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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the Bewilderness by Gus Gordon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of This and Nothing: I Can See Clearly Now

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 19, 2026

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Week: A NYC Magazine Party in 1946

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain Drain, Part 2 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite. So it's no surprise that French bande dessinée creator Pierre-Henry Gomont took a lot of liberties when telling the posthumous adventures of Albert Einstein's brain.

As I pointed out when I wrote about the first half of the graphic version, Brain Drain Part 1, the real story was boring: a pathologist removed Einstein's brain and eyes after death - and against the physicist's wishes - and gave out brain segments to his colleagues what seemed like willy-nilly for the next twenty years until the public finally learned about it. No important research resulted.

Gomont seems to want to follow the general outlines of that story in this second volume, Brain Drain Part 2, without actually saying the dénouement takes place in 1978, as it did in the real world, or tying himself to that sad "no important research." It makes this second book expansive in odd ways, as readers who know the timeline start wondering if decades are passing between pages. In his fictional version, there's also a major scientific finding - somewhat parallel to the real-world research of Marian Diamond in the 1980s - by his fictional neurologist Marianne Ruby.

But let me start at the beginning. Pathologist "Stolz" is on the run with "Professor Albert," who appears as an older man with the top of his head missing and an empty cranium (he wears hats a lot, so people don't notice that), and with the brain of Einstein in a jar. The independent existence of the Professor - zombie? ghost? avatar? - is the central motif of the series and its defining fantasy element; Gomont never explains it: it just is. It is presumably 1955, the year Einstein died. The FBI is chasing them, for never-fully-defined hugger-mugger reasons - the Professor does not want them to get their hands on him, nor does Stolz.

Stolz is said to be married with children; they appeared only briefly in the first book and he has fully abandoned them in this one. He apparently never contacts them again after running away with the Professor. The narrative also blithely says that a doctor can always find work, given his skills - presumably to explain how Stolz has funds for this life. But a doctor can find work as a doctor because he is officially licensed, under his name, on large, maintained lists that detail his training and expertise. This seems implausible for a man officially on the run from the FBI.

Anyway, after hiding out for some indeterminate time, Stolz tries to broker a deal with the head of the Institute where the Professor worked, a man called only Otto. Gomont doesn't give all the details - and the Professor assumes the unqualified Stolz will be in charge of the overall project - but it seems that there could be a research project, blessed by the Professor's family and the Institute, under Stolz as a figurehead and with Ruby as the primary expert.

The Professor and Stolz do enlist Ruby, but the FBI is not a part of (or amenable to) this deal, and capture the Professor and his brain for presumably-unpleasant researches of their own. (This is the MK-Ultra era, though that was the CIA.) Stolz somehow rams the FBI agent's car to retrieve the two remnants of Einstein, and the three (or four, counting the brain separately) flee (in what must be another car but isn't explained), more deeply Most Wanted than before.

Up to this point, the Brain Drain story seems to be taking place basically in 1955 - possibly a few months have passed, but no substantial amount of time. From here, though, the calendar becomes much more flexible.

Ruby demands to begin the research, so Stolz looks up an old professor, Dr. Seward, who now runs an odd, out-of-the-way asylum in Kansas. There are a lot of brains there for Ruby's comparative anatomy studies, and Seward does his own LSD-based researches on the Professor, escalating to cloning the brain (!!!) multiple times and doing surgery on the original that leaves the Professor unable to speak. Stolz is sidelined this whole time, but finally breaks free with the Professor after Ruby finishes her research and heads out of the plot almost for good.

Some years seem to have passed, during which Stolz has not worked as a doctor. But he goes back to hiding out with the now-silent Professor for what may be another decade or so. And he eventually sends part of one of the cloned brains to Ruby, which allows her to expand her research and finally make solid, groundbreaking findings, which she releases in the standard scientific manner.

…which tells the public that Einstein's brain was preserved, and causes a media frenzy. This leads to the actual ending, which I think is meant to be in roughly 1978, as in real life. Stolz finally does what he should have done, back at the beginning, and Gomont's narration nods towards the outlines of real history.

That narration, by the way, is assured and supple and smart: Gomont is very much telling this story, and makes it clear several times he's diverging from history to do so. His art is equally enticing, with realistically lumpy people, sometimes impressionistic vistas, and detailed mid-century objects to ground it all.

I don't think Gomont's themes entirely line up with what actually happened in the real world, and I find his timeline a bit odd. He also seems to want this to be, in the end, the story of the posthumous friendship of Stolz and the Professor, which is entirely fictional - and, for the bulk of those years, the Professor was incapable of speech after the events of this book. It is a very odd and quirky thing. But I do appreciate that about it, and I think it's almost exactly what Gomont wanted it to be. And that's a great thing to be.

All of This and Nothing: Down in the Valley

"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 think this is another case where the song I really like is from a side band or otherwise quirky project. Which is why I count it on the Obscure side.

But, this week, the song is Down in the Valley by a band called The Broken West.

(Some light Googling later: looks like this was the frontman's first band - he's a guy named Ross Flournoy - and the one that brought him and the rest of the group some attention, but they broke up fairly quickly. Flournoy formed another band, which also doesn't seem to have gone very far, and no one's bothered to update Wikipedia for more than a decade. As always, I hope he's out there making music and living off it, and no one around him has had the free time to update some random website.)

And I have no idea what this song is really about.

Sun down, blood horizon, now it feels alright
No one feels the darkness down in the valley tonight

It's all evocative, allusive - it sounds like a Western of some kind (or I may be latching on too hard to the band's name), but there's none of the usual Western trappings: guns, cowpokes, cattle, shootouts, Indians.

But, as I've said more than once in doing these song-based posts, you don't need to understand a song to like a song. A song is about listening, and feeling. This one has a great feeling, and sounds big and impressive: take it on that level.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 12, 2026

Hey, remember last week? This is the the rest of that stuff: books from a few authors that I ordered via Alibris, from a whole bunch of used-book stores, for various reading projects. I'll get to all of these over the next year or three, I expect.

So first I have three books from Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder series:

The second in the series, Bank Shot, in which Dormunder and his crew steal (not rob) a bank.

The one that was my favorite the first time through, Drowned Hopes, a big book from 1990 about trying to retrieve a huge cache of valuables left buried thirty years ago - in a town that has since been abandoned, at the bottom of a reservoir.

Third from Westlake is Bad News, the 2001 novel about a casino heist.

I also have two more serious detective novels from Ross Macdonald:

What seems to be a brand-new, printed-on-demand edition of his 1956 novel, The Barbarous Coast, which isn't what I'd expected from a used-book dealer but I'll definitely take it.

The other one is The Blue Hammer, the last book in the series, from 1976. As I recall, the last two in the series are a bit thinner than the rest, but we'll see if I agree this time through.

And last are two books in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series - all of P.G. Wodehouse's roughly one hundred books, in a uniform trade dress, published in the early years of this century, which I half-collected once and lost thirty or forty of them to a flood.

First up is Kid Brady Stories and A Man of Means collects two story-series from very early in Wodehouse's career. I've never read them, and don't expect much, but the point of a complete library is to include weird little-known things like these.

And then last in this batch of books is Wodehouse's 1921 humorous novel A Gentleman of Leisure, which I also don't think I've ever read.

Quote of the Week: The Old Firm

The offices of the old-established firm of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby are in Ridgeway's Inn, not far from Fleet Street. The brass plate, let into the woodwork of the door, is misleading. Reading it, you get the impression that on the other side quite a covey of lawyers await your arrival. The name of the firm leads you to suppose that there will be barely standing-room in the office. You picture Thorpe jostling you aside as he makes for Prescott to discuss with him the latest case of demurrer, and Winslow and Appleby treading on your toes, deep in conversation on replevin. But these legal firms dwindle. The years go by and take their toll, snatching away here a Prescott, there an Appleby, till, before you know where you are, you are down to your last lawyer.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat, p.109

The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

I think I read this back in the day, but my memory is fuzzy. I used to be in pretty regular touch with Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett's indefatigable agent, in my job as Senior Editor of the SFBC, and Colin would pitch the odder Discworld books to us - after, I'm sure, the more traditional trade outlets for such books had already turned him down. (I could kid Colin, but he was a good agent for Pratchett, relentlessly positive but also, I think, with an underlying understanding of the vast difference in Pratchett's market profile in the US and UK.[1])

I know I read the first Science of Discworld book, and liked it. I thought I bought it for the club, but I'm not seeing a SFBC edition on ISFDB, or any edition in the US earlier than the trade-paperback series starting in 2014, so perhaps my memory is faulty. I also read the second one, and thought it was not quite as strong, and I think got to this one around UK publication in 2005 (thanks to Colin) and had a similar reaction.

There was a fourth book; I'm pretty sure I've never seen that one.

All of the Science of Discworld books are hybrid things. There's a fairly slim Discworld fictional story by Pratchett - about the creation by the wizards of Unseen University of what they call "Roundworld" (our universe) and their subsequent investigations and adventures there. In alternating chapters, scientists and science writers [2] Ian Stewart (math) and Jack Cohen (biology) explain the real science behind the goofy stuff the wizards get up to. I expect the three plotted out the whole thing together and then edited each other for consistency; it's a bit of an odd combination but it generally works on both a comic-fiction and a pop-science level.

So the first book saw the Roundworld created. The second one had the wizards needing to save it from an infestation of Discworld elves, mostly related to Shakespeare for sufficiently-good reasons.

And this third book, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, came out in 2005 in the UK but not until a decade later in the US. It's the one about evolution, so I'm afraid Stewart and Cohen need to talk about the kind of anti-evolutionists they characterize as Christian fundamentalists from the Southern USA. (Not inappropriately, of course, and entirely honestly. But it might have been yet one more thing to give US publishers pause.)

Once again, outside forces - it's not revealed until late in the book, so I won't say who, but it's another Pratchett villain - are interfering with the Roundworld's timeline, causing humanity to go extinct before it can lead a space exodus to colonize the larger Roundworld universe as of course humanity is destined to do. (Science of Discworld is more old-fashioned than some readers might expect.) This time, it's all connected to Charles Darwin, who is being channeled to instead write The Theology of Species rather than The Origin and to stay a good Anglican curate and not be so strident about the whole evolution thing.

The pop-science chapters are an odd mix of evolutionary biology (not quite as much as you might expect) and QED-derived alternate-world physics theorizing circa the early 2000s (because the changes to Darwin's timeline creates many different options, in none of which he wrote Origin). There's some other, even further afield science topics as well, but those are the two central ones: the ways species change and diverge over time, and the ways timelines might conceivably do the same. (They are connected, at least conceptually, but they come across as mostly-separate discussions.)

The short Pratchett chapters feature wizards - mostly Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, and of course Rincewind - having somewhat amusing experiences either watching Roundworld or traveling to it to interfere with its timeline, and talking about the science implications. Then the longer Steward/Cohen chapters go into more depth, non-fictionally, about those implications. It's all amusing, mostly light, and easy to follow: it's a fine pop-science book, if possibly slightly outdated now, twenty years later.

There's enough Discworld that you could read nothing else for quite a long time if you wanted to, and I suppose this series means that those who do - I'm fairly sure there are some anorak-wearing chaps named Kevin who come close, at least - get some actual science knowledge included into their humanistic humorous fiction. I found this one less focused than I'd hoped, but all of the pieces are solid, and they form an essentially coherent whole, so I'm mostly quibbling.

[1] This is complicated and changed over time. But, very generally, in the '80s and '90s, Pratchett was not just the biggest fantasy author in the UK, he was one of the top five or so authors of any kind in the UK, and a measurable fraction of all books sold had his name on them. That profile declined only slightly post-Rowling; I think he still sold basically as well, but others sold at similar or nearly-similar levels, too. Because of that, he could write or commission the kind of oddball line-extension books that were just not commercially feasible for almost anyone else: a cookbook, a long series of annual desk diaries, multiple actual printed-on-heavy-stock maps, an encyclopedic compendium in several editions.

In the US, by contrast, Pratchett sold like a decent upper-mid-level fantasy writer (comparing it to personal income, in the US Pratchett was like the well-respected name partner of a major law firm and in the UK he was Bill Gates) and was beloved in the SFF community. It was absolutely a solid level of success that most writers would be thrilled with, but Pratchett (and, more centrally, I think, Colin) saw the UK sales and thought "why can't we replicate that in the much larger and more lucrative USA?"

There's also the question of how well he was published in the US. I don't want to cast aspersions, but he was with Roc/New American Library at first, who perhaps didn't have the market muscle (or the desire to use it for Pratchett) to replicate the UK success. In the early '90s, he moved to Harper, which went through a confusing period - Pratchett was very prolific at that point, and Roc had gotten behind - where the books were not published in the same order in the US and there were some interesting cover designs in attempts to widen the audience. So, at the point where he was at his absolute peak of market power in the UK - say the late '90s - he was rising in the US after Harper got good at publishing his books but was still very much a genre author rather than a general-audience one. That has stayed true in the US since then.

And, frankly, Pratchett is deeply British in a lot of ways. There's no reason to believe he would be a general-audience author anywhere that doesn't have a solid British cultural identity.

[2] And science-fiction novelists; I read and bought their Wheelers - not for nepotistic reasons related to the title, I think - for the SFBC.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

It can be easy to discount craft and consistency and clear storytelling, particularly at scale. Stan Sakai has been telling Usagi Yojimbo stories for forty years now; I've been reading them for two years, and I've only gotten through about the first decade.

(I may have been inspired to start reading this series by realizing that, after being vaguely aware of it the whole time, that the entire forty-some book series was available through my library's app. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that absolutely everything is available, but I'm now eleven books in and dozens stretch ahead of me, so it's darn close if nothing else.)

I have quibbled about some things about these Edo-period anthropomorphic-animal stories, mostly related to the fact that this is explicitly an all-ages series - and, in practice, that means that there's nothing in it that would be upsetting to a ten-year-old. It's a valid choice, and I think aligns closely with the way Sakai wants to tell stories anyway, but a vast amount of life is inherently upsetting to a ten-year-old, which means all of that is off-limits. Sex in more than the most vaguely implied sense, of course, but also a lot of the consequences of the violence that is central to a samurai epic. Usagi Yojimbo is a clean, somewhat sanitized view of a historical world, with a main character who is always true and honest and brave and on the side of right, where violence consistently solves problems and only occasionally leads to tragic ends, and where new humans appear somewhat mysteriously and relations between the sexes are either on the dynastic-connection level or a vague adolescent longing.

All that is still true of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons, which collects seven issues (including one originally in color; here presented in black-and-white just like the rest) and a few previously scattered stories, all from the mid-90s. It's eleven stories in total; this book was published in this format in 1999 and is still available digitally, though finding a dead-tree edition might be more difficult. (There's a newer reprint series, with fatter - but possibly smaller-format; that seems to be the way these things go - and fewer volumes, which may be easier to find.)

By this point, Sakai had a large recurring cast; two of the semi-loves of Usagi turn back up in this book, plus the inevitable roguish ronin Gen. (I didn't remember the exact detail of the two women, which were somewhat important, but the stories themselves inclue the reader enough.) Geography, though, is not a focus - Usagi does explicitly return to places in this volume that he'd been before, but those places don't get named or placed anywhere specific in Japan.

The stories are mostly miscellaneous; there's no central plot and it doesn't advance any larger overall motion of the story. (I don't think there is a central uberplot to Usagi to begin with; he has enemies and a tragic backstory but the Lone Wolf and Cub parallels don't go any further than that.) Each story is a well-told moment: a couple are vaguely sad, but mostly see Usagi setting something-or-other right or helping out someone in danger.

Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a clean line and exceptionally expressive faces. His pages are impeccably designed and his fight scenes vivid, easy to follow, and as visceral as they can be while staying ten-year-old-friendly. This is a fine series for what it is, and a lot of people would enjoy what it is.