Days of Sugar and Spice by Loïc Clément and Anne Montel

We tend to think of certain genres as being intrinsically tied to a medium - sometimes, right up until the point where it's obvious they do translate into other media. Think superheroes: they were clearly something that only worked right on the comics page - until special effects and other moviemaking skills leveled up enough to equal it.

Specifically, I thought of a certain kind of romance - Young Woman with a Modern Urban Job in The Big City goes back to Quaint Childhood Village, meets A Nice Guy with A Quirky Job there, possibly has An Inconvenient Inheritance that forces her to Confront Her Past and Think What She Wants Out of Life, possibly has a Sassy Friend to Provide Commentary and Drive Her to a Realization - was inherently cinematic.

Well, by "cinematic" I mean filmed and two hours long. But probably an original on The Hallmark Channel.

I'm here to tell you today that writer Loïc Clément and artist Anne Montel successfully ported that genre into bande dessinée form with Days of Sugar and Spice, originally published in France by Dargaud in 2016 and in the Montana Kane translation I read by Europe Comics in 2019.

The woman is Rose Lemon; she's about thirty - as required by the form - and works as a freelance graphic designer in Paris, that job also right down the broad middle of the genre. She has a particularly annoying client who keeps making stupid changes, as required. Her contact at the client is also the requisite Big City Man Who Is Her Current FWB But Doesn't Appreciate Her - his name is Edouard, and we never see him on the page. Rose lives with her best friend Mei, the sassy truth-teller.

Her mother is dead; something vaguely tragic and not entirely specified a few years in the past.

But her father, whom she was estranged from since her parents separated twenty years ago, has just now died. And he's left his boulangerie, Brav Eo, to her.

So she has to take the train, down through scenic Brittany, to the small town of Klervi. There, local lawyer Joseph Doré tells her the town is slowly dying: their big industry (an oil refinery) closed up a couple of decades ago, and, since then, the local Largaux vineyard has been buying up properties as locals retire, die, or leave. Largaux has a growing staff of low-paid workers - probably migrants, though this point isn't stressed - that it low-key exploits. But the important point is that they control more and more of the quaint old town, and, once they get enough of it, are going to replace this real (if dying) town with "an American-style attraction." (Think some weird fusion of Disneyland and a studio tour, featuring a fakey version of the winery.)

Shock! Horror!

Doré tells Rose all of this; he clearly wants her to keep the boulangerie running. She just wants to sell it - to Largaux if necessary - and get back to her real life.

But she misses the last train out that day - trains are deeply inconvenient, and regularly missed, in romantic stories like this one - and has to spend the night at Brav Eo. On the way through those enchanting streets, she runs into her childhood friend Gael Fougiére, now the much-beloved schoolteacher of Klervi. And she learns her half-forgotten great-aunt Marronde is still living next door to Brav Eo and had been working in the boulangerie, but had a stroke a few years back and now cannot speak.

She misses the train in the morning, too, and ends up wandering about town with Gael. She's clearly attracted to him - the form requires it - and she ends up apologizing to him and Marronde about her bad attitude, and staying in Klervi longer than expected.

Long enough to find an old diary of her father's, full of "his baking experiments," which she takes back to Paris to read, and soon starts baking those recipes she finds in it.

Does she go back to Klervi, to start a situationship with Gael and re-open the boulangerie? Is that re-opening at first very unsuccessful, until she connects more closely with the local community? Does her sassy friend come for an extended visit, bringing heaping helpings of sass? Does Rose flee back to Paris after a Fateful Discovery, but eventually come back for the Happy Ending?

I hope I don't need to answer any of those questions.

Clément keeps the tone light, with a Greek Chorus of local cats that comment on the action several times during the book. He also organizes it all into chapters, each named after one kind of pastry - some more informed critic could tell you if there's some kind of progression or sequence of those names; I can just note that they're all yummy things I'd be happy to eat from a quaint pastry shop in Brittany. Montel draws it with an equally light line, illustrative and often vignetted rather than having panel borders; that and her soft colors (pencils?) gives the whole thing a warm, personal, almost sketchbook feel.

Days of Sugar and Spice will not surprise you, but who comes to a Hallmark Romance for surprise? It tells its genre story skillfully and has a good, crabby, particular heroine in Rose: she's the kind of person the reader wants to see happy in the end, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Uri Tupka and the Gods by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart

Mike Mignola seems to be settling into his "Lands Unknown" for an extended stay; that's a good thing for those of us who enjoyed the light touch and quirky bits of folklore - not to mention the pure joy of storytelling evident throughout - that he brought to the first "Lands Unknown" book, Bowling for Corpses.

In possibly even-better news for long-term Mignola fans, he's also shifted to a longer narrative, with a main character who he says will return in at least one more book. This isn't like Hellboy; the world is not constructed around a single character that we'll follow for a decade. But we might get more than the quick views of semi-archetypes that we got in Bowling.

Uri Tupka and the Gods is the second "Lands Unknown" book, a standalone graphic novel set in that world. The background is one part Europe in the Dark Ages and several parts vaguely Europeanesque fantasy-novel-land, of the style stretching back to Bob Howard. We get bits of maps in this book, with clusters of small countries with evocative titles and a "Northern Empire" lurking on the edge of that map, plus the usual dangerous wildlife (in one scene a forest giant fights a river dragon) and humans (pirates, caught between those aforementioned monsters). Mignola throws out minor details of the world, which could be hooks for further stories or just local color, as his hero navigates through it.

Uri Tupka is a scholar in late middle age, who has spent his life studying the gods of this world. Along with a few colleagues, he sent a letter condemning the emperor for some kind of statue, for which he was declared a heretic - his colleagues were seized and killed immediately. But Tupka had a prophetic dream, which told him to run - and so he did.

He travels south, as a pilgrim, after a fateful encounter with a local hermit. He is actually on a pilgrimage, honestly - to find out what happened to the gods, who were part of normal life in the deep past but are distant and unseen now. He has various other adventures, including frightening episodes with a devil-figure and various naked flying witch-women. I won't give more detail than that: this is an episodic, picaresque book - and a fairly short one - so the episodes are best read for themselves.

But he does make it to an ancient city, with a famous temple to the gods. (This world has lots and lots of gods, by the way: Mignola names a handful of them but says there are vastly more, seeding the ground for as many more stories as he wants to tell.) And then he goes on from there to an even more remote and strange place, where he does learn where the gods are now and what they are doing.

Again, I don't want to give away the whole thing, but this is a Manichean world, as fantasy worlds usually are. There is an Adversary, opposed to humanity and life and light and happiness, with as much or more power as the forces of light. And Tupka now has a new focus for his studies: that adversary and its minions. That will come in the second book about Tupka, which Mignola promises at the end here.

Mignola's art is strong and inspired in Uri Tupka, with writing quirky and specific - this new world has clearly inspired him, and he's pouring out its details in stories that play well to his strengths. I hope he keeps up this pace - a new "Lands Unknown" book a year for a while would be a nice thing.

All of This and Nothing: The Dead Heart

"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.

Back to the '80s once more for this week's Famous song.

I don't want to say music is always about passion and energy - there's a place for coolness and craft - but it's a huge part, particularly in all of the sounds that came from rock & roll.

Midnight Oil was a band founded on and driven by a very particular, geographically-specific and politically-grounded kind of energy. All of their strong songs are in the "grab up your banners and march" mode; I think this one is the most successful, but there are several others that are close.

This week, the song is The Dead Heart.

We don't serve your country
Don't serve your king
Know your custom don't speak your tongue

The Oils sang about the plight of the Aboriginals more than once, but this is the most pointed, I think - the purest and clearest version. These days, a song this obviously in the voice of someone else might get called appropriation, but the Oils were one of the few saying anything like this in 1987, and were the loudest and strongest. I hope that stands for something; that there's not a modern equivalent of "premature anti-fascism" for well-meaning lefties.

And the song rocks. The Oils were always driving, powerful, loud and just plain rocking. Sure, it was all in the service of their causes, but they knew the music had to be there first. It always was; never more than with this demanding, in-your-face song.

Forty thousand years can make a difference to the state of things
The dead heart lives here

Quote of the Week: The Saved and the Lost

The windshield wipers were going so it must have been raining. It came to me that everything was provisional. Or perhaps the better word was temporary. All the heroic actions of the past are destined to be unmade, the small memories carefully preserved must inevitably come to be forgotten, and everything we are and do and care about will in time be undone. You can save someone's life, but it's not permanent.

We are, all of us, involuntary passengers on fragile ships, visible from the shore for the briefest of moments and then forever gone. No one can say why. Perhaps we were sent here as punishment. Perhaps we were never here in the first place.

Soon enough, there will be no witnesses to prove otherwise.

 - Michael Swanwick, the closing lines of "Ghost Ships," pp.52-53 in The Universe Box

Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I discovered Kenji Tsuruta's work recently, with the atmospheric, Miyazaki-esque Wandering Island series - two volumes to date but incomplete - and thought I should see what else he'd done.

I think I went in the wrong direction. Wandering Island was a story with some fan-service elements - noticeable but forgivable. Tsuruta's more recent book, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1, came out in 2024 in a Dana Lewis translation, and it's...

Well, not to be glib, but it's basically a fan-service with some story elements. This book is thin in multiple ways.

To start with the most obvious one: it collects a full-color intro and fourteen black-and-white chapters - there's less than a hundred and twenty pages of comics here. In some contexts, that's big - it's nearly as long as three French albums, for example. But, for a manga, it's on the short side.

The plot is similarly small: I've seen this described as "slice-of-life," which is not wrong, but is an odd way of describing a book about a single character all alone.

You see, it's about a thousand years in the future. Giant space freighters plow the spacelanes, carrying goods from one star to another. They are clearly traveling in the normal universe, and transit times are in the hundreds of days but not years, so my assumption is that they're relativistic and there's some time-dilation going on for the crews. Tsuruta says nothing about this, and implies that ship and their "ground" contacts are in the same frame of reference. So this may actually be a universe where the stars are substantially closer together, where there's One Neat Trick to make starships travel at some multiple of lightspeed, or a similar dodge away from actual relativistic physics.

Anyway, these ships used to have big crews, back in the early years of interstellar spaceflight, when pirates infested the skies. (Don't get your hopes up: that was a long time ago, and mentioned as deep backstory.) Now those ships are almost completely automated: each one has a single captain, for reasons that may be about crisis resolution, or just someone-to-take-the-fall-if-anything-goes-wrong. The captain has very little to do, most of the time.

Captain Moshi-Moshi Momo is the sole crew of the freighter Blue Chateau, currently on a 500-day trip from one unnamed port to another unnamed port. Momo has made this same run in the Chateau six times before, and done other trips up to a thousand days long, too. She's a seasoned, experienced captain who rarely if ever leaves her ship, even when it's in port.

She's also, apparently, a slim twenty-something Japanese young woman who prefers to spend all of her time naked, which gets me back to the fan-service. I'm assuming this fairly rich civilization has some kind of life-extension tech, which is why Momo has been captaining ships for what must be at least a couple of decades but looks like Tsuruta's favorite college-age hottie.

There are two other characters in Captain Momo. More important is Momo's cat, Grandpa John, her only companion on the Chateau. Tsuruta doesn't say that this unnamed shipping company encourages or requires its employees to have companion animals, but that could make sense. John is an absolutely normal cat, and does only cat things; his role in the book is largely to give Momo someone to talk at.

The third and final character is Momo's unnamed supervisor, who we know is at Proxima Centauri (and who we see in her underwear in a color frontispiece - did I mention this book is wall-to-wall fan-service?) and who talks to Momo a couple of times during the book. Alas, the Chateau is far enough from Proxima that there's a thirty-minute delay in their conversations, which makes them slow and not particularly useful.

Most of these dozen-plus episodes can be summarized as "Momo wanders about the ship, naked, talking to herself or John about various things." In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked. 

I may be a cynic, but I tend to think the bending and stretching are the real point of Captain Momo, and the dialogue and story are an excuse to get to them. Tsuruta has a scratchy, organic line, and he draws this character - she looks a lot like Mikura Amelia from Wandering Island, and, I understand, like most of Tsuruta's protagonists - attractively. So, if you want to see a lot of pages with a young woman who looks like that wandering about naked on her spaceship, with a cat kibitzing, you are in luck.

If you're interested in a slice-of-life story about a solo starship captain battling loneliness, and are less distracted by her attractive nakedness, though, you might not find very much in Secret Base at all.

The Universe Box by Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick writes more short fiction than most genre writers at his level - the average is roughly "none," for those who can get novel contracts, since short fiction is ill-paid and acceptances are quirky and contingent and short fiction is proverbially harder to write than long fiction. But Swanwick tends to have a couple of stories a year, most years, which pile up and become a new collection roughly once a decade.

The last couple were "Not So Much," Said the Cat and, before that, The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Unfortunately for the animal-lovers out there, he doesn't have a similarly-themed title to complete a "trilogy," so this year's collection is The Universe Box.

It collects nineteen stories, originally published between 2012 and 2023, in various anthologies, Clarkesworld, Asimov's, F&SF, Tor.com and some odder places. Two are new to this book; the title story was published in an ultra-limited edition (thirteen copies) by Dragonstairs Press, the imprint run out of Swanwick's house.

I've long-since given up on reading books of short stories with a notebook on my lap, taking notes of character names and plot points and whatnot. (It was my job for a long time, and the thing about habits that used to be your job is: you need to stop doing them when it's no longer your job.) So let me just say that, like a lot of Swanwick, this book mixes fantasy, usually somewhat mythic but with a modern tone, with SF, usually far enough forward in the future to feature major transformations. And that his insights and sentences are as pointed as ever.

I generally don't think a reviewer should talk in great depth about individual stories in a collection, anyway. Either a reader is going to read the book anyway, in which case she is better off going in clean. Or she's never going to read it, in which case why clutter up her memory with irrelevant things?

Swanwick is one of the genre's most elegant and thoughtful writers, and, as always, short fiction is where skill and thought and craft play out most strongly: it's possible to power through a novel (as a writer) with all sorts of flaws, and still have a thing that basically succeeds. Short fiction is much less forgiving; every word needs to work at least pretty well. Swanwick has some real gems here - though I do think the title story is too long, too self-indulgent, and too much of a shaggy-dog story, so I'm not saying everything in here is perfect. But most of it is strong: that's what I'd say about Swanwick in general, too. He's smart; he's sneaky; he's worth reading.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

This is the ninth book of a twenty-eight book series; three hundred pages of stories that fall in the early-middle of a much longer arc. The premise was set up at the beginning: former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō is wandering through Edo-period Japan, taking various murderous jobs as he finds them, while he works on his longer-term goal of getting vengeance on the ninja Yagyū clan who killed his wife and ruined his life. Oh, and he has his toddler son in tow - hence the title.

There are two kinds of stories in Lone Wolf and Cub. We can call them mythology stories and episode-of-the-week stories, if we want. The mythology ones are part of the central spine, and see Ittō interacting - generally at the point of his sword - with the Yagyū. But they are a minority; most of the stories are about Ittō in this town, or wandering through this bit of countryside, and the people he meets (and often kills) along the way.

Echo of the Assassin is almost entirely episode-of-the week stories. It has four long, separate stories, all set somewhere fairly bucolic and rural, with Ittō passing through or doing something to further an assassination job. At the end, there's a shorter piece called "The Yagyū Letter: Prologue," which I gather leads right into the next volume. In it, we learn that the somewhat obscure actions Ittō took during the previous story were directly related to that central plot, and that the Yagyū will be retaliating, probably in massive force and with sneaky, weird ninja devices that artist Goseki Kojima will have fun drawing.

The joys of this series are still that odd mixture, partially the closely-observed, low-key depiction of life and nature in this now-long-gone era of Japan, with odd facts and quirky sidebar notes and lots of gorgeous panels of the world Ittō wanders through. And then the sudden explosions of violence, from Ittō and other men like him - mostly directed at each other, but not always.

The rules of the stories are always the same: Ittō will win in any contest of violence. Not necessarily easily, and not always against men (and rarely women) we want to see killed, but he will win. He will be more devoted to his mission than anyone else he meets is devoted to anything, and we could construct a ladder of righteousness based on that principle: Ittō at the top, of course, with the occasional nearly-as-driven characters slightly below, and then all of the ninjas and schemers and bullies and corrupt officials and crude rustics just trying to get through their days without being cut in half by a dōtanuki.

This book felt a bit more rural to me than most. I don't know Japanese geography, particularly that of several hundred years ago, but Ittō is traveling through small places in these four stories, far from big cities. He's been other places in the series, of course, and will travel more before it's done. But this one is mostly out in the countryside, leading to plenty of lovely scenery from Kojima. Pity about all the blood splattered all of it, I suppose.

Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One by Mike Dawson

DIY as an ethos pops up across a lot of creative areas. Even moviemakers embrace it, some of them, some of the time - the most complicated, resource-intensive, multi-creator kind of art out there, trying to do great work with two people and a borrowed camera. But the most fertile areas are the ones where one person can do all of the work alone. So music, obviously - the one-person band coming out of a bedroom and a computer is practically a cliché these days - and, even more than anything else, comics.

Comics DIY benefits from multiple threads of history - the undergrounds, minicomics, the wider 'zine scene - going back five or six decades. It doesn't really matter what any one creator's impulses or influences were, though it can be fun to trace them. There's a network of printers who are used to working with lone creators; a schedule of events they could show up at, table, and maybe even sell some units; and an audience that believes "I published it myself" is a badge of honor and not an admission of defeat. All that is to be celebrated; lots of art forms aren't as welcoming, for structural or cultural reasons. (Try to stage your own ballet!)

I'm waffling up front here because I have a cool DIY project today that's probably unavailable to readers right now, and is an anthology to begin with - so it's a collection of all sorts of different things.

Mike Dawson has been making comics professionally for two decades or so, breaking out with Freddie & Me in 2008. He's also a New Jersey guy like me - with a big asterisk, since he was born and spent his first decade in the UK - so I've vaguely kept track of his career for the usual local-guy reasons. Over the past few years, he's published three issues of a 'zine called Fun Time, which he collected into a single book, along with some other material, earlier this year.

The book is Fun Time Omnibus Vol. One, and I don't have a link because it was a Kickstarter and doesn't seem to be otherwise available right now. I bet if you run into Dawson at a comics show, and he's tabling there, he'll have some copies to sell, but that has a couple of big assumptions built into it.

At least some of the stories here have been slightly reconfigured from larger pages - Dawson has published in the New York Times, both in the Metropolitan section and the Book Review, which have much larger pages than this digest-size book - and his new intro here points out that he does often rewrite or redraw his work somewhat to adjust it for later publication, but tends to think of it as locked down once it hits a book page.

This officially collects the three issues of Fun Time, but not in an obvious way - Dawson doesn't include their covers, or run the strips in a clear "this is issue #2" way. He's reconfiguring work that appeared other places - the issues may have done the same thing; I'm not super-clear on how many permutations some of this work went through; and that doesn't actually matter - and presenting it as one anthology of Dawson work, mostly ruminative, mostly non-fictional, often personal in that autobio-comics way.

It's something of a sequel to Rules for Dating My Daughter, that is: more essay-ish comics, about his life and what's going on in the world, anchored in both his normal Jersey-guy life with kids that are I think roughly tweens now and the fact that he mostly made these comics in 2020-21, amid the ongoing fascist hellscape and the very particular global health crisis of that time that the big fans of the hellscape have tried to entirely memory-hole since then.

I think I agree with Dawson politically, at least in broad outlines, which helps for work like this. And he's a thoughtful essayist who has been making comics like this for more than a decade - Freddie, though more personal and backwards-focused, wasn't a million miles away from the same style of work, either.

I hesitate to recommend a book that's a potential reader would have trouble finding, but Dawson is an interesting comics essayist who I expect will keep doing work like this. (Alongside his main gig, which these days are young-reader GNs - I don't want to say every middle-aged comics-maker turns to making kids books when they have kids, but it happens a lot, and even to those who don't have kids.) Check his stuff out when you get a chance: he's thoughtful and has a fun, expressive line - the way he draws noses I particularly amusing.

All of This and Nothing: Little Bird Courage

"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.

Continuing the swing back and forth - as I noted last week, often from '80s songs reasonably well-known in their day to Aughts songs that are somewhat...less popular. This time out I have a song from 2009 by a band called Old Canes.

This is Little Bird Courage - I don't know much about it, or the band. But I liked it then, I still like it, in all of its rattly, clangy glory.

As far as I can tell, Old Canes was a sidebar band - the main guy, Christopher Crisci, had a main band, Appleseed Cast, which I don't think I've ever heard - and Old Canes only had two records in the Aughts. Their website is defunct, so I assume the band is as well.

This is another song with obscure lyrics - a metaphor for something, or more than one something. The title implies a lot of it: the song is about how the world is dark and dangerous, but there is hope.

And when I'm thirsty
You are the fountain
In the face of danger
I am unafraid

The tone is almost religious, but there's no specific dogma - Crisci may have meant it to be in some  particular tradition, but it doesn't come across that way to me. So it comes across as inspiring, no matter what you believe or don't believe - we can all rely on a little bird to give us courage.

Quote of the Week: He Is Not Wrong

'Listen to me, Wolf.' He was standing close, now, his hand on my shoulder reaching for my neck, almost choking me. 'You do not say no to me. No one does. I am America, and America does not take no for an answer. Refuse us, and we will bomb the shit out of your country, kill your women and rape your dogs and burn your houses and piss on the embers. Do you understand me? I said, do you understand me!'

 -Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), pp.194-195

Incredible! by Zabus & Hippolyte

Before I dive into the details of this book, I just want to take a moment to note how far above its weight Belgium punches in the comics world. It's comparable in size and population to the state I live in (New Jersey), similarly sandwiched between bigger, noisier powers (France and Germany for Belgium, New York and Philadelphia for New Jersey) and divided culturally in a similar way. Although, I should note that the gulf between Flemings and Walloons is substantially more fraught than the debate about whether to call one's breakfast meat "pork roll" or "Taylor ham."

And yet, it's not the French comics ecosystem that dominates Europe - it's the Franco-Belgian comics world. With Belgium second in the name, sure, but close to equal with a country that has twenty times its physical size and five times its population. I don't know why - maybe Belgium has Chinese-style academies for fomenting their children's comics-making power, to funnel them into the 9th art? But it's a whole thing, has been for two or three generations now, and this book is deeply Belgian in an unapologetic way that might be notable from some other small country. But, with Belgium and comics, it's just to be expected - Belgium is the land of comics.

Incredible! is a 2020 bande dessinée, originally published by Dargaud in Europe, with this Europe Comics English-language edition coming out the same year in this Joseph Laredo translation. It's written by Zabus and drawn by Hippolyte, two more of those single-named creators so common in Europe (and somewhat baffling to me) - both of whom, as far as I can tell, are new to me. But, again, it's a big Franco-Belgian world of comics, most of which never gets translated into English to begin with, and I've never tried to be comprehensive anyway.

I don't think this is for children, exactly, though it's the kind of book that's fine for most ages. But it is about a child: Jean-Loup, an eleven-year-old Belgian boy. Even if the book didn't tell us explicitly that he was Belgian, the fact that his confidant and basically only friend is a figurine of the then-Belgian king (the story is set in 1983, for possibly semi-autobiographical reasons) would be a major clue.

Jean-Loup is a stutterer, quiet and withdrawn at school, not wanting to call attention to himself. He has a lot of rituals and rules for himself, which we see on his way home from school - we think he may have OCD, or something similar. He lives with his father, who is distant and busy - we don't see the father on the page. Jean-Loup spends his time researching things intensively, writing down facts on little cards, and organizing those cards - so he has a large collection of knowledge, or semi-random things, that he built himself and knows pretty deeply.

His mother is dead. He talks to a funerary urn of her ashes. And he's got some externalized guilt and fear related to his family - we don't know exactly why, but he's an imaginative kid who sees (at least in this book, in comics form to make it visual) visions of his relatives and that Belgian king, nagging and demanding and exhorting and criticizing him all of the time.

So Jean-Loup is a smart, interesting kid with a lot of stuff to deal with, much of it deeply personal - things he doesn't tell anyone else.

And his class at school is having a series of oral presentations. Jean-Loup has prepared his, on a topic carefully constructed to be very boring (so he doesn't draw attention) and very thorough (so he gets a good grade). But things go wrong on the morning of his presentation, and he leaves his notes behind - so he ends up talking off the cuff about his latest research project, the thing he's currently passionate about: the burial customs of people around the world. He's riveting, energetic, engaging his audience and full of facts that he has right at the tip of his fingers.

His teacher gives him a high grade - and also asks him to be their school's representative in a regional presentation contest. He'd have to do a new presentation: slightly more formal, somewhat longer, on a new topic. Jean-Loup immediately agrees - and never regrets or goes back on that decision.

But it's not easy. His father can't take him to the regional competition - in another city a few weeks later - so his deeply unreliable uncle Johnny Gala has to do it. And, even before that, Jean-Loup wants to ask the advice of the Belgian king on his topic - I think this is one part "Belgium is a small enough country that this isn't a completely insane idea" and one part "Jean-Loup is really caught up in his fantasies and thinks this is a completely reasonable idea," so Johnny Gala has to drive him there.

Johnny's car is unreliable, and breaks down on both trips - but Jean-Loup does meet with the king, briefly, and he he does make it to the competition on time, in the end.

Other things happen, too - there's some family history that we learn along the way, and some changes for Jean-Loup - but that's all part of the journey.

There is a happy ending, slightly bigger than I expected, with Jean-Loup triumphant and happy and (we think) somewhat better positioned in life and somewhat less mentally unsteady.

Zabus tells this story in a slightly more ornate, detailed style than the reader might expect - giving more detail, going down more side-alleys, adding more grace-notes - which works, given Jean-Loup's mania for research and his cabinets crammed full of little cards of facts. Hippolyte draws it in a cartoony style, his figures often lightly outlined and his colors giving at least a pop of sunniness - often from Jean-Loup's blonde hair - on every page. His panels are regular and square, but with loose, rough edges, and his watercolors keep that softness, like a haze of memory taking us back to 1983.

Incredible! is a sweet, positive book suitable for eleven-year-olds like Jean-Loup and anyone who has been eleven, in 1983 or since then. I do suspect some aspects of it are semi-autobiographical, but I have no idea how many or how much.

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

You know the old story of the Taoist master who dreamed he was a butterfly? This novel is something like that. It is a dream, or maybe two dreams - one character dreaming the other, or making up his story, and the other in turn dreaming the first.

Shomer is always described in this novel as "in another time and place." His story is shorter, takes up less of the novel. He's a former writer of shund, pulp fiction in Yiddish. His time and place we know: Auschwitz, somewhere near the end of WWII. He's a prisoner there - is prisoner the right word? Victim, perhaps? In his mind, to try to avoid the horrors all around him, he tells a story - a detective story, an alternate-history story, a shocking pulp story.

The bulk of A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar's 2014 novel, is the story Shomer is telling himself - his revenge story, his distraction story, his lifeline.

It is 1939 London, November. The 1933 German elections swung the other way: the Communists took control, purged the National Socialists, aligned with the USSR. German refugees flooded London, and a nativist reaction to them has risen since then. Fascism, led by Oswald Mosley, is poised to take over the government in England, with an election coming by the end of the month. Mosely is expected to be the next Prime Minister.

Our main character is a private detective, one of those refugees, who was held in those post-election German camps but somehow escaped, an Austrian man in his middle years. He calls himself Wolf. He is who you suspect he might be. It isn't a secret, but the novel doesn't say the name - except once, very late.

Names have power, of course, as every SFF reader knows.

Wolf stumbles through a plot that's something like a parody of The Big Sleep and something of an excuse for Shomer to torment him and run through all of the sordid and scurrilous wartime rumors about "Wolf's" proclivities and sexuality.

(Tidhar does note, blandly, in his endnotes that the "one ball" rumor has no factual support. Wolf does seem to have the usual two throughout the book.)

Wolf's story is told mostly from his diary - though it's unlikely he would have time to write in such detail given the events depicted, and his zeal in capturing exact back-and-forth dialogue is both admirable and unbelievable - with some scenes narrated in third person, almost always after a diary section. The Shomer thread is also in third person, and is always introduced with that "in another time and place" line.

Wolf is hired by a rich woman - Jewish, which he loathes, of course - to find her sister, who was smuggled into England from Germany, but disappeared along the way. The organization that handles such smuggling is made up largely of Wolf's old compatriots, and parts of it operate mostly as advertised - delivering people where they expected to be, alive and poorer - and parts of it engage in the usual horrors of human trafficking. Wolf investigates that organization, talks to old friends, learns some things.

He's later also hired by Mosely, whom he thinks of with contempt but has eclipsed him comprehensively at this point. There's a Jewish terrorist organization that keeps trying to assassinate Mosely; they're getting closer. Mosely wants Wolf to find and stop them.

Wolf gets beat up, even more than most Chandleresque private detectives do. He rages and spews hate at random moments. He is sexually humiliated in ways that he secretly loves, in scenes that could limit the audience of this novel even more so than its Holocaust focus already does. He doesn't do much detecting, or show particular signs of being good at it. In the Chandler model, though, he does find that missing sister, though he never actually speaks to her or tells the older sister (or their father, who of course warns him off the case, through violence, about midway through the novel) where he found her.

Wolf takes on a fake identity, a very ironic one, and his story goes in an unusual direction at the end. The mystery-novel plot isn't wrapped up in any way; there are cops who he's embroiled with - there is also a serial killer of prostitutes, a young man obsessed with Wolf and killing them in ways to frame his idol, and so some of Wolf's beatings come at police hands - but they don't solve anything, either.

It ends like a literary novel: not like SF, not like a mystery, not even like noir. Wolf is...not transformed, I don't think, but perhaps I should say transported. And Shomer - well, we can say that Shomer is at peace, and we can argue about what happened to find him that peace.

This is definitely an audacious novel, with a sharp premise that generally works. Wolf sits uneasily in the Chandleresque tradition, though - he cannot be any kind of a knight or good man - which makes me think it would have been better-served with Mickey Spillane as a model. And a good part of the novel's appeal is to see Wolf humiliated, beaten, demolished - which, again, sits uneasily with his role as the hero of a detective novel. Perhaps the best thing I can say about A Man Lies Dreaming is that it shouldn't work, that it's too full of contradictions and elements that undercut it. And yet it does.

Dogtangle by Max Huffman

Comics do at least half of their storytelling through images - but sometimes I wonder if some creators think their images can communicate deep, complex concepts that are clear and crisp in their own minds, even when they don't embody those ideas in words.

Max Huffman's graphic novel Dogtangle brings up those thoughts: it's obviously full of ideas, and Huffman is clearly coming from a specific viewpoint and stance, but his words only sketch lightly around the edges of his premises, leaving his energetic, deeply particular art to carry a lot of the weight of his story here.

That art is deeply caricatured, verging into pure design at times; his characters, to my eye, disappearing into his tinted pages as just more elements to shock or delight the viewer. It's a deeply cartoony, distinctive style - I think I see graffiti influences, especially in his display type, and maybe equally in his defiant love for stark pages and imagery that doesn't quite come into focus unless you already know what you're looking at.

Dogtangle has plenty of dialogue, and a few captions to define what we're look at, but not nearly enough words to explain all of the complexities of Huffman's weird, satirical world. Concepts are thrown onto the page once for the reader to catch, and I suppose Huffman assumes that reader will assemble the elements in their own minds to match the model he has in his own. But I found Dogtangle, as it went along, more to dissolve in my mind to a sequence of striking images - vignettes, scenes, or moments - that sit like beads next to each other but don't connect or combine to form a coherent whole.

I'm sure there is a story here, in Huffman's mind. I'm just not sure it made it onto the page in a format that's intelligible to most readers.

Here's what I can tell you. Vernon Smilth is a local gadfly in Business Park, making long speeches during boring civic meetings in the converted Taco Bell, trying to slow down the relentless redevelopment of the town. He's a failure at this, and there's no sign that he does anything for an actual living: this is all he does that we see.

At one meeting, he meets Caressa Vignette, head and face of the pharmaceutical company named for her. We later on get the usual corporate hugger-mugger, in vague terms, so she doesn't outright own the company, but her actual title and role and what Vignette really does is never clear - they make stuff, she's in charge, that's as far as Huffman wants to explain.

Smilth and Vignette fall in love, eat soup, get married - in the course of about two pages. They both want to do something big, something impressive. And Smilth has an idea: to create a Hypermutt. (The word is always presented in display type, like a splash page, in that Huffman graffiti-esque style, so it's deeply difficult to read.)

Like many things in Dogtangle, exactly how this works is vague and doesn't make much sense. But the Hypermutt is basically a specialized Katamari: once created, it is a big ball of dog that absorbs any other dogs that touch it. This supposedly is the next big product for Vignette, which is supposed to be satirical, but I have a hard time even seeing the space where the joke is supposed to be: this is not a consumer product at all; it can't be sold to multiple people; and it seems to have nothing to do with the actual business of a pharmaceutical company.

Anyway, they make this thing, which is not as central to the book as you might imagine.

Almost immediately, Smilth and the hypermutt disappear - Vignette gets a ransom note for one or both of them, but we don't see anyone nab either of them. Smilth is threatened and beaten by one of the Business Park zoning nabobs, apparently because his useless complaints at meetings were slightly less useless than Huffman made them appear. He has angered Powerful Forces, and He Will Pay.

What does that have to do with the Hypermutt? Did this Florida-based zoning overlord also grab the dog for some unspecified reason? Well...maybe? It's never clear.

Back in Business Park, Vignette goes into business-crisis mode, running the gauntlet of shouted questions from reporters and hiring Ermine Slalom, a high-powered something-or-other (lawyer?) who will help her keep control of the company...but that plot gets derailed quickly by new characters Simon (Slalom's little four-eyed nephew, who she's caring for) and Smilth's formidable mother, who arrives at the same time and is kept in the dark about her son's disappearance.

From that point, a lot more stuff happens - some of it in what seems to be a completely different alternate universe where all of these characters are living in medieval Europe, for no obvious reason. Oh, and it flashes forward what I think is a few years, to Simone Slalom - who I thought at first was Simon's mother, but maybe she's an older sister? - where the Hypermutt now dominates the sky and has ruined the world.

Because what happens when dogs get stuck together in an ever-growing ball is that they fly into the sky and form a layer of cloud...obviously. (Duh!)

Anyway, this is SF and it is satirical, so of course there is an apocalypse, and this one is the Hypermutt apocalypse. At this point, the reader starts to wonder if the build-things-everywhere, knock-down-the-old-city, make-all-the-money folks are actually supposed to be our heroes. They did try to stop the apocalypse and their motivations were clear and reasonable, if venial.

Back to plot: Simone once pet-sat the Hypermutt, and was "the best sitter ever," so now she has to retrieve Smilth from inside the flying cloud of dog. That sentence makes slightly more sense in context, though not very much. She does, he is freed, the Hypermutt collapses or dies or something, and the world...is maybe slightly less apocalyptic in the end? Huffman ends the book with a deeply enigmatic stretch of mostly-wordless pages that I assume mean something to him but left me flipping back and forth to figure out if he actually explained anything or told us where he left any of these characters.

(As far as I can tell: no.)

So Dogtangle is a deeply weird book, a massively particular book, and one that I suspect you might need to be Max Huffman to understand. Well, maybe Huffman could explain it to you in person, too - that's possible. But, if you're just reading it, do not expect it all to come together or make conventional narrative sense. It will look awesome, full of bizarre pages, and you may find yourself asking questions like "All of the pages are tinted, and the colors shift repeatedly throughout the book, from blue to yellow and so on, to end with orange. Does that mean anything?"

I suspect, in Huffman's head, there's a lot of meaning here. But it is not particularly clear on the page.

Just Friends by Ana Oncina

I'm trying to figure out if this sweet teen semi-romance about two girls at summer camp was actually published in an Asian country, to explain why it reads right-to-left. The author's site is less help than it could be, since she's Spanish and so is the site. (Weird how that works!) But that site seems to say that this book was only published in Spain and the USA, but also that it won the Japanese International Manga Award, and that at least the title of the book was also in Japanese on the Spanish-language edition.

How much of that is actually-for-Japanese-people and how much is looking-like-manga-for-a-Western-audience I can't say. But it was created in Spanish, it was translated into English by Nanette Cooper-McGuiness for this 2023 TOKYOPOP American edition, and creator Ana Oncina created the pages, as far as I can tell, with that right-to-left flow from the beginning.

Oncina is best known in Europe for her Croquette & Empanada series, which is also romance-adjacent but more heteronormative. (Not that croquettes are necessarily male-coded, but the one in her books is.) That series has run to several books in Europe - including, notably, one about a trip to Japan - but only the first one has been translated for American publication.

Just Friends tells its story in two timelines: in the framing story, it's around twenty years later, and Erika and Emi are meeting for the first time in a while. The bulk of the story is told in flashback, with Erika the central character, first being forced by her mother to go to this week-long sleep-away camp - against her wishes - and then her time there, meeting and being befriended by the more outgoing Emi immediately on the bus out.

The details are general or universal enough that it doesn't read as "foreign" to an American audience - maybe that same element helped it in Japan as well, assuming it did make it to Japan. Teens go to camps all over the world, to do outdoor activities under the guidance of counselors, to make friends and spend time with people they "like," to do some light making out when they get the chance, to drink furtively in tents or around campfires deep in the night, to talk deeply and seriously with people they might never see again, or might only see "next year."

Erika is quiet, introverted, an artist. Her mother thinks this week would be a good time for Erika to become better friends with Celia, who is in her class. Erika denies they're friends - this is true, but we learn more complicated details of their relationship later in the book. Erika thinks she's going to spend the whole week quietly by herself, and is resigned to that.

But Emi - another first-timer - gloms onto Erika on that bus, and they partner up, in the way of camp, for the rest of the week. Their relationship deepens over those days, though mostly driven by Emi. They both hang out with boys that they talk about "liking," but they have a stronger connection to each other, which comes out as the week goes on.

Meanwhile, in the frame story, we learn how Emi has bounced back into Erika's life every few years since then, for a quick fling, only to disappear for years again. This doesn't entirely connect to what we see of her at camp, but it does provide a larger structure to their relationship and gives Oncina some momentum in the frame-story to close out her book solidly.

Just Friends read like a genre exercise to me, like Oncina was doing her version of a yuri story - down to some details of phrasing that felt more like translated-from-Japanese than translated-from-Spanish. (Though those could be from Cooper-McGuiness, the translator, enforcing a TOKYOPOP house style.) It's a nice, resonant genre exercise, but still sits comfortably within the boundaries of a standard genre and doesn't try to push those boundaries or do anything particularly new or exciting with it.

All of This and Nothing: Under the Milky Way

"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.

As I look forward over my list of Famous and Obscure, I'm mostly seeing Famous songs that are old and Obscure ones that are newer. And I wonder if what I'm really cataloging is that I paid attention to popular music when I was young, and got stuck into quirkier side-streams in the last couple of decades. Or maybe that there used to be a big general culture, more or less, and now there's just algorithms and narrowcasting.

Well, with nearly half the year behind me, I'm not going to change it up now. So stick a pin in that as an interesting potential point, and keep it in the back of your mind as I pick another "Famous" song that was a single back in 1988. (And maybe argue with me, in your head or in comments, that it really doesn't count as famous almost forty years later.)

For this week, the song is Under the Milky Way by The Church.

It's an atmospheric song, on the quiet side - as the title implies, it takes place at night, probably a dark night. The singer is talking to someone - maybe himself, but probably not - in this dark, quiet place, and wondering what it's all about.

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find

I think this is a song inspired by a particular moment - "Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty," "Lower the curtain down on Memphis," and so on - probably after a concert, when singer Steve Kilbey was looking out over an empty, quiet space with a quiet dark sky above him. Or, at least, that's the story the song tells.

Songs don't necessarily tell the truth. They tell a story that the songwriter wants to put out into the world, and stories have their own shape. And that's the story this one tells: here we are, in a hushed, dark place. The singer (Kilbey) is talking to "you," about what seems like something broken or lost, and he's about to move on.

I got no time for private consultation
Under the Milky Way tonight