Platform Decay by Martha Wells

I'm not going to list all of them, or explain which are novellas (the first few, mostly) and which are novels (short novels, mostly the last few), but this is the new book in Martha Wells' excellent Murderbot series, and note that you've probably heard of them, if you've been paying any attention to SF in the past decade.

Instead, for Platform Decay, what I want to talk about is voice. Murderbot - who doesn't use that name at all in this book, by the way - is a bioengineered sapient construct officially called a SecUnit, basically a productized corporate-security mook, one of what may be thousands or millions of similar units across this medium-future galaxy. This unit, though, hacked its governor module, for good and sufficient reasons we learned in previous books, and is now a fully autonomous and self-directed individual...that calls itself Murderbot in its own head, also for good and sufficient reasons.

Murderbot narrates all of the books in the series, in a direct, colloquial, stream-of-consciousness style that is immediately compelling and must be tough for Wells to pull off so seamlessly and gracefully. Everything we know about this universe comes to us through the lens of what you could semi-reasonably call a slacker killer robot - a person who is not human, who doesn't like humans all that much, no longer has to obey them, and wants to be left alone to watch media most of the time.

(I don't know if I've made the direct connection before, but Murderbot's voice reminds me a bit of John Sladek's Tik-Tok in its tone and repressed anger at humanity - and obviously comes as the latest in a very long line of killer robots in SF.)

Like a lot of voice-driven books, Platform Decay is tightly constructed in ways that I don't know if most readers notice. Murderbot books tend to begin in medias res, run through one specific complex situation, and end immediately when the danger is past - and that's what happens here, as well. There have been glimpses of Murderbot in less-fraught moments, during the course of the series, but that's the standard: what is it like to be in Murderbot's head during what I might as well call a mission.

For example, about halfway through this particular escapade, Murderbot encountered, well, pirates, who were looking to rob or do worse things to the unwary humans they captured, but were not at all prepared to face an annoyed Murderbot. On pp.130-131:

I really wanted to kill them but they were so whiney and screamy, it was hard to get started. I don't like helpless humans in my media, but in reality, it's... Provoking them hadn't worked so I tried to be encouraging. "Maybe if you all run at me at once you could kill me."

Target 4 looked tempted, but the others all shook their heads rapidly, 3 sobbed louder, and 5 whimpered.

Great.

Being good at violence - and, more subtly, in control of dangerous situations where violence is likely - is one of Murderbot's core competencies. Or, I should say, the competencies Murderbot wants to emphasize and think about and focus on, the parts of its skill-set that it's most comfortable with. (There's a reason it named itself Murderbot.)

More complexly, since we experience all the events in these books via Murderbot's POV, the telling of those events features a lot of cascading and intersecting thoughts - and, often, notes from semi-separate processes, since Murderbot is not a normal organic human, but a created and hacked and self-modified mind - which Wells often uses parentheses to set off and encapsulate. This is funny and insightful and piercing - and, I'm sure, fiendishly difficult to get to work this quickly and precisely (p.157):

I needed a plan, too. Option (1) I could tell Farai that Leonide's family were all dead.

It was safer, it was sensible. My job was keeping my clients safe.

(Emotion check: Then why does it feel so awful.)

Option (2) I could tell Farai they were all dead and alter my memory structure so I believed it was true.

Risk assessment just hit the roof.

I'm not sure I like having risk assessment be more accurate. It keeps scaring the shit out of me. I knew doing something basically terrible and then lying to myself about it by altering my memory archive would change me, not in a good way... Yeah, when you put it like that, it seems really obvious.

Reading Platform Decay, I was struck by just how much work Wells was doing in few words, in this short book. Every line is precise, even descriptions are filtered through what Murderbot sees (dangers, human fripperies it thinks are pointless) and what they could imply (where hostiles could be hiding, where it can send its own drones to scout things out) and how it feels about everything.

Because Murderbot is close to an open nerve, even eight books into the series. It's not comfortable being a mind that has emotions - in this book, it's built in that "emotion check" I quoted above, to flag those thoughts. Murderbot doesn't like the emotion check, that's clear: but it needs it; it needs to be able to understand its own emotions, to live with them, to regulate them.

Like any of us.

Murderbot has only had emotions and self-will for a few years at this point - it thinks sometimes unkind thoughts about "human juveniles" in this book, but it's basically a juvenile itself, still working towards emotional regulation and integration. I don't know if this series will last long enough for Murderbot to get there - and, in a way, I hope not - but that's the arc. That's what we're seeing, over the course of the series: a new mind exploring the world and its own feelings, trying to do right when what it really wants to do is sit in a corner and binge Sanctuary Moon for twenty hours.

And what actually happens in this book? It opens with Murderbot, along with its compatriot Three, another self-hacked SecUnit, sneaking onto a torus - a gigantic human-built station that completely encircles a world and contains many separate, individually-controlled sections within it. Several of what Murderbot calls "its humans" are held hostage there, by Supervisor Leonide of the unpleasant Barish-Estranza corporation, and Murderbot is going to find them, extract them from their situation, get them across the torus to a port, and leave there with Three's help.

That's what happens, more or less, though there's a lot of complications along the way. But that's the joy of reading it.

Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil by Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet

I am no expert on Euro Disney comics. Fantagraphics has been reprinting what they say are the best of that large universe - and I have no reason to doubt them; publishing programs always try to get the best of whatever - for a decade or more, and I've dipped into that sequence here and there.

So I know enough to say that the Disney Euro universe is not unlike a kid-friendly version of a Big Two superhero universe, especially if you keep the dream/hoax/imaginary story stream in mind as well. They're generally about some permutation of the characters Disney fans call The Fab Five: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto. (Poor Daisy! Only room for one girl in that sausage-fest.) The villains are also always the same, just as you can be sure a year of Batman comics will have the Joker turning up at least once.

But they can be set "now" - in Duckburg (like Donald's Happiest Adventures) or Mouseton (like Trapped in the Shadow Dimension), or trotting the globe - or in some strange world (like Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean). Or in what seems to be the Marvel 2099 equivalent - a future world of 2128 and the fabulous city of New Mouseton!

That's the setting for Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil - the SoE doesn't have "New" in their name to modify Mouseton, possibly because they are the first SoE formed in any Mouseton, possibly due to translation glitches, possibly because no one thought it was important. (The original French name of the fiendish team seems to be "L'Alliance Malefique," which I like much better, but I'm just the kind of person who would.)

Anyway, this book is by Belgian creators Nicolas Pothier (writing) and Johan Pilet (art), and it features The Revenant Blot (future version of The Phantom Blot) getting himself sent to the fabulous space-jail of @lc@trz to break out a bunch of other villains, similarly future-versions of the Beagle Boys and so on. They form the title society, and have a wicked plan to...wreak havoc with giant robot crabs, and then use one member's mind-influencing power to take over the feed in everyone's "Egophone," influence the public to love them all, and then, eventually, run for office and seize political power!

(It seems that giant robot crabs might not be entirely necessary for a plot like that - it sounds like the kind of thing that could be done entirely within the law, which would leave Space Ranger Mickey no reason to come beat them up - but if they did things the smart, sensible way I suppose they wouldn't be villains, would they?)

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while. But Mickey gathers his friends - you know them; I mentioned them in Paragraph One - and, despite a few setbacks and a long unexpected space journey, they are victorious in the end.

Either Pothier or his translator (David Gerstein) has some fun language Easter Eggs, particularly in the overwrought villain dialogue. The bank robbed in the early pages of the book is also named Zeerust, a deep cut I particularly appreciated. This is a book explicitly OK for kids, but has that old Looney Tunes or Jay Ward-style mix of high and low-culture jokes to keep the parents from being bored, too.

Pilet has an energetic, distinctive art style - he gives Mickey a beetle brow to make him look more serious - and gives his coloring the vague sense of being made up of Ben-Day dots. It all gestures in the direction of classic mid-century Disney comics while not specifically copying any of them.

This is a book made to be accessible for kids, part of a giant hegemonic global entertainment corporation looking to maximize the return on its long-running IP. Within that context, it's a fun adventure story.

Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, P. Craig Russell & George Freeman

I'll start with the explanation/disclaimer: this is the comics adaptation, part of a long sequence of comics adapting what was at that point The Complete Prose Elric across a number of comics companies and more than a decade. This specific book was based on the 1977 Michael Moorcock "novel" (actually a fix-up of three Elric novellas and a frame story) of the same name.

The comics version, Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf, came out in five issues from First Comics in 1986, scripted by Roy Thomas (like all of this era of Elric adaptations) with art duties shared out in a complicated way (this one on that issue, this other one laying out this other issue, and so on) among Michael T. Gilbert, P. Craig Russell, and George Freeman. White Wolf was the third book at that point, following Elric of Melnibonè and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, in what was at that point a six-book series. (It's longer now, and has been reshuffled by various reprinting projects, too.)

The current project reprinting the comics Elric is from Titan, for example, and this is #4 in their count, since they popped in an earlier adaptation of The Dreaming City (a 1961 novella that is also part of the White Wolf "novel") as third in their sequence. It makes sense there - that's where it fits by internal chronology - but it points out how much the stories about Elric started with Moorcock writing the beginning and the end (literally) and then spending fifty-ish years filling in more bits in the middle.

These are pretty good bits of middle - the original Moorcock stories are from early in his career, "Dreaming City" and "While the Gods Laugh" from 1961 and "The Singing Citadel" from 1967. The frame story, here (and in the "novel") credited as "The Dream of Earl Aubec," was a 1964 short story under the title "Master of Chaos," but I think Moorcock reconfigured and possibly rewrote it to work as part of Weird.

Anyway, Aubec is another one of Moorcock's heroic-fantasy heroes - not explicitly an avatar of the Eternal Champion, but that kind of guy. He's the champion/lover of a hottie queen - Eloarde of Klant - for whom he's led armies to conquer all of the lands south of Klant. Well, all but the mysterious citadel Kaneloon, which sits right on the edge of the sea of chaos that borders the normal Earth and which is reportedly inhabited only by a mysterious sorceress. Aubec's queen tells him to go grab that fortress, too, which Aubec must do alone, since no soldiers are crazy enough to go with him to the edge of chaos.

The sorceress of Kaneloon is another hottie - women in Moorcock's heroic fantasy are either seductive hotties or nonexistent - who praises Aubec for being so brave and true and getting through the various creepy horrors defending her castle. She shows him the sea of chaos, and says that really amazing warrior types can march right out into it, creating brand-new lands behind them. Aubec is intrigued, but needs the sorceress (Myshella) to show him scenes from the future to psych him up.

Those scenes from the future are the three novellas about Elric, which are the bulk of the book - interspersed with a few pages of Aubec reacting and Myshella shrugging and saying "well, that's the future, bub."

"Dreaming City," as adapted at greater length in the previous book, is the one where Elric leads a flotilla of human pirates to loot his people's nation and kill every last member of his own race, mostly because he's pissed at his cousin. As always with Elric, it does not go well: he wants to save his One True Love (also his cousin and sister of the evil usurper cousin, because decadent aristocratic race), but does not. His allies don't survive, either. In the end, he manages to destroy an ancient (if cruel and decadent) civilization and has nothing at all to show for it but another helping of woe.

The other two novellas are more standard Elric adventures - go to this place, looking for a thing or person that will tell him something important, only to be foiled in that as well. [1]

Anyway, Elric meets and foils the Jester of the Gods (well, specifically the gods of Chaos, his patrons) and then hares off in search of a fabled book that he thinks will tell him all of the important secrets of life. It doesn't, of course, for the usual dying-fall reasons, but Elric gets to travel with his own hottie for a while, kill a bunch of things, and mope about at length.

As far as I can tell, this edition has the art exactly as it was in the First Comics days, down to the dialogue balloons occasionally colored in strange hues. It may have been slightly cleaned up or reshot from the original art, but the coloring is the 1986-era style, which is entirely appropriate. All three artists work in a detailed, almost rococo version of '80s adventure-comics style, full of strange vistas and creepy creatures and weird menace - and their styles, though somewhat distinguishable, do work well together to tell this overall story.

I'm finding that I have more trouble taking Elric's doomy woe-is-me act seriously the older I get, but I still enjoy the stories, even if my reactions are more sardonic now. This is a nice package of some of the earliest, most classic stories in that sequence - I don't know if I'd recommend starting Elric with a book that has a big number 4 in its descriptive copy, but it's fun and amusing and adventurous.

[1] The Elric stories are doomy overall, but also on a micro level - every last thing he does goes wrong, in a way that could become comedy with just a slight tweak. I wonder if anyone has ever done an Elric-and-Moonglum story in the vein of Wodehouse's Wooster-and-Jeeves?

I say, old hat, you know that cursed runesword I have? Been in the family for yoinks, eats souls, all that kind of rot. Well, I wanted a new scabbard for the dashed thing, but Moony thought enameled obsidian was too "showy." Well, I tell you...

All of This and Nothing: Cathedral

"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.

Some songs are really important to you at specific moments in your life. This one was a big deal in my head when I was about thirteen - and you probably are wincing, because we've all been thirteen.

It's not pretty.

I still think the song is interesting and thoughtful, but there's definitely an aspect of sounds-profound-to-thirteen-year-olds about it.

This week, my song is Cathedral by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

(At the time, I didn't know it was explicitly about an acid trip. What can I say? I was thirteen. Profundity flows freely at that age.)

The song is about a guy - lead singer (on this particular song) Graham Nash, to be precise - visiting Winchester Cathedral early one morning and having unexpectedly strong reactions to all of it:

And now I'm standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799.
And the day he died, it was a birthday,
And I noticed it was mine.

Listening forty years later, it's all a bit sophomoric, in that late-night bull-session way, but songs are inherently simplified anyway; I don't know if it's any more sophomoric than any other song trying to tackle big ideas. And Nash absolutely sells it: we feel that this is a real moment he had, that this is what he thought and felt and worried about.

Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here.
Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all.

This is a song with a story and a point of view, from that era when CSN made brilliant, beautiful music what seemed like effortlessly, with flowing harmonies making it all sound larger than life and important. This is the kind of song that has an outsized impact - that style, that material, and the person I was then. I don't know if it still hits like that, even for people who are thirteen now. I'd like to hope so; I'd like to think that a song can still do that.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 25, 2026

There's been an impressive flow of new books coming in, so I'm running these posts further out in the future than perhaps the title would imply. (As I type, it is Sunday the 19th, but I already have a Reviewing the Mail going live today, so this one gets bumped out a week.)

The fourth book of the vacation order (covered last week) arrived recently - which is for a specific reading purpose that will probably be obvious - and I also got three books from the library, which I'll list first in a misguided attempt to create tension.

I might have missed a book in the middle, but The Werewolf at Dusk is (the next?) book of comics stories from David Small, author of the highly lauded 2008 graphic memoir Stitches. (I reviewed it for ComicMix at the time.) Werewolf came out in 2024, and has Small's adaptations of three stories - one of which he's credited as the original author, so I'm not sure if he wrote it in prose and it was published somewhere, or just that he plotted and scripted the comics story - which are all about animals in one way or another. Small is a long-time illustrator, most famously of books for young readers, and won the Caldecott among several other awards.

Mike Dawson is a graphic novelist from my home state of New Jersey - I recently backed the kickstarter for a collection of his short comics - and his new book for young readers is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James, about a tween boy who has trouble speaking up and what happens when he has to be part of a group project in science class. (I read this yesterday and plan to write about it when I'm done with this post, so I'll leave it at that.)

Yes, graphic novels for young readers are still a big deal, and a huge part of the general comics ecosystem. Both of the above books have a slightly cringe "Pow!" sticker on the spine that I suspect is to the current generation what the SF-rocket-ship was to mine. (And I seriously suspect whether Werewolf is actually for young readers; a librarian might have made a mistake or deliberately paid for the Small book out of a budget that is not entirely correct.)

The third library book, though, is very clearly not aimed at kids, and does not sport a Pow! sticker: the most recent Joe Sacco book, The Once and Future Riot. Following his usual modus operandi, Sacco went somewhere people have killed each other recently for stupid reasons and made non-fiction comics about it - this time it's Uttar Pradesh in India and the two groups are Muslims and Hindus. I don't know if this time he's doing the "this group is clearly the right one and is blameless in every aspect" thing that he sometimes drops into; I suppose I'll see. (There's usually plenty of bad faith and random cruelty and murder on both sides of all the locations he writes about, but everyone has their own viewpoint.)

And the book I paid for is Cox's Fragmenta II, edited by Simon Murphy. See my post three years ago on the first one for something like an explanation of the whole deal - basically, some guy in the 18th century kept huge scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, which ended up in the British Library. That's Cox. And another guy - Murphy - edited a small book with a selection of that stuff in the modern day. And then he did a second one, which is this one. It's random and quirky and entirely made up of small snippets, so you can guess what kind of reading that is.

Quote of the Week: Someone That I Used to Know

It's always embarrassing to run unexpectedly into a girl you used to be engaged to. I mean, you don't quite know how to comport yourself. If you look chirpy, that's not much of a compliment to her. Whereas, if you look mouldy, you feel that she's patting herself on the back and saying 'Aha! I thought losing me would make the poor clam think a bit!' and that offends a fellow's pride. I suppose the wheeze really is to have one of those cold, inscrutable faces you read about in books.

 -P.G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas, p.40

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison

They say that one of the best compliments you can give to a book is the wish that it was longer.

Well, I think Foundling Fathers is a great prologue to the book I was waiting to read, but it just sketches out what I'd expected to be the meat of the story. So what's here is pretty darn good, but I was surprised that author Meg Elison framed it up the way she did.

We open with four young men, living on a remote island in what they think is 1750: Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Franklin is the oldest, maybe twenty, and Adams the youngest, around four years younger. They think they are brothers, that their father was a towering, important figure, now sadly dead - though none of them remember him at all, and he was not around even in Franklin's earliest memories. They are being tutored to be leaders and masters of the world, told that they will inherit vast, separate fortunes.

They are all smart and driven: smart enough to see holes in the story they have been told and willful enough to push hard against boundaries. (Tom has just impregnated a "servant" for the second time as the novel opens.) So when Ben finds an iPhone in the privy, it both answers some questions they already had and raises vast numbers of new questions.

The reader already knows, from the back cover if nowhere else, that it is the current day, and the boys are being fed a diet of lies. They are clones of their famous namesakes - how the genetic material for such clones was obtained, or how their upbringing would make them exactly the same as those progenitors is not explained in this short novel - created by a organization of rich libertarian nutbars, the Antediluvian Society, who expect to reveal these four young men to the world, have them clearly be better and smarter and more moral people than modern politicians, something something collect the underpants, and then use these four men to take over the government of the US and rule it the way they want to.

(We can all see half a dozen fatal flaws in that plan, but that's the point: they are delusional right-wing billionaires, so of course their plans are stupid, poorly defined, and overly ambitious. They are the kind of people who think having a lot of money solves every problem, because it has solved every problem they've had so far.)

The boys' handlers - their "mother" (she did bear them, and has been raising them, but has no biological connection to them) and their tutor and the doctor who visits occasionally - start to think something is going wrong as the boys ask some odd questions later that day. They start to worry that the secret has slipped out. There's some squabbling among them: they are not all equally on board with all Antediluvian Society plans, and it doesn't go the way any of them expect, anyway.

This remote island is just a few miles off the Virginia coast. (That the boys saw airplanes a few times in earlier years is a plot point, though I'm not sure how they can have avoided seeing them all the time that close to such a crowded bit of airspace.) As we might expect from a scheme created by libertarian assholes with government connections, the "servants" are all some degree of criminals or political prisoners or the kind of people the Society would call "illegals," renditioned to the island and allowed to work there as long as they stay on good behavior. The servants revolt right about the moment the boys are about to have their own revolt, there is a confused firefight in the night, and the four boys get to the mainland and learn the truth.

At which point we get a few quick scenes of what each one of them does in the immediate aftermath, and the novel ends.

I obviously saw how few pages were left, so maybe I hoped there would be a sequel hook. But it feels like the fun part of this premise would be these four young men interacting with the modern world, each in his own way, each one failing to live up to Antediluvian Society expectations in entirely different ways. (Elison also has a couple of scenes at the end with the Society to show that these four boys were not their only plan, and the other plans are possibly even nuttier - and equally something I would have loved to see spin out at greater length.)

Elison, though, seems to both want to have her four protagonists be smart and capable - somewhat accepting the Society premise that they are "special" - while still insisting that they're absolutely normal, average people and that the myth of the Godlike White Men Founders of the 18th century is stupid and counterproductive. She also has the Society let them go with essentially no repercussions; the boys seem to actually get their promised fortunes. I find it hard to believe the kind of assholish billionaires she depicts would do anything of the sort: they are vindictive and deluded and enamored of their own special brilliance, so I'd expect anything from cruel, targeted legal actions through attempts to recapture the young men for intensive "re-education" all the way up to assassination teams.

What's here is good, but there's a lot less here than I expected. This is basically the story of the day these boys discovered everything they were told about the world was wrong, with nothing before that day and only a quick sketch of what happens afterward. Perhaps if it makes a big splash, Elison will be forced by the allure of lucre to expand on the ending: that's where I end up.

Drew Friedman's Chosen People

Can reading a book be an experiment? I thought of this one that way, but that may just be me being precious about something minor.

I've read previous books of Drew Friedman's art digitally, on my old tablet - a ten-year-old jobbie, 9.7 inches I think - and noted that the art was smaller than the real-world book size, so I didn't recommend that. (See my post on Heroes of the Comics in particular; the other relevant Friedman books are All the Presidents, Schtick Figures, and Maverix and Lunatix.)

But I had a birthday recently, and got myself a newer, fancier, bigger tablet. (I'm still getting used to holding it, since it seems to be approximately the size of a coffee table - they say it's 13 inches but it feels larger than that.) And I'm seeing how digital comics look on this new screen: so far, better and clearer, not just larger.

And so I read the 2017 collection of portraits Drew Friedman's Chosen People, and, I have to say, it looks just fine on a big tablet. This slab of metal and glass is close to the size of the real-world book, so the experience is close to the same. If you have a big-ass tablet, as I do now, even large-format books of art and comics look pretty good there.

And I'm glad I had that consumer note to give you because, otherwise, what's there to say about this book? It collects at least a decade of mostly editorial illustrations by Friedman, and is entirely miscellaneous. Friedman has put out some books that were specific projects, with pictures of people with some connection to each other, like Presidents and the Old Jewish Comedians books and the ones of comics-makers, but he also has done books that collect the other stuff he does that pays the bills, like this and Schtick Figures.

There is a section of potted bios in the back to explain who the people are. You might think that would not be difficult, since each page has the person's name, but Friedman often draws very obscure people, either because they intersect with his hobbies and loves (Forrest J. Ackerman, Max Asnas, Richard Deacon, Friedman's own father, grandfather, and brother) or for reasons that cannot be discerned from the book (e.g., Franklin Longbone and Carl P. Sodiwater, both of whom I vaguely suspect of being fictional).

The main section of the book has 117 full-page pictures. The front matter adds an additional picture of Shemp (there are two more later), plus Al Lewis, Friedman's wife Kathy, introducer Merrill Markoe, and Alex Gard, something of an inspiration for the whole project. In the back is a self-portrait with Friedman's bio and a nine-panel grid of a group of people in front of the American flag, which is not explained in any way. (The front cover is Muddy Waters and the back cover is Chris Ware, but both of those also appear inside.) So it tops out at 140 pictures of people, most of whom are "famous" in some way or other.

By the way, "chosen" here means "chosen to have Drew Friedman do their pictures." The person choosing may be Friedman himself much of the time, but also includes editors of various mostly New-York based publications, especially the New York Observer. The potted bios list (consistently? always?) where the illustrations first appeared, with notes on about half of them.

Friedman has a detailed, immersive style - his people look real and grounded. He's never gone out of his way to draw pretty people, and he tends to make them less pretty than they might like - he's an artist of jowls and dewlaps and ragged hairlines, laugh lines and creases and extra chins, scowls and smirks and incredulous glances. This is a fine book of a whole bunch of those drawings, some in color and some in his distinctive black-and-white stippled style, including some people you will recognize and some - no matter who you are - that will be a mystery to you.

Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation by Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

I don't want to say that creators can't write about whatever they want to write about. That's not my point at all. But if they want to have a particular theme in a particular work, they really should take some time to think about whether that theme actually makes sense.

The Blacksad books are noirish detective stories in comics form, set in a version of the US 1950s as seen by two Spaniards from about fifty years later - Juan Díaz Canales writes and Juanjo Guarnido draws. This world is anthropomorphic, of the no-specific-principle subtype: everyone is a humanoid animal, but it's not like the Red Deer are British and the Whitetail Deer are American, or anything like that. There are lots of different kinds of animals, mostly furry but including some birds, and all the different types seem to be vigorously interfertile, without creating chimeras along the way. The only distinction I think I can see is that men are more likely to be predators (wolves, foxes, bears, tigers) - but some men are large grazing animals (horses, pigs, bulls), too. Women are smaller, frailer things - deer and other ruminants, mostly, I think, plus the usual sexy mostly-human types with fur and animal snouts.

Racial politics maps uneasily at best onto that structure. Animals with darker fur are not necessarily from any particular place in the world, and I'm not even 100% sure if children are even consistently the same "race" as their parents, since there's obviously so many different races and they all interbreed.

That all said, Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation is the "racism is bad, m'kay?" book in the series, set in a decaying suburb [1] where a white supremacist organization - explicitly about color of fur, not about national origin or bloodline or anything more substantial, since their big leader is a white tiger - has taken power. This organization, the Arctic Nation of the title, is corrupt and evil and what I guess passes for racist in this world, though the corruption and evil are mostly in the style of every small town in every noir story since 1930 and not particularly distinctive or notable.

Series hero Jon Blacksad - the black panther on the cover, who does have a patch of white on his face, further muddying the metaphor - is hired by a schoolteacher (?!) in one of the few schools still operating (?!) in this town to find a missing child, Kaylie. Kaylie's mother doesn't want the police - corrupt and evil, run by the Arctic Nation - involved, and is scared of something she won't explain, in that usual noir way.

So Blacksad pokes around, with the aid of a weasel (I think) newspaper reporter, and bumps against the usual racists. (There's also a Black Power equivalent, a street gang of jet-black animals, to reinforce the schema - but that just made me think that most of these animals, like most animals, aren't either pure-white or pure-black, so the metaphor gets more and more strained every time Canales leans on it.)

And, frankly, the white tiger that runs the whole thing has tiger stripes on his face, so he's not pure white, either. Nothing in the story calls this out; it's not, as far as I can tell, meant to be some big "racists are hypocrites" reveal - he just is a tiger, and white enough for Arctic Nation, and we shrug and move on. Let me point back to my second paragraph and tap the sign.

There is a shocking revelation, and several shocking deaths, and of course a scene in which the Arctic Nation gather in their KKK-ish robes, because Blacksad didn't get to where it is by being subtle. Blacksad walks out in the end, shaking his head at human evil and racism and so on.

The dialogue is a bit overwrought and not quite colloquial - I'm not sure if that's from Canales' original or inherent in this translation by Anthya Flores and Patricia Rivera. It's mostly overwrought in a noir direction, so I think it's all on purpose: Blacksad is a cartoon version of a '50s detective story, so the tone and style are all a bit cartoonish, too. It is stylish, and it absolutely means well, but Arctic Nation trips over its own (metaphorical) feet more than I'm comfortable with.

[1] This is what the text says. It doesn't make much sense, particularly given the timeframe. It's too early for major white flight, which is not what's described, anyway. It's clearly not a "those people are moving into our neighborhood," either - everyone seems to have been there already, and changing economic circumstances is creating a crabs-in-a-bucket situation. Not to descend into personalities, but I suspect Canales misunderstands, inadvertently or deliberately, a lot of things about the US in the 1950s.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse

I don't like to make sweeping statements about writers with around a hundred published books, since there's likely to be some oddball piece I've forgotten. But I'm pretty sure that Laughing Gas is P.G. Wodehouse's only fantasy novel. (The Swoop!, which I haven't read, is arguably science fiction, but that's different, he said as a former editor who specialized in that difference.)

It's from 1936, which I (and most others) consider Wodehouse's high period - it came in the middle of Heavy Weather, Thank You, Jeeves, Right Ho, Jeeves, The Luck of the Bodkins, Summer Moonshine, The Code of the Woosters, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime - a murderer's row of humor if ever I saw one. Not all of those books are his absolute tip-top - Summer Moonshine is a minor book; you might be thinking of the Blandings book Summer Lightning; I was - but it's a pretty impressive run for six years ('33-'39).

Laughing Gas is also arguably minor: it's not part of any of Wodehouse's series, the fantasy element is a bit odd and doesn't entirely emphasize his strengths, and it has one of Wodehouse's intellectually duller protagonists without a Jeeves figure to relieve him. On the positive side, there's lots of great Hollywood material, including a wonderfully beastly child star - Wodehouse didn't have major child characters in his work very often, but they tended to be great when he did.

That slightly dim hero is Reggie Havershot, third Earl of that name, the usual late-twenties rich and unencumbered Wooster-esque figure. He's in Hollywood because "the family" (the usual Formidable Aunt) wants him to stop a cousin, "Eggy" Egremont, from marrying an unsuitable American woman.

That woman is Ann Bannister, a former reporter who was briefly engaged to Reggie two years before (of course). She's now minder to the child star Joey Cooley, though she's maneuvering to become the new personal publicist for big star April June.

Reggie met April on the train to Hollywood, and she got her hooks into him then. Since he is dim, he thinks she's wonderful and they have the love that is true. Everyone else thinks she's leading him on for the title, and that she's mean and self-obsessed, but Reggie, like a good Wodehouse hero, will not have the name of the woman he loves bandied about.

But then Reggie goes into a dental surgery at the same time as that child star, Joey Cooley, and the two of them swap bodies "in a sort of fourth dimension." Reggie wakes up as Joey, though he has some trouble remembering that consistently - he thinks of himself as his former, large, strapping self, so the fact that he is now a weedy pre-teen with golden locks is a continual surprise to him.

Meanwhile, Joey is having a grand time in Reggie's body - he'd been keeping a list of people he wants to "pop in the snoot," from directors to scenario writers to April, and now that he is large and beefy, he's going to take full advantage of all the snoot-popping he can do.

Over the course of about two days, in which Reggie-in-Joey's body is stuck with the schedule of a child star living in the home of the head of his studio and under the baleful eye of that studio head's nasty sister, Reggie keeps trying to continue his old life - did I mention he's a bit dim? he's the kind of person who is no good at adjusting his plans to current circumstances - and is moping over what he assumes is the loss of April forever.

It turns out Joey was an absolute terror, and a lot of the things the kid did pre-swap come back to bedevil Reggie over the course of those days. Also, he's thrown together with Ann quite a bit, and comes to curse ever having let her go, particularly when he finally sees what a nasty person April is.

There are complications and chases and various other colorful characters along the way, and, of course, Reggie and Joey do end up colliding in the fourth dimension once again, so they can return to their respective correct bodies and their appropriate happy endings. They each somewhat ruin the life of the other, but in ways that they're both happy with, in the end.

Again, I think this is a bit on the minor side - the fantasy mechanism is fun, but Reggie is a bit too dim to take best advantage of it, and we don't see April being as horrible as we're told she is. But it is a fun Wodehouse book from his best period, with a lot of amusing material.

All of This and Nothing: Cage in a Cave

"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 have a weakness for concept records. I think I developed that growing up in the 1970s - it was hard to avoid concept albums then, and we all came down with at least a mild case.

This week's song comes from a concept record - Rasputina's 2007 Oh Perilous World! I couldn't give you a decent coherent description of the overall story - the Wikipedia article includes a lot of things I don't really remember or didn't focus on. But the record is at least partially about Fletcher Christian, the famous mutineer from the Bounty.

And the song that's all about him is Cage in a Cave.

Fletcher Christian, he found him a cave
and he'd go there to be alone

Rasputina is a band that uses odd instrumentation - the lead is usually an electric cello - and singer Melora Creager sings in what I think is a slightly affected style, too: it's all distanced, strange, specific, different. She also writes the song, and is not afraid of wordplay and long words that take over their lines.

To fits of melancholy
he was increasingly prone

So this is a song I like largely for vibes reasons. It's about a dude hiding out, because the things he tried to do haven't worked out the way he hoped. So he's off in a cave, where he can be alone.

But, most of all, it sounds cool: it's a magnificent, enjoyable "everybody go away and leave me alone" song.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 18, 2026

This is slightly cheating: I'm writing this the morning of Friday, July 10, and the three books below all arrived earlier this week. But I already have a post about new books going up this Sunday, so this one gets bumped back a week. No one cares about the exact timing anyway.

I was on vacation this week - still am, as of the moment I'm typing this - and wanted some things to read. (Because three big bookcases full of stuff clearly wasn't enough, as often is true.) I ordered some things from that retailer we all wish we didn't use as much as we do, and three of the four books I bought came quickly. (One more is still in transit from somewhere more distant; I imagine I'll post about that when it finally arrives.)

Anyway, this is what arrived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week - in three separate packages on three separate days for maximum environmental impact, I guess.

For a reading project: The Moving Target, the first of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. I've already read this, and written a post about it, so what else can I say here? Hmmm. I have a suspicion that this book was printed print-on-demand, if that's interesting. It's the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition from 1998, but the copyright page doesn't have a listing of what printing it is. Also, the covers curl somewhat more than usual while reading, the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy, and there's a bunch of blank pages at the end. All of that, in my mind, adds up to POD - but there's no bar code at the end of the book block, so I can't be sure. If it is POD, it's very close to a "real" offset-printed book, which is nice.

Because I like to try to read longer books when I have a few days free to dive into them: Witch King, the beginning of a fantasy trilogy from Martha Wells. (I almost said "new" trilogy, but this is from 2023, is already in paperback, and I think the sequel is out or nearly out.) I'm not quite a quarter of the way into this one, and looking at my days of vacation left, I might not manage to finish it off before Monday's return to work. So far, it's a meaty, complex book with two timelines, but, given its trilogy-starter status, I'm trying not to expect an actual ending here. If I do get one, that can be a pleasant surprise.

And, more or less as an alternate choice if I decided I didn't want to read Witch King next, I also got Jack Vance's 1982 novel Suldrun's Garden. I've been working my way through Vance novel-series over the past couple of years, and I think I've gotten to all of the classic Vance that has been collected into omnibuses. So now this fantasy trilogy is probably next, and then I'll have to figure out where to go from there. I did read this, I think, but it was a long, long time ago - probably in the mid to late '80s, having gotten them from the SFBC a decade or so before I went to work there.

Quote of the Week: Natural Mechanisms

The lawyer talked. There are more millionaires in this country than in any other, he said, and at the same time more robbers and killers. Therein lay significance. Extremes in riches make extremes in crime. As long as a Social System permitted the acquisition of extreme riches, there would be equalizing crime and the Government and all law-enforcement organizations might as well fold their hands and accept it.

 - Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us, pp.339-340 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s

Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

I'm sure I've re-read this story since 1986. You can't prove it from this blog, though. And my copy of  the trade paperback is the original 1987 edition, with minimal credits and supplemental material, from the era when the Big Two were still figuring out the whole reprint-floppies-in-a-permanent-format thing. (I'm not sure how I can have a copy of that edition, since mine would have died in my 2011 flood, but I do and I'm looking at it now.)

This storyline obviously followed Frank Miller's original run on Daredevil by several years: he'd worked, mostly with Klaus Janson inking his pencils and taking over writing midway through the run, on that series from 1979 through 1983, in material that's now collected in three good-sized volumes.

Daredevil: Born Again collects issues 227-233 of the series, a discrete seven-issue storyline written by Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Like a lot of now-famous mid-80s Big Two stories ("The Anatomy Lesson" is another major example), it's a strong, specific story whose bones have been scattered and re-used by a thousand other hands since then to the point that they've become a cliché.

This is the ur-"villain systematically destroys the hero" story - the next most influential version, I think, is "Kraven's Last Hunt," about Spider-Man, from a few years later. But there are dozens of others by this point: everyone who has had an ongoing series over the last three decades has probably been broken down by now.

They all get better, of course. Daredevil gets better in this one. IP can't be left to wither on the vine.

The specifics here: Karen Page, a former girlfriend of Daredevil, went off to Hollywood to make her fortune a few years earlier. It didn't work out; she quickly got addicted, descended into vaguely-described porn, and found herself somewhere in Mexico with a bad habit and no resources. Well, she had one thing worth selling: the real identity of Daredevil (the New York lawyer Matt Murdock).

She sells that; the letter with her note makes its way to New York and Daredevil's biggest enemy Kingpin; and Kingpin decides to use it to, as villains always say, destroy everything the hero loves or cares about.

Murdock's utilities are shut off, the IRS audits him and freezes his accounts, and a corrupt cop brings evidence that will lead to his disbarment. Murdock already had paranoid tendencies, and he quickly spirals out of control, which overjoys the Kingpin.

But Kingpin also then blows up Murdock's brownstone home, which even a paranoid, spiraling Murdock realizes was done by someone. And, since he's a character in an adventure comic, he knows, correctly, who that was.

Things go on from there - I might sound dismissive, but the story is compelling and told well, with precise, emotionally taut scenes and magnificent character work from both Miller (here still underplaying emotion, unlike later in his career) and Mazzucchelli. There is a lot of violence, since this is a superhero comic, but most of it is shocking and a lot of it is fatal, which was not standard for this era. There's even a comic-relief gangster who talks in malapropisms to keep it all from being unrelievedly grim, and a great supporting-character role for Captain America in the big climax.

Miller constructs a new reality for his main characters out of the broken pieces he reduced them to, which is one of the things that became most cliched about this kind of story. That's not on Miller - it was an ongoing series; he had to leave something for the next writer to work with - but it has become a central aspect of superhero comics since, the big storyline in which everything changes and launches an exciting new direction in the saga of <insert name here>.

I think you can read this with only the vaguest sense of who Daredevil and his supporting characters are. He's a guy in a red costume; he's in New York; his civilian identity is a lawyer. The big fat crimelord hates him. And you get that all from the story itself.

This is still probably the best first Daredevil story for any reader, as well as the best full-stop Daredevil story. I don't think that's faint praise, but it does need to be contextualized: this is a genre exercise, from an era when that genre was opening itself to new influences and story-telling techniques, and one of the early attempts to "write to the arc" that was entirely successful. It is a darn good story about guys who dress up in long underwear, run around rooftops, and beat each other up - but it's still a long-underwear story at its heart.

Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is one of our funniest cartoonists, and also comes off as one of our most erudite. He cartoons regularly both for The Guardian, about books and the literary world (most recently collected in Revenge of the Librarians) and for New Scientist, about, well, science and scientists.

The previous book of New Scientist cartoons was Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, about five years ago. Last fall saw a new one appear: that's Physics for Cats.

Like all of the books reprinting Gauld's series comics, it's in a smallish format, with each cartoon presented in color on one page. His work tends to be about the size of two daily comics stacked on top of each other - sometimes laid out as a single panel, sometimes in a sequence, sometimes in a more complex pattern - which means that page-size presents the work well. And the resulting package could sit nicely in a cardboard display next to the cash-wrap, for those who actually still shop in physical bookstores. (I did, and got this book in one, but it wasn't displayed that way. My frame of reference may still be, anachronistically, a mall chain bookstore from the mid-80s.)

Gauld's art is cartoony in a minimalist way - his people sometimes have faces (well, at least eyes) but, in the middle distance, they tend to turn into silhouettes. That also makes his style well-suited for icons and warning labels, of which we see quite a few in this book (Frost Giants, Haunted Tornado, Sentient Nano-Smog).

The cartoons here are all on scientific themes - particles and theories, labs and colleagues, grants and grant-seeking, academic conferences and meetings, and so on. They will be funnier the more you know about science in general, but they're not deeply hermetic: they're all for a general-science audience, not for any particular sub-specialty like forensic avian biology.

I've written about Gauld's work a number of times before, and am running out of adjectives and ways to praise his cartoons. Look: he makes funny work for smart people, OK? If you consider yourself a smart person, and haven't checked out Gauld yet, you really should.