Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I'm still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it's a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I'd say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that's something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is Sears' new book this year; it follows 2021's Young Shadow and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say "can be considered," because it doesn't reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn't in this book - so maybe it's a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty - mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops - than the typical Big Two character. And he's still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids - a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow's organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he's leaning more heavily into the lefty thing - follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn't, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think "Young Shadow & the Watchdogs" is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it's definitely not that. But it's not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There's only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers - but it's comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids - the term of art used in the book is "prep school jerks" - in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they're going to have a big practice to make sure they're ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids - maybe middle school, maybe late elementary - but no one even mentions school. They're out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don't seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural - signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place - and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don't want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That's another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I'd still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what's the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis by Philippe Riche

I can't tell if Philippe Riche made any comics after this one. He did the two Bad Break books about 2003, this two-book series in 2006, and nothing since. But he also seems to be the same Philippe Riche who works in animation, and that Riche is credited with directing a movie released this year - so he might have just gotten busy with other things.

(This might be a quirk of mine, but I always want to find that creators I know - not even that I like, just anyone whose work I'm even aware of - continued their careers and did interesting or great or exciting things. I worked in publishing for more than a decade, and saw how many creative careers fizzle out after a couple of projects or a short decade. I hate that; I hate living in a world where that's the norm. So I'm always hoping for the opposite, for everyone.)

Be that as it may, this is the back half of the story. The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis continues and completes the story started in the first book, Sapiens, still focusing on the three main characters from Bad Break. Their roles shifted a bit from Bad Break to Alliance - Ernst-Lazare no longer seems to be immortal, or quite as unknowable; Rebecca X is not mentioned as working in porn; and Simon, well, Simon, in this book, seems to have become much dumber and less focused.

We do get a bit more explanation of the backstory, though that mostly fills out the outlines of what we  knew or guessed from the first book. The three heroes have that jeweled Neanderthal skull, and are still looking for an old man, a possibly mentally-ill tramp named Griffon De Martel.

Griffon is both the heir apparent to the (vacant, of course) throne of France, from the medieval Carolingian dynasty, and the last living Neanderthal, the final product of a millennia-long secret society living among modern humans and interbreeding - presumably, exclusively among themselves.

Because of the first aspect of his lineage, he will disinherit Louis, the dissolute Bourbon pretender, due to some complicated hugger-mugger involving something called the Order of Saint Louis. And, because of that, three young blonde women called the Cocaine Sisters - Louis's lovers or friends or enablers or all three - are on a rampage to find and kill Griffon, with high-powered automatic weapons.

Because of the second aspect, as we eventually learn near the end of this book, Griffon is trying to get back to the secret crypt of his people - which is, of course, beneath Paris - where he will reunite that jeweled skull with its body. They both belong to the legendary first leader of his people, forty thousand or so years ago, who made them go underground in human society when the mammoths got hunted to extinction. (I swear I am not making any of this up.) And, legendarily, if the skull is placed on its body by the last Neanderthal, all of the dead Neanderthals will rise and take back the world that is rightfully theirs.

Simon and Rebecca and Ernst-Lazare are mostly bystanders or witnesses to this plot; they're trying to figure out if the skull is valuable, and, if so, to whom. They get shot at by the three women, try to find Griffon to talk to him about this whole bizarre situation, and come out of it all basically the same way they did in Bad Break. They do manage to keep their clothes on this time, which I suppose is an improvement.

It is all very Dan Brown, in that are-you-willing-to-believe-this? style. Riche has nice atmospheric storytelling art here; his people are angular, like a world full of high-fashion models, and his colors are moody. He has a lot of dialogue, to explain this oddball story, and it it all basically makes sense and is believable in the reading, which is all one can expect for a conspiracy-theory book like this one.

I don't think we got, or probably will get, any more comics from Riche, since he's spent the last twenty years in the animation mines. But who knows? Doing animation means he's probably still drawing regularly, so maybe he'll come back - with another tale of these three or something else. I'd like to think so. These books are just weird and specific enough that I feel like the world should have more of them.

Playback by Raymond Chandler

This is the last and least of Raymond Chandler's novels, written after the death of his wife Cissy and published the year before his own death. It's also, uneasily, a sequel to Chandler's previous (longest, best) novel, The Long Goodbye, which can make Playback feel even smaller and less impressive by comparison.

So Chandler didn't do himself any favors with this book. It's still Chandler: there's plenty of strong moments and descriptions and ideas in it, and the detective-plot, though not as robust or resonant as his better books, still works and is at the center of the novel. Playback is not a bad PI novel; it's just disappointing, since we know how much better Chandler could be.

It's about eighteen months after The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's series hero, is still mooning over Linda Loring, the rich heiress who got away in that book. Mooning more obviously here than he was in the previous novel, actually, which I (and many other critics before me) attribute more to Chandler's loss of Cissy.

Marlowe is hired by "Claude Umney, the lawyer" - that's how he inevitably answers his phone, and Marlowe does make a smart remark about it, but it doesn't take - to follow a certain person and report back. Umney is working, he says, on orders from unnamed but powerful forces "back East." The person to be tailed is, of course, a gorgeous blonde woman: Betty Mayfield,  traveling under an alias. Marlowe watches her arrive on the Super Chief train, hang about in the train station for a few hours, and then continue on to San Diego. He follows her there, and to the small community of Esmeralda.

Marlowe finds Mayfield attractive, and thinks she's being blackmailed - she was clearly confronted by a man in the LA train station - so he doesn't just report her location to Umney and finish up the job. Instead, he snoops about, pretending to be her jilted husband to the desk staff at the motel where she's staying, and eventually meets and talks to Mayfield.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with some femme fatale business from Mayfield, a potential murder or death by misadventure but no corpse, the question of the whereabouts of that blackmailer, another PI sent by possibly the same "back East" people, and Mayfield's growing connection to the ex-gangster who owns half of Esmeralda. There's also some mostly-honest cops, and a tough hotel detective, who wander through near the end.

All the materials are there, but Chandler doesn't use them as effectively in 1958 as he did earlier in his career - the Kansas City connection between the second PI and the ex-gangster, for example, is mostly just shrugged aside as coincidence. In the end, Marlowe lets a murderer get away with a stern talking-to, and is rewarded for his bravery by a phone call out of the blue by Linda Loring, the One True Love of his life, who will come back to LA for him if he wants her to.

It's an incongruous ending that feels more like undoing and redoing Long Goodbye than doing up Playback. It might have worked if Chandler had done some work in the middle of the book to contrast Mayfield and Loring - though, frankly, they both seem to be to be cut from the same standard Chandler blonde-dame cloth.

Readers will likely take Chandler's novels in order - there's only seven of them to begin with. You can stop after Long Goodbye is you want to; it's enough of an ending for Marlowe anyway. Playback doesn't retroactively ruin anything, but it is a smaller and lesser thing to come at the end.

Brain Drain, Part 1 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

This much is true: when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain was removed by the pathologist, divided into 240 sections, and, over the next couple of decades, somewhat divvied out to researchers. This only became widely known in 1978. There is, inevitably, a Wikipedia article about it.

Pierre-Henry Gomont's bande dessinée series Brain Drain tells a fictional version of that story. The first half of the story - published as Brain Drain, Part 1 by Dargaud in 2020 and apparently translated into English the same year by Edward Gauvin - sees Gomont getting a little cutesy with those facts. He changes the names slightly - the dead luminary is only called "Professor Albert" and the pathologist, actually Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, is here called "Stolz." And the ghost - or something - of Einstein is a major character. Gomont also diverges from the true history - more so than just having Einstein "alive" and commenting on the action - by making Stolz a horndog for a cute blonde neurologist and introducing rather more drama and running-about than I think the real Dr. Harvey saw.

Well, let me just point to that cover, which seems slightly (and oddly) a Fabulous Freak Brothers homage - that sets the tone for the whole exercise. Gomont has a aggressive line with a lot of mid-century influence in it, matching cleanly-drawn but lumpy people with slashing but precise backgrounds and objects. He also has an equally aggressive narrative tone: this is a story, and he's going to tell it to us, in a clear, detached, omniscient voice.

So "Professor Albert" dies, and "Stolz" performs the autopsy and announces the results to the assembled media. So far, so normal - but Stolz also, on what Gomont presents as a whim or a mania - or a way to get into the pants of that blonde neurologist - removes the brain and hides it, just before the body goes to be cremated.

(The real Dr. Harvey also removed Einstein's eyeballs and gave them to the dead professor's ophthalmologist. Stolz in this book does nothing similar. The historical Dr. Harvey also seems to have been substantially less secretive, making the whole thing more of a conspiracy among doctors, or just a "we doctors know best how to handle these things; we don't need to consider the patient's wishes" attitude.)

After the cremation, an older man shows up at Stolz's house, with the top of his head missing. It is, of course "Professor Albert." He seems to be physical and real in every way - he takes up space, drives cars, is seen by other people, and so on. He's also something like Stolz's Jiminy Cricket, and something like a canary in a coal mine about the state of the removed brain (which, in this book, is sitting in a glass jar, in some kind of liquid - formaldehyde, maybe? purified water? some manner of alcohol? - inside a box, in Stolz's basement).

Anyway, It Is Wacky. Stolz tries to connect with the executor of Professor Albert's estate - it seems to be widely known, or suspected, that Professor Albert's brain is still floating around - but has no luck there. Then large men in suits, who claim to be some kind of government investigators, come nosing around, and Stolz has to flee with the brain and Professor Albert.

This book is only part 1, so it ends with them on the run. Presumably, the second half will wrap up the story, though I don't see how it can reconnect with the actual historical record at this point. (The actual historical record is mostly "Dr, Harvey gave out pieces of the brain to his colleagues, and nothing much happened for twenty years," which is pretty boring in a BD.)

I would not read this hoping it will tell you the real history; it will not. But it is an energetic, goofy story told with a clear voice in a distinctive tone, with wonderful art, and I think Gomont has a point that he's driving the story to. So if the story of the removed brain of a famous historical figure doesn't squick you out, you might want to take a look.

All of This and Nothing: The Hurting Heart

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

We're back to Obscure this week, with The Hurting Heart, my favorite song from singer-songwriter Richard McGraw, off his 2009 record Burying the Dead.

This is another artist I know basically nothing about. Somehow, I got on publicity lists for some small record labels in the early days of this blog - I know; I'm not sure why or how myself - and have gotten a stream of review material that way. Because of that, I think I got Burying the Dead via email: it was coming out, and a publicity person at the label had me on the big list of "media" - or, probably more likely, and sadly for me, "influencers" - so I got it, and listened to it.

I don't know how many other people did. It's a fine record, with a bunch of excellent songs. But there are dozens of fine records every year; I don't myself listen to most of them, and I'm sure you're the same. The world is big and full of wonders, which can be sad if you're someone who just made something wonderful and the world isn't interested.

But maybe I can cast a little bit of light on this raw, bad-love song, a decade and a half later.

This is another "you broke up with me; you're going on with life and I'm not" kind of song, with McGraw's immediate, tormented voice to make it real.

And you're not even a ghost
since you moved back home.

She's doing well; the singer is not - and knows it. He wants to get over this, but he's not there - I hope there's a "yet" implied, but you never know with bad-love songs.

And if I could set aside this hurting heart.
I'd bear your ring at your wedding.
'Cause I don't want to own it
and I don't want to show it.

That refrain is strong and true, and gives the song real power - it's a song that shows rather than tells. McGraw says "hurting heart," but doesn't describe it, or talk about his pain, just what his ex-lover is doing and what he insists he is or will or should be doing.

But he's not doing it yet. That's the point of a song like this, and McGraw has crafted a great one here.

Quote of the Week: The Height of Flush Times

Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails - unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region - in any region for that matter. Is it not so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it established beyond cavil that the "flush times" are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper.

 - Mark Twain, Roughing It, p.798 in The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It

Roughing It by Mark Twain

I've vaguely wanted to re-read Roughing It for a few years now. The last time the urge rose, I didn't have a copy on hand and read Life on the Mississippi instead, but, this time, availability and interest coincided. (I read it in the Library of America omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, which is what I linked from the title above.)

This will not be any kind of formal review or critical evaluation: I've been out of the editorial mills for two decades and, even then, was much more focused on commercial possibilities than literary analysis. But Roughing It is a wonderfully fun book, a collection of almost-random pieces by a young writer still discovering what he can do, and I hope I can inspire some new readers to pick it up.

As an old editorial hand, what struck me this time was how much of a second book this is. Twain had traveled to Europe and "the Holy Land" as a newspaper correspondent in 1867, then turned his newspaper columns into the very successful The Innocents Abroad.

Here I want to note that Roughing It has sometimes been published as The Innocents at Home, from which we can all take the lesson that publishers were always the same, ready to take advantage of any opportunity they could see or manufacture. (And good for them!)

Innocents was a major travel book, one that helped define what was a nascent genre in the late 19th century. It covered one trip, of about a half-year duration, with a consistent "cast" and something like a plotline supplied by the itinerary of the ship. Roughing It, on the other hand, isn't any of those things. To me, it reads like a publisher, or maybe Twain himself, asked "what else do you have like Innocents?" and the answer was "everything!"

Roughing It covers seven years of Twain's life - parts of it in greater detail than others. Mississippi, almost a decade later, went back to the years just before that, when he was a steamboat pilot on the big river, but the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to that career.

Twain doesn't mention either the War or his riverboat piloting in Roughing It. He begins with the journey - his older brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain (in his civilian guise as Sam Clemens) was Orion's personal secretary. The trip across the country - and out of the country, because Nevada and nearby regions were all territories and not states in those days, half-wilderness and thinly populated - takes up the first fifth of the book, a long journey by stagecoach from Missouri, full of local color, stories about Indians and bandits, and lots of details of what that kind of trip was like, for an audience that was already forgetting it with the rise of the railroad. There's also something of a sidebar about Utah and the Mormons, since Twain and company stopped in Salt Lake City for a break on their way to Nevada.

From there, it looks like Roughing It will be the story of Twain's life in that Nevada territory, during the years of silver mania. Twain does some mining for silver himself, and - like most of the population - spends even more time and energy speculating in stock certificates from various mines and getting caught up in various manias, all of which are guaranteed to make him fabulously rich right up into the moment where the whole thing falls apart and he's left with worthless paper.

But Twain gets himself into newspaper work in the middle of this time, and the book starts shifting - first to various fictional or non-fictional stories about colorful figures of the area: miners, criminals, and lawmen. Then Twain himself heads off to San Francisco, for reasons that are clear enough to him at the time, and the last third or so of the book is very miscellaneous, covering the next three or four years in patchwork form. There's a long trip to the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) that takes up almost the last hundred pages, which is the most like Innocents, though without the actual tour-company compatriots that Twain got so much material out of for the previous book.

So Roughing It is a book of parts: the trip West, mining in Nevada, newspaper work there and in San Francisco, and finally the big Hawaii trip. Twain papers over the discontinuities, which means many  chapters start with something like "After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent." (From Chapter LXII) The early material - about the journey and silver-mining - are stronger and more focused than the back half of the book, so one can wish that some editor had been able to get Twain to a shorter, tighter book. (But how often is that the wish, with so many writers.)

I still think of Roughing It as my favorite Twain book: it has all of his strengths and little of the sourness that came into his work later in life. It's full of tall tales, real and invented, and details of life in several places and times of great interest. One thing the book won't tell you, but is fascinating in retrospect, is that during most of this period the Civil War was raging a thousand or so miles east of Twain and his silver-mining adventures. The world is big; even when there's an Obvious Story going on, individuals have their own stories - and they're often completely unrelated.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death by Stan Sakai

This tenth collection of the long-running Usagi Yojimbo series gathers eight full issues - the last two of the short Mirage second volume and the first six of the much longer Dark Horse run - along with one last backup story from an earlier Mirage issue. It originally appeared in 1998, soon after the stories were in floppy form, and was updated somehow or somewhat for the current 2010 edition. (The book doesn't say what changed - it doesn't list the 1998 date anywhere but in the byline of Kurt Busiek's introduction - but I suspect it was only a new cover and trade dress.)

If you didn't know these stories were published in that way, you wouldn't be able to tell, although creator Stan Sakai did make a four-page all-splash-page story for the first DH issue, which comes first in this book. (But that's the kind of thing a reader might assume is first in every book - and, frankly, something like it probably should be, especially in a series that now runs more than forty volumes.)

It's called Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death - that's not the title of any of the individual stories here, so I think it's just a general "hey! find the hot samurai action you love here!" signpost.

As before, I enjoy these stories a lot - Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a precise clean line, compelling but unfussy layouts, naturalistic dialogue and a knack for ringing small changes on genre furniture to tell stories that work well and seem familiar - while finding the whole package just a bit lesser than I was hoping for. One part of that, which I've written about for previous books, is the all-ages nature of Sakai's stories: he's writing for tweens and up, which means sex is all offstage (and not a driver of plots) and violence is the usual stylized flashing swords and falling bodies.

But another piece of it, which just came into focus for me with this book, is Usagi's role in the story. I won't say that he never changes, since I'm only a quarter of the way into a four-decade series. But the whole thing is like an '80s TV show - think The Hulk or The A-Team - where a well-defined character comes into town, fixes something wrong, and moves on as the theme music plays at the end of the episode. Usagi is important, but he's unstoppable in battle, unflappable in conversation, and unerring in his judgement. He's more of an icon than a person: the perfect ronin, always friendly to peasants and children, always ready to fight bandits or help out a friend, always able to escape any danger.

That's pleasant, but it's not really a person.

That figure runs through the nine stories here, meeting some new people and some old friends, having some vaguely tragic things happen to other people which he can help mitigate later or just nod grimly in his perfect-samurai manner. But, most of the time, he's able to stop the vaguely tragic things from happening, for those peasants and children and friends, and then walk on towards the next story.

I can wish for more, but that's what Usagi Yojimbo is. And there's a word for doing the same thing repeatedly - e.g. reading Usagi Yojimbo stories - and expecting something different. What's here is just fine, especially if you want to share them with smaller, shorter, younger people infesting your home.

Days of Sugar and Spice by Loïc Clément and Anne Montel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shock! Horror!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uri Tupka and the Gods by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of This and Nothing: The Dead Heart

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

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

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

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

This week, the song is The Dead Heart.

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Week: The Saved and the Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Universe Box by Michael Swanwick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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