many disappointments - maybe his pumpkin patch wasn't sincere enough.

The era I'm claiming this is the epitome of is the ramp-up era, I suppose: the time where Schulz was assembling the gags and running jokes and ideas that he would ring changes on for decades to come. (All this is in retrospect, of course: some running gags die out, like Pig-Pen, and Schulz couldn't have known which ideas would be durable enough to return to every year and which would be just fine for a one-shot.)

He's also still adding characters, but that continued throughout the life of the strip: some stuck around for a while (like Pig-Pen), some had only a brief life (like the later Charlotte Braun and Molly Volley), and some became part of the core cast quickly (like Peppermint Pattie and Marcie, a few years later). 1960 saw one of the latter: Charlie Brown's little sister Sally, first an off-camera arrival, then an infant pushed around in a stroller, and finally a walking and talking member of the cast. In this volume, she starts her crush on Linus, who is at this point five years older than she is. (That will change over time; ages are flexible things in Peanuts and mostly tend to shake down to slightly-older kids and slightly-younger kids, who seem to be a year apart at best.)

You can always read Peanuts on an entertainment level, and it's excellent that way - it wouldn't have lasted fifty years and been beloved by millions if it didn't. But it's also fascinating to dig in a little more, and examine how Schulz build his running gags and tweaked his characters over the years, how be built a fifty-year run one panel at a time, four daily or a dozen Sunday panels a day. This is a great era to see that building process going on.

Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

I think I'm generally able to meet a book on its level. And I can understand that many of those levels don't include pure verisimilitude, or that they might deform history for their own purposes. But I keep getting tripped up by the ways in which the Blacksad books present a cartoon of US 1950s history: mostly, I tend to think, for maximum noir atmosphere and plots. It's not lazy, exactly - these are complicated stories with big casts and lots of idiosyncratic dialogue, running through twisty noir events - but it's all simplified and schematized, fitting carefully into boxes someone else constructed long ago.

The third book is Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul. The first one was all set-up and "my best girl got killed; I have to bring the killer to justice." The second one was the unsubtle explanation that racism is bad (made somewhat confusing by being set in a world of anthropomorphic animals who come in hundreds of species). All are written by Juan Díaz Canales and drawn by Juanjo Guarnido, who both have serious chops at their respective work.

This one, as you might guess from the title, is the Red Scare book. It's also the Atom Bomb one, and additionally features animal versions of the Beat poets and some other proto-counterculture types. So much, so standard for a '50s-set series. There's one plot development, late in the book, that I found bizarre and that I will have to talk about. 

So: series hero Jon Blacksad knew now-famous atomic physicist Otto Liebber in his (Blacksad's) youth. Liebber and his father ran a community organization, which helped save Blacksad from the streets - that sort of thing. This was twenty-five or thirty years before, when Lieber was presumably a young man. I think Liebber is meant to be a famous physicist, though in this book he works for an overly-enthusiastic atomic-power promoter, Gotfield. (First quizzical look: atomic power as something to be run by the private sector in the mid-1950s.)

Blacksad catches up with Liebber and Gotfield - who he ran into in Las Vegas as part of other work - back on the East Coast. The explanation of Lieber's connection to Gotfield is that he's one of the Twelve Apostles, "leftist intellectuals who would gather together under the protection of Gotfield and his philanthropy." The twelve include the bison poet "Greenberg" (author of Howl in this world), plus a female novelist, and one each of other creative types: an actor, a screenwriter, photographer, sculptor, painter, chemist. (Second quizzical look: this somewhat makes sense if Gotfield was the kind of rich guy who liked to collect "the best" people to surround himself, but that type is more likely to have a batch of the same kind of person - all filmmakers, all writers, all scientists.)

Blacksad, of course, thinks Gotfield is an asshole and makes a play to seduce his wife. This is eventually successful, because Blacksad is our hero, but readers may not consider "but her husband's an asshole" as sufficient justification.

Meanwhile, there's a Foghorn Leghorn-as-McCarthy figure waving around lists of Communists and making threats in Senatorial hearings and on TV. He dips into the story in person a couple of times, and never gets more than that one dimension. As part of his efforts, and related cultural anti-red sentiment, a photo secretly circulates of Liebber next to Hitler, with the explanation that he spent the war years helping the Nazis build a bomb.

...and this is supposed to have been a secret, somehow, and its revelation will blow up his career and life.

Any sensible reader will assume this is a fake, and there's some deeper nefarious plot behind it, designed to get Liebber to do something. Either Liebber was working in the US during the years in question, in which case there would be proof he didn't work for Hitler, or he was actually working in Nazi Germany, and everyone would have known that at the time, so it's not a secret. (Third quizzical look: does Canales think anyone was confused about what Werner Heisenberg was doing during the war? Also, and more bluntly: does he think Americans cared that physicists worked for Hitler? Does the name Wernher von Braun mean anything?)

I am sorry to tell you the photo is not a fake. Liebber did leave the US, around 1930, did help Hitler's atomic program (apparently unsuccessfully in this world as in ours), and came back to the US at some point without anyone noticing. This is utterly crazy-pants, but it's our plot.

I'm giving short shrift to Blacksad's attempts to save Liebber - he's targeted for assassination by unknown forces midway through the book, and then goes into hiding - which is a lot of the plot. But Blacksad does learn the truth at the end - Liebber was also passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, proving he consistently makes utterly horrible geopolitical choices.

The book seems to want to be positive towards the left-leaning intellectuals of the 1950s, but Liebber is our main example, which severely undercuts that effort. And Blacksad loses the girl in the end because he was held incommunicado in prison for a few days, and she apparently made no effort to find him.

The story-telling is assured, the dialogue is taut, the characters mostly interesting and specific, and Guarnido's art is strong as usual, with character designs that owe a lot of mid-century Disney. But, as with other books in the series, the plot goes in directions that are weirdly self-defeating. I suspect  this isbecause they were made by Spaniards for Europeans, so authentically depicting fifty-year-old American details was never that important. This series, for Americans at least, requires industrial-strength suspension of belief to get through.

All of This and Nothing: The Boxer

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

The Famous songs this year are largely - especially now that I'm getting towards the end of the year, hitting things that are older than I am - hugely famous, massively culturally important. They're things I felt didn't really fit into previous years because of that: what can I claim specifically about a Simon & Garfunkel song that's been a world-wide favorite for longer than I've been alive?

But, this year, I thought I might as well. What I get out of The Boxer might not be vastly different than anyone else, but there's probably plenty of people who have never heard it. There are new people every day; everyone has to do everything for the first time once. (And we all have only limited time, so, as the world goes on, new people will have time to experience a smaller and smaller fraction of the cultural world that existed before they did - it's just math.)

This is one of the great songs of the 20th century. It's told in an elevated, storytelling tone - slightly artificial, the same way that the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel are that bit artificial to begin with.

The singer is young, we think - probably a bit full of himself, with that fancy language. He's been kicked around, and clearly isn't succeeding the way he wants to.

Asking only workman's wages
I come looking for a job,
But I get no offers.

He doesn't tell us he's not giving up. He sounds defeated and tired, at the end of his strength. He doesn't say what's next for him at all. But the last verse is about someone else, the boxer of the title. And he's not giving up, not going anywhere. And, sometimes, that's all we can hold to: an image of someone broken but unbowed, still in the ring, still going on.

It's one of those songs that feels big and all-encompassing, with that lie-lie-lie chorus that fights against any kind of coherent explanation. The best songs mean more than they say, imply more than any specifics. This is one of the songs with the biggest gap between what the words say and how the song feels.

Books Read: October 2026

It's been another month; here's what I read. Links will be added once the posts go live.

John Allison, Looks, Brains & Everything (digital, 10/3)

Joshua Barkman, False Knees (digital, 10/4)

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich (digital, 10/4)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 11: Talisman of Hades (digital, 10/9)

David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanove, Percy Shelley (digital, 10.10)

Tom Perrotta, Ghost Town (10/10)

Georgia Dunn, Breaking Cat News (digital., 10/11)

Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsuruta, Emanon, Vol. 2 (digital, 10/17)

Will Henry, All Hands on Deck! (digital, 10/18)

David Liss, The Death and Birth of Ilana Marek (10/18)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 12: Grasscutter (digital, 10/23)

Andi Watson, The Book Tour: A Lack of Alibi (digital, 10/24)

Daria Schmitt, The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence (digital, 10/25)

Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen (10/25)

Alexandro Jodorowski and Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 6: The Fifth Essence 2 - Planet DiFool (digital, 10/31)

Next month, I expect to meet with ministerial colleagues and others read more books.

Quote of the Week: Pacific Interlude

I drove back to my motel, changed to shorts and went down to the beach for a swim. The blue-green swells were heaving slowly beyond the surf. Further out, a few white sails leaned across the horizon curved sharp like wings in the wind, but motionless in the distance. I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swan straight out for a quarter of a mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life.

 - Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool, p.25

Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody by Ian Frazier

This was the first (and, I think, shortest) collection of Ian Frazier's reportage, a collection of five essays originally published in The New Yorker from 1978 to 1986 and brought together in book form in 1987.

I've read a lot of Frazier, and have intermittently said "now I've read all of it," every time, I think, incorrectly. (He has a collection of essays about fishing that is likely to keep making that claim untrue unless my interests radically shift.) So I won't say that now. But he's a good writer in two modes: he writes short humorous essays in the old New Yorker style - his second (and maybe best) collection of that work, Coyote Vs. ACME, inspired a movie this year - and he also does reportage, usually vaguely in the profile mode, also informed by a long connection to New Yorker.

Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody takes its title from the third of the five pieces collected here. The five essays are all separate; what they have in common is that they were all written by Frazier, appeared in The New Yorker, and are about people. So I might as well take them individually.

"Authentic Accounts of Massacres" is possibly the slightest piece: Oberlin, Kansas is the home of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum, commemorating a raid by Cheyennes in the fall of 1878. The museum had some events on that date of the raid over several years, and had a larger event for the centennial in 1978, which Frazier came to see. A group of Cheyennes were supposed to attend, lured by (among other things) the promise of free bowling. The Cheyennes did not, in the event, arrive: their bus broke down far away. So this is mostly about small-town Midwest people and their view of history, and some of the looking-at-landscape material that Frazier likes to do.

"An Angler at Heart" is a profile of Jim Deren, who ran a fly-fishing shop in New York City for many years. Frazier includes some of his own fishing stories here, but it's mostly about conversations with Deren and the atmosphere of his shop (small, crowded, full of random odd things, on an upper floor of a random NYC building - you probably know the drill, though I doubt anything like that has existed in Manhattan for three decades at least). I will say it's pleasant reading even for those, like me, who have never had an interest in torturing fish.

The title essay is a profile of "Heloise" - the second of that name, actually Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, who took over the popular newspaper column "Hints from Heloise" from her mother after the latter's death in 1977. It's one part potted history of the household-hints column and one part "let Ponce talk about various things," and has some subtext about the kinds of day-to-day minutia (usually female-coded) that affect people's lives, and what that means.

Then "Bear News" is inspired by the several years Frazier spent living in Montana; it's about how bears interact with people and, in particular, about the ones that rummage through trash and break into cabins and (once in a very long while) attack people. The title is a reference to the fact that if you read about a bear in the news, it's not going to be good for the bear: bears that interact with people tend to do that more and more, which leads to their being killed by people (sometimes after the reverse, sometimes to prevent the reverse).

Last is a profile of two Russian émigré artists, "Komar and Melamid." This is probably the most obviously New Yorker-style piece, covering people famous in the arts who are mostly talking about their work.

Frazier has a lot of fine sentences and thoughts in all of the essays, and keeps them mostly in that self-effacing, obscure-the-narrator New Yorker mode - he's occasionally a character (especially in "Bear News" and "An Angler at Heart,") but mostly just a viewpoint and voice. It adds up to nothing larger, but it isn't meant to. They're all time capsules now, but that's the way of reportage: it all turns into fishwrap on Day Two. For those who don't mind stories of the past, there's a lot to find interesting here.

Shadow of the Golden Crane by Chris Roberson, Michael Avon Oeming, & Chris O'Halloran

I periodically think I should catch up on the Hellboy universe, but then I take a look at the books I missed and it's always more complicated than I feel like dealing with. So sometimes I just walk away, and sometimes I pick a random book.

This was one of the latter times; Shadow of the Golden Crane was written by Chris Roberson,  a writer who's done various things I liked and who I knew very slightly way back in my own SFnal days. So that was enough of a hook, and it looked to stand alone.

It does stand alone, by the way: it's a smaller story, but entirely itself. You don't actually need to know anything about Hellboy or his world to read it. It's the 1960s in the US; there's supernatural dangers out there; the BPRD is the US agency that handles them; their star field agent is a big guy with red rocky skin. The story tells you all that, almost immediately.

But Hellboy is not the focus here; he's in the first issue and the last (of four) for muscle, and presumably so he can be on the cover. The main character is Susan Xiang, a Chinese-American high-level desk jockey for BPRD with a family connection to the ancient and secretive Golden Crane Society and who has visions.

The four issues are each separate field missions: something is rampaging, somewhere, and BPRD agents are sent out to stop it. The first time, it's Hellboy with Victor Koestler, a field agent who manifests an astral gorilla, and Susan tags along. The second time, it's Susan with Victor, and Susan tackles the third one alone. The fourth issue brings all three back together again.

The rampaging thing is, in each case, possessed by an ancient evil spirit, which - Susan realizes through her visions - was originally captured by the Golden Crane Society and trapped in a specific object. Each issue has a substantial flashback, presumably Susan's vision, of a previous time when members of the Society, back in China, recaptured that very same rampaging thing and re-trapped it. That knowledge allows Susan, and her co-workers, to do the same.

Shadow is not quite schematic, although all four issues have very similar structure. It's pretty straightforward, though: the threats are not explicitly rising or gaining in power (in that usual Hellboy way; note that I am not complaining; we got thirty years of "this issue is worse than last issue" and it can get tedious). And capturing them is not easy, but it's well within the skills of BPRD agents, particularly once they know what to do.

So this is a solid adventure-comics story, in which we don't really doubt the abilities of our heroes to do the thing and stop the monster and save the world. (Well, not the world: these are all small-scale things.) Roberson gives us what turns into a large cast, counting all of the flashback characters, and keeps it energetic and engaging. Michael Avon Oeming draws it with equal verve: I always like his work, though I haven't made an effort to keep up. And Chris O'Halloran gives it appropriately moody colors for a book about punching supernatural creatures back into hair clips. (I may be phrasing that oddly for comedic effect, but it's not inaccurate.)

The Complete Hate, Vol. 2 by Peter Bagge

This is more or less the book that was known as Buddy Does Jersey for a decade or so, in case you have a copy of that lurking on your shelves. Otherwise, it's what it says it is: the back half of Peter Bagge's quarterly Hate comics from their run in the 1990s, collecting issues 16-30, originally published from 1994 through 1998.

Or, as the title succinctly puts it, The Complete Hate, Vol. 2. It followed, obviously, a similar Vol. 1. (There's also a third volume, collecting the '00s Hate Annual and other things; I expect to get to that in a few months.)

Hitting these stories again for the first time in a couple of decades, I'm not sure if Bagge was trying to make his main character, Buddy Bradley, somewhat more reasonable and adult - or if I've just read so many stories about him that he's starting to seem reasonable to me. But he does make some mostly smart choices in this book, though not consistently, and that stands in contrast with most of the other characters.

Actually, I might need to back that up a bit. Bagge's men make horrible decisions almost all of the time - Buddy's old Seattle friend Stinky makes the all-time winner in that category right in the middle of this book; you know it if you know the series - but his women are at least slightly better. Compare Buddy's siblings, Babs and Butch - she's a mediocre mother at best, but has built a life, holds down a serious job, and is raising two kids. But he's an anger-driven military washout drifting on the edges of criminal activity. Lisa, Buddy's long-time girlfriend, is probably the "worst" of the female characters, and, reading these stories, she seemed finely calibrated: crazier than Buddy (for all of the story-driving "women be nuts" reasons) but not nearly as crazy as Butch or Stinky or the crowd of losers on the cover. She's also explicitly "crazy" in-story - she goes to see a therapist, takes medication to calm her mood swings, and so forth; she's trying to manage her uncontrolled brain, albeit in the context of a slapstick-comedy comic.

While the first volume had stories of Buddy and his friends in Seattle, this one sees him and Lisa move back to New Jersey - first just for a visit, but they quickly move into Buddy's parents' basement, in the time-honored way of American children boomeranging back over the past few decades.

The cast is somewhat different in this book than in Vol. 1, obviously - Buddy's family (including Babs's two hellion children) is more central, and the Seattle crew (other than Lisa) turn up only at odd intervals. Important in the first half of the book is Jay, yet another old stoner/loser friend of Buddy's, who has something like a career finding collectables and jobbing them out. The two decide to go into business together, with a storefront (I think in Paterson) run mostly by Buddy to sell the records, toys, and other pop ephemera, and Jay on the road gathering more crap most of the time.

I don't think it was clear in the first volume how quickly time was passing, but it mostly follows the calendar in this book: these stories cover roughly four years in the lives of these people. I could throw in some platitude about the slacker/loser lifestyle getting less appealing the older you get, but look at that cover. Look at those guys. Do you think they have that level of self-awareness? No. They do not. Buddy does, intermittently, but none of his "friends" do.

Each issue has one story, of twenty-some pages. Plots tend to be loose and rambling; Buddy is central (and Lisa only slightly less so), but he's not a driven person, to be polite about it. In the standard Hate manner, there's a lot of drinking, a lot of people yelling at each other (and sometimes stomping off afterward, and very occasionally turning to fisticuffs), and a certain amount of often-regrettable sex (almost always involving Buddy, though we assume other characters are getting their own legs over here and there). In between, Buddy runs his business with Jay, has various family conflicts - actually, that sentence roughly describes two-thirds of the plot of this era of Hate. To cover all of it: Jay-Buddy business issues (with some ancillary druggy-buddy problems), Bradley family drama, and Buddy-Lisa relationship problems. The three strands intertwine, of course: Buddy's central to all of them, and, even if he's as stable as a character in Hate gets, that's not particularly stable.

Is it weird to say that Bagge's characterization got deeper in this era? Many of the secondary characters are still one-note weirdoes, but Buddy and Lisa are complicated people who, at least some of the time, are trying to do better - and that's fairly new in this series. They'll never do that consistently, or Bagge would have no story material, but at least they're trying.

The art, by Bagge with usually Jim Blanchard inking (and occasionally a vaguer credit that may mean Blanchard did backgrounds or more than just inks) is in Bagge's mature style, with cartoony energy that looks borderline realistic a lot of the time but descends into rubber-hose lunacy for moment of high emotion. (Anger. I mean anger, almost all of the time. Hate was well-named.)

This era of Hate is an odd soap-opera of anger and family dysfunction, small-business woes and relationship drama, all set in a reasonably well-observed suburban New Jersey of the time. I think it's one of those comics that appeals to men vastly more than women, since the mindset is so purely and unquestioningly boyish, but Bagge is a fun cartoonist who creates interesting situation, does strong dialogue, and knows his strengths.

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald

I plan to read all of Ross Macdonald's "Lew Archer" novels in order, one every three months or so, until I run out. Since I write about everything I read here, there will inevitably be a series of posts, one on each book. I can't promise critical distance, or brilliance, or even that I'll have much to say as we get deep into the series - I've done, or am still doing, much the same thing with some other series, and I can get to the point where I say a lot of "and then this is the same kind of thing once more."

But I posted about the first book, The Moving Target, and now I have the second one, The Drowning Pool.

It was published in 1950, and I'm coming to think that the fact that the whole series is post-war is important. Macdonald followed Raymond Chandler, who was still writing through the 1950s, but Macdonald's hero Lew Archer is explicitly a man who served in WWII, and the echoes of the war were clear in the background of Target and still noticeable at points in Pool. And both books are set in that post-war boom, with the overheated Southern California real estate market and building boom going on in the background, peace and prosperity supposedly in reach for everyone in this best of all possible worlds.

Mystery novels are often about the discrepancy between the vision and the reality, of course. This one is about that, among other things.

Archer is hired by Maude Slocum, who has received a threatening letter, vaguely in the blackmail line. She dithers a bit about telling him the story, but engages him to come to the sleepy California town of Quinto, north of Santa Monica, to investigate. Quinto is one of two contrasting towns in the area: Nopal Valley welcomed in oil rigs, and is awash with money, nightlife, oil workers of various backgrounds and levels of honesty, and more sordid activities. Quinto has kept out the oil companies and believes itself superior: it is sleepy in the way of people who've had money for some time, though I don't think they have as much money as they think they do.

Maude is married to James, whom the reader quickly realizes is homosexual. They live with James's domineering mother Olivia, who owns half a mountain and a couple of million dollars. (The two are semi-congruent.) Also in the household is Cathy, the teenage daughter of Maude and James. The land the estate sits on is oil-rich, and would be worth vastly more if drilling were allowed - Olivia, despite allowing some exploration to determine that value, is staunchly against any exploitation.

Archer also pretty quickly figures out James - a dilettantish man who has never held a job and spends his time in amateur theatricals - is in a relationship with his director, Francis Marvell. And Maude has what seems to be a similarly long-running affair with the local police chief, Ralph Knudson. So whoever wrote to Maude has plenty of material, though there was no hint of actual give-me-money blackmail in that first letter. Maude thinks the aim may be to influence Olivia, perhaps to force Maude and James to divorce and Maude to go away.

That's the initial setup: every edition of Pool I've seen goes beyond that to mention the murder. (It is a mystery novel, after all: we're all expecting one.) Much of the above Archer learns during a party at the Slocum house. Later that night, Olivia drowns in the swimming pool - she pretty clearly was pushed in by someone.

And a large number of people stand to benefit: Maude and James first, who could quietly separate and live their own lives. Potentially their partners, too, though none of those four are even vaguely suspects. More pointedly, the just-fired chauffeur Pat Reavis used to work for local oil baron Walter Kilbourne, is unstable at best, and got a ride to town with Archer right before Olivia's body was found. 

Archer does some detecting, but Pool is closer to a thriller than a play-fair story; events happen quickly and Archer mostly tries to hang on through them. He gets knocked around and is basically kidnapped towards the end of the book, but he does make it to the end and figures out what really happened - though not before one more death.

As became almost a cliché with the Archer books, the answers lie in the history of the Slocum family - what they did many years ago, and the truth about James and Maude, Knudson and Cathy. There's also a lot of psychology in Pool - of the era, and fairly pop-psych, but mostly durable and still believable seventy years later.

Pool is not, I think, one of the best Archer novels, but it's a solid book that builds on what was good in Target and shows aspects of the elements that will be important in later books. It's qualities are durable, managing to be clearly of their time but still a good lens into that time for those of us further down the timeline.

All of This and Nothing: It Hurts When I Laugh

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I had a Psychedelic Furs song in one of the previous song-series: the original Pretty in Pink. But my rules state that I can have one song per band, not per human being, so this week I have something else from a later band by Furs frontman Richard Butler (and his knife-sheathed-in-velvet voice).

I'm counting it as Obscure, because I don't know if anyone remembers Love Spit Love. But I loved this song when I first heard it, and still love it today.

For this week, It Hurts When I Laugh.

I'm pretty sure it's a song about someone dying, or thinking he will.

It hurts when I laugh
And it hurts when I speak
And it hurts when I talk
And it hurts when I breathe, yeah

There's the singer and "Annie," who lights candles and has a red dress and dreams about tomorrow. It's possible that she's just leaving the singer, and he's taking it really badly. That's the positive interpretation: the negative one is that she's waiting around for him to die.

She's gonna set the candles round her bed
She's gonna light them all
Everything is silent when I'm gone

The whole thing is in a mid-tempo rock beat, driven by a chiming late-90s sound. And I find especially that refrain really compelling - Butler's voice makes it immediate and haunting.

Quote of the Week: That Morning Feeling

He breathed air that was crisp and cold and smelled of ox dung; he remembered they were in Sun-Ar. He opened gummy eyes to see daylight illuminating a dull brown stretch of waxed canvas above his head. He hoped sincerely that he had been captured by some enemy, he didn't particularly care who, because he really wanted to kill a lot of people right now.

 - Martha Wells, Queen Demon, pp.323-4

Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America by Liniers

This may seem vaguely familiar: it's a large-format book, in comics, for a mostly young-readers audience, adapting three folktales from "Latin America" for an American audience, by a noted cartoonist. Jaime Hernandez did very much the same thing, for the same publisher, back in 2018 with The Dragon Slayer.

But "Latin America" - I keep putting it in quotes because a continent and a half, with nearly 700 million people and dozens of cultures, is not one thing - has plenty of folktales to choose from. So TOON Books, a few years later, asked Liniers (best-known for the daily strip Macanudo, and an Argentine now resident in the USA) to do his version.

That's 2024's Night Stories, which adapts three traditional tales - Liniers or his editors include a map, showing that one is from the Texas-Mexico border, one from the Amazon basin of Brazil, and one from the Argentine pampas - along with some related, and vaguely educational, text material. Novelist and translator David Bowles provides an introduction, and there's text explanations of the three tales (by Liniers, maybe) and a bibliography in the back.

Liniers has always been fond of story-telling in his comics, and he has a suitable frame story here - two young siblings, a boy and a girl, are in bunk beds, not ready to go to sleep, and telling each other these stories to (lightly) scare each other.

The boy leads off with the Brazilian story, "The Mermaid and the Pink Dolphin," about a solo river-boat captain who is captivated by a mermaid he sees at night (but who turns into a pink river dolphin by day) and finds a way to join her.

That's not very scary, his sister says, so he continues with "The Owl of Doom," the Mexican border story. The Owl of the title is a powerful bruja or witch, who frightens a local town with her calls - which are said to variously kill or torment all those who hear them. One young person in town has a novel solution to the problem.

And then the sister tells the last story, from Argentina: "The Evil Light." Two gauchos, out on the pampas, talk about the title manifestation, said to be the light from a crack into Hell. It of course brings death and mayhem in its wake, and they flee when they see a mysterious light...which is not what they expect.

Liniers makes his people somewhat cartoony, in a very story-book way, here - it's appropriate for the material and the audience, and very similar to the way he works in his daily strips. He mostly keeps the tone light, despite the kids' talk about scary stories. And he tells three different, interesting bits of folklore in a modern, knowing tone.

I imagine this is already in a lot of libraries, school and classroom and public, which is where most readers will find it. (It's where I did, too.) The package may be a little too obviously "educational" for some readers well past their educational years; that's too bad for them.

The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition) by Faith Erin Hicks

Don't get your hopes up the way I did: it's not much expanded. It was also much closer to the original publication date than I expected; I missed that this existed for basically a decade.

Faith Erin Hicks did a series of "Superhero Girl" strips - I think online - more than a decade ago, and they were awesome. (I didn't see them at the time; I don't know where they appeared. But I still know they were awesome.) They were collected in 2013 as The Adventures of Superhero Girl, which was also awesome, and a fine package for the series. (Link goes to a monthly round-up where I wrote about that original package.)

Sometime in the next few years, Hicks did two short comics-formatted stories about Superhero Girl. I'm going to guess they were in comics anthologies; the book doesn't say. And, in 2017, all of that (plus a few pin-ups of Superhero Girl by other hands) was published as The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition).

Superhero Girl is a young woman - probably still college-age - trying to make a life as a superhero in some small Canadian city. She lives with a roommate, she accidentally shrinks her cape in the dryer, she wishes she had a nemesis [1], she complains that this city has lame villains (mostly a flock of ninja). She has an annoying older brother - Kevin. We all hate Kevin. - who is better than her at the superhero thing, nationally-famous, and just plain big-brother annoying. During the course of these stories, she meets another young female superhero, Spectacle, who she low-key resents but also is friendly with.

There are some multi-page continuities, but it's mostly one-off strips. Superhero Girl is a slice-of-life strip about being twentysomething, making a life in a new city, trying to do a job that you know you can be good at, hanging out and hoping for more. Only with more capes and masks and some occasional punching. (Not as much punching as you'd might expect; they are all Canadian, remember.)

I do wish I lived in the universe where this was massively popular, so Hicks had to keep doing these stories, maybe for a month or two a year (I'm not a monster; I'd like to see her doing other work, too), so there was at least a small shelf of lovely fun Superhero Girl books by this point. That is not this universe, sadly. (Though, maybe, if Future Evil Superhero Girl manages to alter the timeline with her attack, it could still be.)

But this book does exist, and there's even this expanded version that's existed for nine years without me knowing about it. So maybe Hicks has made, or will make, more Superhero Girl comics. That would be pretty cool. If not, there's still this book - and, if you haven't read it, you really should.

[1] I've never had a nemesis, which I have to imagine would be tiring, and don't really want one. My wife does have a nemesis - calls her "my nemesis" and everything - but you'd have to ask me about that in person.

Queen Demon by Martha Wells

I haven't had to tackle a classic middle-book fantasy here in a long time; let's see what I can do for you today.

Queen Demon is the second of what will be at least three books in the "Rising World" fantasy series by Martha Wells. The first book was Witch King; see that post for the political background, the various magic systems, and other details. Various reports from earlier this year say Wells has been working on a third book, under the working title Hierarch, but there's no guarantee that book would end the series. (I suppose there's also no guarantee she'll finish the book and it will be published, but she's been doing this for thirty-some years; I have faith in her story-making abilities.)

Like the first book, Queen is told in two time-frames: The Present and The Past. Both timelines follow fairly quickly from the first book; this is a roughly continuous narrative, though each book is structured to be a novel on its own, and not just a few hundred pages of middle. (I edited fantasy for a long time; I saw a lot of "books" that were just collections of middle.)

The Past is set about sixty years before, during the (eventually successful) rebellion against a world-conquering Evil Empire, of the Hierarchs and their legions. That invasion and pacification had been going for a few years, maybe a decade or more, before that point: entire regions had been devastated and entire nations killed. We're getting deeper into that war in this book, but the series, I think, still sits solidly in the small subgenre of books that mostly take place after the world-changing cataclysm happened. A lot of the present-day concerns are about those cataclysmic changes, and what they did to the people who lived through them.

Because, even though it was almost two generations ago now, our main characters are all variously immortal or very long-lived. They were among the leaders of that rebellion, under the mortal man who became the first Emperor of the Rising World Coalition (and was the top general or war leader of the rebellion), Bashasa. And their various relationships to Bashasa in the past - and, in the present, to his heir Bashat, who is not exactly an antagonist in the series but you could call him one - are central to these books as well.

Primary among those main characters is Kaiisteron, once one of a fairly large number of "demons" - members of a long-lived, body-hopping race from a parallel dimension or world - who lived in the bodies of members of the nomadic Saredi people as part of a long-term peace pact between those two people. The Saredi were one of the first nations destroyed by the Hierarchs; there are other demons left alive, but not many of them. And, even sixty years later, it seems that no mortal Saredi survived.

So the obvious comparison to Wells' popular Murderbot books is that both series are centrally about main characters deeply damaged by trauma and still living through that. Kai is less of a raw nerve than Murderbot is, but he's had sixty years to build coping mechanisms: not least his self-created magic system, which subverts the Hierarchs' incantations by powering them with his own pain. (In the books, it does not come across as the unsubtle metaphor it might seem to be when stated bluntly like that.)

Witch was about, in the past, the initial organization of the rebellion: a futile act of resistance in the Hierarchs' northern capital, the Summer Halls, that unexpectedly was vastly more successful and led to the core of this rebellion forming, destroying those Halls, and fleeing to build their forces. The present-day plot started with Kai trapped in a dead body, having been captured about a year before, and with an over-confident enemy attempting to enslave him as a familiar. He took a new body and spent the rest of the book trying to find out what happened and to free his major allies.

Queen's past sections continue the story of the war, with Bashasa's forces maneuvering to set up for an attack on a major fort at the end and encountering a group of initially-hostile Witches along the way. And the present sections start out with the aftermath of the end of the first book: offstage, a major political convention to renew the Emperorship failed, as Kai had been planning for years (and had been lightly killed largely as a counter-plot to ensure the renewal). More importantly, a scholar connected to Kai's family and friends is worried that the Hierarchs' original power Well has never been found, and that there may be enemy forces regrouping there, building strength for another attack on the Rising World.

So there's another rush to get to a faraway place - this time heading into the distant south. Queen does not have a map, though Witch did, and I'm unhappy with that. It might be because there's a long trip along a straight line down into that unknown southern continent, and Wells hasn't defined enough of the surrounding lands to have them mapped. Still, even the map from the first book would have been a help.

Wells juggles her two plots well, keeping them solidly parallel. I noted there's a point, near the end, where both timelines are basically focus on "Kai needs to go kill a Hierarch right now," which was not just technically impressive, but gripping and visceral. And she's, as always, really good at damaged people and their relationships with each other, without ever making a big deal about it. Great fantasy is always about something, with concerns that its authors want to work out on the page, ideas that need to be embodied in characters and ideas and actions. (Poor fantasy is about gathering a sufficient number of plot tokens so the characters can send away to the author for an ending.) Wells is making this series about grief and survivorship, about coping with having lost everything, about how that can still feel raw even long afterward.

And about interesting, well-developed characters fighting to save their world, too, of course. That's the other side of fantasy.