The Complete Hate, Vol.1 by Peter Bagge

There was a time when slackers were hip. Especially young slackers, particularly in Seattle or thereabouts. I don't know why. I don't remember the sequence, thirty-some years later - I think it was a "scene" first, even before Nirvana hit big, with breathless media coverage about what all these wacky young people were doing.

But it was a big deal, for a while. Just before and during the first wave of grunge, when my generation, GenX, was young and aimless and energetic, with hair and abs and knees as good as any of us were ever going to get. A lot of us resented the attention and the stupidly breathless media focus on mostly dumb egotists doing mostly dumb egotistical things, while the vast majority of that generation were living ordinary lives and doing normal things - much like what the average Boomer probably thought about hippies, come to think of it.

I think Peter Bagge's Hate comics series might actually have been one of the early signposts of that scene - the first issue came out in April of 1990, well before Nirvana's Nevermind or the movie Slackers. Oh, it was definitely already a scene - Bagge himself had moved to Seattle, for reasons I'm sure he would argue long and loud had nothing to do with any of that, a few years before - but I think in Spring of 1990 it was still a mostly underground scene, known by cognoscenti, and not the media extravaganza it became a year or so later.

The Complete Hate, Vol.1 collects the first half of Bagge's 1990s Hate comics: the first fifteen issues, from 1990 to 1994. (He's done other things called Hate since then, first an Annual for about a decade, then an newer Revisited that I haven't seen.) This is the full Buddy-in-Seattle run, starting with a minor time-skip from the end of the Bradley family stories in Neat Stuff.

As it often is with Bagge, all of his characters are horrible people who make universally bad decisions, with massive anger issues and an almost total lack of impulse control. (I enjoyed that in fiction a lot more at the time, before people almost exactly like that took over all the levers of my government.) Buddy Bradley is the central character, and the one who comes closest to being a functional adult - oh, he still makes bad decisions every time he gets the chance, but we see his thought processes as he almost resists his impulses and sometimes even feels bad about the things he does. Well, he mostly feels bad because bad things happen to him because of his stupid decisions, because he's a Bagge character and they have no capacity to mentally model other people's thinking at all.

Buddy is working in a used-book store: it's a McJob that lets him steal stuff from work and doesn't require too much effort or thinking. (Slacker, remember?) This is actually a step or three up from where we saw him at the end of Neat Stuff - he was living on a beach at that point, having gotten kicked out of every home he possibly could have - so baby steps, huh?

His childhood friend Stinky (Leonard Brown, the guy on the cover) also made the trek, and is more suited for the fake-it-till-you-make-it culture, having no self-awareness at all and only ego. Their third roommate is the socially awkward loner George Cecil Hamilton III, who mostly stays in his room, reading and writing conspiracy-theory materials. (Yes, people like that existed before the Internet - they tended to use the mails, they had a much lower profile, and the world was better for their relative disconnection.)

And Buddy's ex-girlfriend Lisa and new girlfriend Valerie (as of the beginning of the series) are also roommates, making more sitcom-like opportunities for drama.

These fifteen issues take that cast, add in a few supporting characters, and bounce them off each other violently and chaotically for what seems to be maybe a year or so in-universe. (There's no way the timeline is as long as the four-plus years the issues took to come out.) Nobody learns anything, nobody gets better at anything, nobody advances in their careers - people do move in and out, change jobs and chase dreams (like Stinky's band, which almost takes off), and break up and form new "relationships," because things are always happening in a Bagge comic.

It's energetic and nutty: these people will always make the worst choice possible when given the chance. I don't think Bagge even wrote it that way; this is just how he sees people. It intersects with his core libertarianism, of course: he's of the school that you should just let people do whatever, because people are universally horrible and that (somehow) keeps everyone off his lawn. I still think that Bagge characters + libertarianism = something like The Purge all night every night, but I'm not here to enforce logical consistency into fictional worlds.

His cartooning is still aggressively rubber-hose here, with the old faithful concentric-circles to show that characters are running really fast, too. It's very wordy, too - his characters may not be good at getting what they want, but they can yell back and forth at each other for pages on end.

Hate is a time-capsule now, this first batch probably the most so. This was a time and place in American culture, and Bagge had a predictably sour and jaundiced take on it before it had even properly gotten started. If you can have sympathy for characters who resolutely refuse to do anything to deserve sympathy, you can have a great time reading it.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

It was a long time ago, but I think it happened quickly.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return - my library app has a slight disagreement with itself as to the subtitle, so you may also see The Comeback some places - was published in French by Dargaud in 2000, the same year as the first volume. This version took a lot longer: it was translated by Mercedes Claire Gillion and lettered by Sylvain Dumas for a 2018 e-book-only Europe Comics edition, which is, I think, still the only way this book is available in the English language.

Like the first book, it was written by the prolific Lewis Trondheim and drawn by the energetic Manu Larcenet. It follows directly from the first book; you could click my link above to get a precis of the story if you want or need that. Or, if you prefer to remain ignorant of the plot details of the first book, stop reading now.

Elementary-schoolers Martina and Gildas learned in the first Cosmonauts that their seemingly-paranoid worries were correct: everyone around them was an alien and/or robot (mostly robots made to look like humans by aliens). They were, they were told, clones of the "survivors" of the crash of a human spaceship on this alien world, and were being raised in a close simulacrum of their original lives on Earth by the kindly aliens of the planet Mawis.

Now, they know the truth...but they're still kids, and need to grow up. So all of the robots around them admit to being robots, but school goes on - with some changes, such as the "Exterminating Stinky Aliens" class taught by Professor Vatter.

But, like so many stories told to children, they learn early in this book that what they were told is true...but not complete.

There are nasty aliens: the Meskimek. A Meskimek ship is approaching, and will destroy all life on Mawis. The Mawissians, unfortunately, venerate life so much that they are physically incapable of fighting back.

So the only people on the planet capable of violence are the cloned members of the human crew: Gildas and Martina. Who are maybe eight or nine years old.

But are they the only survivors of that crash? Are there more secrets of their past yet to be discovered?

Well, of course. It would be a short book if the stinky aliens just swept in and killed everybody.

This one is more action-oriented than the first book, as there's a hostile Mekimek fleet chasing our heroes' spaceship nearly continuously for the back three-quarters of the story. This is popular fiction, so of course they survive, learn the truth, and save their friends - and, since it's arguably a book for kids, they also learn some lessons along the way. (Although I should note that European comics "for kids" have a substantially higher amount of violence - very cartoony violence, all zap-rays and explosions, admittedly - than some readers may be comfortable handing to their little Taylors and Liams.)

Larcenet has a very distinctive style here, with lots of often-small panels to get all the action in and people with weird but very readable faces. This is zany but has an undercurrent of real emotion, as I've come to expect from Trondheim. This is a fun, goofy soft-SF comics series, and I'm happy to note that there's still one more to go.

That's Not Funny, That's Sick by Ellin Stein

Sometimes I fall into the reading habits of a typical middle-aged man. What I mean is: I hit a point where I can't stand any fiction, and need facts in my books.

I think this is a every-male-reader-in-his-fifties-has-a-tedious-opinion-on-Gettsysburg thing, but it could also be that my editor brain - long-unused professionally, but once switched on, it can never be entirely silenced - is finding things to complain about with every possible novel I'm thinking about reading.

Or why not both? It could easily be both.

So I recently read That's Not Funny, That's Sick, Ellin Stein's [1] 2013 history of the National Lampoon comedy empire of the 1970s. Stein starts with the moment when the two founding editors of the magazine - Henry Beard and Doug Kenney - headed there from Harvard and ends with Kenney's death just over than a decade later.

In between, she pulls in a lot of threads of American comedy. She spends the first chapter mostly setting up the backstory of the Harvard Lampoon, which licensed "Lampoon" to the new national magazine and was the source of a bunch of writers and editors for the NatLamp over the years, and was particularly important in the way it shaped the early NatLamp.

The magazine itself is central for about the first half of the book, but Stein wants to tell the wider story, so the second half of the book is something of a back-and-forth, from the magazine itself to its immediate offshoots: the Lemmings stage show and later similar things, the radio shows, and, most importantly, the actors and writers that worked on the stage and radio shows and then went on to Saturday Night Live and, in some cases, massive fame.

Stein has a very wide remit here, but she's done a lot of original research - there's a long list of people she interviewed in the back matter, and she quotes from those interviews throughout the book. In fact, she seems to have talked to basically everyone still alive - with the inevitable exception of Henry Beard, who I don't think has ever agreed to any interviews, from anyone, about his time at NatLamp. (A Henry Beard biography would be an interesting thing, if anyone could pull it off - but I doubt it would be possible.)

There's a part of me that wanted a more in-depth look at the magazine itself, or maybe a tighter focus on the things that actually had "National Lampoon" in their title. But then Animal House has to be included, and then how do you get John Belushi from Lemmings to Animal House without mentioning SNL? And that's assuming that you keep Stein's basic framing of the first decade - if you run longer, you need to include Vacation, and you have the same problem with Chevy Chase. Stein's implied point, which I have to agree with, is that NatLamp was foundational to a strain of American comedy, and that strain went in blockbuster directions fairly quickly.

There are thus a lot of names in That's Not Funny, from Beard and Kenney to publisher Matty Simmons (and his son Michael, later a NatLamp editor himself) to their Harvard Lampoon predecessors and occasional collaborators Christopher Cerf and George Trow, to later NatLamp writers and editors like Tony Hendra and P.J. O'Rourke and Michael O'Donoghue to the actor/writers like Chase and Belushi and Bill Murray and his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray. Stein includes a twenty-page epilogue bringing the careers of all of the major figures up to the point when she wrote the book - that's an additional thirty years of career, though not all of them lived through all of it.

She also, I think, interviewed some people who did not want to be named, or at least not to have some quotes attributed to them. (Stein is a long-time journalist, which shows in her clean prose and facility in navigating this big, complex group of people with shifting loyalties and relationships to each other.) That's Not Funny is full of the voices of these people - named and unnamed, some from historical documents but largely from Stein's interviews around 2010 when she was writing this book.

The book generally focuses on that first decade, from the magazine's April 1970 launch issue to Kenney's death in August 1980, but does extend the timeline both at the beginning (to explain what the Harvard Lampoon was and to give a quick look at notable events and people of that magazine in the '60s) and the end (to untangle threads and talk about the major projects that especially the SNL actors were working on, even if those didn't emerge until 1983 or 4.)

That's Not Funny doesn't have a central premise or argument to make, other than "this was an important thread in American comedy, and here's how it worked out." Stein covers the schisms and differences of opinion, without, mostly, taking sides in things like the Hendra-O'Donoghue feud. Simmons in particular often has a different view of events than others, a view in which Matty Simmons is more central and important than other people believed, and Stein quietly underlines those moments without explicitly calling him out. She comes across as even-handed, honestly interested in this world and what these people did without being dazzled by any of it.

I suspect that may be because she's an outsider: NatLamp was '70s, aggressive, juvenile, masculine, American. Stein is based in London, a long-time journalist, and obviously female. I don't know if she grew up reading NatLamp at any point - I did, in its later, lesser years, though I also spent the early '80s collecting back issues as well - but, whatever her history, she didn't let that affect her viewpoint or understanding.

This is a fine, even-handed look at an important time in comedy, with lots of insight well-packaged and organized to tell the story in a clear, reasonable, honest way. There may be better books about SNL - there have been a lot there - but there's nothing that comes close about NatLamp.

[1] Pointless digression: this author is only the second person I've heard of with the name of Ellin, after my wife's great-aunt. (The great-aunt spelled it with only one L, which is apparently the Danish spelling. No idea if two Ls means Norwegian or Macedonian or Nepalese.) That may have been one reason why I noticed this book in the first place, actually.

Still Smitten by Catana Chetwynd

Sometimes you just want to be convinced that the old verities are still true. The sun rises in the east, robins nest in the early spring, and Andrews McMeel publishes cute little books of relationship cartoons for impulse purchases.

Catana Chetwynd is from my neck of the woods - the part of New York that we all agree is actually "upstate," even if we draw the line as far north as Albany. (I tend to aim about Poughkeepsie, these days, maybe because I went to college there.) I want to say she's the most famous cartoonist from Saratoga Springs, but then I wonder if there isn't some 19th century racing-horse cartoonist I'm forgetting about. Still, at the very worst she's the second-most famous cartoonist from Saratoga Springs, and rising in the charts.

She's been publishing short-form cartoons - some single panels, but it looks like mostly newspaper-style longer sequences of panels (three or four a lot of the time, but plenty that run longer) - on various social media for about a decade. She has a website, which is probably the best way into her work these days.

And she's published five books of her cartoons, the most recent of which (beginning of this year) is Still Smitten. The books seem to have vague themes, but, reading between the lines, I think they're mostly just collections of Chetwynd's newer comics: those are her regular themes anyway.

These are cozy cartoons, focused on her home life and relationship with her partner John - and a bit about their two dogs. Very domestic, very comforting, very sweet. She's got a crisp, cartoony style that I think was influenced by Sarah Andersen - especially in the way Chetwynd draws eyes. She's definitely in that school of modern cartooning: women telling stories about their ordinary lives, a little goofy but mostly straightforward and honest, with an emphasis on specific moments and common experiences.

This book is sweet and fun, if maybe a little too focused on this one relationship. Chetwynd's comics are easy to read quickly - both her bold lettering and her clean, rounded figures - so I can see why they work well on social media. I might like to see if she does cartoons on slightly wider topics, but this is swell for what it is.

All of This and Nothing: You Cross My Path

"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 swing back to Obscure this week with a song from The Charlatans from 2008. (This is the modern UK-based Charlatans, sometimes referred to as Charlatans UK; there was a US band with the same name in the '60s. This UK band of Charlatans, I'm happy to see, is still out there.)

They'd been putting out records for almost twenty years, and had some up-and-down fame - I think more in the UK than the US, but bands are quirky and have odd careers, so maybe they were massive hits in Poland or Thailand somewhere along the way, too.

You Cross My Path was the title song of that record, and it's just a great rocking song, in the old "you don't want to mess with me" genre.

It's not entirely clear who the singer is aiming the song at, or why, but he makes his intentions clear:

You cross my path I'll take you down

Or, to be even more pointed that than refrain, slightly later in the song he tells us

I will rise again and I'll take you down like that
You will die up there alone, I'll take you down like that

Given that this was a band well into their career, there's a non-zero chance that it's "about" a DJ or rival band - I'm deliberately not doing any research because I don't want to find out if that's the case. I like this song in part because I can fill in the blanks - I suggest you listen to it with the same openness.

But do listen: it's a barn-burner, full of energy and emotion and life. And do not piss off that singer, if you know what's good for you.

Quote of the Week: Staff and Customers

The girl gave him a look which out to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.419 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek by Geof Darrow

There are some creative projects that you're pretty sure just aren't for you. Maybe it's in a genre you know nothing about - and aren't inclined to learn. Maybe it's a creator that just doesn't click for you.

Or maybe you know that the project is doing something you're not really interested in. And then, twenty years later, you see it again, and don't remember exactly why you avoided it, and remember liking that creator's work, once upon a time.

So you try it. And you remember: you were right to begin with.

I am not going to be praising Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek. Geof Darrow is an amazing artist, delivering a long sequence of magnificent, eye-catching pages here, and his imagination is clearly equally fertile and weird.

But I've always been a fan of story. And Darrow makes only the most minor, vague, smirking-into-his-sleeve attempts to tell a story here. This is not so much a book as it is a series of ultraviolent moments, frozen in time and memorialized on large pages. The best way to experience it, I think, would either be in a volume at the size of the original art or, even better, that actual art, on the walls of some museum somewhere, maybe even in a slightly confusing layout so that the viewer can't quite read it as a story at all.

The premise is that there's this guy - both an ex-Shaolin monk and a gunslinger, somehow. He's dumpy and not-young, leaning a bit into the kung-fu movie trope that the really old guy is the scariest killer. He's out in the desert somewhere, probably the American West. It's an unspecified time - now or a little later - with a lot of modern-looking people but also whatever fantastic-looking monsters and supernatural entities that Darrow feels like drawing at that moment. As the first page of the book puts it: "Someplace in the middle of nowhere, the day before yesterday and a week before tomorrow."

A lot of people want to kill this guy. The one reason we learn here - from a talking crab, no less - doesn't show any evil on the cowboy's side, but the crab has good reason to be eternally angry and to swear vengeance in the traditional manner. We can assume all of the other dozens or hundreds of odd and heavily-armed people assembled in this desert have reasons as well - maybe equally good, maybe worse, maybe better.

I tend to think that if hundreds of people are insistent enough on your being dead enough to gear up and chase you into a desert, you've definitely done something you shouldn't have. But maybe the cowboy is just really, really karmically unlucky, and that every action in his previous life horribly damaged someone else in ways that he couldn't predict and didn't notice. Either way, we start with - hundreds? dozens? lots - of people assembled, as the cowboy rides up on his talking mule, and announce that they're going to kill him.

Well, the Talking Killer Gambit never works, of course. So we get a bunch of hyper-detailed double-page spreads of dozens of these unnamed people being murdered in horrible ways - but it's by our hero, which means we're presumably happy about it.

So that happens. Then the cowboy is moseying on a bit further, and discovers a talking baby and three flying supernatural demonish entities. One of those entities, of course, decides to fight him, and the dialogue this creepy skeletal whatsit yells at him during the fight gives the usual confusing and half-baked explanation, in which the talking baby is cosmically important and the Fate of the World lies in its bloody hands. (Did I mention the creepy baby has blood-soaked hands for no specific mentioned reason? He does.)

But we need to go through about a hundred pages of fighting in weird ways, before we get to the it's-not-the-end. (It all just stops when we hit the last page. There were some more Shaolin Cowboy issues after this run, which have been collected elsewhere; I have no idea if they "end" the "story.") We do see a lot of very impressive spaces and monsters, and plenty of detailed double-page spreads of zombie hordes and seas of dismembered corpses and people flying through space doing that holding-up-two-fingers-to-show-its-martial-arts thing. It is exceptionally visually inventive.

But, as an actual book that tells a story, I can't say there's much of anything here. There's a kind of comic that is driven by whatever the artist felt like drawing at that moment; this is perhaps the exemplar of that style. Continuity and logic and plausibility are not its strong suits.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Glorious Summers, Vol.2: The Calanque by Zidrou and Jordi Lafebre

As Spring in my area has been chilly and damp, and I had an official company-wide Mental Health day, I indulged myself with a nostalgic book about a long, wonderful summer vacation - warm and relaxing and seemingly endless. (All of of those aspects were a nice contrast.)

Glorious Summers is a six-book series by writer Zidrou (Belgian) and artist Jordi Lafebre (Spanish), originally published fairly quickly in French during the teens. The first five books were translated into English - this one by Lara Vergnaud - soon afterward, but they're all from Europe Comics, which is more of a proof-of-concept than a major publisher, so you can only find them digitally.

Each one, I think, is about one year - one long summer vacation in the life of the Belgian Faldérault family. The first book was set in 1973, and had a light frame story in the modern day. This second one, The Calanque, is set in 1969 and wastes no time in other frames.

I have two thoughts before I dive into how wonderful and lovely this book is - and it is wonderful and lovely, the best kind of nostalgia.

First is informative: a calanque is what you call a fjord in French, or maybe what looks something like a fjord when it's on France's Mediterranean coast. It's a narrow, steep-walled inlet of the sea - you've probably seen them, looking untouched and beautiful, in a dozen comics and movies and other visual media, without knowing it had a French name. (I did.)

Second is more ruminative, or predictive. Each book is about one year, and they might cluster in this time-frame. Pierre and Maddie Faldérault were young in 1973, and they're four years younger here - with three children under the age of about seven and a fourth on the way. I think that's the premise of the series: this era in their lives. But I'm hoping for something to break the mold, later on. Maybe a book set in 1962 or 3, with Maddie pregnant with their first child or the two of them trying to get away with a new baby. Maybe a book set in 1982, with the older girls coming back from university or école, maybe jetting in to join the rest. I'd like to see nostalgia for other phases of life: the thing about kids is that they're always changing, and when you look back, you realize every year is a completely different era. I don't know if the series went that way, but I can hope.

In this book, BD artist Pierre is working full-out to finish his latest assignment so his family can go on vacation - just as we saw in the first book, running over their supposed departure date by three days. He's delivering the first installment of a new series he created, Four, about a four-armed sheriff in the American West. (Westerns were popular in Eurocomics, then and to some degree even now.)

He does finish; they do set off. And, in what I think is characteristic of this family, they don't have a specific destination in mind. They're going to camp anyway, so they don't need hotel reservations, and they're going to be gone for a month or two, so they're in no hurry. [1] The point is to go south - toward the Mediterranean, into the sunshine, down into France - for this family, to go to the land of summer.

The first night, they find a place to camp after dark - and it turns out to be the front yard of an older French couple. Luckily, they're happy to see a boisterous Belgian family camping on their lawn, and give the Faldéraults both a place to stay for a day (feeding them very well) and a tip on a place to spend the rest of the summer: a cabin in a calanque, on the sunny southern coast.

The rest of the book is set in that calanque, as they snorkel and fish and sunbathe and loaf and sing random songs and reenact the moon landing they just saw on TV. The brother of "Old Man Rufus" - half of the friendly French couple - lives nearby and also befriends the family, taking them to the local town in his boat for supplies.

Zidrou shows a real knack in this series for the small rhythms of life, of the running jokes a family creates and the quirks individual kids have at particular times in their lives. The Faldéraults are specific and quirky - maybe a bit weird, which the French always attribute to their being Belgian. They enjoy life, and are getting the most out of this vacation: memories to hold onto for the next long year and cold winter.

And Lafebre's art continues to be a delight, with expressive animation-inspired character design and poses on cleanly laid-out pages mostly drenched in that French sunlight. Glorious Summers is a series that makes you wish you grew up somewhere in driving distance of France in summer, and had two months a year to enjoy it.

[1] I don't know if the camping thing is a generational marker. In a US context, it might be - my own grandparents, both schoolteachers, headed off into the woods every summer for much of the summer for decades (the late '40s through at least the early '80s), though they stayed much closer to their home (Albany, NY) than the adventurous Faldéraults. My sense is that my mother and her sisters were not as fond of this as their parents, so it was not repeated with my generation. I think that kind of roughing-it camping is much rarer, at least in US culture, in the 21st century than it was in the mid-20th.

Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World by Seymour Chwast and Steven Brower

I grabbed this from my library app for one simple reason: it was a new book (copyright 2025) by Seymour Chwast, who I am happy to note Wikipedia says is a famous American graphic designer and illustrator. (They swing immediately into the past tense when required.) Chwast is not just a designer: he's one of the titans of mid-20th century design, influential in massive ways.

Implied by what I just said is that Chwast is not young: he was born in 1931. Apparently he's still doing design work through his Push Pin Studios, and he turned to adapting classic literature into comics earlier this century, with Dante's Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court over roughly a decade, over a decade ago. I hadn't seen anything new in that vein for a while, and, given that Chwast is now in his mid-nineties, wasn't holding out lots of hope.

Charlie is not like those prior books, in a bunch of ways. Chwast only drew it; Steven Brower (another renowned ad man, a generation or two younger than Chwast) here provides the words. And, in keeping with the old maxim that the longer the title, the shorter the book, Charlie comes with the double-barreled subtitle Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World and a slim 32-page package.

Brower's text is in the first person, from the point of view of Chaplin, and tells a short, very focused version of his life story. After a page of Chaplin's childhood (mostly miserable and poverty-stricken), it dives directly into filmography, and stays in that mode to the end. Charlie covers Chaplin's major movies, on a mostly-superficial plot and audience-reaction level, but doesn't get into Chaplin's personal life at all. It doesn't mention any of his wives or children, and leaves a reader with the impression that 1952's Limelight was his last movie. (It wasn't; he directed two more after that and lived for another quarter-century.)

Chwast provides the pictures here, with various spot illos on every page. Given that he's credited first, it's possible that the illustrations existed - maybe even culled from a longer stretch of Chwast's long career? - and Brower wrote around them. They're mostly pen-and-ink, with a few full-page colored-pencils pieces, and mostly in Chwast's Push Pin style. It's not comics format; the style is closer to a picture-book, especially given the length.

So this is a small thing, and somewhat of an odd thing - likely why it was published by Fantagraphics Underground, their oddball short-book imprint, rather than by some larger entity in a larger way. But it does have some new (?) Chwast drawings of Chaplin, many of them charming and evocative, and it does provide a not-horrible potted look at Chaplin's major work.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

Not to blow my own horn, but I'm close to the perfect person to review this book. Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a brand-new SF novel, the debut from adman and writer Justin Feinstein, about a new breakthrough in AI, specifically a Adtech agent in a B2B space, and the launch plan for that new product.

And I'm pretty sure I'm the only former SF editor who has been working in marketing for the past two decades and currently creates content about AI for a major tech company that is one of the leaders in its space. (OK, I work in legaltech rather than adtech, but I use adtech as a marketer every day, and I have been involved in multiple major product launches, including an upcoming one I can't talk about.) I will try not to nitpick too much, but I did have a lot of internal questions about this company's launch plan, among other things, while reading the book.

Actually, let me ground it all first: Monitored tries to do something impossible. Feinstein started writing it in late '22, and it's a near-future novel about a technology that is changing almost daily, and has been transforming entire industries over the past four years. I enjoyed it, and thought Feinstein did an awesome job, while still deeply believing he was writing about a 2022 tech world and tech capabilities, when those already look very different just a short time later.

If you work in AI at all, read this book quickly. Near future dates the fastest of all SF, and this is an area that is dating like fresh-baked bread. No offense to Feinstein about any of that: it's just the nature of the field right now.

That said: Monitored is an epistolary novel, in a zippy style. It's told through chat logs, surveillance videos, meeting transcripts, email exchanges, and similar media. It reads quickly, and focuses on the people (and bots) and what they say to each other.

UniView is a newish company, apparently already public, headquartered in Manhattan. They create sophisticated AI bots - their Sam is the basis of what's said to be all self-driving cars, though he was at least partially open-sourced, so UniView is not making as much money as it might.

(Actually, maybe I will nitpick. UniView has three active models at the beginning of the book - three products. Unlike the real-world frontier-model makers, each UniView model is discrete; they don't do new versions of old models, a la ChatGPT 5.5-Pro. 

Those three models are:

• Sam is presumably the one bringing in revenue, either partially through licensing to other companies or entirely through running the UniView proprietary version.
• Lex runs the internal UniView HR function, and there's no indication it has been licensed - though it could be.
• The third model, Casey, has no specific purpose Feinstein mentions, and is deleted very early in the book, so it clearly is not bringing in revenue.

I had a very hard time understanding UniView's business model and figuring out how they actually make any money. Plot elements later in the book further deepen my confusion.

Frankly, they act like a pre-IPO company most of the time, which could either be Feinstein doing it deliberately or something he didn't think of. And we don't see any of the UniView functions that would actually bring in revenue - marketing, sales, partnerships - which is either a bug or a feature, depending on how you look at it.)

UniView has a fourth bot in development: Quinn. Quinn will be an adtech engine, designed to create broadcast-quality video ads in real time, individualized for particular viewers. (I did wonder how Quinn would do this all that quickly from the server side, without any lag, and how it would get that data on all of the viewers, but those are minor quibbles.)

So, my marketing brain thinks: OK, so UniView will need to have an alpha customer or two - probably some big ad agency, but maybe a media outlet - to vet Quinn's output, provide glowing quotes, and work with the Quinn dev team under an NDA. Nope, not at all. Nothing like that. In fact, Feinstein has UniView fire its entire salesforce midway through the novel, right before the launch, and seems to be expecting customers to come to them after launch. This is a vaguely plausible motion in a consumer space - though you still need to have distribution at scale ready - but makes no sense for B2B. The customers for a ad-creation engine are ad agencies (at least in the short term, until they're actively routed around and marginalized) and large, mostly consumer-facing companies. Those companies are not going to come up to your door.

There's also no mention of metrics to feed back to customers, and I really wanted to know the pricing model for this thing, but now I'm getting on my hobbyhorses, so I should get back to the plot.

(Well, except for a quick second nitpick. UniView's AIs are presumably agents, but Feinstein doesn't use the word "agentic" at any time in this novel. I think this is on purpose; he also doesn't use "GenAI." Since AI is moving so quickly, Feinstein did what he could to future-proof the novel, and uses mostly base-level, long-term terminology. Readers may think of them as LLMs, but be aware that Feinstein is not being that specific - so the ways his characters interact with his bots are not "wrong" because they don't match current practice.)

UniView needs to train Quinn how to target individuals - teach it the basics of advertising. Training bots at UniView mostly happens through text-based chat - occasionally voice, but not much - which is slightly quaint. They decide to hire an advertising expert to do this, and grab Noah Ross, a fortyish veteran looking for work after a vaguely-mentioned (and somewhat clichéd) personal and professional breakdown.

Noah goes to work on the Quinn team, under project leader Simon Chung and working closely with ethicist Haley Ellis. (Feinstein sets up for a potential romance between Noah and Haley, but the format of the novel - also some plot elements - leaves that mostly as potential rather than actuality.) He chats with Quinn about how advertising works, how to target individuals, what people care about - all of the emotional grounding of the ad biz. Quinn generates ads for particular profiles, which are gauged on a standard scale; in the best Silicon Valley fashion, Noah's sole purpose is to make Number Go Up, as quickly as possible for the upcoming launch.

All that is pretty straightforward, even if the bot training is a bit more touchy-feely and less tinkering-with-weights than I expected. As is usual with SF novels about AI, the bots are supposedly non-sentient...but they act like people and talk like people and the other characters interact with them like people, which leads to the Big Ending.

But, meanwhile, the CEO and founder of UniView, Ian Lindell, is coming up on a milestone birthday. He had promised himself that he would do a whole bunch of things by that birthday, and the one missing thing on that list is "become a billionaire." So this launch has to make him a fortune.

Again, that feels very pre-IPO, and is a level of ambition and arrogance that would be unremarkable for any founder/CEO. Since UniView is already public, and Ian doesn't seem to have Musk-level abilities to cloud the minds of his board [1] to vote him massive unearned bonuses, he has to go in a somewhat different direction than the usual "launch product, disrupt everything, get all the money" playbook.

Ian's choice is frankly that of a cartoon villain; it happens very early in the novel and I found it weird, unlikely, and bizarre. It's not that I don't think CEOs aren't sociopaths who would take any action that benefited themselves; it's just that it's so criminal, and would be massively obvious in retrospect, that I don't believe he would be stupid enough to believe he could get away with it as depicted.

But he does the stupid illegal thing, and he covers over it, and he is mildly paranoid that a competitor will beat them to market, so he both makes things more difficult for the Quinn team (mostly inadvertently) and speeds up the launch radically.

Are these bots people? Do they have free will? Will they make choices?

This is a SF novel, not the real world, so the answers should be obvious. Also, though nobody actually says so during the novel, Feinstein clearly expects we will all think of Quinn's outputs (ultra-targeted video ads that know everything about you, manipulate your desires, and are really great at getting you to buy things you don't need) as horrible.

It does end well, and the speed imparted by Feinstein's epistolary style is a real strength - as I said up top, this novel is zippy and modern-feeling, which goes a long way to making it work well. I do have a lot of nitpicks - perhaps my background does not actually make me the perfect reviewer for this book, but instead a guy who knows too much for his own good - but they're mostly on the worldbuilding end, and mostly (I expect) artifacts of what changed in the world between when Feinstein started writing this book and I started reading it.

I do think this will date quickly; it's already dating quickly. But that just means it's of a particular time, and that can be a great advantage in SF.

[1] He presumably has a board, but they don't figure in the novel at all. UniView is stated to be a public company, but there's nothing about governance or financial reporting in the novel. As far as we can tell, by the end of the book UniView consists of a CEO, an automated HR bot, and a few product teams - no one else.

All of This and Nothing: I Can't Stand Still

"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.

Any indy cred I might have ever had is out the window: I'm writing about a Don Henley song.

I Can't Stand Still was the opener and the title track for his debut solo record, way back in 1982. The Eagles had broken up; he'd had a random song or two in the year or so in between, including a single with then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks; Stand Still was his big launch as himself and not one guy in a band. This song was never a single. But, if you bought the record, as a lot of us did in those days, this is what you heard first: Henley's disciplined drumming and a wailing keyboard line to launch right into yet another story of bad love.

You say you haven't got another lover
You say you only want to make the scene
Then you try to keep it under cover
What does that mean?

It's all in the voice of Henley's character; we don't know what "she" would say about any of this. But the singer is jealous, and suspicious, and worried. When I listened to this song in 1982, I was thirteen - I believed him entirely.

Now...well, I'm not so sure. There's more than a little control in the way he talks about the relationship.

I can take it if you need some freedom
Understand it if you miss your friends
Don't you ever try to think of me some
You never tell me where you've been

The refrain is all about that other guy - the one the singer assumes or knows or suspects is seeing "his" girl when she goes off - maybe assumes he's always there whenever she's anywhere else.

I love that energy in Henley's singing, and especially the keyboard, which is dominant throughout the song, in a clear '80s style that sounds nothing like a real physical piano or organ. And, most of all, that restlessness, fed by that unspecified, sourceless dread of what he's sure is happening when he's not around.

But baby, I can't stand still (while he's holding you)
I can't stand still (while he's touching you)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 13, 2026

It was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of book-shaped things as presents - one from myself (who knows me better?) and one from my older child.

I also got two books from Tachyon during the week since that momentous birthday party, and, given the title of this post series, they need to come first.

Meg Elison has a new short novel, Foundling Fathers, officially publishing later this month. (Though what I have in my hands is a final book, so you may be able to get one, too.) It's a SF novel, in which some shadowy right-wing billionaires are raising clones of "Thomas, John, George, and Ben" - exactly the ones you think, from the title - as part of their usual schemes. Apparently a modern smartphone falls into their hands, which leads to various funny complications.

(I am exactly the kind of person who immediately thinks, "wait, isn't Franklin a good thirty years older than the others? How does that work?" But the whole raised-in-secret, isolated-island-plantation thing is so vastly different from their original lives that this is a really silly, minor quibble at best.)

Also from Tachyon (published last month): Ignore all Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann. I should note that I've never been fond of the "this one company owns everything, and they are Evil and Oppressive, and Our Hero will smash them in the course of the book" kind of story, which this seems to be. (Companies that big and evil and oppressive don't get smashed that way; they wither away when something else crops up or change over time.) It's set on Callisto, where the evil oppressive company is Inspiration, which uses GenAI to something something "own everything and [determine] which stories can be told." Have I mentioned that, after my time in the book-mines, I also have a mild allergy to stories about story-tellers, particularly when that story-telling is Important and Foundational to their Very Identities and the Source of All Good Things in the Known Universe? Also that I think most discourse around AI - especially things that use "GenAI" as the stake in the ground, three years later - is stupid and confused and wrong, on both sides?

So I'm afraid I am very unlikely to enjoy this book, or be able to read it without flames on the side of my face, so I will point you to it, note that you are not me and probably have completely different hobby-horses, and say that Ignore has a bunch of glowing quotes and is notably queer-positive.

Bought for myself: Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the most recent novel in the "Murderbot" series. You probably don't need me to tell you about the series, but I will if you're interested. I don't really know what happens in this book, and I don't much care: I'll read it fairly quickly no matter what.

And last is the big present from my child: a big slipcased thing called The Skyrim Library. There are three books in a very handsome case, each collecting a lot of short material and a lot of art that I think was mostly from in-game materials (the game being Skyrim, of course). It is a cool-looking object that I now need to find an appropriate place on a shelf - and, I hope, also find time to read at least parts of the thing.

Quote of the Week: Has the Look of a Publisher

Unlike most publishers, who tend to become lean and haggard from mixing with authors, he [Russell Clutterbuck] bulged opulently in all directions and with his round face, round eyes and round spectacles, looked like an owl which has been doing itself too well on the field-mice.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, French Leave, pp.129-30

Black Hammer: Spiral City by Jeff Lemire and Teddy Kristiansen

I think this is still the most recent Black Hammer collection; it came out last November. It's set in the modern day, and does not feature the series main characters - the group of five Bronze Age heroes stuck on an extradimensional farm, like that dog you had as a child that had to go away, who I've come to call the Moping Crew because their super-team was never named.

Like most Black Hammer stories, it tells superhero stories that the reader will find at least faintly familiar, using its own invented world and characters that are different enough from Marvel and DC so as not to excite the vicious IP lawyers. I wonder if anyone has traced those familiarities: my sense is that some of them are obvious, but I also think there have been many more iterations of these stories since the '70s-80s versions I only vaguely remember.

Anyway, Black Hammer: Spiral City is potentially a new beginning for the series. It's written by series creator Jeff Lemire, with atmospheric, organic art in a variety of styles by Teddy Kristiansen. I have a hard time taking anything Black Hammer seriously, for the above second-hand story reasons, but maybe you feel differently.

It is soon after the Second Crisis Cataclysm. The techno-powered semi-fascist governmental/military group known as Cadmus AIM TRIDENT maintains the peace in Metropolis New York Spiral City. This city is presumably somewhere in the USA, but Lemire has never said where, or referred to any larger government of any kind. Black Hammer stories tend to use "Spiral City" as shorthand to mean "the real world" or "where we live" - Lemire's city has the usual streets and neighborhoods named after dead superhero artists, but there's never been a sense of larger geography, of suburbs and bridges and commuters and airports and so on.

That lack of specificity is used as if it were a strength in the storytelling here: one strand is in a storybook style, about a "kingdom" in which we follow a few iconic characters: a fool and a princess and a knight and a king. The kingdom, of course, is Spiral City itself, which has a mayor but apparently is not subject to any other level of government.

Malcolm Gold is the villain, the "king." He runs TRIDENT, and we know from the first page he's the Luthor-esque manipulator gathering power for his own nefarious aims. (Primarily outlawing superheroes, since that's the most important issue in a superhero story.) Aside from being evil and personally corrupt, he might be a reasonably effective technocratic manager, but superhero stories are never happy with "reasonably effective." He is running for mayor, and we expect he will win.

The fool is Inspector Insector, a bug-headed private detective who is a bit of metafiction - a "forgotten character" from a land of others like him, who never appeared in a "real story" in the "real world" until he bumbled his way into the Second Cataclysm and became part of a story - the Black Hammer story. He could be a fun character in the right kind of story, but his strengths and style are at odds with most of the core elements of the series: he has no powers, is no good as smashing Anti-Gods, and isn't even much good at moping. He wanders through this story as something like comic relief - though his story is sadder than that.

The princess is Helle's Bell, a superpowered pop star at a cusp in her career. She's trying to expand her work into movies, but she's also a young, hot-headed - literally, as with everything in superhero comics: she has fire-based powers triggered by her anger - prima donna who will sabotage her own best chance and be forced to run back to her Spiral City home from the vague land of Hollywood we first see her in.

And the knight is Concretestador, a former guard at the Akrham Spiral Asylum, which Malcolm just shut down with much grinning and twirling of mustache, because we all know comic-book asylums and prisons are just revolving doors to hold antagonists until they're needed for the next story, at which point they will escape easily. Concretestador needs to get a new job, but his skills are particular and the obvious outlets (TRIDENT and its ilk) are run by Malcolm and so don't want anyone good-coded. So he goes back to fighting other supers at the usual underground high-stakes fighting ring.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public - as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can't understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters - has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don't have superheroes on them.

(The Spiral City centrality issue also means that people talk as if Anti-God was trying to destroy Spiral City specifically, and not the entire universe it was part of - which is how it appeared in the actual story, too, so I can't fault them for that. Come to think of it, perhaps Spiral City is a small, flat, compact universe - that would explain how the evil forces could appear in the sky above during the various Crises Cataclysms at a 1-to-1 mapping; that would never work on any normal round planet.)

Anyway, everyone hates superheroes now: it's that kind of story. The bad guy is about to win a landslide election, take over everything, and outlaw Our Heroes. The plucky Good Guys are outnumbered, overwhelmed, and seemingly have no options left.

Of course they win in the end. Of course Malcolm wins the election but is forced to leave Spiral City, the only real place in the universe, with his tail between his legs. Along the way, nearly every friend Inspector Insector has is murdered by a serial killer, but I guess you can't make a superhero story without breaking eggs.

This is a second-hand story told well. If you've read superhero comics, of almost any kind, any time in the past fifty years, it will all rhyme with things already in your head. I think that's the point. I personally prefer stories that at least attempt to do something new, but I may be in the minority.

French Leave by P.G. Wodehouse

As I continue my saunter through the odder ends of P.G. Wodehouse's oeuvre - I've already read the famous novels at least once - I'm testing my assumption that the early obscure books (pre-war) are generally better than the late obscure books (post-war).

Wodehouse was born in 1881. His first novel was published in 1902 and his last in 1874, just before his death at age 93. There were nearly a hundred different books in between, so there are a lot of datapoints and a lot of potential arguments to be made about that assumption of mine. The best thing is that, to make those arguments well, you need to read Wodehouse books, which are always fun, even if one wants to argue this particular one under the microscope is slightly lesser than some other Wodehouse novel.

French Leave is a short 1956 novel, somewhat out of character for Wodehouse in its setting. The main characters are three sisters from Long Island - two fairly standard romantic-comedy protagonists and one slightly older budding Forbidding Aunt - and the action takes place mostly in two French resorts, Roville and St. Rocque.

Kate, Josephine, and Teresa Trent run a farm, mostly of bees, and are not too unhappy there. But, when a play their late father wrote is sold to television, they each get a windfall about about two thousand dollars. And the two younger sisters, Jo and Terry, want to go to France to waste that money and, just maybe, find some millionaires to marry. Kate disapproves, but will go with them as a chaperone and to disapprove at close range.

Since their money is slim, to make it go farther they will alternately pose as each other's maid. First, in St. Rocque, Jo is "Miss Trent" and Terry is her maid "Fellowes." Jo has some dates with a man she thinks is suitable - but it turns out he's already married, so she flies back to America, alone, to marry the lawyer she was dating there.

Terry and Kate move on to Roville, setting up in the big fancy hotel there. Terry falls in love with Jefferson, Comte d'Escrignon - the half-American son of a penniless Marquis who writes for a living and is called "Jeff." French Leave is most Wodehousian in the way in which nearly every major character has an official name and then the name that people actually call them, most notably in Jeff's father, alternately Nicolas Jules St. Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne and "Old Nick."

There are some ex-wives - of the Marquis in particular - and a parallel young couple of fairly dim but rich heirs to sparkling-water fortunes, who Jeff and Terry get somewhat entangled with. There's also an officious and somewhat corrupt local police Commissaire, who is aimed at Terry by that formidable ex-wife.

Of course, there are misunderstandings, primary among them about who is actually rich and who is not. (Terry is definitely not, though she's posing as an American heiress. Jeff has good prospects from his writing, but his father is penniless and their titles are very impressive but come with not a single sou.)

As any good Wodehouse book must, it ends with the young people getting married in the right permutations and the forces of repression and unhappiness (the Commissaire and the ex-wife primary among them) foiled.

Along the way, it's a bit more cumbersome than Wodehouse's better books - the whole deal with Jo feels extraneous to the central plot, which means the real complications don't start up until about 75% of the way into the book. But there's good material, especially about a publisher, Russell Clutterbuck, who is both a neighbor of the Trent sisters on Long Island and Jeff's great hope for fame and fortune. In the end, it's a slightly lumpy, not entirely well-shaped novel in the Wodehouse manner, quintessentially a book one can call minor but still enjoy reading.