Fishflies by Jeff Lemire

It still surprises me when I lose track of a "favorite" creator's work - in my head, I'm still the guy who spent sixteen years diligently tracking every last thing being published in my areas of concern, so that feels impossible to me. But I haven't tracked like that for two decades now, and I don't even see the trade publications I used to use as initial sources. Even if I wanted to, both PREVIEWS and Publishers Weekly are gone or vastly diminished from what they were when I relied on them.

But when I recently read 10,000 Ink Stains, Jeff Lemire's recent memoir of his career in comics, some of those old habits came back - I took notes. (I keep a small google doc with mostly series I want to keep reading in the library app - keeping them more-or-less in the same order, so I rotate through and remember to keep going with the ones I want to continue with. On the other side, I just removed my entry for Asterix as I was updating it based on reading this book.) So I now have a list of things I missed by Jeff Lemire.

Some of them are his Big Two superhero work - those have question marks after them, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get to them. But I also missed some of his more "indy" work, which I've consistently (well, mostly, with a big asterisk for Ascender/Descender, where the worldbuilding triggered a strong reaction) enjoyed - so I have a list of those books, and plan to get to them in '26.

First, though, he had a major series recently that I missed - seven issues of sixty-ish pages each, collected as a single book this past March. Written and drawn by Lemire, with one flashback section drawn by Sean Kuruneru. That was Fishflies, another story of rural Ontario and the hardscrabble lives of the damaged people who live there, like a lot of his solo work going back all the way to Essex County.

Fishflies is the story of two people - that's them on the cover. She's Francis "Franny" Fox, an elementary-schooler in Belle River, a small town in Southern Ontario, near the water. He's Lee Simard, a minor criminal, probably in his late twenties, who held up the Belle River Mini-Mart one night, shot a kid coming there to buy popsicles, and then...something happened to him.

It's the height of summer, the few weeks around a full moon when the local mayflies - called fishflies here, because they come from the water and smell like fish - swarm over everything. Some of you may have similar insect infestations where you live: I've seen cicadas here in New Jersey and "love bugs" down in Florida. This is a big, annoying, unpleasant one - the fishflies gather in huge masses for a few days, and then die. They don't bite or sting; they're purely a nuisance - the worst thing is their vast number and the unpleasant crunch underfoot.

There's a supernatural element to this book, which isn't explained until much later. 

Lee flees the botched robbery and his shooting of the kid, Paul Dupuis. He seems to be shot himself, in exactly the same place as the kid. He's also tormented by the fishflies, which seem to be biting him. He runs through the fields, and ends up on the farm where Franny lives with her sour, abusive father. She takes him in, making him a place to stay in an unused silo. She knows he "did something bad," but insists God can forgive him if he changes.

And he does change - but not the way she means. See that thing on the cover? That's Bug, which Simard transforms into by the next day. He can't talk, but is strong and can jump really far. Franny still wants him to be her friend. She still wants to protect him, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the local head of police Danny Laraque is looking for Simard. We also follow Dupuis's mother Helen, first watching over her comatose son in the hospital. And there's an old couple, brother and sister, who have seen "bugs" like Simard emerge before - and devoted their lives to killing those bugs.

Franny and Bug flee - and the police realize that she's missing and think Simard has kidnapped her. Things escalate. We learn the secret of the supernatural element: why Simard became a bug, and how it's happened before. All of those characters circle the story, and circles always lead back to where they began.

Fishflies is somewhat horror-tinged and somewhat crime-story-plotted, but it's still very much in the mainstream of Lemire's solo work: damaged people, in poor circumstances, in small Ontario towns, in stories that are, to quote myself, "literary explorations of death and regret and loss." His scratchy art is perfect for those kind of stories, those hardscrabble people, and it works really well for a giant anthropomorphic bug, too. Lemire gives this story the page-space it needs to breathe, including sidebars about fishflies from secondary characters in this town at the end of most of the original issues. It's creepy and sad and dark, but does give a glimmer of hope for some people, especially Franny - who needs it most.

Criminy by Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier

Roger Langridge has an almost uniquely quirky comics career, and I sometimes forget that. He has some projects where he does everything, writing and drawing. (I think he even does the coloring and lettering, at least sometimes - this book right in front of me now doesn't credit anyone else with those tasks.) Sometimes, though, he just writes - as in The Baker Street Peculiars, which I saw recently.

And sometimes he just does the art, as in today's book, Criminy, which was written by Ryan Ferrier. This is from 2018, as I'm still poking around the odder corners of my library book-reading app and finding unexpected things by creators that I follow, more or less. Ferrier also writes this in what I think of as a very Langridge kind of way, so it reads  not all that differently from all-Langridge works.

Criminy was originally a four-issue comics series, and then collected in this more durable form immediately afterward. It's a classic-animation-inspired - Langridge mentions the Fleischer studio several times in the sketchbook section at the end - in both look and story, as the Criminy family goes through various travails, as narrated in rhyme.

Daggum Criminy and his family - wife Ditto, older son Nadda and the baby twins Bitt & Bobb - live on the bucolic Isle of Burnswick, and are very happy there...until the pirates led by Baron Bugaboo attack and capture all of the locals. The Criminys sneak away, and set sail on a raft at the end of the first issue.

Each subsequent issue sees them finding another place, where there's more trouble. First they're sucked up into a gigantic "floaty-boat" run by a robot-squid-whatever Kapitan, where they join a vast horde of other folks similarly captured and waiting decades to be freed, until the Criminys inadvertently spark a squabble and wreck the ship. Then they're swallowed by a living island and forced to work ceaselessly in its bowels for the benefit of the leisured aristocrats who live on top - until everything goes wrong there as well, though this time there's a happier outcome.

The Criminy family's third destination is Slinkle Reef, a supposed paradise run by skeletons in zoot suits, an eternal carnival full of free food, entertainment, games, and frivolity. There is, of course, a dark side, and the Criminys find it and use it to overthrow the Slinkles and free a gigantic new friend.

With the aid of that friend, they can return to Burnswick, save their neighbors, kick out the pirates, and live forever afterward in peace and harmony, protected, we think, from any subsequent pirates or similar miscreants.

This is an all-ages book, which means the dangers are all cartoony - reasonably threatening on that level, and full of excitement, but characters can get eaten without a drop of blood (and, maybe, even get out later some of the time). There's a lot of talk of family, as the Criminys stick together - well, most of the time, since Nadda gets a moment or two of rebellion in, as required - through thick and thin to win out in the end. Langridge makes it all look like a cartoon from the '30s, and Ferrier's often-rhyming captions and similar dialogue (not rhyming, but just a bit off from colloquial, to sound a bit more serious or formal or just quirky) also work well for the story. This is a fun book - not just for the kids, but probably more for them than for older people.

Wyst: Alastor 1716 by Jack Vance

This is the third Alastor novel, from 1978. Like the first two - Trullion and Marune - it's set in the titular globular cluster, nearby but not part of the Gaean Reach of much of Vance's other SF novels. The three are entirely separate stories; the only real connecting link is the presence of the overlord of the Alastor Cluster, the Connatic, who has a somewhat larger presence in this novel than the first two.

Wyst: Alastor 1716 opens in the Connatic's palace on Lusz, where he is preparing to receive the four Whispers of Arrabus, elected leaders of the main polity of the world Wyst. Arrabus is entirely urbanized, several massive cities with billions of inhabitants - the rest of Wyst is thinly populated and doesn't seem to have much in the way of government above a village level.

A century ago, Arrabus had a revolution: the previous aristocratic rule was overthrown by a philosophy called Egalism, which seeks to make all people aggressively equal. Now, everyone lives in roughly identical apartments in giant blocks, works only a dozen hours a week at "drudge," eats the same heavily-processed food, and spends most of their time in recreation and affairs. By most accounts, Arrabins are happy, though smug about their system and punctilious about what they will or won't do - and, of course, they break some of the rules of Egalism routinely for themselves while insisting on them for others. As usual, Vance is interested in both what societies say about themselves and how they actually run on the ground - and the interesting, specific ways those two things diverge.

The Whispers are the four co-heads of what government Arrabus has, standing atop a loose system of elected block-level leaders in turn nominating sub-sets of themselves for groups covering larger and larger areas, all the way up the chain to the Whispers, each of whom represents one of Arrabus's four cities. They are coming to Lusz to invite the Connatic to attend the upcoming festival for the Centenary of Egalism, and also, the Connatic thinks, to ask for aid to adjust their system somewhat: they are overwhelmed by immigrants seeking an easy life, and their machinery has not been maintained as it should have been, which is going to come to a head quite soon if not corrected. Arrabins, of course, consider work and expertise and specialization "elitism," and that all is beneath them - so they do work grudgingly but not well, and don't want to be good at any of it.

As the Connatic turns his attention to Wyst - unspoken but implied is that most planets get very little of his time, since there are three thousand worlds of humans ostensibly under his rule - and discovers a series of increasingly-alarmed messages from his representative on Wyst, Cursor Bonamico, and Bonamico's staff. Apparently, an offworlder named Jantiff Ravesroke has gotten into some kind of trouble, which may have wider implications, and the Connatic's direct attention is desperately needed.

The book then shifts to Jantiff, who will be our main character. We get a brief sketch of his young life: he grew up in a family of skilled upper-middle-class workers in the city of Frayness on Zeck, Alastor 503, but wanted to become an artist. He won a contest for his art, which gave him the opportunity to travel to another world in the Cluster, and he chose Wyst for its famously magnificent light - and, maybe, also a bit because of its inhabitants' fabled freedoms and leisure.

He arrives in Arrabus, is assigned an apartment in the city of Uncibal, and quickly learns that Egalism is not as wonderful as he was led to believe when most of his goods are stolen while he's out of the apartment. (On the ground level, Egalism comes to mean that if anyone else has something you want but don't have, grabbing it for yourself is entirely moral.)

The rest of the novel is a slow burn from there: Jantiff lives among the locals, learning from them and influencing them in turn, and Vance quietly lays out some moments that start to explain some of the unexpected things that happened when the Connatic met with the Whispers in the first chapter and, also, those increasingly frantic messages from the Connatic's representatives on Wyst. Eventually, things get dangerous, and Jantiff goes on the run.

This is a 1978 space opera novel, so it does all end well for Jantiff. There was a major criminal conspiracy going on, which he sparked, in an odd way, and he's instrumental in both bringing it to the Conantic's attention and helping the Connatic to break that conspiracy. Wyst is slightly longer than the first two Alastor books, which gives Vance room to show Jantiff's day-to-day life in Uncibal, giving an interesting picture of the Egalistic life in both its positive and negative aspects.

Those two sides of Vance's writing - the adventure-plot and the anthropological - come together well in Wyst; a lot of his novels lean towards the former and the novellas to the latter, so it's a treat to see them so well integrated into a single whole here.

Death in Trieste by Jason

If I say this book is more like Good Night, Hem than like Upside Dawn, does that help anyone place it? How about if I say that's not just because Athos makes a few appearances here?

(Athos is turning into the glue of Jason's later career, the character who turns up everywhere and has met everyone. See The Last Musketeer for his initial appearance, if you're confused. Not that will necessarily make you less confused, but it's a good place to start.)

Death in Trieste is a book with three long stories. They are not formally connected, though David Bowie - in one of his most glam '70s incarnations - is a character in two of them. They are somewhat typical Jason stories: laconic, allusive, but also deeply genre stories, told through gesture and implication, with blank-faced characters we're often supposed to recognize - usually as "the vampire" or "the secret agent" or Rasputin, but in one story here as "Annie Lennox circa 1985" and other pop-music figures. (Jason's drawing style makes the latter somewhat more difficult: they're all anthropomorphic animals with big blank eyes and fairly standard faces for their "type - I'm not sure who most of the musical characters in the story "Sweet Dreams" are meant to be.)

"The Magritte Affair" leads off. It's set in contemporary Paris, where a group of criminals place specially-made Magritte knockoffs in the homes of random people, which turns them into Surrealists, complete with black suits and bowler hats. (This oddly reminded me of the Monty Python sketch where an alien blancmange turns tennis players into Scotsmen.) The usual wisecracking detective duo - a man and a woman - track down the ringleader of the gang and foil the plot, just before Surrealism completely takes over the world.

The title story is in the middle, and it's a very Jasonian mix of genre tropes and characters - a bewildering mix of characters across Europe in the '20s (including a time-traveling David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Nosferatu, and the oracular skull of Rasputin) are involved in several intersecting plots mostly involving Dadaism, the theater, and a rampaging vampire. Athos shows up here, wandering through some of the later scenes, and influences events but has no dialogue.

Last is "Sweet Dreams," in which several New Wave bands are actually superheroes led by Avalon, a Dr. X-ish wheelchair-bound presumably-psychic. They battle mummies, living suits of armor, and other menaces, but are helpless against a giant meteor that has been diverted by unknown forces and will strike Earth with devastating force right after the end of the story. (A space mission by "Starman" - the same Bowie as in the previous story - was unsuccessful in shifting the meteor.)

Jason has done some other kinds of books over the past decade - the travelogue On the Camino, for example - but this book is firmly in the mainstream of his work. I find the joys and strengths of that work really clear in the reading, but difficult to nail down when writing about it. No one else is like Jason; he mixes high and low culture fluidly, telling what should be junky stories with the chill of high culture and a detachment that makes them fascinating and distinct. You might have to deeply enjoy both high and low culture to really appreciate Jason: for me, that's no handicap, but it might be for some readers.

All of This and Nothing: Divisonary (Do the Right Thing)

"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.

Some songs you love because they say things you want to believe. They put into words ideas that might be in your head already, saying it more clearly and precisely than you managed to do yourself. The best of those songs give you an image to hold up, maybe a vision of your best self, of the person you want to be or could be, if you tried.

Divisionary (Do the Right Thing) is the last song on Ages and Ages's 2014 record of the same name. And it's very much one of those songs, as the subtitle implies.

Do the right thing, do the right thing
Do it all the time, do it all the time
Make yourself right, never mind them
Don't you know you're not the only one suffering

That's how it starts, like a meditation or an affirmation - like the singer telling himself as much as he's telling us.

He doesn't give us specifics: this is not about a particular situation, or at least he's not going to tell us here. There may be something specific in his mind. This is a song about how to engage with the world: how to work with people, I think, who claim to be open to change and compromise but will only drag you down.

Cuz they ain't moving, they're just moving around
So if you love yourself, you better get out
get out, get out, get out
now

This song has lived in my head since 2014. I hope it can live in yours as well. 

Do the right thing. Do it all the time. Make yourself right.

Don't you know you're not the only one suffering?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 31, 2026

One book came in the mail this week, from Norton - who send me things once in a while, so I really should make an effort to actually review this one and encourage them.

It is The Neverending Book by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yohsitake, translated from the Japanese by Kendall Heitzman. It's an illustrated story (Matayoshi is the writer; Yoshitake the illustrator) that apparently was a "runaway bestseller."

I've never been clear on how much, or how quickly, a book has to sell to run away. Maybe if the publisher can't manage to keep it in print?

Anyway, this was a big deal in Japan, and the English-language edition is coming on April 21.

The story is, well, let me just quote the official copy:

An aged, near-blind, book-loving king sends two of his subjects out into the world to learn about unusual and magical books. One year later, they return to tell the whimsical, tender, and touching stories they’ve learned.

That makes me want to respond with a version of the old Lou Grant reaction: "Kid, you've got quirk! I hate quirk." But that's dismissive and unwarranted. It does sound quirky and uplifting, in that pop-culture fantasy mode, a compendium of quickly-sketched stories across many genres and types, for the kind of reader who thinks she loves books more than most people. And there are, of course, a lot of people who think they like books more than most people. If you are one of them - I am, myself - this may be of interest.

Quote of the Week: The Little Girl and the Wolf

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer then twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: it is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

 - James Thurber, from Fables For Our Time, p.449 in Writings & Drawings

The Great British Bump-Off: Kill Or Be Quilt by John Allison and Max Sarin

Allison and Sarin were the team behind (the bulk of) the Giant Days comics series, which ran for a number of years and was pretty successful, as I understand it. Before and since, Allison has also had an array of related webcomics - he started with Bobbins in the late '90s, transitioned that to Scarygoround for longer stories this century, ran an offshoot called Bad Machinery involving two sets of mystery-solving kids for about a decade, and has most recently done offshoots like Steeple and Solver - which are set in the same fictional world as Giant Days, though the Giant Days cast has not reappeared as often as other Allison characters have.

For some bizarre reason, John Allison is not a giant of world comics, beloved by millions, even though he has been making wonderful, smart comics with zippy dialogue, quirky plots, and fascinating characters for around thirty years now. In my darker moments, I think of that as yet another indication that we are a fallen race, and that we simply can't have nice things. More realistically, Allison can be quite British, which may have limited his appeal to the segments of the American public who have trouble breathing with their mouths closed. (Oops, there I go again with the cynicism.)

What I might grandly call the mainstream of Allison's work generally involves each new series having a few characters from the last series, doing something new with a somewhat different cast. Thus Bobbins turned into Scarygoround, with a cluster of the same people, and then a couple of those people turned up as background characters in Bad Machinery. The Bad Machinery kids are young adults now, and so they're popping up in their own series - fan-favorite Lotty Grote in the print-comics series Wicked Things and then Solver stories on the web was first.

But her mystery-solving compatriot Shauna Wickle has also gotten a spin-off: first The Great British Bump-Off, in which the mystery-loving young woman competed on a reality show whose real-world analog you may be able to figure out from the title.

And, about a year later, Allison and artist Max Sarin (with colors by Sammy Borras and letters by Jim Campbell) brought Shauna back for a sequel: The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt. It keeps the title of the first miniseries for continuity, but Shauna is not on that reality show, or any reality show, this time, nor does anyone actually get bumped off.

Instead, Shauna has borrowed a narrowboat for the summer, to wend her way down the canals and rivers of Jolly Olde and have some fun minor adventures. Unfortunately, her first stop is in Barton-on-Wendle, where her lack of knot-tying acumen leads to the boat getting free and gaining a very expensive scratch down one side. So she needs to get a job to pay for that repair, which drags her into the intrigues of the two quilt shops of Barton.

The proprietors of those shops hate each other, and accuse each other of trying to sabotage their shops - which is plausible, since the EV of one of them bursts into flames right after Shauna arrives and the other's shop has an extensive flood caused by a deliberately-blocked drain soon afterward. Shauna works in both shops, as an undercover spy for both proprietors against both proprietors, as she tries to figure out the villain behind the mayhem.

It all comes to a head at the big annual quilt convention in town, and Shauna does solve the mystery - and bring the quilting community of Barton-on-Wendle back into harmony, with the aid of the traditional feisty old lady quilter - in the end. It is lighter-hearted than some of Allison's stories - as I noted above, nobody gets murdered in this one, and there's no supernatural element, unlike Bad Machinery - and has a lovely ending, including return visits by many of the Bad Machinery cast.

I tend to be slightly old-school with Allison: I think no one draws his comics quite as well as he does. But Max Sarin is a very close second, with similar body language and faces. And drawing is, of course, time-consuming - an Allison who writes more than he draws can make more comics, which is a major enticement. So now I just have to figure out how to make an audience of millions fall in love with all things Allisonian, so that he will have to increase production to fill the massive demand.

If you haven't yet read John Allison's work, perhaps you can help? Buy one of his books, or, if you prefer free samples first, either this page or this one offer lists of currently-available Allison projects on his website. And then tell all your friends, so they can tell tell all their friends....

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

This is the third of what looks to be four posts on the big James Thurber Writings & Drawings volume from the Library of America. My reading rules and plans are a bit quirky: I keep track of books read, which (since every metric turns into a target, as marketers like me well know) means that I tend to prioritize both short books and discrete books. So when I wanted to read Writings & Drawings again, for the first time since the late '90s, the fact that it's mostly made up of excerpts from Thurber's various collections was annoying to me and threatened to mess up my carefully-organized system.

But! Thurber wrote a few short books, which were incorporated in toto into Writings & Drawings by the compiler, Garrison Keillor, and so I'm able to name the separate posts - and, more importantly, write down actual books finished in my reading notebook - after those books. So the first post was named after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times, while the second was named after The Last Flower.

And this one, which will cover almost three hundred pages of miscellaneous Thurber, including excerpts from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, My World - And Welcome To It, Men, Women and Dogs, The Thurber Carnival, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, is named after the short 1950 fable The 13 Clocks, which is at the end of that sequence of stuff.

This clump of Thurber covers the Forties, and it's largely similar to the selections I mentioned in my first two posts: autobiographical snippets pitched in the humorous mode, officially fictional sketches that are often very similar in tone and matter to the aforementioned, Thurber's quirky simple drawings, light satire of various things.

The first big group of pieces are from the 1940 collection Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, which is made up of two kinds of pieces, exactly what the title promises. First we get twenty-eight fractured fables, of the kind that others have done since but none done better. Among them is the famous "The Unicorn in the Garden," and a handful of others that might seem vaguely familiar, either from actually reading them or just because others have "borrowed" Thurber's ideas since. Then there are four famous poems, in the heroic mode - three of them are "Excelsior," "Lochinvar," and "Barbara Frietchie" - made somewhat bathetic by Thurber's drawings.

My World - and Welcome To It has a clump of the usual Thurber pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." There's also "You Could Look It Up," a baseball story in light dialect that's reasonably famous and somewhat outside of Thurber's usual narrow bounds. Like earlier collections, some - like "Mitty" - are pitched as fictional and others, like "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," are framed as stories from Thurber's life, but both styles have very similar tones and styles and plots.

Next up is Men, Women and Dogs, which opens with a big group of captioned cartoons and also includes my tag-defining "The War Between Men and Women" and one other piece. The Thurber Carnival (which I think was partially reprint anyway, way back in 1945) with two pieces and The Beast in Me and Other Animals with four come next. Of these, "The Princess and the Tin Box" is interesting as either a late addition to the Fables cluster or a precursor to 13 Clocks, and "A New Natural History" is another one of the distinctive Thurber pieces that combines writings and drawings - in this case, using a lot of jargon or technical words and drawing the odd creatures Thurber thought appropriate for those names.

Then comes The 13 Clocks, which I expect was originally aimed at younger readers. Thurber's old New Yorker buddy E.B. White had published Stuart Little in 1945, which I think was a success from the beginning, which may have inspired him. (Or, as I see from some digging, it could be that 13 Clocks was the fourth of Thurber's eventual five books for younger readers, all in the fairy-tale mode, the first of which was previous to Stuart. So that's a nice theory that doesn't fit the facts.) Clocks is another fractured fable, told at greater length and with more detail. Somewhere unspecified and medieval, there is an evil Duke, in whose castle dwells the beautiful Princess Saralinda. As is typical, princes appear regularly to ask for her hand; the Duke either just kills them (slicing them from zatch to guggle) if they break his many and quirky rules, or sets them to impossible tasks so they never return.

But one prince - Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a wandering minstrel named Xingu - arrives, and is aided by a magical person called the Golux, son of a witch and a wizard, and not a mere device, in a tag that's repeated several times without ever becoming entirely clear to this reader for all its punchy specificity. With the Golux's aid, Zorn wins the hand of the princess, restarts the titular clocks - stopped at ten minutes to five years before by the evil of the Duke - and generally sets things right in the world. As a fable, it's substantially less fractured than the short ones, for obvious reasons.

This is another good clump of Thurber work, including several of his most famous pieces, including "Mitty," the "War Between Men and Women" and 13 Clocks. I'm still recommending the overall Writings & Drawings as a great single-volume Thurber; if you want more, though, you will have to go to the individual books and dig through for the pieces Keillor left out of this one. So the question for a reader is: do you want one big thousand-page clump of Thurber, or do you think you'll want to read it all? If the latter, probably start with Thurber Carnival or something similar, and then chase after all of the other books individually.

Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story by Ana Oncina

The book doesn't say so, but I'm pretty sure this is a collection of semi-autobiographical stories, by a Spanish cartoonist, about her life with her French boyfriend in some big city in Spain. The American edition is published by Andrews McMeel, the most strongly middle-America publisher of comics-format books, and I wonder if they thought their audience would be less likely to buy a book if they knew it was about "foreigners."

Now I'll actually check to see if any of that was true....

Croquette & Empanada is the first of a series by Ana Oncina, who is indeed Spanish - there were two numbered sequels immediately after this first book in 2014, plus a Christmas-themed book and one about a trip to Japan. None of the other C&E books have been translated into English since this first one was in 2019, but I see two later standalone Oncina books are available here from a romance-themed Tokyopop imprint.

Nothing I can find online says anything any more detailed than that C&E was inspired by Oncina and her boyfriend at the time, so I have no idea if "Croquette" meant he was French, or from another part of Spain, or just that it was his favorite food. And I am assuming that means there was a specific "him" to inspire the character at one point, but not any more than that.

And that tracks. This is a collection of short comics about the two characters - she's an empanada; he's a croquette - starting with their first date but immediately turning into the story of their domestic life together. It's mostly non-specific: Oncina mentions Spain a few times, mostly in the context of a trip to Berlin, but not a particular city. The stories are about their domestic life - living together, small squabbles, getting pets and caring for them, shopping together, and that kind of thing. They love each other, but each have their own foibles - it's a book about youngish people learning to live with another person, who you might love but also does weird things that sometimes surprise you and/or are annoying. It's probably all loosely based on Oncina's real life, but I'll guess "loosely" is pretty loose.

One quirky aspect is that C&E live in a world of mostly normal people - there are a few other anthropomorphic characters, like annoying Garlic at a party and Greek Yogurt in a Berlin hostel, but the vast majority of the background people and secondary characters are drawn as humans with dot eyes, in a similar cartoony style to the main characters.

This is fun, and I can see how it would be popular in Spain, running to five books. It's not actually generic, but it's a lot like many other similar books by other young creators (mostly women, the ones I can think of) and doesn't have as many really distinctive or quirky aspects as some other examples. Well, except for the way Oncina draws her characters - that's unique.

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don't know if it's going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.

All of This and Nothing: Jacqueline

"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.

You know this song, I expect: it's by Franz Ferdinand, the lead-off song on their 2004 self-titled record. Jacqueline.

Does anyone pick up a new record, put it on, and listen to it from the beginning anymore? Did they do that even twenty years ago?

I suppose some of us did - though most of us hear songs as one-offs, on the radio in 2004 or streaming in 2026 or beamed directly to our brains in 2038.

This is one of the greatest introductions to a band out there, starting slow and quiet, telling a story, and then kicking into the sound we've all become familiar with since, with that killer guitar line picking up at about the 0:45 mark.

That intro seems to have nothing to do with the lyrics in the loud part of the song, but the first verse is actually a true story - the other verse, as far as I know, is fictional, about a guy named Gregor who might be about to get into a major pub fight.

What do the two verses have to do with each other, or with the chorus? Like a lot of songs, a lot of good, quirky interesting songs, it's not anything obvious and straightforward - Jacqueline is a song to think about as well as a song to just experience.

And, for another piece of the song that also doesn't necessarily fit nicely like a puzzle piece with the verses and intro: the refrain has probably popped into your head over the past twenty years, now and then, its own little Zen koan. Because, no matter who we are, no matter how much we say we like what we do, and find meaning in our work, and all that, well...

It's always better on holiday
So much better on holiday
That's why we only work when
We need the money

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 24, 2026

Two books came in the mail this week, from the fine folks at Tachyon:

Michael Swanwick's new story collection The Universe Box - which I think is his first major collection since The Dog Said Bow-Wow back in 2007 - is publishing very soon, on February 3rd. You can probably pre-order it, and copies of the final book (I have what I still call a "bound galley," since that's what we called them when I worked in the field) might even be wending their way through the system now. Universe Box collects seventeen stories from various places, mostly originally published from 2017 through 2023, but including one 2012 story and two original to this collection.

(Parenthetically, Swanwick has always been prolific in short fiction, so I suspect there's another collection between 2007 and now. Let me fire up ISFDB and investigate...ah, yes! there was a 2016 book, Not So Much Said the Cat, which I must have missed.)

Swanwick has been winning awards for his short fiction since before my SF career, so I recommend this even before reading it. Is it fantasy or SF? Knowing Swanwick, probably both - maybe both even in individual stories. But definitely at least one of them, each time.

The other book is already published: Theodora Goss's Letters from an Imaginary Country, which came out in November. This one is a themed collection, sixteen fantasy stories about storytelling, many of which seem to have a fabulistic or other-people's-stories background. Three of the stories here are original to the collection.

I have not read a book by Goss, though I think I've seen her stories in anthologies over the years. But this is a big interesting book with a connection that seems supple and intriguing, plus an introduction by Jo Walton, so it goes on the shelf and I'll see if I can manage to get to it.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Dogs of Sark

It is at the Colinette that the dogs of Sark can best be studied - supposing that anyone wished to study them - as they lounge in the white dust, or snap at flies, or molest one another or scratch their ears with the claws of one of their back legs, their muzzles pointing at the sky, or while they lie in the warm dust meditating on the vicissitudes of life, and how mean a fortune is theirs with never a bitch to woo, for none, by law, are allowed on the island.

 - Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye, pp.8-9

Quote of the Week: First Impressions

I disliked him on sight, and as a rule I was prepared to like Mexicans. He was too studiedly humble, which is colossal arrogance of a kind. But I wouldn't place my life in the hands of a lawyer I liked.

 - Loren D. Estleman, Burning Midnight, p.146