This Country by Navied Mahdavian

Navied Mahdavian was a fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, married to a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to be a cartoonist, but the go-go needs of life in the SF Bay frustrated that ambition. He and his wife, Emilie, had had a good vacation trip to rural Idaho, where land was cheap, and so they thought - why don't we just move there?

They did, in late 2016, buying six acres, uprooting their lives, and having a small house built and delivered to their new home. And they discovered that, if there ever was a good time for two urbanities (and their dog) with typically urban careers - one of them a brown-skinned man with a big beard and a "foreign" name - to move to the most deeply conservative and xenophobic part of the country, near the end of the 2016 election season was somewhat more...problematic.

This Country tells the story of their three years on that land, from their first night in a tent through their efforts at farming and fertility struggles, until they decided to go live somewhere else. And, I should say, the locals were definitely friendly, in their way. They gave advice, generally useful and often blunt. They asked Mahdavian politely if he was a Muslim, and generally seem to have assumed that, if he was, he was one of the good ones. They treated Mahdavian and his wife much like they treated everyone else. They included him in their paranoid conversations about secret ISIS training camps nearby. Some of them became personal friends, and all of them were helpful, in that way people have in thinly-populated areas where any crisis must be handled by whoever's already there. They felt comfortable enough to throw around major slurs when talking to him. They encouraged vegetarian Mahdavian to go hunting with them.

What they didn't do - and Mahdavian doesn't say this outright - is adjust the way they thought and acted and spoke the tiniest bit ever, at any time, when interacting with Mahdavian and his wife. And that, as anyone othered in any context can attest, is exhausting.

That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.

On the other hand, rural Idaho is thinly populated. Mahdavian could go days without seeing anyone other than his wife. It was gorgeous, and it gave them three years to live on and be part of their own land - seeing the seasons pass, learning the local animals, working hard to make raised beds and try to grow their own food. (It didn't work: I think that never works, for individuals trying it in Year One. You can only grow food to live on on the first try if you're supported in a community that already knows how.) It was lovely, and Mahdavian and his wife would have been happy to stick it out there, among the locals who didn't mean to be rude and racist, and spend their lives there.

But they also wanted to raise a family. In the last section of this book, we see their fertility problems, and the treatments they went through. And that struggle led to the reason they decided to leave Idaho. I probably shouldn't blatantly tell you, since that's as close to "spoiling" the ending as a cartoon non-fiction memoir can get, but it did have to do with their desire for a family, and what it would mean to have a family in that place, among those people.

Mahdavian tells this story quietly, in soft tones. His people have dot eyes but expressive faces. His landscapes stretch out across the page, to show the attractiveness of this land. He balances showing us their lives and telling us about it well - looking back, I think of this book as mostly not narrated, but, looking through pages, there are captions all over the place. But they don't intrude; they don't tell us things that we can see - they set the scene or give context or explain the non-visual aspects of their Idaho life.

And, more importantly, This Country tells an important story: of who gets to be "here," who gets to be comfortable, where home is and who gets to have a home. Without preaching, without complaining, looking clearly at these Idaho locals who I think Mahdavian and his wife had a lot of affection for.

America is a land that used to be famous for telling the world that anyone could be welcome here. One end of the political spectrum has given up on that, while pretending they're more patriotic than the rest of us.  But there's nothing more patriotic than a nation's best image of itself - there can be nothing more patriotic than that. They are liars and charlatans, because they have turned away from what their country can be and what it has striven to be for two hundred and fifty years. Places like rural Idaho will always be insular - small places far away can't help that. But they don't have to be unwelcoming. They don't have to curdle with paranoia and xenophobia, the way rural Idaho and a thousand other pockets of America have. That was deliberate, that was caused, that is someone's fault.

Sometimes I wish I believed in Hell, so I could have an appropriate expectation for people who deliberately stirred up hate and division so they could make a little more money and get a little more power. I don't, though. Those people will just die, like all of us. If we're lucky, they will thoroughly die, and be as forgotten as possible. In the meantime, I prefer to focus on the positive - on books like This Country.

Class Clown by Dave Barry

Dave Barry has written a lot of books over the years, and plenty of other things, but he hasn't written a memoir before. However, every successful writer who lives long enough finds the pull of "tell us your fascinating life story" to be unavoidable, and so Barry's new book for 2025 was the story of Who He Is and How He Came To Be.

(He's a guy from Armonk, NY who went into the newspaper business when that was thriving, had a knack for humor that he relentlessly cultivated for decades, and expanded his empire through hard work and a newspaperman's gleeful disdain for hate mail, as a very high-level overview.)

Class Clown is that story, subtitled both "The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass" and "How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." It's fairly short and zippy, like all of Barry's writing: he trained early on writing copy that people would want to finish rather than flipping the page to the bridge column or the weather report, and he still has that facility and the goofball tone he's cultivated over the years. (Standard disclaimer here that writing short, zippy, and breezy is vastly harder than it looks: it takes a lot of work to be effortlessly readable.)

This has some elements of Standard Boomer Memoir, since Barry is a Boomer and that's the life he lived. It comes out most strongly in the first couple of chapters, about his childhood and parents and schooling, which were, in his telling, about as wonderful as anything was possible to ever be. (Memoirs are very binary: a childhood was either idyllic or horrific. Barry falls on the former end.) Barry doesn't belabor the point, and he does get into some negative things about his parents briefly, mostly after he grew up. But you will get the usual joke about Duck and Cover, among other old favorites.

Most of the book is about his career, though, since that's what his audience cares about. Barry had a syndicated newspaper column for around twenty years (1983 to 2005, in retrospect the high-water mark of newspaper domination of the media scene), and turned columns into books almost immediately, putting out a nearly-annual string of bestsellers that were all-new material (I will guestimate) about half of the time. He even became a novelist - I remember really liking his first two, Carl Hiaasen-esque kitchen-sink Florida thrillers, though I have one more unread book in that vein sitting on my shelf and he's written a bunch of other fiction (alone and in collaboration) that I haven't gotten to.

Barry tells us about all those things, plus the lousy rock group of famous authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, that he's been part of for thirtyish years, the TV show made from his work in the '90s - no, really, he was that famous that Harry Anderson played him weekly on TV for multiple seasons. Barry has had what seems like an interesting life, and he's not precious about it: he comes across as frankly amazed about some of the things he's done (wrote for Steve Martin hosting the Oscars! his second TV appearance, for his first, small-published book, was on Johnny Carson!) and really happy that he got to make jokes in public so long and in so many ways.

Again, Barry was lucky enough to write during the great zenith of the newspaper columnist, and I think he realizes that. He had a huge audience, and he kept it engaged - and knew exactly how to do it, as I will illustrate with a quote from pp.118-119:

Not to toot my own horn, but I was the only nationally syndicated columnist, and I include George Will in this statement, willing to write consistently about toilet-related issues. My readers appreciated this and were always sending me relevant articles clipped from their local newspapers. If a toilet exploded anywhere in the English-speaking world, or a snake showed up in a toilet - you'd be surprised how often these things happen - there was an excellent chance my readers would alert me.

The only potentially upsetting or contentious stuff - other than from the kind of readers who sent angry letters about his booger jokes or causal mocking of Neil Diamond or random negative references to their city or state - is the chapter on Politics. Barry covered the presidential race, in his usual joking manner, from 1984 through 2016, and he has the old-time newspaperman's disdain for both politicians and the way newspapermen cover them. (He notes midway through this chapter that he's a libertarian, which absolutely tracks - though I would have hoped for a bit more engagement from the son of a man who was both a Presbyterian minister and a leader of the New York City Mission Society. Barry even attended the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech as a guest of the Urban League; I will note that he doesn't seem to be the modern, racist kind of libertarian.) It was all the same sort of thing, as he tells it, until Trump came along and everything got ruined. He appears to be willing to maybe allow that some of the ruin is due to Trump directly - he claims to hate Trump, in the way that rich older white guys in red states with outdated vaguely liberal credentials do claim - but also thinks that the media was just too hard on the poor fella, which caused him to win. I wonder if he would say the same today.

But Class Clown is 99% funny stuff, as expected. Barry has been funny consistently in public for about forty years, and this is the story of how he did that. His work has rarely been deep - like any columnist, he did get serious now and then, and those tend to be the columns that are best-remembered later - but it's been consistent, and it's been good, and it's been entertaining. Class Clown not only gives us that story, it also includes bits of his old writing from the time throughout, because why should Barry write a new version of something he did right the first time? So there's also a slight "greatest hits" feel to the book as well.

Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

This book is less official than I thought - not that that's a bad thing, but I should note it.

Lawrence Wood is the reigning champion of the New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest - he's won eight times and been a finalist fifteen times, far above anyone else. Bob Mankoff is the founding editor of that contest, though he left the New Yorker a few years back. Wood, supported and introduced by Mankoff, wrote Your Caption Has Been Selected to explain what the contest is, how it works, and, most importantly, how entrants can maximize their chances of winning.

(The long and informative subtitle, as required by any nonfiction book, is "More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.")

Your Caption was published by St. Martin's Press in 2024, and is not officially endorsed or otherwise directly connected with The New Yorker, as a disclaimer on the copyright page states. But...it does reprint more than a hundred New Yorker "drawings," with and without captions, so old-publishing-hand me suspects there was some kind of underlying agreement, possibly brokered by Mankoff.

Obviously, the audience for Your Caption is made up almost entirely of people who are already well aware of the Cartoon Caption Contest, and probably enter it regularly. (I used to enter back in the early days, but fell off the wagon some years ago and have never quite remembered to start up again.) So the "what is it" portion of the book is short and somewhat perfunctory - and it's not that hard to explain, anyway. 

Here's my potted version: The New Yorker posts a "drawing" without a caption on Week One, and during that week collects reader-contributed captions for it, which are also up- and down-voted by readers and sorted by a semi-automated system. In Week Two, an august board of New Yorker worthies selects three finalists, which are presented for a final reader vote in Week Three. Week Four sees the winning caption published.

Wood uses about a hundred examples, including the first few annual versions of the Contest going back to 1999, to discuss, in concrete terms, what makes a good cartoon caption and what should be avoided. His lessons are generally pretty good ones: be short, address the elements of the cartoon (who is speaking, any incongruities, all the major oddities), avoid the obvious jokes that everyone else will think of, and put it into the best words for the idea possible. He has some more detailed rules, too, which are also good - don't take my thumbnail here as covering it all.

This is a fun book about cartoons, which delves more deeply into how and why single-panel cartoons are funny - and the ways in which they can attempt to be funny and fail - than a "normal" collection of cartoons. If you're the kind of person interested in theories of humor, this is a good choice. Or if you just want to see your name in The New Yorker and win a contest - it could be useful there, too.

Black Hammer: The End by Jeff Lemire & Malachi Ward

So a few years ago there was a Black Hammer story-segment [1] called The Last Days of Black Hammer, which sounded like it could have been an ending. But that was a flashback; it told us things we already knew in greater detail, like so many superhero comics. It was not an ending.

Series creator and writer Jeff Lemire might be getting more blunt; the new Black Hammer book for 2024 was explicitly The End.

And, this time, it actually was. (Well, I don't want to oversell it. This is Vol. 8 of the main Black Hammer sequence; there's already a Vol. 9 out, so I mean "end" in a story sense rather than an actually stopping sense.)

I have been reading the Black Hammer stories, with somewhat of a gimlet eye, since mid-'21. I should mention that I haven't been particularly a fan of superhero stories for at least twenty years; they are artificial in silly (and seemingly absolutely required) ways that I find more and more annoying as the years go on. I keep coming back to this one, I think, because it's discrete, because I respect Lemire and enjoy most of his work, and because just whaling on something in writing is one of the little-discussed great pleasures of criticism.

OK, so let me set this up. In 1996, this superhero universe had its required crossover: worlds lived, worlds died, nothing was ever the same again. One superhero team from Spiral City, which apparently didn't have a team name because we've never learned it, was mostly exiled to a pocket universe afterward, while their leader and big gun, the titular Black Hammer [2] died defeating the Big Bad, Anti-God. [3] The main cast moped on a farm in that pocket universe for a while, and then - in a story I only vaguely remember, and am mostly going on faith that it was actually told in the pages of these comics - were freed from the tiny pocket universe to the exact same location, but on our Earth, a world outside of the superhero multiverse, which was Better Somehow. (This is explicitly a no-superpowers world - our world, remember? - but superheroes can pop in and out and their powers work just fine on this planet like anywhere else, so it's somewhat of a distinction without a difference.)

In between stories about the Moping Crew on the Farm, there were a lot of flashback and side stories about other superheroes back in Spiral City, including the Moping Crew themselves, mostly set before the big fight with Anti-God. Finally, in the Reborn series, Black Hammer's daughter Lucy - who had taken up as Black Hammer II for about twenty years after his death, but got older and settled down with a family even later than that - faced Shocking Revelations and The Return of the Villain She Thought Was Gone Forever.

The End is what happens next. My dismissive description is: Jeff Lemire said, "What if Crisis, but me?" It is very, very much in the Crisis mode. Anti-God is working his way down the string of infinite universes - hey, if they're infinite, shouldn't that take infinite time? wait, don't answer that - while he sends the Evil Black Hammer (older, with white in his evil-coded facial hair, like the old-man evil Hulk and a thousand others) ahead of him to whack all of the other Black Hammers in all of those universes first.

Because only a Good Guy with a Really Big Hammer can defeat a stone-faced kaiju-sized villain intent on eating your universe, of course!

So we get panels of worlds like beads on a string, getting crunched or eaten or whatever one after another. We see two versions of Earth with each other upside-down in the sky (like, really close!) and the requisite evil Hellamentals run around killing people and causing destruction, because if you're capable and willing to eat an entire universe, you need minions to smash things on one particular planet first, for Reasons.

And we see, in what is surely the point of the whole thing, alternate versions of all of our heroes, assembled from other universes, including the inevitable Parliament of Weird - every superhero multiverse must have a Parliament of That Guy; it's required - who are gathered by characters we vaguely remember from some of the many, many random Black Hammer spin-offs, who squabble with each other in the best Marvel Manner, and who fight Anti-God in various ways, which are all ineffectual (leading to many of them getting killed on the page - multiverses are great for disposable versions of characters the reader is expected to care about) until the One Last Crazy Idea That Just Might Work.

Anyway, before the Crisis kicked off, Lucy fled with her family to what DC Comics would prefer I don't call Earth-Prime, to live with the Moping Crew on their farm. She is pursued by the Evil Black Hammer, and she and her family eventually fight the guy. They lose and the entire multiverse is destroyed, the end!

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

Then they pop back into the main multiverse to take part in the really, really final fight, because the page count is dwindling. And Anti-God, we think, is defeated for ever and ever.

But, then, we also thought that way back at the beginning of Black Hammer, and we were wrong then.

As always, I do not take this seriously in the slightest. It's Superhero Grand Opera, and the fat lady is screeching for all her might in a really silly costume downstage center, trying to make us all really invested, but I just don't feel it. No shade on Lemire, who keeps everyone talking like human beings and does his best to make it as grounded as possible (spoiler: not very much) along the way. Or on artist Malachi Ward, who draws a bewildering array of versions of characters in a solid adventure-comics style - not as flashy as some of the previous Black Hammer artists, but dependable and clear. (This could easily have been a mess with a flashier artist, frankly.)

I cannot recommend any of the Black Hammer books for anyone with an attitude towards superhero comics anything like mine. Or, well, maybe I can, because I do enjoy making fun of them, and maybe you will, too. But I expect you need to have a very different opinion on the value of yet another Crisis knockoff to enjoy this on a non-camp level.

[1] They're all in Big 2 all-epic mode, so none of the main-sequence miniseries have been actual stories, since there was one beginning (at the beginning) and no end previously - all middle, all the time.

[2] How literal are superhero comics? Black Hammer is a Black guy who hits things with a comically oversized hammer. That literal.

[3] Anti-God has no personality or traits other than wanting to destroy all of the universes (for no stated reason). Visually, he's basically Darkseid in a Spirit Halloween "Galactic Planet Eater Guy" costume.

All of This and Nothing: The Bad Touch

"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.

No one can be serious all of the time.

If you're my age, you know this song. I don't know if the younger folks have heard it - it's not a song that anyone is going to be claiming is a masterpiece of any genre, or that provides deep insights into the human condition, or any of that bullshit.

It is a song that is massively fun, that has more energy than any three songs usually get in their budget, that makes you want to yell along with it, despite what everyone else in the world would say and think and judge you for if you did.

It's The Bad Touch by Bloodhound Gang. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, I'm quite gleeful to say.

It is quite possibly the most explicit "you and I should totally fuck right now" song every to get major radio airplay, which is impressive, since that's been a central concern of rock music since Day One. (Though most singers had to disguise things substantially more than the Gang did.)

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel

It is also so late-90s, full of those quick random references in the style of white-boy pop-rap of the day: Lyle Lovett, Siskel & Ebert, X-Files, and, of course, more than anything, the Discovery Channel.

This song, I have to admit, will never work. It was rapped by who-knows-how-many young men, earnest or not, to the objects of their affections - or maybe I should say "at" those people - when it was new in 1999 and maybe since then. And no one, ever, has been or will be convinced by this goofy song to "Do it now."

But that's OK. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or else what's a glimpse of heaven for?

Books Read: February 2026

I do this every month: at this point, mostly because I have been doing it every month. I think it's useful, to me at least, as an index. My posts on all of these books have already been written; they'll go live over the next six weeks and I'll eventually add links. (Most likely each month, as I do this post each time and update the previous ones.)

Here's what I read last month.

Manu Larcenet, Ordinary Victories, Vol. 4: Swing That Hammer (digital, 2/1)

Zidrou and Jordi Lefebre, Glorious Summers, Vol. 1: Southbound! (digital, 2/7)

Juan Barrio, Kiosco (digital, 2/8)

Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance (2/8)

Rick Geary, A Billy the Kid Alphabet (2/13)

Naoki Matayoshi & Shiunsuke Yoshitake, The Neverending Book (ARC, 2/13)

Lewis Trondheim & Nicolas Karamidas, Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures (digital, 2/14)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol.3 (digital, 2/15)

Alex Potts, Was That Normal? (digital, 2/16)

Kate Atkinson, Big Sky (2/16)

Manuele Fior, Red Ultramarine (digital, 2/21)

Gregory Hirschak, E Is for Edward (2/22)

Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 (digital, 2/22)

Juan Diaz Canales & Junajo Guarnido, Blacksad, Vol. 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows (digital, 2/28)

In March, I plan to read more books.

Quote of the Week: Kipple

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's horoscope. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed having any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

"I see." The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

"There's the First Law of Kipple," he said. "Kipple drives out unkipple. Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple."

 - Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, p.219 in Counterfeit Unrealities

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I saw Blade Runner again recently, as part of the weekly let's-watch-a-movie Wednesdays with my twenty-something kids. And it made me realize I haven't read any Dick novels since probably the '90s - I collected and read the whole reprint series from Vintage Contemporaries, which was all or nearly all of his work, and re-read some novels for various SFBC projects.

And I still had the result of one of those projects on my shelf: Counterfeit Unrealities, an omnibus of four Dick novels I edited back in 2002. One of those four novels was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that turned into Blade Runner (under a title acquired from a very different Alan Nourse novel, for the usual vibes-based Hollywood reasons).

To start off, Blade Runner is a noir; Androids is not - Dick was always more quotidian and grounded than that. The Rick Deckard of Androids is a guy with a job, like a hundred other Dick protagonists, not a elite replicant-hunter. In the novel, he's the #2 bounty hunter for this region, who gets work only when the #1 guy has too much or specifically subcontracts something to him - or, as in both versions of the story, when the #1 guy is seriously injured and hospitalized by one of his targets.

In the novel, it's a somewhat near future, year unspecified as far as I remember. It's a 1968 novel, so call it thirty or so years on from there. There has been a World War Terminal, which smashed a lot of the world, and the survivors are mostly emigrating to the colonies - in the novel, explicitly on Mars, unlike the vague "colony worlds" of the movie. The people remaining on Earth are living in a semi-ruined human landscape, all huge buildings ("conaps," in best '60s skiffy lingo). There are places where a lot of humans live - popular places, fashionable places - but Dick protagonists never live in the fashionable places. So the people we see in Androids are among the few, or only, people living in gigantic, slowly deteriorating buildings originally built to hold many more people in an happier, more optimistic world.

Dick's language is also more grounded. The novels' Deckard hunts androids, or "andys." Not "replicants," not "skin jobs." And the background details of the world are more foregrounded, as the title makes clear. Real animals are close to extinct, which means they are fantastically valuable and the main way people in this society compete through conspicuous consumption - every family has the most expensive real animal they can afford, or an "electric" replica, pretending to be real. There's also an element of empathy or connection there, as often with Dick: everyone wants an animal to care for, to keep, to connect them to a living world mostly destroyed by "W.W.T."

Also important in the novel, and completely absent from the movie, is the invented religion of Mercerism. Just about everyone has an "empathy box," through which they commune, semi-telepathically, with everyone else interacting with the box at that moment, and through which all of them experience moments in the life of Mercer, the prophet of this sect. Mercer climbs a mountain, with unseen forces throwing rocks at him - rocks which his followers feel themselves, which draw their blood when they hit - for a long time, and then is cast into a hell-like space for a time after finally reaching the top, only to begin the cycle over again. Androids cannot use the empathy box, and are hostile to Mercerism - as also is this world's omnipresent TV and radio personality, Buster Friendly.

Deckard is the second-rank bounty hunter for the San Francisco region. Dave Holden was number one. But Dave had just gotten a job to "retire" a group of eight andys the day before, and successfully handled two of them before being shot himself by the third.

So Deckard now has six escaped androids to find and kill. But, again, this is only partially a "you have a really dangerous job" issue. Deckard is also grappling with the question of empathy, and, more prosaically, with thinking about the big bonuses he gets for retiring andys, and how expensive a real animal he might be able to buy if he does it all successfully.

Also, book Deckard is married. His wife, Iran, apparently has no job outside the home - it was a 1968 novel - no real hobbies or pastimes, and is chronically depressed, even though Deckard bought them both fancy Penfield mood organs to orchestrate and control their emotional states. Deckard thinks, or purports to think, that a "better" animal would make Iran happy.

Meanwhile, the narrative also turns to a young man, John Isidore. He's slightly retarded - a "chickenhead," he's called - and thus unable to emigrate to the colonies even if he wanted to. He lives alone in a big conapt building out in the suburbs - but discovers that a woman, Pris, has moved in. She's pretty clearly one of the runaway androids; we can tell because of her lack of empathy and responses to his questions, but John partially doesn't care and partially doesn't realize. Over the course of the rest of the novel, he comes to help the runaways - or they use him and his apartment as a base, if you prefer.

Deckard flies to Seattle to learn more about the Nexus-6, the new, fancy brain that all of this group of runaway androids have. In the novel, there's a robust capitalist competitive market in androids; multiple companies make them, and they've all been improving their "products," making androids where each generation is more human-like and harder to differentiate. These andys were made by the Rosen Association, and he meets with Rachael Rosen, who claims to be a member of the family that controls the company - but is, as in the movie, a Nexus-6 android with an implanted set of memories. The standard current test, the Voight-Kampff, does work on her, and indicates she is an android, but it was more difficult and time-consuming than previously. (Deckard and his colleagues speak frankly of the long sequence of tests - new andy types are always appearing that can't be detected with the current test, and new tests always being worked up to find ever-more-specific differentiators.)

Deckard does some running around, some investigating. He retires three of the andys, one of them working as a police officer in a shadow police office - this comes at the end of a very Phildickian section, where Deckard is arrested by a uniformed policeman and taken to a completely different "new" police station, and the reader is momentarily unsure if we have been following a delusional impostor for the first half of the novel. Eventually, he tracks the last three to the building where Isidore lives, and, with Rachael's help, goes there to kill them at the same time that Buster Friendly's long-promised debunking of Mercerism is broadcast.

The fate of Mercerism - and, by implication, that of the human race - is left unclear at the end. Dick also has some subtle hints that perhaps almost every animal we see in the novel is actually secretly electric, that it's nothing but electric sheep everywhere. The ending is substantially different from the movie, but the feeling, the concerns are not. Those are parallel, though expressed here through Mercerism and the electric animals. But it is still an ambiguous ending: Deckard has succeeded at his work task, but what the reader has learned about the world isn't as easily settled. And what the reader suspects about the world is even less so.

Man's Best by Pornsak Pichetshote, Jesse Lonergan, and Jeff Powell

If I were cynical - and I am, a lot of the time - I'd think of this book as "We 3, but with a happy ending!" or maybe, more vaguely, "We 3 in SPAAAACE!"

That might be reductive, but, really, how many other comics about three uplifted and cyborged animals fighting to save their humans can you think of? Sometimes, the precursor is glaringly obvious.

Man's Best is a 2024 SF comic, originally five issues long and then collected into a single book-sized volume, written by Pornsak Pichetshote, drawn and colored by Jesse Lonergan, and lettered by Jeff Powell. (I don't usually credit letterers, but Powell is on the cover, and I try to defer to the book most of the time.)

There is a starship, heading to an alien planet to test a terraforming device. Earth, of course, is falling apart in the background, for thematically important but non-specific "people are fighting" reasons - it's not quite the '70s-standard population-bomb argument, but maybe a revised and updated version of that. Among the humans, there is a Captain and a Doctor, and then an undifferentiated mass of everyone else.

The Doctor - a woman, and very feminine-coded, with big fluffy hair and huge circular glasses - has three animals, said specifically to be for emotional support on this journey. (The Captain is similarly masculine-coded, all craggy features and eyepatch.) But the animals also are heavily cyborged, or maybe just lightly cyborged (one definitely has a new leg) and live inside exoskeletons that augment them. They are Athos, Porthos, and....Lovey; two dogs and a cat, with the cat as the leader in a twist that will amuse anyone who has ever met a cat.

For some reason - this really isn't clear - the Doctor is running the animals through training sessions in what seems to be a Star Trek holodeck, in which they fight giant robots they call Klangers. This is the beginning of the story, so they do not work well together, and fail. This clearly sets up Narrative Tension for when the animals have to battle robots for real later in the book.

Anyway, the planet they're supposed to test the terraforming doohickey on is missing, which leads to some doomy speeches from the humans. But a planet suddenly appears, and the ship crashes into it. The animals wake up, somewhat later, in the wreckage. The humans are all gone.

So they decide - not without squabbling, because we need to see them squabble a lot for aforementioned Narrative Tension reasons - to save the Doctor and the Captain, somehow, using their various technological enhancements and The Power of Friendship. (Well, they don't say the latter.)

The planet they landed on is some kind of third-generation copy of the Well World, with various regions separated by some kind of gates - we don't see big walls around the hex-equivalents, so it might be implemented somewhat differently, but it's the same idea: a big planet full of sentients from lots of other planets all over the place, each in their own habitat. And, of course, there are robots that run the whole thing, which are hostile to Our Animal Heroes. Plenty of the inhabitants of the individual regions are somewhat hostile, too, so there's a lot of running and fighting and squabbling, as the animals see their tech enhancements get degraded, destroyed, or removed along the way.

They also learn a bit about the purpose of this world, and do, of course, eventually get to the Doctor and the Captain, where there is a Shocking Revelation and a big Boss Fight with a robot that looks just like the one from their training. In the aftermath, the animals need to make a decision about The Fate of Earth, and we readers think they make a pretty good one - but it is a bit of a "Lady and the Tiger" ending as to whether their decision will work.

For all of the "Earth is doomed because people Can't Get Along" talk and the eternally-squabbling animals, this is a fairly positive story: it does come down on the side of humanity being salvageable, which could be a bit of a stretch in a story about uplifted animals made to fight robots. I found it a bit talky but pleasant, and didn't argue with the premises (how are these animals uplifted? they seem to be just plain shelter rescues who can magically talk to each other in clear idiomatic English and eventually communicate with humans, too) as much as I normally would. And Lonergan is a great story-telling artist, particularly for SF stories like this one: he gives the action sequences a lot of punch and energy.

I found Man's Best to be somewhat lighter and fluffier than I think it wanted me to, but it's just fine for what it is. And if you want cyborged-animals-fighting-robots action, it can't be beat.

The Incal, Vol.3: What Lies Beneath by Alexandro Jodorowosky & Mœbius

The Incal series is set in a space-opera universe, and I don't think we get a good sense of how it all works - like most space opera, things are big and flashy, with exotic names and complex factions, and the scope is vast. We do see what seems to be the seat of government for this entire polity in this book: the ruler of the human galaxy, and its equivalent of a Congress or Council of Ministers. And I think we're supposed to at least root for one group there, the human crew of a starship who bring a shocking report to the top of their government, but the rest of the political maneuvering was vaguer and less clear, other than a vague "all of these people are corrupt and unpleasant" sense. Maybe that is the point.

The Incal books are a mystical space opera: they're not about strength fixing what's wrong with this universe, battling evil and overwhelming it. They're about what I suppose I should call right-mindedness transforming that universe by the power of its better paradigm. And I should admit that those kind of stories tend to annoy me: I can still probably still work up a good head of steam thinking about Rick Veitch's The One, which is another "if only we all lost every bit of individuality and specificity to be loving cosmic gloop, everyone would be eternally happy and perfect" story.

I don't recall how far The Incal goes in that direction by the end; I think not quite as far.

This is the third of six books, The Incal, Vol. 3: What Lies Beneath. Like the whole series, it was written by filmmaker and visionary Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by Mœbius. These stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s in French and were collected as this book in 1984; the first English edition was from Marvel in 1988 and this corrected edition, translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, came out in 2013.

As of the end of the second book, the main cast - six humans and a concrete seagull - were hurtling down into the center of their planet. I think I called it "Earth" when talking about the previous books; here we learn this is actually Ter21, one minor world in this far-future polity. See my posts on the first and second Incal books for how we got here, including who these characters are and why they used to hate each other. But they have rapidly lost most of the personality traits that were important earlier: they spend most of this book doing Spielbergian pointing and gasping, or functioning as explanations of the plot, often as speech bubbles pointed at an object.

(There are a number of panels late in this book featuring back-and-forth dialogue, pointed at a spaceship or that spaceship's precursor, where there's no way to tell who is saying what, and no difference in the voice of any of the characters. They all function as Jodorowsky explaining his themes.)

The action of this book is mostly those people doing the old journey to enlightenment thing: down into the depths of their world, through an ocean of garbage, battling the nasty and violent locals, chased by an implacable robot, down and down and down through strange and wondrous places until they hit the point where they can ascend. Late in the book, they do a lot of talking to each other about the significance of their journey: "We're forming an entity of transdimensional energy!" announces one of them.

Meanwhile, we do see that human crew, first on the way to the seat of their government, then presenting there, and then what happens afterward. Note that this is not the kind of story where talking persuasively or "normal channels" in general or human government are ever going to be seen in a positive light, and set your expectations accordingly. The only hope for humanity is The Incal.

Something I noticed this time, which is a bit disconcerting: our hero John DiFool, and Animah, the carrier of the other Incal, are shown as physically different while they have the Incals. In their better, purer form, they have lighter, almost neotenic features, are taller, speak quietly and with authority. Once they lose the incals, they have coarser features and notably much darker skin, besides being vastly more emotional. It's not quite racially coded, but it tends in that direction in an uncomfortable way.

Anyway, the two incals merge with some other stuff to form a spaceship, and one of the seven - the kid, who previously had basically nothing to do - is himself transformed to be the motivating intelligence of that ship. And they will set out to battle a giant black "Shadow Egg" which is eating their sun - at this point, the Technopope's organization is still the main antagonist for the series. (I think that changes, and gets more cosmic, in the back half.)

The bafflegab is still silly here, but space-opera bafflegab is always silly, no matter what kind of space opera it is. This one is silly in a mystical way, but it's mostly grounded in the way this universe works; I can't complain too much about that. I still have trouble taking any of this seriously, but it's a famous series beloved by millions, so that could be a Me Problem, if you want to see it that way.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson

For whatever reason, I've been reading books about the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show this past year - Frank Conniff's movie-essays-cum-memoirs, the great '90s Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the team, and, most relevantly for today, Dale Sherman's history of the show, The Worst We Can Find.

Today's book is in the same vein as Sherman's - luckily, they have very different focuses and audiences. Sherman's book was a show-biz history, for a show-biz publisher - heavy on the personalities and the work they did, and on connections to similar projects before and after. It also was a pretty general-reader-friendly history of the show itself, the careers of the major players since (they were all fairly young, and didn't have much of a career to speak of before, except for Joel Hodgson), and where "riffing" came from in popular culture and what has happened in that space since the show was first cancelled in 1999.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History is a more academic book, by two professors, Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson. It seems to be a bit shorter than Sherman, but substantially denser, and vastly more interested in what riffing means - the stance of the audience to a creative work, the interplay between an existing work and commentary on it, and things like that. (Sample sentence: "The series also operates as a form of culture jamming, a type of protest used to disrupt media culture and its attendant cultural institutions such as corporate advertising" on p.46.)

It does also include the history of the show, with plenty of quotes from the major players from articles and publicity material of the time. It's just as well-researched as Sherman, maybe more so, with a nine-page bibliography and fifteen pages of notes in the backmatter. But it is vastly less concerned about what these people did and vastly more interested in the why of it and particularly what it all means.

Academics gonna academic, of course. And the subtitle is "A Cultural History" - this is part of a larger series from its publisher about what specific TV shows mean in popular culture, what they stand for or represent or indicate.

I generally agree with Foy and Olson's connections and find them interesting, while still thinking this book is a tad dry and much less general-reader-friendly than the others I mentioned above. If you want a general history of the show and its main players, Sherman is probably better for you.

But if you want to think about what it means for an audience to add their own jokes to an artistic work - or to seek out kinds of art that embed commentary on top of an existing work - this book will give you a lot of mull over. And if you are an academic, or have that background, it will be more familiar and accessible to you.

All of This and Nothing: Dr. Bill

"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'm back to Obscure this week with Dr. Bill, a 2011 song from a band called 13ghosts. This is probably the first song of theirs I heard, and it got me to buy one full-length and an EP. I didn't like anything else of theirs quite as much as this one song, but there was some good stuff. And that's the way it goes, isn't it?

This is a ominous, noisy, compelling song, focused tightly on the singer's voice and the things he's telling us.

Well, maybe the things he's trying to convince himself of, if we're honest.

I like the instrumentation here, the way it starts with that slow, walking beat, punctuated with emphatic guitar chords and timed out with the spare, mostly single-hit drum sounds. Then the singer comes in, and the music builds slowly behind him - the drumming gets more complex, an electric guitar with a slightly more soothing sound to start out with, but then it all goes on, a little tenser each verse. 

I'm very normal
I'm very like everyone else

The singer is visiting Dr. Bill, we think. Some kind of regular checkup. And the singer is protesting, we think, that he shouldn't be there, that he doesn't need this, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with him.

We might even believe him, at first.

I've got it all
Nine days a week
I never sleep, I never eat
I'm a real breadwinner, a real go-get-her

But he definitely protests too much. We've probably done that ourselves. Everything is completely normal. There's nothing wrong with him. There's nothing wrong with us.

There are no voices in my head
Everything I hear is real
There are no monsters in my bed
Everything I dreamed is dead

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 28, 2026

I got one book from the library this week, and, continuing the theme from last week, it is physically larger than I expected. I'm getting much more of an upper-body workout from my books lately than expected.

That book is the most recent graphic novel by Peter Kuper: Insectopolis: A Natural History. As best I can tell, it's a pop-science book in comics form telling the history of the vast phylum of Arthropoda. (OK, I'm cheating slightly. I was hoping Insects would have their own Kingdom, but they don't - they're Animalia like most of us. And Arthopodia includes things that aren't insects, who all sit within the Class Insecta. But that isn't nearly as much fun to type out.)

The big deal here, for anyone not aware, is that insects are dying out in vast numbers, due to human activity, over the past few decades. And they are an important base level to a lot of ecosystems, which means the extinction of various insect species is A Bad Sign. Kuper has never been the most positive storyteller - he always seems to gravitate to things that are broken, lost, or horrible in various ways - so I expect this will be depressing in multiple ways.

Quote of the Week: Unexpected Surprises in One's Domicile

It is not easy to state offhand what is the last thing a young man starting out in life would wish to find on the premises of the furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy which he had just begun to occupy. Bugs? Perhaps. Cockroaches? Possibly. Maybe defective drains. One cannot say. But a large black pig in the kitchen would unquestionably come quite high up on the list of undesirable objects, and Jerry, as he gazed at Queen of Matchingham, was conscious of that disagreeable sensation which comes to those who, pausing to tie a shoelace while crossing a railway line, find themselves struck in the small of the back by the Cornish express.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.204

The Alliance of the Curious, #1: Sapiens by Philippe Riche

French creator Philippe Riche had a two-part series called Bad Break - as far as I can tell, it came out in France close to twenty years ago, and was translated into English in the mid-Teens, as part of Humanoids' expansion. Riche also did a sequel series around the same time, which was also brought into English by Humanoids.

I can't find any newer related books, but Humanoids - which I think was Riche's publisher in France, too - has been having some troubles lately, particularly the US outpost, so he might have pivoted to different projects with more stable partners. (Or maybe not - creative careers are odd and contingent, so he could be doing something different but vaguely related, like art-directing or making animation, right now.)

I did read the two Bad Break books last year - see my posts on the first and second one - and now I'm jumping into the sequel series, called The Alliance of the Curious. Riche seems to have carefully made this second go-round so he could expand on it easily with more stories - so, to my cynical mind, it's only to be expected that he wouldn't have the chance to do so.

This first Alliance of the Curious book is titled Sapiens. It picks up some time after Bad Break, or perhaps slightly changes the premise to facilitate more stories. Simon and Rebecca, two of the three main characters of Bad Break, are now in a relationship, and Simon is still working in vaguely the same junk industry: he now cleans out storage units and sells what he finds there, or acts as a middle-man between, on the one hand, people who have a bunch of random old junk and, on the other, potential buyers. It doesn't seem to be a lucrative career, but there's no sign that Rebecca is working, so I guess it pays for their lifestyle, such as it is. (Rebecca was a porn actress in the first series - in a vague way, since we only saw a few advertisements - so maybe she retired or maybe she's still working at the same thing or maybe she's shifted to acting/modeling work with more of her clothes on.) The third member of the original trio, Ernst-Lazare, is still doing the same thing: high-end dealer in cultural artifacts, mostly those that are or incorporate human remains. 

Meanwhile, we also see a secret society called the Order of Saint Louis, including three wild young blonde women known as the Cocaine Sisters, a man named Louis who is the previously-presumptive heir to a mysterious "throne," and a grumpy middle-aged functionary, Grégoire De Tours. An old woman has died, and she is of a "purer lineage" than Louis, so her son will inherit whatever this is.

That son, Griffon De Martel, is a white-haired man with some kind of mental problem, and we watch him stumble through his life as well - losing his apartment when his mother died, having all of his stuff sold to a junk dealer, falling into a group of homeless people.

Simon gets Griffon's stuff, most of which is worthless crap. But there is a jeweled skull, which he passes to Ernst-Lazare for help identifying and finding a market for. Meanwhile, the Cocaine Sisters start searching for Griffon - why them isn't as clear, but they obviously want to kill Griffon so their boy-toy Louis inherits whatever there is to inherit.

All this is set during a massive summer heat wave in Paris, mostly for atmosphere though it also allows Riche to put his cast in fewer clothes (or none, as we saw in Bad Break).

The secret of the De Martels comes out by the end of this book, and I won't give that away, but this is a Dan Brown-esque secret society thing, with hidden people with unexpected and frankly unrealistic connections to ancient history. In this book, there's mostly a bunch of running around, some shooting, and a whole lot of Griffon being confused and muddle-headed.

This one is all set-up; I expect the second book will have more action, explain the deal of the Order, and maybe even see our heroes make a little money from their findings. Although they didn't make a penny in Bad Break, so that could be a standard feature of Riche's work.

His art is still Euro-stylish, though his women all tend to look the same. Translators Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe put it all into idiomatic, clear English - it's a silly thriller plot, but that's the genre, not a complaint.  I tend to think this is slightly less engaging than Bad Break was - too much running about, with the Griffon scenes entirely separate from everything else - but it's in the same style, and I have hopes the back half will land the plane well.