The Red Badge of Courage by Steve Cuzor

I should probably point out first that the subtitle of this book is "A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Stephen Crane's Classic" - it's not trying to hide or obfuscate anything. It's not anyone else's "Red Badge of Courage."

The first surprising thing is that our creator is French - Steve Cuzor was born in Rennes and is about my age, because the second surprising thing is that he had a nearly twenty-year career as a rodeo rider in Texas before turning to comics around the turn of the century. So this book was originally published in French in 2024, and translated by Montana Kane for this 2025 Abrams US edition. There's also an introduction by academic Stephen Cushman (U. VA., English) to underline how serious and historical and renowned this all is, presumably as a pitch to teachers and librarians thinking about buying the book and possibly a bit hesitant about the graphic-novel thing.

(It's a bit funny to think of such an American book needing to be translated back into English, but there you go: it's a big, weird world.)

So that's this The Red Badge of Courage: a fairly new, visual adaptation of Stephen Crane's 1894 novella, by someone who might not be what you expect in at least one way. (As luck would have it, I read the novella last year, and I'll try to avoid telling you the story again: it's about two days in the life of Henry Fleming, a young man in his first battle during the American Civil War.)

Cuzor has a realistic, traditionally illustrative style here - not fussy, but with a lot of detail, inky blacks for the night scenes, and precisely ruled panels with mostly narrow gutters. His pages are tinted, with generally one color for each "Act" - he divides the book into about ten of those, plus a brief Prologue; I don't know why he doesn't call them "Chapters," since acts don't generally come in packs larger than three or five.

Cuzor, as translated by Kane, uses quite a bit of the dialogue of the novel - accurately, as far as I can tell, though probably modernized a bit. I wasn't struck by the odd 19th century dialect choices here as I was with the novella itself, which is generally good but might mean that dialogue is not entirely book-accurate. (It's possibly to be too accurate to something that's very much of its time; on the other side, the "jimhickey" speech I called out last year is presented mostly intact, though a bit regularized in spelling and punctuation.)

But Red Badge is equally a book of shocking action, when the two armies clash in those woods and fields, and Cuzor incorporates those moments well - sometimes with dialogue running during, sometimes without. His sound effects are present only for important specific moments, and tend to follow the tinting of the background: he's aiming, I think, to visually show the chaos of battle, and doesn't want the artificiality of sound effects to break that spell.

Does it stand as a good replacement for the original? I think so. Cuzor's art is immediate and detailed; his people authentically 19th-century in their looks and their dialogue. He adapts the whole story, in nearly every detail. Crane's prose was solid, but history generally has not considered him a master craftsman. If you're inflicting a Red Badge on a group of thirteen-year-olds, your school system probably will require Crane's version. But if it's one choice on a list of summer reading or similar, Cuzor's version is probably substantially more attractive with pretty much the same expected outcome. (I.e.: half the kids will skim it and miss everything important anyway; one or two will love it; the other grinds will take notes and get high marks on the test because they need that for their college admissions in a few years.)

Waterloo Sunset by Ray Davies

Between his two autobiographies X-Ray and Americana, Kinks frontman Ray Davies also wrote a book of short stories. I'm not sure if it was his idea, or imposed on him by the publisher, but Waterloo Sunset is explicitly a book of stories directly inspired by or adapted from his songs.

It was published in 1997. It seems to have become deeply obscure almost immediately: I think there was a US edition, but what I have is a British Penguin paperback (rather battered) that I found randomly a few years back at a library sale.

Which is reasonably appropriate: it's an odd, quirky book that probably had more of a life in the UK to begin with. I don't know if I'm going to get into the minutiae of all the stories here - there are seventeen in about 250 pages, all named after and telling versions of his famous songs - but maybe I can give a sense of the gestalt of the thing.

It has something of a vague narrative arc, focused on shopworn semi-rock-and-roll star Les Mulligan, who is not Ray Davies but acts as his stand-in. (And isn't present in most of the book: the conceit, intermittently, is that these are the characters in the mind or songs of "the songwriter," who may be Mulligan or may more directly be Davies. There's a repeated motif that they're waiting, wherever they are, for him to actually turn them into something, that they'll keep doing the same few actions forever unless or until the song actually gets made.) Mulligan is attempting a comeback, in what seems to be the late '80s or early '90s, and has connected with agent Richard Tennant to negotiate with United for a big record deal: a new crowd-pleaser, plus the whole back catalog. Stories about the Mulligan-Tennant connection - mostly about Tennant, who is posher than Mulligan but generally on the side of good, unlike the vaguely-sketched record-company folks - pop up throughout the book, interspersed with stories about other characters, come of whom also recur or connect. 

The stories are all named after Kinks songs - songs Davies wrote, he'd probably say - from "Rock and Roll Fantasy" to "Celluloid Heroes" to "Return to Waterloo" to "Afternoon Tea" to the title song. They all tend to retell the story of the song in a slightly longer form, or maybe give the parts of the story that had previously been only in Davies' head.

I found the prose to be just fine - Davies always was a good wordsmith - but they're not great as stories a lot of the time, instead focusing on detailing motivations and inner states of the characters at great detail, explicating all of the things the original songs left implied. They don't have strong story-structures a lot of the time: like songs, they express a mood or a particular moment, and then stop. Like most books of this kind, it's very much for big fans, for people who want a ten-page story loosely based on the song "Driving" and fascinated to see what might have been in Davies' mind when he wrote that song. (Or, as I think more likely, inspired him two or three decades later when he wrote this book based on those songs.)

All of This and Nothing: Monkey Sees

"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.

Chris Mars is probably the third-most famous person in the Replacements. Paul Westerberg, the singer and frontman, is obviously first. Tommy Stinson would be placed at #2 by most people.

But Mars came quickly out of the gate from the wreck of the Replacements with a great record in 1992, called Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. It had three absolutely top-tier, all-time-great songs on it. (And he did some fine solo stuff later, too.) So, at least at that moment, it looked like he might be jumping up in the rankings.

I had a hard time picking one of those three songs, but I had to put aside Popular Creeps and I, Me, We, Us, Them for this exercise. Because the 'mats were always about bile and spleen, so I have to give extra points to Monkey Sees, which I'm pretty sure is about Westerberg himself.

Something follows blind on the trail behind
Like a bent disciple, carbon clone

There's a lot of language in this song that adds up to "fake" in different ways. Mars is calling someone a poser, a follower, derivative. Given the timing, most people are pretty sure it's Westerberg. But Mars never says - you can take it as an attack on anyone you prefer.

Better follow close
Better follow fast
Better heed the keeper's call

But, best of all, it's all in a crunchy early-90s proto-grunge style, with punchy drums - Mars was the drummer for the Replacements - and a fun guitar line. Mars was never as popular as I thought he should have been, which means there's probably a big audience who is vaguely nostalgic for this kind of music but never heard this one. If that's you: check it out.

Quote of the Week: A Future Full of Kipple

Further, I think the time will come when we won't be able to fix our air conditioners, there will be no electricity delivered, and we'll be saying "This is what we used to call a television and it showed video images." It takes two weeks for an air conditioner to be repaired now, and when those things accumulate, I'm sure a time will come when we must face the fact that even if things worked in the past nothing works now. A time will come when maintenance isn't kept up, so that power lines exist but electricity wont be delivered. I dislike it when people insist things will always keep progressing in the same direction that we're moving in now.

 - Hayao Miyazaki, "Earth's Environment as Metaphor," in Starting Point: 1979-1996, p.421

Elric: The Vanishing Tower by Roy Thomas & Jan Duursema

From the mid '70s through sometime in the '90s, Michael Moorcock's Elric series had six books, starting with Elric of Melnibonè and ending with Stormbringer, both from his first burst of stories in the '60s. The ones in between were all written later, and most of them were assembled from shorter pieces of fiction. Since then, Moorcock has continued to add more middle: I'm not sure how many books the Elric series officially has these days, since the stories have also been reconfigured into larger volumes at least some of the time. But there's more of it: some of which I've read, some I haven't.

Roy Thomas adapted, I think, all of that '70s version of Elric into comics - a graphic novel for Marvel first, then a series of book-by-book adaptations mostly from First Comics during the '80s. He worked with various artists over the course of more than a decade, and those series were collected originally by First and then later by others. Currently, Titan Books has a big Moorcock reprint program that also includes most or all of the comics adaptations, with the Thomas Elric books a defined subseries with unified trade dress and nice packages.

And I've been reading those books over the past year or so, returning to things I collected in floppy-issue form when they were originally released: Elric of Melnibonè, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Dreaming City, and The Weird of the White Wolf.

The fifth in that series is Elric: The Vanishing Tower, adapting what was then the fourth of the then-six novels. Like the other books, it tends to fall into novella-length sections, though there is more of an overall plot in this one - and I see no indication that the sections were published separately originally; that may just be the way Moorcock plotted. The credits shifted somewhat for this book, which was a big deal at the time: Jan Duursema took over the art, with Roy Thomas continuing as adapter/scripter.

Duursema's art, as I recall, was not looked upon fondly at the time: one part the comics-reading audience's dislike of change, I think, and one part that her work was a bit rough, or maybe just less detailed, in the early pages here than her predecessors.

But the story, and Thomas's adaptation of it, is very much like the previous Elric volume or two: the middle of the series has always been the wandering-about era, with Elric whining loudly about his doom, tangling with various nasties, and sucking down souls by the thousand with his black sword.

The original novel has three major sections, which Thomas adapts here into a six-issue comics series: Elric and his sidekick Moonglum are chasing the evil sorcerer Theleb K'aarna (Moorcock's names were frequently silly in this era), then enlisted by the Sleeping Sorceress (an alternate title for a slightly different version of the book) Myshella, whose eternal castle is coincidentally being attacked by K'aarna. There's the usual epic-fantasy running around and hugger-mugger, with a lot of pathos for our doomed albino, but eventually Elric defeats the evil sorcerer, but not before the gorgeous Myshella is fatally injured by his forces. (Alas! Everything Elric touches will die! Alas!)

Along the way, there's another meeting of various avatars of the Eternal Champion, which Moorcock did more and more often in that era. And there's a lot of Elric yelling about his woe, stabbing various things to steal their souls, and so forth.

Duursema's art improves over the course of the book; I think she was very new to long-form comics, so this was something of a trial by fire. And her early pages here aren't bad: they're just somewhat less detailed (or maybe I mean rococo) and more directly story-telling than readers of the series had been used to from the likes of George Freeman and P. Craig Russell. 

Elric is, of course, Elric: whiny, self-destructive, self-pitying, and more dramatic than a thirteen-year-old-girl trying out for a school production of Les Miserables. But if you're not up for that, you're not reading Elric books to begin with.

Starting Point: 1979-1996 by Hayao Miyazaki

This might have been a gift; I got it long enough ago than there's no record on this blog. (One thing this blog does is serve as my external memory, particularly for the questions "when did I read that book?" and "how long has that one been on the shelf?") It's also the kind of bits-and-pieces collection that's difficult to "review" succinctly: I expect I'm going to be short and breezy here.

Starting Point: 1979-1996 collects various writings by and interviews of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki originally published (in Japanese, various places) during the years of the title, and collected as a book (again in Japanese) in 1996. The English translation is credited to Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt, and was published in this form in 2009. I think I got this copy soon after that; it's been on my shelf for a long time before it moved into the smallest room in the house to be read in the traditional way of a book made up of lots of short pieces.

(There has been a follow-up second volume, covering roughly the next decade. My cynical nature leads me to believe the publisher is expecting to do a third, but is waiting for Miyazaki to die, so it can be definitive.)

Starting Point is organized into a half-dozen sections: each one is a rough area of concern for a filmmaker and animator, and pieces are roughly chronological within each section. So it starts with "On Creating Animation," the most base-level, "what-I-do" pieces, then moves into opinions on other people's work in "On the Periphery of the Work" and some views of co-workers and friends and inspirations in "People." There's a section of short Miyazai comics, first the color story "Dining in Midair," then a more miscellaneous section called "My Favorite Things."

The back half of the book gets into specifics of his major movies, and is what I expect most readers will gravitate to. First is "Planning Notes; Directorial Memoranda," which seems to be actual documents from the production of his movies from Nausicaä to Princess Mononoke, and is fairly short. Then comes the much longer section "Works," which has interviews with Miyazaki and essays by Miyazaki about what seems to be all of his works from Future Boy Conan and Lupin III up to Mononoke. Many of these seem to have been originally published in fancy heavily-illustrated guides to the movies, published around the time of their release, so they were fairly "official" from the beginning.

Also included is a foreword by John Lasseter, an afterword by Miyazaki's longtime collaborator Isaeo Takahata, and a detailed "Biographical Chronology" from Miyazaki's birth in 1941 through 2009. (Did he say he was retiring in 2009? He's retired a couple of times and I can't remember when, exactly.)

Miyazki is a cranky, opinionated workaholic - this comes out most clearly in Takahata's afterword, but it's pretty clear throughout. But you can be a cranky, opinionated workaholic when you make great work, and Miyazaki definitely has, especially in this period. I would not want to work for or with him, but it's interesting to see how he thinks about his movies, often in very technical or production-focused ways that don't match at all a viewer's expectations. But he is cranky, and cranky about vastly more things than any random reader would expect - you should realize that going in. He's not going to be happy and positive about...well, just about anything, actually.

The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960 by Charles M. Schulz

I have an uneasy relationship with re-reading books: it feels like cheating, sometimes, to someone who spent a couple of decades in the book-mines. (If you're not at the coal-face digging out new material, what good are you?) On the other hand, there's a lot of things I read long ago and don't remember well: the old Heraclitian thing about steps and rivers is true. On top of that, I don't want to repeat myself here, and I write a post about every book I read, for complicated flaw-in-my-character reasons.

Anyway, I have a couple of random Complete Peanuts books on my to-be-read shelves; I had them before, read them, and lost them in my 2011 flood. Am I trying to rebuy the whole series? I don't think so. But ask me again in ten years if I keep filling in the gaps.

So I just reread The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960, relatively early in the fifty-year run of that strip, entirely and famously by creator Charles M. Schulz. I did have a post on this book way back in the early years of this blog, but I'm happy (?) to see that it was just a signpost, the way I often did in those days. I'll also link to the posts on the first and last volumes collecting the series, which in turn link to lots and lots of others.

Reading these two years of strips this time, I thought how purely it encapsulated that era of Peanuts - an era I haven't written about as much. The very early Peanuts strips are electric and punchy, with that famous "How I hate him" first strip, but they quickly change tone and the character of Charlie Brown shifts to his permanent form. Later in the life of the strip, there was the era of long continuities and persistent sadness, from the '60s through the mid-'70s, which was followed by the much sunnier Snoopy-centric era that continued, with changes and more new characters, through the end of the strip in 2000.

1959 and 1960, though, are in the age when the continuities are starting to expand, but haven't hit their full extent yet. Lucy is a pest sometimes - she's already started yanking the football away every year - but is still a little kid, and hasn't entirely transformed into the avatar of Schulz's first wife that many commentators assume she was later in the '60s. The world is just starting to expand outward at this point: Snoopy is getting odder and quirkier, but he's still a dog, albeit one who can sleep on the top of his doghouse. Linus has his crush on his teacher, Miss Othmar - who, of course, we never see, like all Peanuts adults. He also comes up with The Great Pumpkin in 1959, and suffers the first of many disappointments - maybe his pumpkin patch wasn't sincere enough.

The era I'm claiming this is the epitome of is the ramp-up era, I suppose: the time where Schulz was assembling the gags and running jokes and ideas that he would ring changes on for decades to come. (All this is in retrospect, of course: some running gags die out, like Pig-Pen, and Schulz couldn't have known which ideas would be durable enough to return to every year and which would be just fine for a one-shot.)

He's also still adding characters, but that continued throughout the life of the strip: some stuck around for a while (like Pig-Pen), some had only a brief life (like the later Charlotte Braun and Molly Volley), and some became part of the core cast quickly (like Peppermint Pattie and Marcie, a few years later). 1960 saw one of the latter: Charlie Brown's little sister Sally, first an off-camera arrival, then an infant pushed around in a stroller, and finally a walking and talking member of the cast. In this volume, she starts her crush on Linus, who is at this point five years older than she is. (That will change over time; ages are flexible things in Peanuts and mostly tend to shake down to slightly-older kids and slightly-younger kids, who seem to be a year apart at best.)

You can always read Peanuts on an entertainment level, and it's excellent that way - it wouldn't have lasted fifty years and been beloved by millions if it didn't. But it's also fascinating to dig in a little more, and examine how Schulz build his running gags and tweaked his characters over the years, how be built a fifty-year run one panel at a time, four daily or a dozen Sunday panels a day. This is a great era to see that building process going on.

Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

I think I'm generally able to meet a book on its level. And I can understand that many of those levels don't include pure verisimilitude, or that they might deform history for their own purposes. But I keep getting tripped up by the ways in which the Blacksad books present a cartoon of US 1950s history: mostly, I tend to think, for maximum noir atmosphere and plots. It's not lazy, exactly - these are complicated stories with big casts and lots of idiosyncratic dialogue, running through twisty noir events - but it's all simplified and schematized, fitting carefully into boxes someone else constructed long ago.

The third book is Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul. The first one was all set-up and "my best girl got killed; I have to bring the killer to justice." The second one was the unsubtle explanation that racism is bad (made somewhat confusing by being set in a world of anthropomorphic animals who come in hundreds of species). All are written by Juan Díaz Canales and drawn by Juanjo Guarnido, who both have serious chops at their respective work.

This one, as you might guess from the title, is the Red Scare book. It's also the Atom Bomb one, and additionally features animal versions of the Beat poets and some other proto-counterculture types. So much, so standard for a '50s-set series. There's one plot development, late in the book, that I found bizarre and that I will have to talk about. 

So: series hero Jon Blacksad knew now-famous atomic physicist Otto Liebber in his (Blacksad's) youth. Liebber and his father ran a community organization, which helped save Blacksad from the streets - that sort of thing. This was twenty-five or thirty years before, when Lieber was presumably a young man. I think Liebber is meant to be a famous physicist, though in this book he works for an overly-enthusiastic atomic-power promoter, Gotfield. (First quizzical look: atomic power as something to be run by the private sector in the mid-1950s.)

Blacksad catches up with Liebber and Gotfield - who he ran into in Las Vegas as part of other work - back on the East Coast. The explanation of Lieber's connection to Gotfield is that he's one of the Twelve Apostles, "leftist intellectuals who would gather together under the protection of Gotfield and his philanthropy." The twelve include the bison poet "Greenberg" (author of Howl in this world), plus a female novelist, and one each of other creative types: an actor, a screenwriter, photographer, sculptor, painter, chemist. (Second quizzical look: this somewhat makes sense if Gotfield was the kind of rich guy who liked to collect "the best" people to surround himself, but that type is more likely to have a batch of the same kind of person - all filmmakers, all writers, all scientists.)

Blacksad, of course, thinks Gotfield is an asshole and makes a play to seduce his wife. This is eventually successful, because Blacksad is our hero, but readers may not consider "but her husband's an asshole" as sufficient justification.

Meanwhile, there's a Foghorn Leghorn-as-McCarthy figure waving around lists of Communists and making threats in Senatorial hearings and on TV. He dips into the story in person a couple of times, and never gets more than that one dimension. As part of his efforts, and related cultural anti-red sentiment, a photo secretly circulates of Liebber next to Hitler, with the explanation that he spent the war years helping the Nazis build a bomb.

...and this is supposed to have been a secret, somehow, and its revelation will blow up his career and life.

Any sensible reader will assume this is a fake, and there's some deeper nefarious plot behind it, designed to get Liebber to do something. Either Liebber was working in the US during the years in question, in which case there would be proof he didn't work for Hitler, or he was actually working in Nazi Germany, and everyone would have known that at the time, so it's not a secret. (Third quizzical look: does Canales think anyone was confused about what Werner Heisenberg was doing during the war? Also, and more bluntly: does he think Americans cared that physicists worked for Hitler? Does the name Wernher von Braun mean anything?)

I am sorry to tell you the photo is not a fake. Liebber did leave the US, around 1930, did help Hitler's atomic program (apparently unsuccessfully in this world as in ours), and came back to the US at some point without anyone noticing. This is utterly crazy-pants, but it's our plot.

I'm giving short shrift to Blacksad's attempts to save Liebber - he's targeted for assassination by unknown forces midway through the book, and then goes into hiding - which is a lot of the plot. But Blacksad does learn the truth at the end - Liebber was also passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, proving he consistently makes utterly horrible geopolitical choices.

The book seems to want to be positive towards the left-leaning intellectuals of the 1950s, but Liebber is our main example, which severely undercuts that effort. And Blacksad loses the girl in the end because he was held incommunicado in prison for a few days, and she apparently made no effort to find him.

The story-telling is assured, the dialogue is taut, the characters mostly interesting and specific, and Guarnido's art is strong as usual, with character designs that owe a lot of mid-century Disney. But, as with other books in the series, the plot goes in directions that are weirdly self-defeating. I suspect  this isbecause they were made by Spaniards for Europeans, so authentically depicting fifty-year-old American details was never that important. This series, for Americans at least, requires industrial-strength suspension of belief to get through.

All of This and Nothing: The Boxer

"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.

The Famous songs this year are largely - especially now that I'm getting towards the end of the year, hitting things that are older than I am - hugely famous, massively culturally important. They're things I felt didn't really fit into previous years because of that: what can I claim specifically about a Simon & Garfunkel song that's been a world-wide favorite for longer than I've been alive?

But, this year, I thought I might as well. What I get out of The Boxer might not be vastly different than anyone else, but there's probably plenty of people who have never heard it. There are new people every day; everyone has to do everything for the first time once. (And we all have only limited time, so, as the world goes on, new people will have time to experience a smaller and smaller fraction of the cultural world that existed before they did - it's just math.)

This is one of the great songs of the 20th century. It's told in an elevated, storytelling tone - slightly artificial, the same way that the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel are that bit artificial to begin with.

The singer is young, we think - probably a bit full of himself, with that fancy language. He's been kicked around, and clearly isn't succeeding the way he wants to.

Asking only workman's wages
I come looking for a job,
But I get no offers.

He doesn't tell us he's not giving up. He sounds defeated and tired, at the end of his strength. He doesn't say what's next for him at all. But the last verse is about someone else, the boxer of the title. And he's not giving up, not going anywhere. And, sometimes, that's all we can hold to: an image of someone broken but unbowed, still in the ring, still going on.

It's one of those songs that feels big and all-encompassing, with that lie-lie-lie chorus that fights against any kind of coherent explanation. The best songs mean more than they say, imply more than any specifics. This is one of the songs with the biggest gap between what the words say and how the song feels.

Books Read: October 2026

It's been another month; here's what I read. Links will be added once the posts go live.

John Allison, Looks, Brains & Everything (digital, 10/3)

Joshua Barkman, False Knees (digital, 10/4)

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich (digital, 10/4)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 11: Talisman of Hades (digital, 10/9)

David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanove, Percy Shelley (digital, 10.10)

Tom Perrotta, Ghost Town (10/10)

Georgia Dunn, Breaking Cat News (digital., 10/11)

Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsuruta, Emanon, Vol. 2 (digital, 10/17)

Will Henry, All Hands on Deck! (digital, 10/18)

David Liss, The Death and Birth of Ilana Marek (10/18)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 12: Grasscutter (digital, 10/23)

Andi Watson, The Book Tour: A Lack of Alibi (digital, 10/24)

Daria Schmitt, The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence (digital, 10/25)

Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen (10/25)

Alexandro Jodorowski and Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 6: The Fifth Essence 2 - Planet DiFool (digital, 10/31)

Next month, I expect to meet with ministerial colleagues and others read more books.

Quote of the Week: Pacific Interlude

I drove back to my motel, changed to shorts and went down to the beach for a swim. The blue-green swells were heaving slowly beyond the surf. Further out, a few white sails leaned across the horizon curved sharp like wings in the wind, but motionless in the distance. I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swan straight out for a quarter of a mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life.

 - Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool, p.25

Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody by Ian Frazier

This was the first (and, I think, shortest) collection of Ian Frazier's reportage, a collection of five essays originally published in The New Yorker from 1978 to 1986 and brought together in book form in 1987.

I've read a lot of Frazier, and have intermittently said "now I've read all of it," every time, I think, incorrectly. (He has a collection of essays about fishing that is likely to keep making that claim untrue unless my interests radically shift.) So I won't say that now. But he's a good writer in two modes: he writes short humorous essays in the old New Yorker style - his second (and maybe best) collection of that work, Coyote Vs. ACME, inspired a movie this year - and he also does reportage, usually vaguely in the profile mode, also informed by a long connection to New Yorker.

Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody takes its title from the third of the five pieces collected here. The five essays are all separate; what they have in common is that they were all written by Frazier, appeared in The New Yorker, and are about people. So I might as well take them individually.

"Authentic Accounts of Massacres" is possibly the slightest piece: Oberlin, Kansas is the home of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum, commemorating a raid by Cheyennes in the fall of 1878. The museum had some events on that date of the raid over several years, and had a larger event for the centennial in 1978, which Frazier came to see. A group of Cheyennes were supposed to attend, lured by (among other things) the promise of free bowling. The Cheyennes did not, in the event, arrive: their bus broke down far away. So this is mostly about small-town Midwest people and their view of history, and some of the looking-at-landscape material that Frazier likes to do.

"An Angler at Heart" is a profile of Jim Deren, who ran a fly-fishing shop in New York City for many years. Frazier includes some of his own fishing stories here, but it's mostly about conversations with Deren and the atmosphere of his shop (small, crowded, full of random odd things, on an upper floor of a random NYC building - you probably know the drill, though I doubt anything like that has existed in Manhattan for three decades at least). I will say it's pleasant reading even for those, like me, who have never had an interest in torturing fish.

The title essay is a profile of "Heloise" - the second of that name, actually Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, who took over the popular newspaper column "Hints from Heloise" from her mother after the latter's death in 1977. It's one part potted history of the household-hints column and one part "let Ponce talk about various things," and has some subtext about the kinds of day-to-day minutia (usually female-coded) that affect people's lives, and what that means.

Then "Bear News" is inspired by the several years Frazier spent living in Montana; it's about how bears interact with people and, in particular, about the ones that rummage through trash and break into cabins and (once in a very long while) attack people. The title is a reference to the fact that if you read about a bear in the news, it's not going to be good for the bear: bears that interact with people tend to do that more and more, which leads to their being killed by people (sometimes after the reverse, sometimes to prevent the reverse).

Last is a profile of two Russian émigré artists, "Komar and Melamid." This is probably the most obviously New Yorker-style piece, covering people famous in the arts who are mostly talking about their work.

Frazier has a lot of fine sentences and thoughts in all of the essays, and keeps them mostly in that self-effacing, obscure-the-narrator New Yorker mode - he's occasionally a character (especially in "Bear News" and "An Angler at Heart,") but mostly just a viewpoint and voice. It adds up to nothing larger, but it isn't meant to. They're all time capsules now, but that's the way of reportage: it all turns into fishwrap on Day Two. For those who don't mind stories of the past, there's a lot to find interesting here.

Shadow of the Golden Crane by Chris Roberson, Michael Avon Oeming, & Chris O'Halloran

I periodically think I should catch up on the Hellboy universe, but then I take a look at the books I missed and it's always more complicated than I feel like dealing with. So sometimes I just walk away, and sometimes I pick a random book.

This was one of the latter times; Shadow of the Golden Crane was written by Chris Roberson,  a writer who's done various things I liked and who I knew very slightly way back in my own SFnal days. So that was enough of a hook, and it looked to stand alone.

It does stand alone, by the way: it's a smaller story, but entirely itself. You don't actually need to know anything about Hellboy or his world to read it. It's the 1960s in the US; there's supernatural dangers out there; the BPRD is the US agency that handles them; their star field agent is a big guy with red rocky skin. The story tells you all that, almost immediately.

But Hellboy is not the focus here; he's in the first issue and the last (of four) for muscle, and presumably so he can be on the cover. The main character is Susan Xiang, a Chinese-American high-level desk jockey for BPRD with a family connection to the ancient and secretive Golden Crane Society and who has visions.

The four issues are each separate field missions: something is rampaging, somewhere, and BPRD agents are sent out to stop it. The first time, it's Hellboy with Victor Koestler, a field agent who manifests an astral gorilla, and Susan tags along. The second time, it's Susan with Victor, and Susan tackles the third one alone. The fourth issue brings all three back together again.

The rampaging thing is, in each case, possessed by an ancient evil spirit, which - Susan realizes through her visions - was originally captured by the Golden Crane Society and trapped in a specific object. Each issue has a substantial flashback, presumably Susan's vision, of a previous time when members of the Society, back in China, recaptured that very same rampaging thing and re-trapped it. That knowledge allows Susan, and her co-workers, to do the same.

Shadow is not quite schematic, although all four issues have very similar structure. It's pretty straightforward, though: the threats are not explicitly rising or gaining in power (in that usual Hellboy way; note that I am not complaining; we got thirty years of "this issue is worse than last issue" and it can get tedious). And capturing them is not easy, but it's well within the skills of BPRD agents, particularly once they know what to do.

So this is a solid adventure-comics story, in which we don't really doubt the abilities of our heroes to do the thing and stop the monster and save the world. (Well, not the world: these are all small-scale things.) Roberson gives us what turns into a large cast, counting all of the flashback characters, and keeps it energetic and engaging. Michael Avon Oeming draws it with equal verve: I always like his work, though I haven't made an effort to keep up. And Chris O'Halloran gives it appropriately moody colors for a book about punching supernatural creatures back into hair clips. (I may be phrasing that oddly for comedic effect, but it's not inaccurate.)

The Complete Hate, Vol. 2 by Peter Bagge

This is more or less the book that was known as Buddy Does Jersey for a decade or so, in case you have a copy of that lurking on your shelves. Otherwise, it's what it says it is: the back half of Peter Bagge's quarterly Hate comics from their run in the 1990s, collecting issues 16-30, originally published from 1994 through 1998.

Or, as the title succinctly puts it, The Complete Hate, Vol. 2. It followed, obviously, a similar Vol. 1. (There's also a third volume, collecting the '00s Hate Annual and other things; I expect to get to that in a few months.)

Hitting these stories again for the first time in a couple of decades, I'm not sure if Bagge was trying to make his main character, Buddy Bradley, somewhat more reasonable and adult - or if I've just read so many stories about him that he's starting to seem reasonable to me. But he does make some mostly smart choices in this book, though not consistently, and that stands in contrast with most of the other characters.

Actually, I might need to back that up a bit. Bagge's men make horrible decisions almost all of the time - Buddy's old Seattle friend Stinky makes the all-time winner in that category right in the middle of this book; you know it if you know the series - but his women are at least slightly better. Compare Buddy's siblings, Babs and Butch - she's a mediocre mother at best, but has built a life, holds down a serious job, and is raising two kids. But he's an anger-driven military washout drifting on the edges of criminal activity. Lisa, Buddy's long-time girlfriend, is probably the "worst" of the female characters, and, reading these stories, she seemed finely calibrated: crazier than Buddy (for all of the story-driving "women be nuts" reasons) but not nearly as crazy as Butch or Stinky or the crowd of losers on the cover. She's also explicitly "crazy" in-story - she goes to see a therapist, takes medication to calm her mood swings, and so forth; she's trying to manage her uncontrolled brain, albeit in the context of a slapstick-comedy comic.

While the first volume had stories of Buddy and his friends in Seattle, this one sees him and Lisa move back to New Jersey - first just for a visit, but they quickly move into Buddy's parents' basement, in the time-honored way of American children boomeranging back over the past few decades.

The cast is somewhat different in this book than in Vol. 1, obviously - Buddy's family (including Babs's two hellion children) is more central, and the Seattle crew (other than Lisa) turn up only at odd intervals. Important in the first half of the book is Jay, yet another old stoner/loser friend of Buddy's, who has something like a career finding collectables and jobbing them out. The two decide to go into business together, with a storefront (I think in Paterson) run mostly by Buddy to sell the records, toys, and other pop ephemera, and Jay on the road gathering more crap most of the time.

I don't think it was clear in the first volume how quickly time was passing, but it mostly follows the calendar in this book: these stories cover roughly four years in the lives of these people. I could throw in some platitude about the slacker/loser lifestyle getting less appealing the older you get, but look at that cover. Look at those guys. Do you think they have that level of self-awareness? No. They do not. Buddy does, intermittently, but none of his "friends" do.

Each issue has one story, of twenty-some pages. Plots tend to be loose and rambling; Buddy is central (and Lisa only slightly less so), but he's not a driven person, to be polite about it. In the standard Hate manner, there's a lot of drinking, a lot of people yelling at each other (and sometimes stomping off afterward, and very occasionally turning to fisticuffs), and a certain amount of often-regrettable sex (almost always involving Buddy, though we assume other characters are getting their own legs over here and there). In between, Buddy runs his business with Jay, has various family conflicts - actually, that sentence roughly describes two-thirds of the plot of this era of Hate. To cover all of it: Jay-Buddy business issues (with some ancillary druggy-buddy problems), Bradley family drama, and Buddy-Lisa relationship problems. The three strands intertwine, of course: Buddy's central to all of them, and, even if he's as stable as a character in Hate gets, that's not particularly stable.

Is it weird to say that Bagge's characterization got deeper in this era? Many of the secondary characters are still one-note weirdoes, but Buddy and Lisa are complicated people who, at least some of the time, are trying to do better - and that's fairly new in this series. They'll never do that consistently, or Bagge would have no story material, but at least they're trying.

The art, by Bagge with usually Jim Blanchard inking (and occasionally a vaguer credit that may mean Blanchard did backgrounds or more than just inks) is in Bagge's mature style, with cartoony energy that looks borderline realistic a lot of the time but descends into rubber-hose lunacy for moment of high emotion. (Anger. I mean anger, almost all of the time. Hate was well-named.)

This era of Hate is an odd soap-opera of anger and family dysfunction, small-business woes and relationship drama, all set in a reasonably well-observed suburban New Jersey of the time. I think it's one of those comics that appeals to men vastly more than women, since the mindset is so purely and unquestioningly boyish, but Bagge is a fun cartoonist who creates interesting situation, does strong dialogue, and knows his strengths.

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald

I plan to read all of Ross Macdonald's "Lew Archer" novels in order, one every three months or so, until I run out. Since I write about everything I read here, there will inevitably be a series of posts, one on each book. I can't promise critical distance, or brilliance, or even that I'll have much to say as we get deep into the series - I've done, or am still doing, much the same thing with some other series, and I can get to the point where I say a lot of "and then this is the same kind of thing once more."

But I posted about the first book, The Moving Target, and now I have the second one, The Drowning Pool.

It was published in 1950, and I'm coming to think that the fact that the whole series is post-war is important. Macdonald followed Raymond Chandler, who was still writing through the 1950s, but Macdonald's hero Lew Archer is explicitly a man who served in WWII, and the echoes of the war were clear in the background of Target and still noticeable at points in Pool. And both books are set in that post-war boom, with the overheated Southern California real estate market and building boom going on in the background, peace and prosperity supposedly in reach for everyone in this best of all possible worlds.

Mystery novels are often about the discrepancy between the vision and the reality, of course. This one is about that, among other things.

Archer is hired by Maude Slocum, who has received a threatening letter, vaguely in the blackmail line. She dithers a bit about telling him the story, but engages him to come to the sleepy California town of Quinto, north of Santa Monica, to investigate. Quinto is one of two contrasting towns in the area: Nopal Valley welcomed in oil rigs, and is awash with money, nightlife, oil workers of various backgrounds and levels of honesty, and more sordid activities. Quinto has kept out the oil companies and believes itself superior: it is sleepy in the way of people who've had money for some time, though I don't think they have as much money as they think they do.

Maude is married to James, whom the reader quickly realizes is homosexual. They live with James's domineering mother Olivia, who owns half a mountain and a couple of million dollars. (The two are semi-congruent.) Also in the household is Cathy, the teenage daughter of Maude and James. The land the estate sits on is oil-rich, and would be worth vastly more if drilling were allowed - Olivia, despite allowing some exploration to determine that value, is staunchly against any exploitation.

Archer also pretty quickly figures out James - a dilettantish man who has never held a job and spends his time in amateur theatricals - is in a relationship with his director, Francis Marvell. And Maude has what seems to be a similarly long-running affair with the local police chief, Ralph Knudson. So whoever wrote to Maude has plenty of material, though there was no hint of actual give-me-money blackmail in that first letter. Maude thinks the aim may be to influence Olivia, perhaps to force Maude and James to divorce and Maude to go away.

That's the initial setup: every edition of Pool I've seen goes beyond that to mention the murder. (It is a mystery novel, after all: we're all expecting one.) Much of the above Archer learns during a party at the Slocum house. Later that night, Olivia drowns in the swimming pool - she pretty clearly was pushed in by someone.

And a large number of people stand to benefit: Maude and James first, who could quietly separate and live their own lives. Potentially their partners, too, though none of those four are even vaguely suspects. More pointedly, the just-fired chauffeur Pat Reavis used to work for local oil baron Walter Kilbourne, is unstable at best, and got a ride to town with Archer right before Olivia's body was found. 

Archer does some detecting, but Pool is closer to a thriller than a play-fair story; events happen quickly and Archer mostly tries to hang on through them. He gets knocked around and is basically kidnapped towards the end of the book, but he does make it to the end and figures out what really happened - though not before one more death.

As became almost a cliché with the Archer books, the answers lie in the history of the Slocum family - what they did many years ago, and the truth about James and Maude, Knudson and Cathy. There's also a lot of psychology in Pool - of the era, and fairly pop-psych, but mostly durable and still believable seventy years later.

Pool is not, I think, one of the best Archer novels, but it's a solid book that builds on what was good in Target and shows aspects of the elements that will be important in later books. It's qualities are durable, managing to be clearly of their time but still a good lens into that time for those of us further down the timeline.