The Kingdom, Vol.1: Anne by Benoit Feroumont

I was sure this book was different, but I didn't know how much or in what ways. It looked like it might be for younger readers, which was hugely different from the first book I read by its creator, Benoit Feroumont: Gisèle & Bèatrice.

After a bit of research - mostly trying to navigate a computer-translated version of Feroumont's detailed Wikipedia page - I believe that The Kingdom series is more typical of Feroumont's work than Gisèle & Bèatrice was, but there's a certain sharp wit and love for antic mischief that I suspect is common in his work. After reading this one, I don't think The Kingdom series is specifically for young readers, but it's all-ages in a European sense: full of things certain American readers (you know the kind) would be shocked to give to their little darlings, but pitched to be understandable to an audience roughly ten and up and reasonable for that audience for most normal human beings.

The full title is The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne; it was originally published in 2009, has colors by Feroumont's wife Christelle Coopman, and was translated by Mercedes Claire Gilliom for this 2017 Europe Comics edition. (There are ten books in the series; the six that existed before 2015 were translated in the years of Europe Comics' flourishing and the rest seem to be sitting in limbo for now.)

It's one of those lightly fantasy stories set in a pocket kingdom - small enough to be just the unnamed capital city and as much countryside as needed for stories, small enough that the King can be a local figure, and specifically with no neighbors that impinge on the story. This one, I think, sets up a lot of the characters and situations for later in the series. In particular, this one is about the title character, Anne, the friendly, happy, ultra-competent maid who has been taking care of the King - this isn't the kind of book with a deep sense of the organizational structure of a big house - who loses her job and has to move on.

You see, she's been frightened by owls hooting in the night, and so has been sleeping in the King's bed to avoid them. (He's the usual good-natured-but-ineffectual doddering old guy, along Lord Emsworth lines, so there's no thought or possibility of hanky-panky.) But a flock of little yellow (talking) birds have just arrived in town: this is annoying and disruptive, but not seen as particularly weird or unnatural. They're gossip-mongers - I might say "shit-stirrers," to be more precise - who delight in telling people things that will annoy, anger, or frustrate them, and particularly things that will cause them to fight with each other.

Anyway, the birds told the mean Queen about Anne and the King, so she fired Anne. The King gives Anne an old house down in the city, which she is to turn into a tavern. On the way there, she has some slapstick adventures, attempting to attack the birds and running into the large blacksmith's apprentice François, who immediately falls madly in love with her. (This, I gather, will be a major plot engine for later in the series.)

Anne does find her new home, which is a dump. But the birds more-or-less befriend her - they're still jerks - and help to clean it up. And she does turn it into a tavern. The climax of the story is the opening night of that tavern, when the King's children - two goofy sons and a more sensible daughter - come in disguise to patronize that tavern, plus a large contingent of the palace guards, sent by the Queen to give the impression that the tavern is raucous and unpleasant, so it will fail.

Does the character whose name is in the title of a the first book in a comic adventure series succeed despite all odds? Of course she does.

Feroumont tells this story in a broad way, full of jokes and big body language - it's a funny book that makes very little attempt to be subtle. And it's mostly tween-friendly, assuming your tweens aren't shocked by the "sleeping"-with-the-King plot-starter.

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

I used to read Walter Mosley books regularly - at least the Easy Rawlins series, which I devoured in the '90s. But first kids, then my exile from editorial work slowed down my reading - and mysteries took the first and most severe hit in that slowdown.

So I now realize that 2007's Blonde Faith - the tenth book in the series, of sixteen novels and some short fiction so far - is the first book in this series that I've read in probably twenty years and only the third Mosley book I've read at all this century.

Add to that the fact that I'm a white East Coast guy reading a mystery series about a Black detective in historical LA and points nearby, and I might need to warn you that you have no reason to take my opinion as having any weight whatsoever.

With that said: this book is set in early 1967. As usual, the series hero is Easy Rawlins, a man originally from Houston, a WWII veteran, and a guy who's tangled in his own head all of the time. (That's been true throughout the series: Easy is a smart man who is good at the private-detecting work he does, off and on, but not as good at getting through the interpersonal stuff in his own life.) He's forty-seven at this point, though still, as seen in this book, chasing women that are literally younger than his own stepson. (Catching them, too: it's that kind of book.)

That also means that this series, since it's in the first person from Easy's POV, gets stuck in his head. It's been a long time since I read the earlier books, so I can't make a comparison, but this one doesn't have as much plot as you might expect from its three hundred pages. It's basically: Easy looks for two guys, both old friends, and eventually finds them together. Some other things happen along the way, but not a whole lot of complications or sideplots.

Meanwhile, Easy is tormented because the great love of his life - or at least his recent life; he has capacity to chase women in bulk and has for decades at this point - Bonnie Shay, is getting married to her other boyfriend, an African prince. There's some complicated backstory there that might have come up in previous books or might have been between books: Easy's daughter Feather needed some tricky medical treatment, and the prince paid for it, but his price was Bonnie, who he took from Easy at that point. (But he's supposedly a good guy, so this might be somewhat colored by Easy's memory and prejudices.)

The two missing men are Christmas Black, a former Green Beret caught up somehow (on the "trying to stop them" end) with a nasty ring smuggling drugs via Vietnam, and Easy's old best friend Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, a gangster who is accused of killing Pericles Tarr. Easy tracks down Tarr, who turns out to not be dead, and meets the smugglers, who are posing as Army officers. As required by a mystery novel, the two plots somewhat intersect, because Black and Mouse know each other.

Easy's voice is compelling and believable, but I found him more than a bit whiny here, especially for a guy who bags one hottie (the woman of the title), is well on his way to a relationship with a college-aged additional hottie, and flirts very successfully with one or two others I can think of - all while being despondent because he lost Bonita entirely because he didn't bother to get in touch with her for an extended period of time. A man can definitely protest too much.

And the mystery is a bit thin here. Easy is just trying to find two men, who he's pretty sure will be not that far away and who are both so good at violence that it's unlikely they'll be in any serious trouble. And that turns out to be the case. The tension is mostly about Bonnie, and about Easy's own internal demons - this is closer to a literary novel than a mystery. I do like literary novels, admittedly, but I prefer their heroes not be utterly obnoxious twerps, and Easy is really close to that line here.

All of This and Nothing: Songs That No One Will Hear

"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.

This is possibly the most Obscure of my obscure songs: a single from one of those bands that is basically one person: the Swedish indypop "band" we are soldiers we have guns. (Stylized in all-lower case, for maximum indy cred, I guess.)

we are soldiers we have guns ran for the back half of the Aughts, roughly, with a few EPs and at least one full-length (get up, get out, - still on Bandcamp for anyone interested to look for more). The one person in this case was Malin Dahlberg; no idea what she's doing these days but I hope it's creative and fulfilling and wonderful.

Songs That No One Will Hear is the first we are soldiers we have guns song I ever heard; I think it was featured on Fingertips (which has been the way I discovered a lot of bands over the years - might be good for you, too. If not, my general advice is to find some outlet that is similar enough to your tastes that you always find what they feature interesting).

The lyrics don't exist anywhere online, and we are soldiers (I'll stay lower-case, but I have to abbreviate it somehow) has a lo-fi sound - so untangling exactly what Dahlberg is singing might not be worth the effort.

But, for a lovely mostly-quiet song from an obscure band from an obscure part of the world, Songs That No One Will Hear is almost a platonically perfect title, and the song itself lives up to it. Just listen.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 26, 2026

Three books for this week - one I bought myself (trying to use an old gift card that didn't go through in the end, curse the luck) and two new books from Tachyon. The Tachyon books will be first, according to my usual rules.

Mary G. Thompson has written short fiction and novels for younger readers, but I think Precious Children is her first novel for adults. It's a SFnal horror novel about cloning, of the replacing-loved-ones style, focused on one family who seem to have awful luck in the mortality of their children but luckily are rich enough that those children can be replaced and their existence continued - the question being how closely that existence continues, and what happens to the person previously using the brain that becomes the newest version of their beloved son. It's just been published by Tachyon.

Also from Tachyon, even more recently published if I can trust the metadata, is a new collection of short fiction by the least positive man in Hard SF, Peter Watts. Fold Catastrophes collects eleven stories originally in various anthologies, websites, and magazines, going back to 2013. There's also a new original story at the end.

And last of the three is the book I bought myself. I've gotten behind on Charles Stross's Laundry-verse novels, possibly because they do try to be substantially more depressing and gloom-soaked than the real world, which has been a tricky thing this past decade. I believe Quantum of Nightmares is the second of the "New Management" series, set officially after the apocalypse, and following Dead Lies Dreaming, which I wasn't super-fond of. This one seems to be less "Peter Pan-inspired goofy young people putting on a show," though, so I hope to give it a try. I also already have the sequel to this on the shelf, and want to get to the supposed final actual Laundry novel The Regicide Report. (Which, come to think of it, I could probably just read without hitting the others first - but it looks even gloomier than Standard Stross, which is incredibly gloomy indeed.)

Quote of the Week: A Relapse of Poetry

I have generally found, as I have gone around the world, that people are tolerant and ready to forgive, and in our little community it was never held against Rodney Spelvin that he had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

    - P.G. Wodehouse, "Rodney Has a Relapse," p.131 in Nothing Serious

Leonardo the Genius (Vol. 1) by Bob De Groot & Turk

The credit on the book just says "De Groot and Turk," but other official descriptions include De Groot's first name. I'd have to go to a secondary source to learn that Turk is actually an artist named Philippe Liégeois. Similarly, this material looks to be forty or fifty years old, but the book itself gives a 2002 publication date in French and a 2016 date for this translation by Montana Kane.

The same secondary source notes that the Léonard comics - the terminal "o" pops up in Dutch and English translations, and possibly elsewhere, but the original French and Belgian editions don't have it - began in 1974. I think this book collects '70s stories in a package - possibly the start of an entire repackaged series - from the early days of this century.

This is one of those works of humor that seem to be very popular in their home culture - there have been fifty-seven volumes in French, continuing to the present day - but have not travelled as well. At least, it's barely traveled into English, which is the only bit I can really evaluate.

The premise is simple: there's this genius, living in a small town in a vaguely Renaissance world (but with some Renaissance-versions of modern things when the jokes require them), who invents crazy things. He looks a lot like Leonardo Da Vinci. This is the first book of his adventures: Leonardo the Genius.

It starts out with single-pagers, and even the longer stories only last four or five pages. I see that this series originated in magazines, and might still appear in magazines today, which explains that.

The jokes are silly and broad, which makes me wonder why it hasn't traveled into English more successfully. There is something vaguely European about it: like Asterix, there's an underlying sense that you have to have at least a little bit of cultural/historical grounding to get the jokes, and maybe general American audiences react badly to that.

Over the course of this book, Leonard hires an assistant - just called "Disciple" here, though I gather he gets a name in some later stories. This allows even more slapstick, and for the inevitable "guy wrapped up in bandages in a hospital bed" results of some less-successful experiments.

As I said, it's all just a bit old-fashioned - big squared panels with tightly ruled lines, squared-off dialogue balloons, that mid-century style of humor, a big-nose cartooning style from Turk - but that's just a sign of the era it came from. A few of the jokes are unfortunate now - there's one in which Leonardo invents the first airplane, and then a swarthy guy tries to hijack it to Cuba, ha ha ha - but most of it is durable all-ages humor that still basically works.

I find this kind of series fascinating, because it's so obviously A Big Deal in the land of its birth, probably hyped every year when a new volume comes out and the big birthday/Christmas wish for thousands of kids, and yet it's totally unknown in my country. The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting. The book itself...ehhh, it was OK. I think it's a lot more resonant if you grew up with it.

Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel by Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre

This is not my nostalgia. But, reading this book, I was reminded that the whole series is about the nostalgia of people around my age and their parents, remembering the era when the parents were young and energetic and the children were young and free.

Glorious Summers is a six-book series, written by Belgian Zidrou and drawn by Spaniard Jordi Lafebre. They were published in French quickly in the teens, and the first five translated into English - this third volume by Laura Vergnaud - for publication in 2018 by Europe Comics. They're digital-only; Europe is not quite a full-line publisher, and acts mostly as a proof-of-concept and an engine for licensing material to American/British publishers who would then bring out their own editions. Each one is set in a particular year, and tells the story of one summer vacation of the Faldérault family.

So Southbound! began with a frame story in what seemed to be roughly the present day, with an aged Pierre Faldérault and his wife Maddie, before flashing back to 1973, when they had four young and rambunctious children. The Calanque dove right into 1969, without a frame story, when the Faldérault family had slightly younger children and only three of them.

This third book is Little Miss Esterel - that's the model of car they drove in those first two books, and this is her story, in a way. The frame story isn't dated, but it's probably the mid-Nineties: the youngest child "Peaches" (Paulette) is still at home, in her early twenties (wearing a Nirvana T-shirt), and the other three are out, with their own lives. But the bulk of this book, like the others, is about one summer - in this case 1962, the year the Faldérault family got that Esterel and went on a two-week long vacation (minus four days; as always Pierre overruns the beginning of the holidays finishing up his comics-making work).

The family is obviously even smaller in 1962 than it was in 1969: Peaches and her older brother Louis aren't even born yet. Julie is a toddler and Nicole is a baby, still breast-feeding. But the traveling crew - in that brand-new Esterel - will include Maddie's parents as well.

She's an only child - we learn some details of why late in the book - and her parents seem old in 1962, while the Faldéraults are in their energetic mid-twenties. Maddie's father Henry - lovingly called "Fat Pop-Pop" by Julie - had a heart attack the year before, and around the same time sold his hat store and retired. He's a genial, happy man. His wife Yvette is tighter-wound and massively more controlled - we think she's been managing her husband's health (and maybe his store, and her family, and whatever else) for a long time, back to the War which still looms in their history.

Pierre thinks it will be fun to have Henry and Yvette along; that they'll drive down to the coast and camp out and Julie will love having "Fat Pop-Pop" to play with. The last of those things is true, at least.

Yvette is an inveterate organizer, with a Michelin guide in her hands, and she takes over entirely - they only make it as far as Saint-Etienne (which is reasonably far South, but not "The South" and certainly not on the Mediterranean), and settle into a hotel there. Yvette leads them around to see all the cathedrals and churches, in strict Michelin-star order.

Worse, the hotel has a Belgian-style restaurant, so they end up eating as if they were at home instead of French cuisine - but not even that, since Yvette browbeats the staff into taking frites off the menu for their entire visit, to protect Henry's heart. (And what is more Belgian than frites?)

Julie has a fine time, of course - she's a toddler. And Nicole is a baby. Yvette is having the vacation she wants, mostly - as much as she can be happy about anything. Henry is thrilled to still be alive and spending time with his family. Pierre and Maddie push back in some ways - they commandeer a wheelbarrow to act as a stroller for the girls - but the tension between Maddie and her mother simmers, until it breaks out into a full-fledged argument in the (slow, stuck-in-traffic) drive back home.

But Maddie learns things about her mother she didn't know, and Yvette learns to unbend a bit. We see the whole Faldérault family making a stop at a frites stand just over the border, the beginning of a tradition that was called out in the previous books. And the core family does have a quick camp-out, in their own backyard, back at home - we are convinced they will find ways to be happy and to do the things that strengthen their family, no matter what.

That's the nostalgia, or the story-telling aspect of it - the haze of memory that turns it all to something good in retrospect. Even a vacation you didn't love at the time becomes a good story years later.

As always with this series, the story is true and realistic, with interesting characters we care about - even Yvette, in the end. And Lafebre's art is magnificent in a clean, crisp story-telling style, with great faces in particular. Glorious Summers is a marvelous example of what comics can be: this series tells stories almost entirely outside any of the mainstreams of North American (or British, or even Japanese) comics - domestic, evocative of specific moments in the past, family-centered, lovely, small, perfectly formed. 

Into the Bewilderness by Gus Gordon

There are some signals that a book is actually for kids. Sometimes they're obvious: the shelf it sits on in a store or library, a big sticker on the spine, quotes from "little Jimmy, age 10."

Sometimes, though, you find a book in a library app, and think it could be a fable or something else quirky like that. And then you realize it's one of those stories about two people who live together Ernie-and-Bert-style, and that snaps a lot of other vague or goofy things into perspective. "This is a book for ten-year-olds," you realize, "I might enjoy it but it's not for me."

I hit that point about halfway through Gus Gordon's Into the Bewilderness, which sent me to his bio at the back of the book. He is known for writing and illustrated books for "small people," as he puts it. I think Harper Alley, the publisher here, might also be at least in part an outfit aimed at small people, though the copyright page doesn't have the age guidance I usually look for as my dead giveaway.

Anyway, this is nice and pleasant and a bit cozy, largely because it's a book for younger readers. Keep that in mind, and it's quite enjoyable.

Luis and Pablo live together in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. We know this from the beginning of the book: it starts with a map that includes their "Bewilderness" as well as other places including "The Really Pointy Mountains" and "Grumpy Toad Valley" and "Weird rock place."

Luis is a bear who wears a sweater and a tuque; Pablo is a mole who wears overalls and glasses. Luis is the Ernie-coded one: he carries a guitar, makes up songs, and has silly ideas. Pablo is Bert-coded: always reading books, more knowledgeable, deeply grumpy.

Luis yearns for culture: shows, arts, musicals. There are none such in the middle of nowhere. Pablo notes that his people never leave this area, since his great-great-great grandfather ran off and...he leaves this story vague for a long time.

But Luis wins two tickets to a musical in the Big City, and - after some mostly-friendly banter, Pablo eventually decides to go with him. They go wait at the bus stop, finally get a bus, and take the long, circuitous (we've seen the map) ride to the Big City.

It is, indeed, Big - very different in every way from what they're used to. In interesting ways, surprising ways, fascinating ways. They go to find the theater where the musical is playing, and things don't go like they or the reader expects.

Of course, the end of the story sees them back in their cabin in the Bewilderness; books for small people must always renormalize. And we get the inevitable pitch for friendship: books for small people sometimes are about family, but most of the time - especially with a set-up like this - they lean heavily into the "friends are the best darn thing in the world" framing.

Gordon has a nice cartoony style - his self-portrait looks a bit Quentin Blake-y - and he does the vaguely-smartass dialogue and narration on a kid-appropriate level. This is a renormalizing book about the importance of friendship for ten-year-olds, but it's quite entertaining on that level.

Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse

I am on a multi-year, vaguely serious plan to read "all" of P.G. Wodehouse, in the lovely little Overlook hardcovers. He wrote around a hundred books, so it'll take a while, but I've got fifty-two down now (counting this one) and eight more sitting on the shelf to be read. So I do need to track down some of the more obscure and rare books - which might mean shelling out more money than I feel like spending at the moment - but it's all doable.

(I had a somewhat different shelf of Overlook Wodehouse before my flood in 2011 - probably forty or so; no idea how distributed between read and unread - but I'm taking the current shelf as the master record, so I'll be done when I have all of them and have read them, whether that's for the first time or not.)

Some of those books spark interesting posts on this blog, since Wodehouse was a deeply entertaining and fun writer for around seventy years.

But some of them are collections of short stories, largely about golf, originally published in 1950, and my options are to give potted plot synopses of each story (boring for both of us) or a general airy overview (quick and easy for me; possibly dull and vague for you). I hope you realize which way I'm going, and will forgive me if it is dull and vague.

Nothing Serious collects ten stories originally published, if I can trust the dates on the copyright page, between 1939 and 1948. Some may also have been original to the book. It leads off with two stories of the Drones Club, follows that with five about golf narrated by the Oldest Member, and then ends with three odd stories, including one very odd one featuring Lord Emsworth selling encyclopedias in a Long Island suburb.

Wodehouse in short form tends to be concentrated: there's not as much room for complication, so it's mostly the pure young-love-thwarted plots, with one major obstacle thwarting that love which is then cleared by the end of the story. There's occasionally other plots - Emsworth sells encyclopedias, as I mentioned above, to help a young woman who is already married (and pregnant) build a nest egg - but assuming each story is going to be about this guy and the lady he loves is a solid strategy.

And these are good stories, with some fine Wodehouse prose, from the prime period of his career. There is rather a lot of golf in it; short Wodehouse seems to be about golf more often than most readers expect. (Did he write short stories for a golfing magazine? I've never dug into the question.) It's not part of any of his major series, and not famous: if you read Nothing Serious, you're, like me, deep into the Wodehouse Cult and looking for more to keep going. Luckily, as I noted, he did write about a hundred books, so you can keep going for quite a while.

All of This and Nothing: I Can See Clearly Now

"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.

This week swings back to Famous, with Johnny Nash's 1972 song I Can See Clearly Now.

(Speaking of seeing clearly, I wonder if it's at all clear what my organizational structure was for this year? I don't think I ever actually said it. Both Obscure and Famous songs are running in reverse chronological order, though the two streams are entirely uncoupled, to keep them alternating. And they would have to be, since, in a weird bit of symmetry I didn't plan, only five of the Obscure ones are from before this century and only five of the Famous ones are from the current century. There's a reason for this structure, a deeply silly one which I'll explain when we hit the relevant song.)

As with all of the Famous songs, I'm assuming you know it by this point. Even if you weren't around in 1975, it's been in plenty of media; the copy I have is from the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack, where it runs under the opening credits in that traditional movie undercut-the-mood-with-a-poppy-song way.

The song itself is happy - purely so. There's few enough of those.

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

There's no subtext, no hidden darkness. I was going to spin a whole theory here about how it reflected the post-Watergate mood when I realized I had the date as 1975 in error - it's actually from 1972. So I don't even have that. Just a happy song about things finally going right, after a long time when they weren't. That's plenty.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 19, 2026

I'm stacking these posts off into the future again; I'm writing this the morning of Saturday, September 5. Why? Because I already have a "Reviewing the Mail" post for tomorrow and one for next week. And the exact timing of my mail really doesn't matter to anyone.

This time I have one book, from the library; it came in much later than the others I requested at the same time. It didn't come from any farther away; the library system is basically just this one county, anyway. Maybe someone already had it checked out. Anyway, it's here now, and I'll probably read it "today" (two weeks ago as you read this.)

Night Stories is a comics-format collection of "Folktales from Latin America," as the subtitle puts it - Latin America is a huge, diverse region, so I'll have to see if it's one tale from here and one from there or a more focused look at a particular area. It was written and drawn by the Argentine cartoonist Liniers, best-known for his daily strip Macanudo. There also seem to be extensive text features, since this is a book aimed at younger readers (and, more so, at their librarians and teachers, as the ones who will spend the money to buy it).

I suppose it's something of a companion to the earlier book The Dragon Slayer by Jaime Hernandez from the same publisher, which also collected folktales in a comics format. I would be somewhat surprised if any of the stories repeated, but I suppose I'll see.

Quote of the Week: A NYC Magazine Party in 1946

...and next I met a small legal cog in a major political engine. And next Janoth's latest invention in the way of social commentators. And others, all of them pretty damned important people, had they only known it. Some of them unaware they were gentlemen and scholars. Some of them tomorrow's famous fugitives from justice. A sizable sprinkling of lunatics, so plausible they had never been suspected and never would be. Memorable bankrupts of the future, the obscure suicides of ten or twenty years from now. Potentially fabulous murderers. The mothers or fathers of truly great people I would never know.

 - Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, pp.384-5 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s

The Incal, Vol. 5: The Fifth Essence - The Dreaming Galaxy by Alejandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

The Incal series is both a continuous narrative - individual volumes stop rather than ending; the primary conflict just keeps building over the whole series - and explicitly set up as a series of three sets of diptych titles. It begins with The Black Incal and runs into The Luminous Incal, most obviously. Then came What Lies Beneath and What Is Above.

But this fifth book has the more-complicated title The Fifth Essence, Part One: The Dreaming Galaxy. It will all end with the second Fifth Essence book, with a similarly parallel title, Planet DiFool, but it indicates, possibly, that writer Alejandro Jodorowski's metaphysical musings are starting to overwhelm the skiffy adventure here.

(Or that they did so some time back, and the titles are just catching up now.)

The Incal books started as medium-future, vaguely space-operatic adventure: the main character is a somewhat sleazy, low-level private investigator, John DiFool, who gets dragged into events of cosmic significance when he finds the title McGuffin, one of two sentient items of untold and fundamental power. By this point, the antagonists of the first couple of books have all become allies, the two Incals have merged with a minor character, and the team has been battling the real enemy, the Great Darkness, for a book or two. In this book, they mop up the last bits of conventional conflict, the Techno-Centreur - who I gather is a person rather than a group; it was less clear in the previous book - and the remnant bits of government of this human-dominated galaxy that they hadn't already co-opted.

But The Great Darkness is the usual overwhelmingly powerful outside-context force of destruction, manifesting as spiky black goo that envelops and transforms/destroys everything it can, and that is prone to the sort of loud histrionic bwha-ha-ha speeches that we always expect from our cosmic villains.

The plot of this book starts off with that mopping up - DiFool and his allies must attack the War Star, the final stronghold of the Techno-Centreur and his forces, so they can consolidate control of the human worlds and tackle the Great Darkness. There's a lot of impressive pages from artist Mœbius - I still insist the biggest fans of this series saw this before it was translated from French (this edition is translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson) and are mostly reacting to the magnificent visual storytelling and not the dull repetitive Jodorowski dialogue.

There's some fighting with the Great Darkness as well, mostly by the personification of the Incal, which - for a reason Jodorowski doesn't make entirely clear - means the Great Darkness was pushed away now but is now able to completely conquer the entire universe twenty-one days later. (It seemed entirely capable of conquering right now if not stopped; I don't quite get the distinction here, or what the twenty-one-day delay means.)

Anyway, the only way to save all life everywhere is for every last human being - I don't think Jodorowki means "sapient being," because the alien Bergs don't seem to be included - to go into a special sleep called the Theta Dream. If any single human doesn't, every last person will die.

(I am constitutionally opposed to mystical skiffy stories that center on "give up all of your individuality to The Great Mind and everything will be Special and Wonderful," but there's no hive-mind yet, so I'm withholding judgment for now.)

Anyway, at the very end of this book, that's mostly happened in the human galaxy, surprisingly. But, there are also multiple billion humans over in the Berg galaxy, after DiFool fucked their queen a few books back - I swear I am not joking, though either they're all babies or the timeline is weirder than I thought - so he has to zoom off over there to convince all of his offspring to fall asleep to save all life everywhere.

Meanwhile, DiFool has to be dragged kicking and screaming through every last plot point: he doesn't want to do any of this. He's somewhat annoying, but also the only character with any individual personality left and the only real source of human conflict in the series, so it's not too bad. And we know that he'll give in every time: he's a weak-willed loser being led by his impressive nose through the whole thing, a convenient hook for plot and action.

As always, these books are visually sumptuous and impressive. The dialogue cluttering up those pages is somewhat sillier and repetitive, but space opera is not known for deep characterization and Algonquin Round Table-esque conversations anyway. You come to The Incal for magnificent Mœbius pages, and suffer through the goofy Jodorowski plot to get them.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

I've been reading random noir novels in various Library of America omnibuses over the past couple of years: this one is smack in the middle of the Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s book. It's by Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet before turning to writing crime novels, and this is his most famous book.

The Big Clock is from 1946, and is modernist enough that it feels - well, not exactly contemporary, but like it takes place in a world close enough to our own that we can still feel the texture of it and understand how it works. Fearing tells it in chapters from multiple points of view, but the main character, and viewpoint for about two-thirds of the book, is George Stroud.

Stroud is head editor of Crimeways, one of a group of sophisticated, strong-selling magazines from Janoth Publications in New York on various aspects of modern life. The whole group has a consistent style and method; they're not necessarily the very biggest magazines - they have notable competitors mentioned in the book - but they sell a lot of copies, pay exceptionally well, and pride themselves on having the best talent. (Think Time-Life of about the same era and you'll be close.)

Stroud is happily married, but...he's the main character of a mid-century noir novel, almost as smart as he thinks he is, and drinks about as much as any similar character. He falls into a brief affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, head of the whole operation - very brief, one overnight and then a weekend in Albany a few days later. On that Sunday afternoon, he drops her off at her apartment, watching her walk up to the building from across the street - and be met by Janoth, who came back from a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier than expected.

Janoth fights with Pauline up in her apartment, gets angry, and kills her semi-accidentally. He gets out of the building quietly and goes to see his second-in-command/fixer Steve Hagen. Janoth knows he saw someone drop off Pauline, but isn't sure who it was. That man could unroll his otherwise-solid alibi. Steve hints that he will have the man killed, if only they can find him.

So they set the entire apparatus of Janoth Publications to work to find this mysterious man, with a thin cover story about the man being the central figure in some bribery scheme. And the whole project is given to one of Janoth's most trusted and seasoned editors to run: Stroud.

Stroud knows the threads that could lead to him - a painting he bought with Pauline that morning, his physical description, a low-life bar the two visited, that trip to Albany - and does all he can to seem to be pursuing the investigation zealously while putting subtly wrong people on particular aspects of it and letting the results point as much away from him as possible. After all, no one expects that the clues will lead to him in the first place - he's potentially safe unless there's something really obvious.

But Janoth Publications is good at this, and they find multiple people who could identify the mysterious man - including the eccentric fine artist Louise Patterson, who painted and (coincidentally) competed with Stroud to buy the very painting he'd bought the morning of the murder. Stroud's long interest in her work - he has a Patterson on the wall of his office, and several at home - could potentially blow up the whole thing. And his wife Georgette is already worried that he's become distant, as he did once before during an affair.

This is a noir, so someone has to die. The last line of the novel explains who and how - I won't explain further. (It's a short book; just reading it would be quick enough.)

Fearing tells this, as I said above, in a modernist way, with multiple first-person viewpoints, though Stroud is the dominant voice. Each of them have their own quirks and foibles; they're distinct people, though we only spend a lot of time in Stroud's head. The only other repeat narrator is Janoth himself.

Fearing is also witty and interesting on the workings of Janoth Publications itself, including how big media operations will mold public conversation in specific ways - not the usual thing a reader would expect in a noir novel, particularly a short zippy one like this, but it's authoritative and interesting. 

Even further afield, there's a sub-plot about a scheme called Funded Individuals - in which some group of young people would be given support and roughly a million dollars to get started in life, something like a vague early sketch of a venture capital fund but much more general, official, and personal - which I don't think would work at all like Fearing's characters assume it would, but is interestingly quirky and turns up more in the book than I expected. It's the kind of book that feels like it has everything relevant that ran through the author's head while writing it: full of quirky sidebars and precise moments and arch opinions.

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

Did you know there are at least two comics about animals that talk? (Random animals, out in the world, and not talking to humans, but to each other.) I say "at least" because if there's two, there's probably more than that.

The one I was vaguely aware of is called (unsurprisingly) They Can Talk, and has been running for more than ten years. But I ran across a book in my library app from a different comic, False Knees, and decided in my whimsical way to read that one.

For a reductive comparison, Talk has a lot of domestic animals (dogs, cats, and so on) who live around people, and occasionally goes wider. Knees is mostly about birds - lots of different kinds of birds, depicted as far as I can tell exceptionally accurately - with occasional cats. So choose your talking-animal strip appropriately.

Ew, It's Beautiful is the second False Knees collection; it was published in July of 2025. The cartoonist is Joshua Barkman, who lives in Southern Ontario and who I suspect sees a lot of the same birds that I do here a few hundred miles south in Northern New Jersey.

What I mean by that is that I can't necessarily identify all of these birds - I do see jays and crows and cardinals and pigeons and a whole lot of those small nut-eating birds of various kinds - but I do recognize most of them, thinking "I've seen dudes like that at the birdbath out the back window." Barkman gives them body language and speech - obviously - but he mostly keeps them birds; they're all recognizable, and, more subtly, the things they care about and the topics of the comics are very bird-centric.

Ew, It's Beautiful is funny, but not Borscht Belt funny - not funny like so many daily-style strips. The strips are deeply about how these birds (and others, poking through while writing this I saw a strip about a beaver and one with an ant) actually live and behave, slightly exaggerated for humor but not all that far. I don't think I laughed out loud, but I appreciated all of the strips: they're thoughtful and interesting and smart in subtle ways.

The art is ink and gouache, for a soft organic look and bright natural colors. It might not need saying, but Barkman is very good at depicting specific birds; it's kind of his thing here.

Barkman has arranged this book in four sections according to the seasons, starting with Winter; there's about 130 comics here, so roughly one for every three days of a whole year. And you can go through it with these loud, demanding, millet-loving little fellas, if you like. They're not overly fond of humans, but I think you'll come to like them.