Quote of the Week, Supplemental: In Which Evelyn Waugh Is Less Racist Than Expected

Even now [1959] you will find people of some goodwill and some intelligence who speak of Europeans as having 'pacified' Africa. Tribal wars and slavery were endemic before they came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. Meantime, under European rule in the first forty years of this century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far larger scale than anything perpetrated by marauding spearmen, waged by white men against white, and a generation which has seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand silent when civilized and uncivilized nations are contrasted.

 - Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa, p.1052 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Week: The Joys of Homeownership

Marrying Bea, who had drifted into his life in the wake of her stormy sister, Bech had ignorantly climbed aboard an ark of suburban living whose engines now throbbed around him like those of a sinking merchant ship in Conrad. There was no ignoring noise in these environs. In New York, there were walls, precincts, zones and codes of avoidance; here in Ossining every disturbance had a personal application: the ringing phone was never in someone else's apartment, and the child crying downstairs was always one's own.

 -"Bech Wed," p.236 in The Complete Henry Bech

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.

The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

Books Read: June 2026

I'm back-dating this post, because I already have two quote posts "today" (Saturday, the Glorious Fourth, when I'm typing this) and a massive number of hourly quote posts for tomorrow, the twice-yearly day I burn off my excess book quotes.

You don't care about that. But I might wonder, looking back sometime in the future, so, Hi Future Me! that's why you did this.

Here's what I read this past month. I'll add links once the posts go live; that's running five to six weeks ahead, pretty consistently, these days.

Flore Vesco & Kerascoët, The Court Charade (digital, 6/1)

Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us (in Crime Novels : American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s, 6/1)

Tom Gauld, Physics for Cats (6/6)

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Daredevil: Born Again (6/7)

P.G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas (6/7)

Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido, Blacksad, Vol.2: Arctic Nation (digital, 6/13)

Drew Friedman's Chosen People (digital, 6/14)

Meg Elison, Foundling Fathers (6/14)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, P. Craig Russell, & George Freeman, Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf (digital, 6/19)

Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet, Mickey Mouse Vs. The Mouseton Society of Evil (digital, 6/20)

Martha Wells, Platform Decay (6/20)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, Murder Book (digital, 6/21)

Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (6/26)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania (digital, 6/27)

Katriona Chapman, The Pass (digital, 6/28)

Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning (6/28)

Next month, I do expect to read more books.

The Shadower by Peter & Maria Hoey

I've written about the Hoeys' comics before: they're a brother-and-sister team, who both also work as illustrators. They share writing and drawing duties on chilly, precisely-constructed stories. But I don't think I've mentioned that their pages are horizontal, unlike most comics.

A Hoeys page spreads across, not up and down, like a landscape rather than a portrait. Landscape is often important in their work: they've done multiple short comics showing the same scene - usually from a high, slightly tilted vantage point, to see multiple streets and cutaway buildings between them - with actions ramifying through the panels over the course of six or eight pages. And their crisp, digital art makes their places both precise and generic; we see streets and apartment interiors in detail, but those details are multiplied.

Add this to the fact that their worlds are typically vaguely historical, with big blocky cars and people in suits and no modern technology, and a Hoeys story is a window into a specific, distinct world - one clearly not our own.

In Perpetuity was set in an afterlife: a Greek-style, mostly unhappy one. The Bend of Luck showed us a world where luck was a physical commodity. Animal Stories could have been our world, almost, with six loosely-linked stories are centered on animals.

And their new book this year is The Shadower. It's set in the unnamed capital city of an unnamed country, in an unnamed year. The cars are big and boxy. The women wear skirts and the men suit jackets. Phones attach to the wall. Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House is "a hundred years old" - is that meant to be a vague placeholder for "really old," or more specific?

I doubt it's specific. The Hoeys are specific, but only about the invented details of their world.

A civil war has recently ended, uneasily. There's some kind of power-sharing system, and the city is divided into sector by green lines, guarded by soldiers who check passports and visas. Most people seem to stay in their districts; moving between them is difficult. (We think this must be a poor city, a poor country - commerce is not going to thrive in a system like this. But maybe this is what the little people endure, and the ruling class lives differently.)

Nadia is studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is both a prestigious national treasure and part of "a small college in her district."  Her father was a theater director and her mother a stage actress; a bombing during the war, in her childhood, killed her father. Her mother has been living quietly, not acting, since then. Nadia is apparently good at acting, a devotee of her father's method - which he codified in his influential book The Methodology of Disappearing. It's a very deep acting style, of subsuming the actor into the role completely.

And she's tapped by one of her father's old comrades, Nikola, to do something for the Popular Resistance Committee - the group her father was a leader in, the group that rules this sector of the city.

She is to impersonate a café waitress, Miriam, in another sector. O'Brien, a leader of that sector's ruling group, the Revolutionary Provisional Council, uses that café as an office, meeting with important people all day long. Nadia is to place a listening device at O'Brien's table and retrieve it at the end of the day, for seven days.

She doesn't have a choice, of course.

So she "agrees." She studies Miriam, uses wigs and fake glasses and a fake facial mole to impersonate the other woman. She spends a week in a replica of the café, practicing. And then she is inserted into the other woman's life, and goes to work in that café.

It goes as expected for the first few days: nerve-wracking but she's prepared. Then, things start shifting, both for her personally and otherwise. Her father's teachings will be more important than she expected. This impersonation will not end the way Nikola promised.

The Hoeys - the book also credits the story to C.P. Freund and Peter Hoey, which I think means roughly what the same credit would in a movie: not the script but the original plot - tell this story in their usual chilly manner, distanced, mostly quiet, with an emotionless third-persona omniscient narration.

They give it the inexorability of a tragedy: we think most of the lives in this broken, separated city are tragic, one way or another.

Bech Is Back by John Updike

I like having omnibuses on the shelf, especially ones that collect books that can easily be read separately. I can pull them down when I get back to that shelf, read the next clump of whatever, and move on.

I used to be the kind of reader who would plow through one of those big omnibuses, beginning to end, over a few days, but that was when I read professionally. I'm pretty sure I could still do that if the professional side of my brain was still connected to capital-L Literature. (Though my bank account might not survive that; there's a reason I'm doing boring content marketing these days.)

So I got back to Henry Bech, John Updike's sad-sack writer character, recently. Bech first appeared in 1970's Bech: A Book, which I read last fall. The second batch of Bech stories were collected in 1982's Bech Is Back - a few scattered pieces from the mid-70s in the New Yorker and Playboy, then what seems to have been a concerted effort by Updike to add enough text to fill it out to book-length soon before that eventual publication.

Both of those are in the omnibus The Complete Henry Bech, along with one later collection and the last (otherwise uncollected?) story.

Bech is a Jewish writer, in the vein of Bellow or Roth, who published some big and/or well-received books in the '50s but had fallen into silence by the time of the mid-'60s and the first stories in A Book. I think Updike meant Bech to be satirical, which is how I can believe that a guy who wrote three novels twenty years before - novels which are taught but not hugely read - can continue to live on them and do nothing else productive.

(And that's the question in the back of my head throughout the Bech stories - how does this guy spend his days? We mostly see him in special moments, away from his usual life and milieu, but how does he fill up the endless days in his small New York apartment, for years and decades? He can't have that many affairs. We don't think he's a theater aficionado, or involved in any volunteer work, or sitting in front of a TV screen twelve hours a day. Does Updike mean us to believe he just sits and reads, all day every day, for twenty-some years?)

Anyway, we know this is literary fiction for a few reasons. First, Updike's prose is lovely and supple, which is a requirement. Second, Bech is a writer and the stories are deeply in his head - literary fiction is about people like their authors, grappling with the Big Serious Questions that writers alone have to face. And third - and possibly most importantly - the stories are also largely about where Bech wants to put his dick. Literary fiction, canonically, is about writer characters having affairs.

Sadly, Bech was not married - had never been married - by the end of A Book, so he was not able, technically, to have affairs. (He did make up for it in dalliances, though.) Updike does remedy that in this second book.

But first some travel. The first book saw Bech on a tour behind the Iron Curtain - it was the '60s - while this book sees him move more widely about the world. There's a story that bounces among three mostly-American trips, another that does something similar with trips to two African countries and South Korea, the what-it-says-on-the-tin "Australia and Canada," and two trips with the new wife he picks up along the way, to "The Holy Land" and to Scotland in "Macbech."

Again, the Bech stories, up to that point, are mostly about him going to some strange (often foreign) place, feeling a bit out of sorts, and trying to get into the pants of some attractive woman he meets there. (Generally at least ten years younger than him, of course - this is both literary fiction and the '70s.)

But then we get a novelette-length - the longest piece in the book and the longest Bech story to date - piece called "Bech Wed," in which our hero settles down in a big house in Ossining with his new wife (the stand-in mistress younger sister of the primary mistress from the prior book). There, she gets him to actually sit down and write every day - a crazy idea he has apparently never had before - and, lo and behold, he actually produces his fifteen-years-delayed fourth novel. It is a massive success, despite being not very good, which leads to Bech fucking his wife's older sister (his former mistress, remember) and blowing up his marriage.

It's literary fiction: characters can be successful or happy, but never both. And frequently neither. Besides, fucking the wrong people is what literary fiction is about.

The last story is a bit of a coda, with a newly-single-again Bech going to someone else's book-launch party, now that he's living in Manhattan again. He of course ends it going home with a lady mud wrestler, because those are the attractive women available at the event, and a literary-novel hero must Always Be Macking.

There are books I can enjoy reading even though I don't take them seriously: space opera, plot-coupon epic fantasy...and this-writer-is-totally-not-me literary fiction. Some readers might find take offense at that odd company for Updike; they can suck it. The Bech books are frivolous and untethered to anything in real life, but they can be enjoyable on that level.

All of This and Nothing: Logical Song

"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 weeks the title of the post gives away the song. This is probably one of the most obvious: there's only one Logical Song.

It's from Supertramp, who were huge in the 1970s but are one of those bands (pretty common in the '60s and '70s, now that I come to think about it: Three Dog Night, Grand Funk Railroad, Bread, Bad Company) who dropped out of visibility almost immediately when they stopped making music.

So I'm calling this one Famous - it was Top 10 in the US & UK, and the biggest hit from a then-major band - but you might have to have been alive in 1979 to agree with me.

It's one of the great classic rock "what's the point of all of it?" songs, coming at the end of the supposedly-happy '70s and asking the musical question

Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am

I love the way it's full of half-rhymes and almost-rhymes, piles of words that sound like "logical" in one way or another, just words on words on words about what life as an adult is like - and that wistful question of whether it has to be that way.

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh, responsible, practical

The instrumentation is also more than a little odd for rock - two keyboards drive most of the song, it starts with that iconic maraca-shake sound, and there's a prominent saxophone solo in the middle. Well, it was the late '70s, at the end of a long run of prog-rock doing quirkier and quirkier things with the form.

And some thing never do change:

watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal

Quote of the Week: Seaside Entertainments

Rain was best for business, people came in to find shelter and it was only a two-pound entry fee, though even that often proved too much once they had sampled the meager amount of horror on offer. The exit was on a different street so Harry didn't usually have to deal with the disappointed customers. By the time they'd worked out where they were and how to get back to the beginning they'd lost the will to live and two pounds didn't seem worth arguing about.

 - Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.67

The Complete Hate, Vol.1 by Peter Bagge

There was a time when slackers were hip. Especially young slackers, particularly in Seattle or thereabouts. I don't know why. I don't remember the sequence, thirty-some years later - I think it was a "scene" first, even before Nirvana hit big, with breathless media coverage about what all these wacky young people were doing.

But it was a big deal, for a while. Just before and during the first wave of grunge, when my generation, GenX, was young and aimless and energetic, with hair and abs and knees as good as any of us were ever going to get. A lot of us resented the attention and the stupidly breathless media focus on mostly dumb egotists doing mostly dumb egotistical things, while the vast majority of that generation were living ordinary lives and doing normal things - much like what the average Boomer probably thought about hippies, come to think of it.

I think Peter Bagge's Hate comics series might actually have been one of the early signposts of that scene - the first issue came out in April of 1990, well before Nirvana's Nevermind or the movie Slackers. Oh, it was definitely already a scene - Bagge himself had moved to Seattle, for reasons I'm sure he would argue long and loud had nothing to do with any of that, a few years before - but I think in Spring of 1990 it was still a mostly underground scene, known by cognoscenti, and not the media extravaganza it became a year or so later.

The Complete Hate, Vol.1 collects the first half of Bagge's 1990s Hate comics: the first fifteen issues, from 1990 to 1994. (He's done other things called Hate since then, first an Annual for about a decade, then an newer Revisited that I haven't seen.) This is the full Buddy-in-Seattle run, starting with a minor time-skip from the end of the Bradley family stories in Neat Stuff.

As it often is with Bagge, all of his characters are horrible people who make universally bad decisions, with massive anger issues and an almost total lack of impulse control. (I enjoyed that in fiction a lot more at the time, before people almost exactly like that took over all the levers of my government.) Buddy Bradley is the central character, and the one who comes closest to being a functional adult - oh, he still makes bad decisions every time he gets the chance, but we see his thought processes as he almost resists his impulses and sometimes even feels bad about the things he does. Well, he mostly feels bad because bad things happen to him because of his stupid decisions, because he's a Bagge character and they have no capacity to mentally model other people's thinking at all.

Buddy is working in a used-book store: it's a McJob that lets him steal stuff from work and doesn't require too much effort or thinking. (Slacker, remember?) This is actually a step or three up from where we saw him at the end of Neat Stuff - he was living on a beach at that point, having gotten kicked out of every home he possibly could have - so baby steps, huh?

His childhood friend Stinky (Leonard Brown, the guy on the cover) also made the trek, and is more suited for the fake-it-till-you-make-it culture, having no self-awareness at all and only ego. Their third roommate is the socially awkward loner George Cecil Hamilton III, who mostly stays in his room, reading and writing conspiracy-theory materials. (Yes, people like that existed before the Internet - they tended to use the mails, they had a much lower profile, and the world was better for their relative disconnection.)

And Buddy's ex-girlfriend Lisa and new girlfriend Valerie (as of the beginning of the series) are also roommates, making more sitcom-like opportunities for drama.

These fifteen issues take that cast, add in a few supporting characters, and bounce them off each other violently and chaotically for what seems to be maybe a year or so in-universe. (There's no way the timeline is as long as the four-plus years the issues took to come out.) Nobody learns anything, nobody gets better at anything, nobody advances in their careers - people do move in and out, change jobs and chase dreams (like Stinky's band, which almost takes off), and break up and form new "relationships," because things are always happening in a Bagge comic.

It's energetic and nutty: these people will always make the worst choice possible when given the chance. I don't think Bagge even wrote it that way; this is just how he sees people. It intersects with his core libertarianism, of course: he's of the school that you should just let people do whatever, because people are universally horrible and that (somehow) keeps everyone off his lawn. I still think that Bagge characters + libertarianism = something like The Purge all night every night, but I'm not here to enforce logical consistency into fictional worlds.

His cartooning is still aggressively rubber-hose here, with the old faithful concentric-circles to show that characters are running really fast, too. It's very wordy, too - his characters may not be good at getting what they want, but they can yell back and forth at each other for pages on end.

Hate is a time-capsule now, this first batch probably the most so. This was a time and place in American culture, and Bagge had a predictably sour and jaundiced take on it before it had even properly gotten started. If you can have sympathy for characters who resolutely refuse to do anything to deserve sympathy, you can have a great time reading it.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

It was a long time ago, but I think it happened quickly.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return - my library app has a slight disagreement with itself as to the subtitle, so you may also see The Comeback some places - was published in French by Dargaud in 2000, the same year as the first volume. This version took a lot longer: it was translated by Mercedes Claire Gillion and lettered by Sylvain Dumas for a 2018 e-book-only Europe Comics edition, which is, I think, still the only way this book is available in the English language.

Like the first book, it was written by the prolific Lewis Trondheim and drawn by the energetic Manu Larcenet. It follows directly from the first book; you could click my link above to get a precis of the story if you want or need that. Or, if you prefer to remain ignorant of the plot details of the first book, stop reading now.

Elementary-schoolers Martina and Gildas learned in the first Cosmonauts that their seemingly-paranoid worries were correct: everyone around them was an alien and/or robot (mostly robots made to look like humans by aliens). They were, they were told, clones of the "survivors" of the crash of a human spaceship on this alien world, and were being raised in a close simulacrum of their original lives on Earth by the kindly aliens of the planet Mawis.

Now, they know the truth...but they're still kids, and need to grow up. So all of the robots around them admit to being robots, but school goes on - with some changes, such as the "Exterminating Stinky Aliens" class taught by Professor Vatter.

But, like so many stories told to children, they learn early in this book that what they were told is true...but not complete.

There are nasty aliens: the Meskimek. A Meskimek ship is approaching, and will destroy all life on Mawis. The Mawissians, unfortunately, venerate life so much that they are physically incapable of fighting back.

So the only people on the planet capable of violence are the cloned members of the human crew: Gildas and Martina. Who are maybe eight or nine years old.

But are they the only survivors of that crash? Are there more secrets of their past yet to be discovered?

Well, of course. It would be a short book if the stinky aliens just swept in and killed everybody.

This one is more action-oriented than the first book, as there's a hostile Mekimek fleet chasing our heroes' spaceship nearly continuously for the back three-quarters of the story. This is popular fiction, so of course they survive, learn the truth, and save their friends - and, since it's arguably a book for kids, they also learn some lessons along the way. (Although I should note that European comics "for kids" have a substantially higher amount of violence - very cartoony violence, all zap-rays and explosions, admittedly - than some readers may be comfortable handing to their little Taylors and Liams.)

Larcenet has a very distinctive style here, with lots of often-small panels to get all the action in and people with weird but very readable faces. This is zany but has an undercurrent of real emotion, as I've come to expect from Trondheim. This is a fun, goofy soft-SF comics series, and I'm happy to note that there's still one more to go.

That's Not Funny, That's Sick by Ellin Stein

Sometimes I fall into the reading habits of a typical middle-aged man. What I mean is: I hit a point where I can't stand any fiction, and need facts in my books.

I think this is a every-male-reader-in-his-fifties-has-a-tedious-opinion-on-Gettsysburg thing, but it could also be that my editor brain - long-unused professionally, but once switched on, it can never be entirely silenced - is finding things to complain about with every possible novel I'm thinking about reading.

Or why not both? It could easily be both.

So I recently read That's Not Funny, That's Sick, Ellin Stein's [1] 2013 history of the National Lampoon comedy empire of the 1970s. Stein starts with the moment when the two founding editors of the magazine - Henry Beard and Doug Kenney - headed there from Harvard and ends with Kenney's death just over than a decade later.

In between, she pulls in a lot of threads of American comedy. She spends the first chapter mostly setting up the backstory of the Harvard Lampoon, which licensed "Lampoon" to the new national magazine and was the source of a bunch of writers and editors for the NatLamp over the years, and was particularly important in the way it shaped the early NatLamp.

The magazine itself is central for about the first half of the book, but Stein wants to tell the wider story, so the second half of the book is something of a back-and-forth, from the magazine itself to its immediate offshoots: the Lemmings stage show and later similar things, the radio shows, and, most importantly, the actors and writers that worked on the stage and radio shows and then went on to Saturday Night Live and, in some cases, massive fame.

Stein has a very wide remit here, but she's done a lot of original research - there's a long list of people she interviewed in the back matter, and she quotes from those interviews throughout the book. In fact, she seems to have talked to basically everyone still alive - with the inevitable exception of Henry Beard, who I don't think has ever agreed to any interviews, from anyone, about his time at NatLamp. (A Henry Beard biography would be an interesting thing, if anyone could pull it off - but I doubt it would be possible.)

There's a part of me that wanted a more in-depth look at the magazine itself, or maybe a tighter focus on the things that actually had "National Lampoon" in their title. But then Animal House has to be included, and then how do you get John Belushi from Lemmings to Animal House without mentioning SNL? And that's assuming that you keep Stein's basic framing of the first decade - if you run longer, you need to include Vacation, and you have the same problem with Chevy Chase. Stein's implied point, which I have to agree with, is that NatLamp was foundational to a strain of American comedy, and that strain went in blockbuster directions fairly quickly.

There are thus a lot of names in That's Not Funny, from Beard and Kenney to publisher Matty Simmons (and his son Michael, later a NatLamp editor himself) to their Harvard Lampoon predecessors and occasional collaborators Christopher Cerf and George Trow, to later NatLamp writers and editors like Tony Hendra and P.J. O'Rourke and Michael O'Donoghue to the actor/writers like Chase and Belushi and Bill Murray and his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray. Stein includes a twenty-page epilogue bringing the careers of all of the major figures up to the point when she wrote the book - that's an additional thirty years of career, though not all of them lived through all of it.

She also, I think, interviewed some people who did not want to be named, or at least not to have some quotes attributed to them. (Stein is a long-time journalist, which shows in her clean prose and facility in navigating this big, complex group of people with shifting loyalties and relationships to each other.) That's Not Funny is full of the voices of these people - named and unnamed, some from historical documents but largely from Stein's interviews around 2010 when she was writing this book.

The book generally focuses on that first decade, from the magazine's April 1970 launch issue to Kenney's death in August 1980, but does extend the timeline both at the beginning (to explain what the Harvard Lampoon was and to give a quick look at notable events and people of that magazine in the '60s) and the end (to untangle threads and talk about the major projects that especially the SNL actors were working on, even if those didn't emerge until 1983 or 4.)

That's Not Funny doesn't have a central premise or argument to make, other than "this was an important thread in American comedy, and here's how it worked out." Stein covers the schisms and differences of opinion, without, mostly, taking sides in things like the Hendra-O'Donoghue feud. Simmons in particular often has a different view of events than others, a view in which Matty Simmons is more central and important than other people believed, and Stein quietly underlines those moments without explicitly calling him out. She comes across as even-handed, honestly interested in this world and what these people did without being dazzled by any of it.

I suspect that may be because she's an outsider: NatLamp was '70s, aggressive, juvenile, masculine, American. Stein is based in London, a long-time journalist, and obviously female. I don't know if she grew up reading NatLamp at any point - I did, in its later, lesser years, though I also spent the early '80s collecting back issues as well - but, whatever her history, she didn't let that affect her viewpoint or understanding.

This is a fine, even-handed look at an important time in comedy, with lots of insight well-packaged and organized to tell the story in a clear, reasonable, honest way. There may be better books about SNL - there have been a lot there - but there's nothing that comes close about NatLamp.

[1] Pointless digression: this author is only the second person I've heard of with the name of Ellin, after my wife's great-aunt. (The great-aunt spelled it with only one L, which is apparently the Danish spelling. No idea if two Ls means Norwegian or Macedonian or Nepalese.) That may have been one reason why I noticed this book in the first place, actually.

Still Smitten by Catana Chetwynd

Sometimes you just want to be convinced that the old verities are still true. The sun rises in the east, robins nest in the early spring, and Andrews McMeel publishes cute little books of relationship cartoons for impulse purchases.

Catana Chetwynd is from my neck of the woods - the part of New York that we all agree is actually "upstate," even if we draw the line as far north as Albany. (I tend to aim about Poughkeepsie, these days, maybe because I went to college there.) I want to say she's the most famous cartoonist from Saratoga Springs, but then I wonder if there isn't some 19th century racing-horse cartoonist I'm forgetting about. Still, at the very worst she's the second-most famous cartoonist from Saratoga Springs, and rising in the charts.

She's been publishing short-form cartoons - some single panels, but it looks like mostly newspaper-style longer sequences of panels (three or four a lot of the time, but plenty that run longer) - on various social media for about a decade. She has a website, which is probably the best way into her work these days.

And she's published five books of her cartoons, the most recent of which (beginning of this year) is Still Smitten. The books seem to have vague themes, but, reading between the lines, I think they're mostly just collections of Chetwynd's newer comics: those are her regular themes anyway.

These are cozy cartoons, focused on her home life and relationship with her partner John - and a bit about their two dogs. Very domestic, very comforting, very sweet. She's got a crisp, cartoony style that I think was influenced by Sarah Andersen - especially in the way Chetwynd draws eyes. She's definitely in that school of modern cartooning: women telling stories about their ordinary lives, a little goofy but mostly straightforward and honest, with an emphasis on specific moments and common experiences.

This book is sweet and fun, if maybe a little too focused on this one relationship. Chetwynd's comics are easy to read quickly - both her bold lettering and her clean, rounded figures - so I can see why they work well on social media. I might like to see if she does cartoons on slightly wider topics, but this is swell for what it is.

All of This and Nothing: You Cross My Path

"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.

We swing back to Obscure this week with a song from The Charlatans from 2008. (This is the modern UK-based Charlatans, sometimes referred to as Charlatans UK; there was a US band with the same name in the '60s. This UK band of Charlatans, I'm happy to see, is still out there.)

They'd been putting out records for almost twenty years, and had some up-and-down fame - I think more in the UK than the US, but bands are quirky and have odd careers, so maybe they were massive hits in Poland or Thailand somewhere along the way, too.

You Cross My Path was the title song of that record, and it's just a great rocking song, in the old "you don't want to mess with me" genre.

It's not entirely clear who the singer is aiming the song at, or why, but he makes his intentions clear:

You cross my path I'll take you down

Or, to be even more pointed that than refrain, slightly later in the song he tells us

I will rise again and I'll take you down like that
You will die up there alone, I'll take you down like that

Given that this was a band well into their career, there's a non-zero chance that it's "about" a DJ or rival band - I'm deliberately not doing any research because I don't want to find out if that's the case. I like this song in part because I can fill in the blanks - I suggest you listen to it with the same openness.

But do listen: it's a barn-burner, full of energy and emotion and life. And do not piss off that singer, if you know what's good for you.

Quote of the Week: Staff and Customers

The girl gave him a look which out to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.419 in Later Novels & Other Writings