Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Lone Wolf and Cub is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early '70s in the aptly titled Weekly Manga Action. Now, each installment is long: fifty pages, sometimes longer. But they often tend to be separate, each one an adventure or encounter of the main character, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō.

But, sometimes, the stories in a particular collection - I think the English-language editions of this series actually are in tankōbon format, unlike most manga, which is closer to bunkoban or the US-specific "Tokyopop trim" - are more closely related, and form something like a story arc.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child is one of those. It starts with a massive battle, in "The Yagyū Letter," which is, if I recall correctly, the first big battle between Ittō and the forces of the evil ninja Yagyū clan. Since there's still several thousand pages of story to go, neither Ittō nor Yagyū Retsudō, his nemesis, are completely victorious, though they do get to cross swords in between Ittō killing just about everyone else in the scene. (Samurai stories, like cowboy stories, usually have a character who is vastly better at dealing out death than is plausible - it's just a trope of the genre, and we have to accept it.)

In the aftermath of "The Yagyū Letter," Ittō is separated from his son Daigorō, and the narrative hints that he might be dead. (Of course he isn't; that's the whole point of this series.) But we get two stories of Daigorō's adventures without his father, and then two more showing what they do separately as Ittō  follows the tracks of his son's path. Daigorō is saved by a former samurai, whose death - and that of his mentally disabled son - allows Daigorō to flee. In the second all-Daigorō story, various peasants are amazed and astonished at his shishōgan eyes and calm demeanor, while a temple priestess (I think) loudly insists they should send the kid away because he's bad luck.

She is correct, but that's kind of the point of every Lone Wolf and Cub story: crossing the paths of either Ogami is likely to shorten your life, often down to the next few minutes. 

The last story here sees a starving and nearly-dead Daigorō picked up and nursed back to health by a bandit as a "straw boy" - he and his two henchmen can travel more easily if they're not obviously a band of thugs, and a little boy helps sell that story. Since this means Daigorō is "working" - he's a look-out for the gang, among other things - the kid then allows himself to be fed and regains his strength. The authorities are close on the bandit's tail, though, and everyone but Daigorō dies in the end.

Daigorō has not reunited with his father Ittō yet; I assume that will happen in the next volume. And Yagyū Retsudō and his remaining forces are still nearby - I think; it can be difficult to follow the geography in this series - ready to attack once again. So danger still lurks, as always, but Ittō and his fancy sword will be slicing torsos for another eighteen volumes to come.

Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Last novels are often incomplete, fragmentary, not fully formed. Details might be fluid in different chapters, as if the author hadn't fully made up his mind, or changed it. Characterization could be sketchy, with motives left murky. Transitions may be abrupt, leaving lingering questions.

Of course, all of those things were already true of Gene Wolfe's novels to begin with. So it is difficult to say which aspects of Interlibrary Loan - his final novel, though reportedly turned in to his publishers as final before his death - are muddled because of finality and which are muddled on purpose because of Wolfe being Wolfe.

I'll also say that, though I'm fond of many of Wolfe's books, I've found his late work - roughly since the death of his longtime agent Virginia Kidd in 2003, though I have no idea if that means anything - to be lesser and thinner. I went through those points with A Borrowed Man, the 2015 novel to which Interlibrary Loan is a sequel. My main concern is that none of these books seem to be informed by anything that has happened in the world past about 1950: they're all retro-futures, populated by men with hats on the side of their heads and the dizzy dames that befuddle them. (Oh, and those dames are essentially unknowable: that's the biggest thing. Women aren't people.)

Here's a quote from p.30 of Interlibrary that alludes to that:

If I said "girl," it would sound like nineteen or twenty with curves and makeup, right? So I won't. Let's call her a kid. 

No. No one born since 1960 would automatically think "girl" means "hot babe I want to fuck."

And here's another bit, from p. 165:

Audrey had been good for sex most nights, but that was bound to stop sooner or later. When it did, would Ricci and Idona be around? And willing? Maybe so - and maybe not.

Ricci would be cozy and a lot of fun, but hard to get rid of if I ever wanted to get rid of her. Also she would make every guy who saw her jealous, which might get me in a lot of scrapes. Idona would be hell on wheels. Sometimes that means lots of fun in bed, but she would be hell on wheels twenty-four/seven.

Um, yeah. So that's the mindset of Late Wolfe: a certain WWII-era boyishness that also comes out in stated desires to keep a really cool knife he comes across and a wish that he still had a neato rifle he once had. I don't think Wolfe intended to make his hero a sex-mad teenager, but his hero does think and act like one.

Like Borrowed, our hero here is Ern A. Smythe, the "reclone" of a once-popular (at least a hundred years before) mystery writer kept as a circulating resource in the Spice Grove Public Library. Oh, and the name says "public," but authors require large fees - particularly deposits - to be checked out, so it's not "government-funded and free" in the way that "public" means these days.

I spent a lot of words on Borrowed Man about how implausible this world is, in so many ways - take all of that as read here.

This time, Smythe and two other reclones - by the way, either Wolfe or his characters have the usual confusion between an author and their work; in the real world, a detective writer is not a detective and a romance author is not a whore - are transferred, in a complicated way, though the big central library at Niagara Falls to a small town called Polly's Cove, which seems to be in what was the Canadian Maritimes.

There, he gets caught up in the affairs of the Fevre family. It's all Wolfeanly vague in the end - one or more of these people may be duplicates, or reclones, or both - but most of them are women so they only get broad characterization to begin with. (Matronly and good at cooking, or hot to trot, or comradely and willing to fuck Ern.)

Dr. Barry Fevre is a professor of medicine at a university in Spice Grove, the name of which is never mentioned. He mostly does anatomy, and apparently spends a lot of time trying to get cadavers for his students to dissect. He married Adah more than a dozen years ago, and abandoned her (according to her) at the birth of her daughter Chandra. But Adah is a Wolfe woman, and her one character trait is manic depression - Wolfe doesn't use the term; he always avoids using specific words that mean exact things when he can be vague and allusive instead - so we are not to believe what she says. Their daughter Chandra is twelve, and so, as noted above, is too young to fuck, so is mostly colorless and barely present in the book.

Barry, when Ern finally meets him, says his wife has a mental condition which, alas! the laws of their society require that she be the one to address, and she refuses to, so he is estranged from her and hasn't seen his own daughter for seven or twelve years. (And I mean "seven or twelve" very deliberately here: those are the options.)

Barry has also been mining ancient corpses from an Arctic island called Licholm, where the locals have been chucking their ancestors into an ice cave for a millennium or so. There's a clear discussion that the locals really like their ancestors, and would be very against such mining, but the book also makes it clear that Barry has been mining those corpses for the medical students of Spice Grove to practice on, without ever squaring that particular circle.

Ern is mostly concerned with acting like a detective to figure things out, but those things always turn out to be unimportant or just quickly dropped by the narrative. He also, as I expect most reclones are, is worried about his number of check-outs and vaguely grumpy about the poor living conditions of his kind and annoyed that his conditioning forces him to speak like his original wrote. Oh, and Polly's Corner had an Ern Smythe copy already - a much older, one-armed "earlier edition." That edition dies, possibly murdered, before he can talk to our narrator Ern. None of that has anything to do with what seems to be the main plot of the book.

That main plot is mostly going on in the background. Barry is mining corpses on Licholm this year - he seems to do this during his his sabbaticals, every seven years. He also has discovered that some corpses are not really dead, and can be revived even centuries later with no problems - the Ricci and Idona of the second quote above are two such. Does Barry distinguish between ice-corpses-suitable-for-dissection and ice-corpses-suitable-for-revivification? Not as far as we can see, which is worrying. Perhaps he's just reviving the women with nice tits, since that's the main thing Wolfe tells us about Ricci and Idona.

Barry is also somehow connected with some kind of technology that connects to alternate universes - or maybe just portals to other planets in this universe; Wolfe, as always, will not specify. A big mook comes out of one of those portals and kills Barry, for reasons we never find out. But Ern and a lady cop semi-randomly find one of those portals, wander through into a world of gigantic trees, and kill a guy they're totally sure is the same mook, so that's OK.

Oh, there's also a box that needs to be kept flat or else reality starts to shift around the holder - presumably it's the way portals are made, or otherwise similar tech. It doesn't even get a name other than "the box."

None of that leads to anything. Slightly later, Ern is in Barry's big house, and Barry shows up. Is it a clone, a twin brother, an alternate-universe version? Your guess is as good as anyone's.

And then the novel ends abruptly. None of the various things that might have been its plot are really resolved. I could blame that on last-novel-itis, but I think Interlibrary Loan is mostly the book Wolfe wanted it to be. I think, if he'd lived longer, it would have been 10-15% longer, with some more connective material and slightly less vagueness, but Late Wolfe is inherently like this. Loan is just the culmination of his direction for the last twenty years of his career.

If you're in the mood to untangle some Wolfe, I'd suggest one of the series with "Sun" in the title, or The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Secondarily, anything published in the last century.

Seek You by Kristen Radtke

One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the "here's a trend; what does it mean?" book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; breezy or deep; based on research or vibes. But I don't think it's been presented in comics form much, if at all.

Kristen Radtke, though, seems to be carving out that as her niche. Her first book, 2017's Imagine Wanting Only This, was largely a memoir - a genre very common in graphic books for the last thirty or so years, post-Maus - but also an examination of what it means to want things, and how we know what we want.

Her second book came out four years later, and had many of the same elements in a different mix: less memoir, more research, more rigor. Seek You feels like a book that could have been done in prose, possibly by someone like Mary Roach, but the comics format adds depth and focuses attention in ways that prose can't. (Every format has its strengths; the same story can be told well in opera, film, or lyric poetry but it won't be told well the same way.)

Seek You is about loneliness, in particular the oft-remarked "epidemic of loneliness" in American life. Radtke's touchstones include scientific research (especially the monkeys of Harry Harlow), ham radio, laugh tracks, gun culture and the image of the cowboy, the rise of the Internet and mobile technology, romantic comedies and the image of the princess, changing ideas about child-rearing in the 20th century, and Casey Kasem's long-distance dedications. It's explicitly in the line of modern books starting with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, that say "Americans are more separated than ever; here's the reasons I think matter most." There's a bit of politics in it, but not a lot: there is clearly an element of politics over the past two generations that has deliberately fomented anger and distrust among Americans, which directly led to increased loneliness. Radtke points to that, more visually than in her narrative, to note that it exists and is one strand of this story.

Radtke starts with specifics and builds up to her central theme: this is a book about connections, if mostly about the lack of them, how they have thinned out over historical time and inevitably thin out towards the end of a person's life. It's broken into sections in clusters centered around the senses, about ways to connect - Listen, Watch, Touch. The sections connect loosely to form the full picture - and I mean "picture" deliberately; Radtke uses the comics format to include images the reader will recognize, explicitly or vaguely, as she tells her overall story.

Some books in this genre have an answer, a solution to the problem they examine. Those tend to be the more facile ones, and often the bestsellers. Radtke has some ideas, and some thoughts, and plenty of evidence and details, but she doesn't have a fix to this problem - it's not something that can be fixed quickly or easily. But she does explain what we know, and where the answer likely might be.

Seek You is focused on Americans - the subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness" -  but I think the problem isn't purely American, or even more American than general. But Radtke is American (as so am I), and a book can't be about everything, so it's a natural focus.

A different version of this book, by someone else, might have compared nations, and national spirits, to examine which are the most lonely, and what that means. Radtke, instead, wants to chart American loneliness over time - has it been this bad before? who was lonely then and who is now? how personal is it and how systemic? She does this well, with a lot of research informing a fairly long (350 pages), fairly wordy graphic novel - it's serious and thoughtful without being weighty.

If you've ever felt alone, and wondered how to change that, Seek You is a good book for you - Radtke has a lot of ideas, and a lot of research, and a lot of pictures, and a lot of words that might help.

Planeta by Ana Oncina

I'll admit I don't always understand what makes a book "manga" in the American market. Translated from Japanese - sure, that's obvious. Korean and Chinese comics get more complicated, since those generally read left to right, but getting fussy about "manhwa" or "manhua" smells a bit too much of the lamp.

But if a book is by a Spanish creator, why are the pages organized in an English-language edition to flow right-to-left when each page reads left-to-right (like the Spanish read, like English-language also reads, like most European languages), and why is it called a manga?

At that point, I start to think it's purely a marketing slogan, detached from the actual content of the book. Doesn't mean anything negative, but it has stopped imparting any useful information to the reader other than "the publisher thinks you will like this if you've liked other stuff they did." 

That brings me to Ana Oncina's [1] 2025 "manga" Planeta, a science-fiction story by the creator behind the cozy Empanada & Croquette series and the 2023 teen-lesbian romance Just Friends. It was published in a romance line, Love Love, though I would not characterize it as a romance. On the other hand, it is largely about the relationship between the two main characters, and they do meet and form a relationship over the course of the book.

Well, in one reality, they do...

Planeta takes place in two realities. Valentina is a young woman living in a small cabin in the woods with her dog Soup, near a small town she visits regularly for supplies and human contact. She makes pottery, and sells it both online and at local craft fairs. It's heading into winter. The time is "now," as far as we can tell.

VAL3 is a young woman in a medium-future universe where humans have fled a devastated earth. Everyone lives in couples, each with a small module inside a transparent bubble, on the inhospitable planet Nebulon, or "Planeta." The couples are matched to each other from birth, and grow up together under the care of robots. Their society is like Asimov's Spacers, but even more so: they never meet anyone else outside of VR. VR is their main way of experiencing everything; Oncina doesn't show any of them working but does imply money still exists.

VAL3 is matched with AN3. The two are in love, as they must be. They have been very happy together. We don't know how aging works in this world, or how old they really are, but let's assume they are fairly young, as they look to be.

Valentina is dreaming of being VAL3, and vice versa - or the same mind is switching between the two realities every time she goes to sleep.

And then Valentina sees another young woman in that small town, who looks exactly like AN3. Her name is Anna; she's staying at a B&B in town for an extended time. The two fall in love - as we see in the other reality, they're perfectly matched for each other, right?

VAL3 isn't happy anymore. The life as Valentina, in a living world, is more compelling than her entirely-VR life in the sterile module. Oncina doesn't directly compare the relationships in the two worlds, but I had to wonder if the newness and surprise of Valentina's new relationship with Anna was also a factor, compared to the inevitability and day-to-day-ness of VAL3 and AN3.

VAL3 withdraws, spends all of her time in bed, trying to get back to the other world. She neglects her partner AN3, her friends, everything about her life. She consults with an AI therapist, which doesn't help. She just keeps being told this is her life; it's wonderful and as good as human could ever wish for; she must be grateful and live this life or else.

That escalates; the implied "or else" is the way the book ends.

There's a version of this story where Valentina/VAL3 is inspired by her double life; where she takes ideas from one back to the other; where being with the same woman in two worlds means they're meant for each other and that brings them closer together. This is not that story. This is the story where a cold SF world is inherently off-putting, wrong, inorganic, sterile, stifling - and the reader is supposed to see and sympathize with that, and not with poor neglected AN3.

I found the ending of Planeta strong but a bit unearned, and quite a puzzler for a book published as a romance. It also collapses the essential question of which world is real, when an ending that kept that ambiguous could be more interesting.

But Oncina tells the story she meant to tell well, with crisp art, cleanly differentiating the two worlds through color - but still making them parallel as well. (The book ends with schematics of the cabin and the module - our heroine's homes in both worlds - which emphasizes how similar they are.) I might wish she had made different choices, but it was never my choice.

[1] Translated by Diego Jourdan Pereira, which I didn't find room to fit in anywhere else.

All of This and Nothing: One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

"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 like self-indulgent media more than most people, I think - long rambly shaggy-dog stories in whatever format, from MST3K's sublime "A Joke by Ingmar Bergman" to Tristram Shandy.

This week's song is the musical equivalent of that: a fifty-year old version of a much older blues song, by what was then called George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers, from their 1977 debut record. (Some of you might prefer the John Lee Hooker version; that's valid but I don't agree.)

This week, we've got "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer." No "and" in the title - it's late, and you gotta get some drinking done, so there's no time for wasted words.

The "song" is actually a medley; the story-song portion that opens it is a different Hooker song, "House Rent Boogie" - but who cares about that at this point? It all goes together, and it all tells one story. You want to nitpick?

I said I know,
everybody funny, now you funny too

Thorogood was in peak form here, in his early incarnation as a bar-band slide-guitar hero - before the blandness of the '80s took over his schtick. The guitar work is blazing, and his singing is just perfect for the song: dismissive, offhand, barely engaged until the subject of alcohol comes up.

No I ain't seen my baby since
Nigh on a week
Gotta get drunk man
Till I can't even speak

Blues songs are like noir in that they're about the main character doing things the wrong way, or for the wrong reason, or just ruining things - getting blotto drunk in some dive bar because his girl is off somewhere else doing something else. And, if you don't have your girl, what else is there in life? That's the blues.

One drink ain't enough
Jack you better make it three
I wanna get drunk
I'm gonna make it real clear
I want one bourbon,
one scotch and one beer

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Reporting, Circa 1996

Price had taken what the police had told him and gone straight to work on it; the thought that there might be more to discover would never occur to him. His job wasn't to find things out, his job was to 'make' stories. Some innuendo here, some association there and voila: you had fifteen pars on the front page that suggested much but actually told you fuck-all.

The success of popular reporting since the Eighties has lain in the practice of massively increasing the ration of column inches to facts. Facts were both expensive and time-consuming to procure, so you had to use them as sparingly as possible.

 - Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning, p.38

Quote of the Week: Not Bad for Government Work

General Stubblebine countered by setting his psychic spies on Noriega. This was the Fort Meade team, who worked out of a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Maryland and who, as a result of not officially existing, had no coffee budget, a fact they had come to resent. They were also going stir-crazy. Their offices were claustrophobic, and many of them didn't much like each other to begin with. One, a major called Ed Dames, had taken to psychically spying on the Loch Ness monster during the fallow months, when there wasn't much official military psychic work. He determined it was a dinosaur's ghost. This finding irritated some of the others, who considered it unscientific and frankly implausible. Another psychic spy, David Morehouse, was soon to check himself into a psychiatric hospital as a result of an excess of psychic spying.

 - John Ronson, The Men who Stare at Goats, p.80

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking they looked like fun, and having to go back to reading things for my program instead. I think, over the last few decades, he became just a standard Big Thing in much of the English-speaking world, though sadly not a Thing at all in the USA.

Looking him up now, I'm seeing his major series - which started with this book, his first novel - with radically different cover treatments on current editions, and many of them showing up for sale in their UK editions here. That's a sign the US market has not been kind to Brookmyre, for whatever reasons.

And that's disappointing, because on the evidence of Quite Ugly One Morning, his 1996 debut, Brookmyre is something like a Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen, with funny, fast-plotted thriller novels with a political undertone, smart-ass characters who get themselves into more trouble than they expect, and amusingly baroque levels of violence.

It might be the "Scottish" bit that caused the trouble - parts of Quite Ugly get into nearly Trainspotting-levels of Scots dialect and spelling. I found nearly everything clear from context, but a few random words were puzzlers - and there's a Black LA police detective, in one flashback scene, who does not talk like an American at all. It's the kind of thing that can bounce American readers out of a book, I suppose.

The series hero here is Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist with a talent for getting himself into trouble, not least because he's good at burglary, which we are told he only uses (these days) in the line of duty. He got into hot water in London for exposing the wrong people and fled to LA, where the same things happened - and more seriously, since the wrong people in LA hire killers, and one tried to murder Parlabane.

So now he's newly in Edinburgh, having just landed a day or two before and about to look for newspaper work there. (This is 1996; newspapers were still booming.) But there was a horrific murder in the flat one floor below his last night, which he did not hear because of the usual all-too-Scottish over-indulgence in alcohol. So he wanders into the crime scene, in his underwear, hungover but endlessly inquisitive.

He's briefly a suspect, but, more importantly, it triggers Parlabane's need to get to the bottom of things. So he starts investigating on his own.

At the same time - this is a thriller, not a mystery - we get scenes from the POV of both the murderer (mostly a Standard Thriller Thug with Scottish Characteristics) and his boss, a deeply Tory and horribly self-satisfied wanker who is head of a NHS Trust and looking to use that to personally enrich himself. There is, of course, a nasty scheme behind the murder of Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby, and Parlabane connects with Ponsonby's ex-wife, the anesthetist Dr. Sarah Slaughter, as they both have separate clues that can join up to help solve the crime.

Among other major characters, there's a few cops, including a youngish lesbian woman who is willing to listen to Parlabane's theories and is not immediately dismissive of them. And this is a short novel, so it rattles very quickly through a lot of scenes - often very colorful, in language or violence or setting or all three - on the way to a big ending with Slaughter, Parlabane, the murderer, and the wanker.

It is a fun romp, the more so if you are inclined to align with Brookmyre's regular, quite pointed, but often sidebar attacks on Toryism - our villain is very much like the guy in this meme:

I'm going to be looking for more Brookmyre books myself - I've got thirty years to catch up on - so take that as a recommendation if you like.

The Pass by Katriona Chapman

Mea culpa: I put off reading this book for several months because I thought it would be heavy, wordy, "serious." It is not. Creator Katriona Chapman tells her story swiftly, lovingly, on full-bleed pages of softly painted color, and both shows rather than tells and has a positive story to present.

The reader does need to figure some details of that story out. Though, if you're paying close attention, the very first page, right before the title, gives it all away.

The Pass is about Claudia, a young chef in London. Her father ran a famous restaurant for years, so she grew up in the business - and she has a lot of expectations and demands related to that. (Mostly from her parents, who I think mean well but are sure they know best in every situation and are endlessly willing to give their advice increasingly forcefully until Claudia does what they say.)

She's a few years out of culinary school, and opened a restaurant, Alley, with her best friend from school, Lisa. We don't know the exact business arrangement, but it seems like they started out as partners but somehow - Lisa has a young child and a partner with medical issues; Claudia is focused entirely on the restaurant and her parents provided the seed money - Claudia is "chef" and Lisa is very much in a support role. The third major player is Ben, the bartender - he does a lot of the host's role in the dining room (calming unhappy customers, in particular) and is as inventive in his drinks as Claudia is with the food.

Alley seems to be fine dining but not fussy: the kind of restaurant that's been popular, especially in big cities, over the past decade or two. Claudia goes to the fish market early in the morning, obsesses about presentation, makes new dishes regularly: that kind of thing. It seems to be consistently busy, and making money - popular at least in the neighborhood, with a growing larger reputation.

And the big Pro Chef of the Year competition is coming up; a major food writer who visits Alley encourages Claudia to enter, and we think she's probably hearing the same thing from others as well.

Meanwhile, there are other stresses  - the bookkeeper for the restaurant, Lisa's brother Jack, is not particularly communicative; all three principals have complicated relationships with their families; and just the day-to-day of running a restaurant is grinding and demanding.

The Pass covers close to a year in the life of Alley, starting with the day before Christmas. We follow all of the main characters as they live their separate lives and come together at Alley, but Claudia is at the center of it. Chapman never directly tells us any of her thoughts. Instead we see her live through all of this, navigate it as best she can, until we start to wonder, along with her, if this is really what she wants. In the end, The Pass is about a decision Claudia makes - a decision hinted at by the title.

There's a lot of depth here, a lot of carefully-observed life, and a fairly large cast all seen honestly. Even Claudia's parents, in their domineering know-it-all-ness, are doing what they are sure is right, and trying to be helpful. And it's all presented lovingly on comics pages that tell this story unfussily, as much through gesture and things left unsaid as in its major scenes.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania by Doug Savage

First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly disappoints me.

That might be the only criticism I have of this book, so I'm putting it up front.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania is the fifth and most recent book in this middle-grade graphic-novel series, written and drawn by Doug Savage, who more adult readers might know from his online comic Savage Chickens.

Laser Moose is, yes, a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes (when he wants to) and Rabbit Boy is his best friend, a happy and slightly more reality-based fellow without any superpowers. They've previously appeared in the books Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, Disco Fever, Time Trout, and As the Deer Flies.

They have adventures, generally of the kind involving animal supervillains - well, animals with strange and unusual powers, but not necessarily bwah-ha-ha evil except for the villainous Cyborgupine - in their forest home. They have a supporting cast with a few named characters - Frank the deer, Doc the raccoon, Gus the wolf - and many more squirrels and eagles and other folks who fill out the crowd scenes. The tone is just a couple of clicks towards goofy: the danger is treated as actual danger, but these are the kind of books where we know everything will turn out right in the end. And our heroes have a somewhat different perspective on everything, being North American forest animals, than their readers do.

(There has been some light ecological content, especially in the end-of-book educational exercises Savage includes - mostly along the lines of "the McGuffin here is a weirdly polluting thing from those humans, who are always causing trouble.")

So this time out we start with Cyborgupine being chased by an ominous spider, and then crashing a party at Doc's house, to celebrate Frank getting the casts off his legs this time. (A running joke is that Laser Moose keeps cutting off Frank's legs or otherwise injuring him, and Doc has to keep stitching him up.) Laser Moose is a bit sad, because he doesn't like parties: he'd prefer to be a "lone wolf," which concept Rabbit Boy has been quizzing him about.

Cyborgupine arrives, with an important piece of paper and saying the usual vague and portentous things, before his eyes turn purple, he starts spitting spider webs, and will only say "We are spider." In best zombie-movie fashion, he starts biting party-goers, who in turn also get purple eyes and declare themselves to be spider.

Our heroes flee, grabbing the paper, and head to Cyborgupine's VW microbus HQ. There, they learn that one of Cy's "father's" (a human scientist who had a lot of weird experiments, one of which produced Cyborgupine and several of which caused the plots of the previous books) notebooks details a plan to create a hive-mind among various animals. That's what happened: there's one spider who was mind-enhanced, and now can control anyone she bites, or who they bite.

The paper is a map to the spider's lair, and so they head there, hoping to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing spider hordes. They do, in the end, without killing the spider or squishing the eggs she thinks she's protecting. And everyone, of course, goes back to normal.

At the end, there's a short piece with Savage-as-himself talking about his fear of spiders, and how, during the creation of this book, he went through a desensitization process to lessen that fear, culminating in an encounter with a giant tarantula.

Again: these are silly, irreverent adventure stories with zippy dialogue and crisp cartooning for an audience of pre-teens. I find that kind of book a lot of fun when done well, and Savage does them very well. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

I saw the movie made from this book long before I actually read it. And I've read several other books by journalist Jon Ronson before getting to this one, finding him usually breezy and amusing but not always bringing as much depth as I might want. (See Them in particular, and also somewhat The Psychopath Test.)

So I wanted to see if the book The Men Who Stare at Goats was much like the movie, or like Ronson's other books. It was published in late 2004, and it's very much an Iraq-War-era book, a look at a particular wild-hair strain of thinking within the US military-industrial complex, which strain had become somewhat more relevant and visible at that point because the US MIC was flush with cash and taken off its leash and urged to Do Anything that would help in its not-particularly-well-defined mission to Make The World Safe For Americans Again.

The premise of Stare at Goats is: there's a group of US soldiers who have tried to use various psychic or paranormal powers, vaguely centered on Fort Bragg and led in the early Reagan years by a guy named General Stubblebine. Ronson talked to Stubblebine, and then to others that he found, to see what those psychic powers might be, if they were real, and what weird things this bunch of soldiers got up to.

Like Ronson's other books, it's very much a "I talked to This Guy, and this is what he said" book. I think Ronson is of the "don't question a good story" school of journalism, rather than the "if your mother says she loves you, check it out" school. That means there is a lot of material here where Ronson is presenting it somewhat skeptically, or at least wanting the reader to believe that he's not accepting it whole-heartedly, while still presenting the crazy idea, because it's zippy and fun and that's the material he has for this book. What I'm saying is: Stare at Goats would either be a lot shorter (leaving out everything dubious) or a lot longer (explaining why it's dubious) if Ronson had spent any substantial time in fact-checking.

Instead, this is full of those stories that are too good to question, which readers should believe exactly as much as they believe in similar stories. Ron's narrative does intersect with proven, journalistic history multiple times - a CIA agent's mysterious death in 1953, some verified details of interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, the Heaven's Gate death-cult, and other places - so those are clear facts.

But it also has several retired military leaders who solemnly tell Ronson that they personally witnessed someone stare a goat to death - well, OK, maybe it was a hamster, but still! - that by thinking really hard it's possible to walk through walls, and other patently stupid ideas. Many of those are Vietnam-era guys, and Ronson does note that war as a source of trauma for individuals and the larger US armed forces, so maybe that's his excuse for how delusional so many of them are.

Stare at Goats is a meandering, discursive book. Ronson picks up successive threads, gets told fantastic things by people with axes to grind, does not make any serious efforts to prove those things actually happened, follows up some minor leads until the trail inevitably quickly grows cold, and then moves on to another old military hand with a somewhat different nutty story. There's a vague through-line with Colonel Jim Shannon and his '70s-era manifesto about the First Earth Battalion, a catalog of a whole lot of those nutty ideas that others later developed (or didn't), but Ronson also drops back late in the book to hit MK-ULTRA, the CIA program in the '50s and '60s that dosed scientists with LSD and did other, equally useful and deeply scientific things.

And the lens for every section is whatever guy Ronson talked to: this is the collective story of a bunch of self-aggrandizing folks, many of whom were at the time (just post-911, early Iraq War, when the military contracts were flowing like the oil would be at Rumaila once the fires were put out) trying to get lucrative government contracts to do whatever they claimed they could do and who used Ronson as a way to publicize their amazing powers.

It's a vague, incomplete, and confusingly organized catalog of various "unconventional warfare" ideas that various aspects of the US military and related agencies had in the fifty or so years up to 2004, without any attempt to put any of it into serious historical context, get comments from any then-current government people, or fact-check it. On the other hand, it is funny throughout, it features some absolutely fascinating oddball characters, and there are more than a few actual facts within it for careful readers. And anyone inclined to think large militaries are full of idiots who make bad decisions for venial and self-serving reasons will find much to love.

(The movie turned some this material into a fictionalized, and, as I recall, somewhat more straightforward narrative, in which at least a few of the unconventional warfare tricks actually worked and there was something of a thriller plot in Iraq.)

All of This and Nothing: Quit While You're Ahead

"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 it's another Obscure choice: a 2007 single from a band with at least this one good record, about whom I don't know much else.

Quit While You're Ahead is from Southeast Engine, who were big enough to have a Wikipedia page listing their seven records. But, on that page, the most recent record listed is from 2012, and the first outside link is to MySpace, so I suspect they're solidly defunct at this point.

But a song, once recorded, lives on. And this is a good one.

The singer is talking to someone: someone who's trying to convince him of something, and has almost succeeded.

So tell me what I believe
tell what it is I need
tell me you'll provide it for me yes
and I will do anything for you
I'll do anything you tell me to
I'll mistake the lies you sell me for the truth

But that other person hasn't quite closed the deal yet.

Say it, say it like it is
you got thirty seconds kid
you got all the time you need

It's all in a straightforward rock presentation, big and impressive and driving, with strong drumming and guitar work to support that compelling voice. What more do I need to say?

Books Read: July 2026

I'm slightly back-dating this; I'm writing in the late morning of August 2, and setting the post-time to be a few hours ago, mostly for tidiness reasons. (I don't remember why I set posts for 8:30 AM in my time zone, but, by Gum! it's my standard and a man has got to have standards.)

Here's what I read this past month:

Ana Oncina, Planeta (digital, 7/3)

Kristen Radtke, Seek You (7/4)

Gene Wolfe, Interlibrary Loan (7/4)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child (digital, 7/5)

Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, The Cartoonists Club (digital, 7/6)

P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves (7/6)

Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics (7/7)

Guy Delisle, Muybridge (7/8)

Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (7/8)

John Porcellino, Perfect Example (7/9)

Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You (7/10)

John Cuneo's Good Intentions (7/11)

Shinji Kaijo and Kenji Tsuruta, Emanon, Vol. 1 (digital, 7/12)

Martha Wells, Witch King (7/12)

Mike Dawson, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James (7/18)

David Small, The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories (7/19)

Joe Sacco, The Once and Future Riot (7/25)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 11: Seasons (digital, 7/26)

Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (7/28)

Next month I'll be back with another one of these.

Quote of the Week: On That We Can All Agree

Ugh. I hate these kind of decisions. Any decisions, actually. Decisions suck.

 - Martha Wells, Platform Decay. pp.70

Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell has one of those modern gig-style careers where she does multiple things (I presume to get something vaguely like the life the previous generation had with A Job that they kept for decades). She does burlesque and stand-up comedy, illustrates books for other people, cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, makes documentaries - and has done two book-length comics memoirs about specific aspects of her life and family.

I read the second one, The Joy of Snacking, soon after publication a few months back. It's a dense, fun, amusing and deep look at a woman who has certain very specific issues with food and made that into both a great story and a thoughtful exploration of the world she lives in.

So I figured I had to go back to her first book. Murder Book was published in 2021, and it's just as dense, thoughtful, personal, funny and insightful as Snacking. Both could be reduced to clichés about modern women - Snacking is the "nothing for me; I'll just pick" book, and Murder is the "why are so many women obsessed with true crime podcasts?" one.

Campbell's remit is wider than podcasts, though: she's low-key obsessed with true crime in general, books and movies and streaming TV (and the wider world of ripped-from-the-headlines but not-quite-true crime, like Law & Order) as well as podcasts, and she has several friends and family members (one sister and their mother in particular) just as obsessed as she is. She's honest about the genre: the template true crime story is about the mysterious death of an attractive (young, white, more often than not blonde) woman, and how, usually, Some Man is found to be responsible and brought to justice. 

Murder Book is organized roughly into chapters - she has full-page white-text-on-black headers to introduce sections, but they're not titled like chapters, and the narrative flows conversationally throughout - with an introduction and then sections on the various different types of true crime and true-crime-adjacent media (movies, books, TV like 48 Hours, TV like Law & Order, streaming shows, podcasts, and so on), plus a few more about her family's history with true crime (she traces the obsession back to her mother's mother's mother, which is pretty impressive and/or worrying).

Along the way, she retells some of her "favorite" murder stories - the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy have long sections, among others - mostly through the lens of how she heard the story and engaged with it. Campbell grew up in northern California in the '90s, and compares that with her mother's life, in San Francisco and nearby, during the serial-killer-soaked '70s: both of them felt like death and murder were everywhere around them, though it was probably more true for her mother than the more media-influenced Campbell.

Like Snacking, this is conversational and funny, with long back-and-forth dialogue and extensive narrative captions: Campbell is telling this story, and it's in her voice throughout. Her art is cartoony, with dot eyes and mostly simple figures. Her pages have panels jammed up right against each other without gutters, and tiers that don't always line up, to keep that headlong, energetic, "I'm going-to-tell-you-everything-I-can-think-of" style.

Campbell does get into the "why do women love true crime so much" question, dipping back into it a couple of times during the book, and tends to come down on the worry/fascination side. True crime is about the deaths of women, so women look at it, think "that could be me," and want to know more. Campbell, as a stand-up comedian, joked that she loved true crime so much she wanted to be a murder victim - but she mostly thinks it's the other way, that women consume so much true crime to learn all of the tricks and keep themselves alive.

It's a big book, and a dense one. It might have more about murder than many people want at once - but, clearly, there is a huge audience for murder, so I don't think that's a major problem.

And Campbell has a lot of fun with it. It's weird to say a book so much about murder is breezy, fun, and amusing, but Murder Book definitely is. It's a passionate observer's guide to true-crime media, combined with her personal history, and still recent enough that it's fairly up-to-date. I'm not personally obsessed with true crime - I'm a man; I think men worry more on the other side of that equation - but Murder Book is a fascinating deep dive into the mostly women who are obsessed with true crime stories, what they find in it, and what it means to them.