The Complete Neat Stuff by Peter Bagge

I read Hate back in the '90s, like the twenty-something slacker I was then. And I've read most of what Peter Bagge has published since then, more-or-less, eventually. I don't know if you could call me a fan of his work, since I seem to always complain about the same few aspects: the oh-so-nuanced "don't let government spend any money ever" libertarianism that is ludicrous in the context of Bagge's id-driven characters, mostly. Those two elements are both interesting and particular, but they directly contradict each other: in a world of Bagge people, libertarianism is literally insane; his people require major, intrusive government programs just to keep them from blithely and randomly murdering each other on a whim.

But he's a great cartoonist with a particular point of view and usually a knack of constructing interesting stories (if, too often, ones that allow him to grind his very particular axes), so I do keep coming back to the Bagge well to see what he's done that I missed.

And I finally thought that I should go all the way back. Fantagraphics, who was Bagge's first major publisher, did a big two-volume set a decade ago to collect all fifteen issues of his debut series, Neat Stuff, from the late '80s.

The Complete Neat Stuff has almost five hundred pages of comics, featuring Bagge in some of his earliest published work, all rubber-hose arm flailing and screaming and gigantic Big Daddy Roth toothy mouths and other extreme transformations of his characters. He's gotten somewhat more realistic in his cartooning than this since - this is the early, extreme, most underground-influenced work Bagge ever did.

In the underground tradition - and something that Bagge has kept up, mostly, since then - these are regularly very wordy comics, full of people making long speeches (usually at the top of their lungs; they're Bagge characters). Those characters are, almost all of them, horrible people in different ways - this also has been central to Bagge's work from the beginning.

Neat Stuff was a single-creator anthology, with a number of different characters, each in their own distinct stories, all mixed together over the course of five years and those fifteen issues. Any particular issue had stories about multiple characters, but I'll take each strand separately, which, I think, will make it more coherent. The two volumes here, though, present the issues as they originally appeared, in the original story order, with only the covers separated out into a separate section to show them in color.

Probably the nicest character is the sad-sack Junior, a twenty-something guy who does very little but eternally dreams of getting out from under his mother's thumb. (Frankly, his mother is mostly absent in the stories, so she doesn't seem that bad, either.) He's weak-willed and feckless, mousy and unmotivated, good-hearted but utterly unable to do anything productive. And his stories mostly petered out - there was a sequence early here in which he moved out, lived in a rooming house, and started to build a separate life, but then he moved back home and his stories got shorter and rarer, entirely focused on his sad-sackness. My guess is that Bagge realized he could either change Junior into a different character - one who did get out, and what happened next - or he could keep Junior the same. And Bagge characters, in this era (and arguably throughout his career), are about staying exactly the same.

The most realistic characters are the married couple Chet and Bunny Leeway, who - if I want to be pompous - embody late-80s suburban ennui. They're about thirty, and have Bagge's own sourness about anything and everything in the real world - all friends are dumb, transparent phonies; all culture is stupid; all activity is pointless; and life is a harsh grind that they hate but can't think of any way to change or mitigate. All you can do is drink vast quantities of alcohol to numb the pain and make other people interesting enough to talk to, and then - this was the '80s - drive drunk on to your next event. There aren't a lot of these stories, which is good: the Leeways are so comprehensively sour that they work best in small doses. They are the kind of people you want to grab hold of, shake, and say "isn't there anything at all that you enjoy? Why not do more of that?"

But that's, I think, the core Bagge viewpoint. Life is horrible, full of other people who are hideous and inherently wrong, and no one with a brain can be happy for a second ever.

I mostly enjoyed the stories about Studs Kirby, the once-and-then-again right-wing talk radio host. He's in a small city somewhere, probably in the midwest - parenthetically, all of these characters seem to be in particular places, though Bagge doesn't always make that clear. (The Leeways are probably in the Pacific Northwest; the Bradley family is in New Jersey.) Studs is a jerk and a loudmouth, like so many Bagge characters, but the secondary characters in his stories actually realize that and call him out on it. It doesn't help, of course, since Bagge characters are generally incapable of growth, learning, or getting better at anything, but it does tag to the reader that Bagge knows that Studs is an obnoxious blowhard. The stories are mostly about Studs getting into various obnoxious-blowhard situations, first as a former talk-radio guy trying to get back to a regular working-guy life, and then once again on the radio, stirring up shit with hair-trigger anger and the regular Bagge-character aptitude to take everything the worst possible way and escalate massively at the drop of a hat.

Then we get into the oddball, wacko characters, like the '60s crooner turned '80s evangelist Zoove Groover. He shows up in short features, tracing his weird and goofy career, for a few issues and then disappears forever. These are fun, but mostly in flashback mode - there's one or two stories closing out the '80s Zoove, with the bulk about his teen-idol days. They're tonally different from most of this work - almost sweet, in that "look at this crazy character!" style - and don't really connect with anything else in Neat Stuff.

Then comes the big cluster of goofballs: Girly-Girl, Chuckie-Boy, and the Goon in the Moon. Girly-Girl is the usual underground chaos-generator, a supposedly elementary-school girl with an endless well of energy and an equally endless set of demands for everything in the world. Chuckie-Boy is her dumb, loving stooge, there to be abused. The Goon is a middle-aged guy who is their friend (?!) and an alcoholic, and later on becomes a bit of a horndog in stories without the kids. These are the characters who do the most "underground" stuff - murdering each other, screaming & hollering, rampaging about - that kind of thing.

And then there's the stories about the Bradley family, which were some of the longest and most involved in Neat Stuff and led directly into Bagge's follow-up series, Hate. The father Pops is thinly characterized, just a middle-aged guy who wants to be left alone and seems to hate his family. (But then everyone hates everyone in a Bagge story.) Ma is put-upon, and comes across (to me, at least, thirty-some years later) as the closest thing to a reasonable human being in any of the Neat Stuff stories - which of course means she's marginalized and mostly ignored. Babs is a dumb teen girl obsessed with dumb teen girl stuff, and Butch similarly a violent, impulsive grade-schooler - neither one has any real depth.

Buddy, the older brother, is the Bagge self-insert character, explicitly taking what I hope he realized were his worst qualities as a young man and amplifying them - lazy, self-obsessed, unmotivated, thoughtless, grumpy and crabbed and nasty. These stories mostly focus on him, as he ends his high school years and starts an aimless "adult" life - selling a little weed to his friends but not otherwise doing anything at all to further his own life and independence and aims. (Assuming he has any aims.)

I would have liked to see more of Ma, but I don't know if twenty-something Bagge could have given us much from her point of view. Buddy is an annoying twerp - he was still an annoying twerp throughout most of Hate, too, though he did at least support himself financially and become semi-responsible, which were big steps up from the way he appears here.

Neat Stuff was a lot of things, and all of them were loud and brash and in-your-face, just like their characters. I can see why Bagge decided to end it and focus on one somewhat more realistic story - this material goes off in lots of directions and expends a lot of energy in that. That energy mostly covers over the essential sourness - all of Bagge's people are horrible, to themselves and each other, and they're embedded in worlds that are equally sour and horrible. I'd say that's a young man's yawp against the world, except that Bagge's stories have been pretty consistently in that vein for the past forty years: he still is out there making stories about how the world is sour and everyone is a complete idiot. But this is where it started.

All of This and Nothing: Fade Into You

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

I'm back to Famous this week - though you may have to be from my generation to know this song. It's not in a sound that's been popular, or major, or central any time in the past thirty years. But, then, it wasn't a lot like everything else in music at the time, either.

This week, it's time to Fade Into You, the most famous song by Mazzy Star, which came as a quiet, calming counterpoint amid a sea of grunge in 1993. 

The sound of the song is quiet and contemplative - that's the way Mazzy Star was - but that doesn't mean the meaning is happy and positive. 

I want to hold the hand inside you
I want to take the breath that's true
I look to you and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth

You may notice there's a lot of "want" at the beginning of this song. As it goes on, there will not be nearly as much "is" or "going to be." This is a song about something that didn't happen, or didn't happen in the right way, that the singer is extricating herself from and looking back at. She knows what happened, even if the person she's singing to doesn't get it at all.

Fade into you
I think it's strange you never knew

This is a quiet, contemplative song - about something broken or gone or lost...or maybe never really there at all, despite what the singer wanted. You can decide which.

Quote of the Week: Hello, Wilbur

General Mannister did not seem to share his enthusiasm. He looked like a horse with a secret sorrow. He coughed three times, like a horse who, in addition to a secret sorrow, had contracted asthma.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, pp.58-59

Girl in the World by Caroline Cash

Caroline Cash took over the Nancy comic strip at the beginning of this year, after a try-out run (before and after a couple of other creators) a year before. Her predecessor was Olivia Jaimes, a female creator who rejuvenated the strip in 2018 and is shrouded in mystery. Well, slightly more mystery than any other name on a national media entity where you never see the human being behind it - she's pseudonymous and has guarded her privacy, though the assumption is she's also known as a cartoonist under her real name, whatever that is. [1]

I liked the Jaimes Nancy; so far (it's January 31 as I write this) I'm liking the Cash Nancy; and I liked Cash's brief run in 2024. So I figured I should see what else Cash has done. She was best-known, pre-Nancy, for her ongoing comic PeePee PooPoo, with a confusing numbering scheme that has so far gone 420, 69, 80085, and 1. (I may have the order wrong, for obvious reasons.) Before that, though, she had a standalone graphic novel, Girl in the World, as her comics debut in 2019. So I took a look at that.

Girl follows a large cast, almost all female - there's one gay man I remember, and possibly other men in minor roles as passers-by, but it's a story about a lose friend group of women, during one long night. (Yes, there is a Bechdel Test reference at the end.) They're all young, and I guess to complete the cliché I should say they're all restless, too. They're all part of the same set in whatever city this is - Cash herself is from Chicago, but the city here is unnamed but mostly low-rise, rowhouses and buses and dark late-night streets.

These girls - I guess I should call them girls, from the title? - have different things they can do this night: the organized ones are Facebook events, to make this even more 2019, but the characters mostly ditch organized frivolity early and spend their time traveling with each other to the next thing, talking and just hanging out.

There's no larger plot: this is a book about those conversations, about what this group of young women are thinking about and worried about and unhappy about in this random night in 2019. They're different people - Cash does, I think, give them all names and personalities, but the names don't get used much, as friends don't dialogue-tag each other all that often.

Cash's art style shifts and alters - at first I thought she was creating looks for each cluster of characters, but I think, in the end, it's more a new creator working on her first long work - trying new things, using all of the tools she has, pushing in every direction she can, using each new blank page to learn something new.

Girl is a very "indy" book - that art style, that kind of storytelling, that feeling of a young creator trying things out in public. I find that kind of work energizing, and this is a great example of the type.

[1] I would love to work up a conspiracy that Cash is actually Jaimes, and this is a complicated double-fakeout to go public and switch her art style. But Cash is barely thirty, and I think was still in art school when "Jaimes" took over Nancy, so the timeline really doesn't work. Sad, because that would be an awesome thing to at least pretend to believe in.

The Age of Video Games by Jean Zeid & Émilie Rouge

Comics are a global industry; they're created in all corners of the world, and often travel far from their native shores, if the content works in the new countries. That's a good thing: something to be celebrated and encouraged.

Andrews McMeel, though, does not seem to agree. They have gone out of their way to disguise that the book The Age of Video Games - published in 2024 by Les Arènes, in 2025 by AMcM - is  originally - gasp! horror! - French.

They bury their copyright page at the very end of the book, and bury deeply there the credit "translated and lettered by Jen Vaughn" - note that this includes a fairly substantial part of the credits of the book, and I'm just talking about the lettering here. It's all pointless, because this is a book by two people named Jean Zeid (a man named Jean; even the dimmest AMcM executive must realize that screams French) and Émilie Rouge (which also sounds pretty clearly French).

Zeid is a journalist who has focused on video games; Rouge is an illustrator who has done a variety of things (there's a whole section of fake media on her site that I bet is from some single unnamed project, and it fascinates me). Here they appear as themselves to explore the whole global history of video games in a little under two hundred and fifty pages. 

The frame story is fun and a bit frivolous: Zeid and Rouge are joined by "Roby," a flying talking robot thingy, who looks like a handheld console, and maybe is supposed to be one, and they have video-game-ish travails several times over the course of the book.

But the core of the book is a detailed, well-sourced overview of video games, in all of its manifestations, starting with Space War! in 1960 and moving forward from there. Well, repeatedly moving forward from there - games had multiple, mostly separate strands, especially in the early decades, so Zeid and Rouge have separate chapters on arcade games, home consoles, and home PCs that overlap in time and occasionally in characters. The later chapters, once the field had professionalized and mostly merged, continues the story forward through the '80s and '90s and so forth, each chapter focusing on one time period or one major change (CD-ROMs and the '90s wave of consoles, casual games on phones, multiplayer games played via networks, etc.)

They find space to show a lot of people; this is a book that credits individuals for their work, and not just faceless corporations. So we see the famous names, like Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, but also a lot of historically-important figures and newer indy-game makers. Zeid and Rogue seem to be trying to be both global and inclusive; they specifically mention a lot of women creators, possibly slightly out of proportion to their impact on the field.

And there is that light overall story, with the avatars of creators Zeid and Rouge, plus the robot/console/AI Roby, who - as required by an AI in anything video-game-related - will need to be defeated in the final level.

It's a fairly big book, with lots of detail, told in an engaging way. Zeid is clearly an expert, and Rouge makes fun pages - colorful but slightly desaturated, somewhat cartoony but not really looking like a video game, which I found very appealing. (I can imagine a version of this book that tried to look like a modern AAA title throughout, or that changed art style every chapter to match the look of the era it's representing - Rouge does a little of the latter, for spice and style, but keeps most of her work consistent, which I appreciated.)

Big comics histories of random things seem to be at least a minor genre in France, and we've been seeing many of them making their way to the US in translation. I prefer it when publishers actually make that clear - unlike Andrews McMeel here - but just having the books is a good thing, especially when they're as amusing and informative as this one.

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

Hisataro is a mostly ordinary Japanese schoolboy, in his first year of high school in the mid-90s. Well, ordinary except for one thing: he relives the same day, over and over again, regularly but unexpectedly. By this point, he's worked out the rules: when a day repeats, it always happens exactly nine times. He's the only one who can alter what originally happened on repeated days, but what he does can make other people change what they did the first time around. He doesn't control when it happens, and it can happen multiple times in a week or not for a couple of months.

(He has, you might say, just a mild case of Groundhog Day syndrome, one that consistently clears up on its own without any need for medical or other intervention.)

So, at the point The Man Who Died Seven Times begins, Hisataro is physically sixteen - but he's lived through, he estimates, about twice as many years as that. It's given him advantages - acing tests that happen to land on repeat days, or using multiple days to get to know girls he wants to date - but mostly, he admits, he's a mediocre student without strong desires for anything, maybe a bit fatalistic because of his condition.

Seven Times takes place over one New Year's holiday, among Hisataro's family, mostly during one particular day repeating over and over again. And his grandfather keeps dying on that day - murdered, Hisataro thinks, by a member of the family. If he can just arrange events the right way on the last version of the day - the one that becomes "real" - then Hisataro can save his grandfather's life. 

He might be the only one that strongly invested in keeping the old man alive. Reijiro, that patriarch, was a bad father to his three daughters, especially after their mother died early. His oldest daughter ran off to college and married early to escape him; his youngest daughter married a teacher at her school soon afterward, also to escape. The middle daughter was left to keep care of him - and to become President and assumed heir of his company when an unlikely sequence of lucky bets and business ventures were wildly successful and the old man became very rich.

In the last few years - it's probably almost thirty years since those two daughters ran away - they've gotten closer as the old man got older. Everyone now spends the days after New Years at the old man's now-palatial house, reconfigured from how it was when the sisters grew up. 

Hisataro is the third of three sons of his mother; his aunt Haruna has two daughters. Their Grandfather is probably going to have one of those grandchildren adopted by his middle daughter Kotono, and so inherit the entire vast fortune. (Or, maybe, he'll have his faithful young assistant Ryuichi adopted instead - or even Emi, Kotono's assistant.) He writes a new will each New Year's, potentially changing his mind on his heir every time, though - before this fateful year - his family doesn't know all the details of how he decides and which heir he has decided on.

The whole family arrives - the five grandchildren and three sisters, but not the two husbands, who each bowed out for vague reasons related to problems each is having at work - on the 1st of January, to spend two days celebrating with family and then returning home the night of the 2nd. There's tension, as you'd expect, but mostly between the two runaway sisters, each maneuvering to set at least one of their children up for the fortune.

The days go normally; Hisataro remembers getting into the car to go home the evening of Jan 2, after a day of too much drinking with his grandfather. (There are a number of aspects of Seven Times that will seem really odd to North Americans; the casual way a sixteen-year-old gets absolutely blotto with his grandfather is the first and most obvious.)

But he wakes up in his grandfather's house. It's what he calls the Trap: the day will repeat nine times. And, in this first repeat, something shocking and unexpected happens: his grandfather dies, having his skull smashed in by a vase of flowers.

So Hisataro rearranges the next day so that the person who was with grandfather couldn't be - but grandfather is also dead at the end of the third version of the day, his head bashed in by that same vase.

And so on - Hisataro tries several times to gather as much of the family away from grandfather as possible, only to see him still die, still have a heavy object batter his skull, in versions four and five and six.

This is a play-fair mystery, so I won't give any more of the plot than that - I might have said too much already. Hisataro does solve the "mystery" in the end, and there is a plausible, fascinating twist even after he does solve it.

Nishizawa has a sly sense of humor here - this is not the kind of humorous book that has jokes, but there's dark amusement in the ways Grandfather keeps getting killed, and a different flavor of amusement in the infighting and maneuvers of the family members to get the old man's money. If you're looking for a mystery novel with an odd skiffy premise that makes strong use of both, Seven Times is a lot of fun.

Grendel: Devil's Odyssey by Matt Wagner and Brennan Wagner

The Grendel stories used to be about the flaws of their protagonists: usually, eventually, in the tragic sense. Each new person behind the mask would have strengths, of course - well, Brian Li Sung might be an exception there - but their weaknesses were just as important, and led to each one's inevitable end.

But then creator Matt Wagner had an idea that seemed good at the time: what if there was a perfect Grendel? One whose flaws were entirely about lack of vision and emotion, a cyborg killing machine willing, able, and ready to do whatever his deeply crapsack world asked of him. It was an intriguing idea in context, and at the time - the early '90s - it was very in tune with the zeitgeist of big adventure comics.

Unfortunately, it leads to the question: where do you go after perfection? And Wagner's Grendel stories since War Child - that is, since 1992 - are either flashbacks to the first Grendel, Hunter Rose (who is problematically "perfect" in different ways, seeing as how he's basically Evil Batman) or more Grendel-Prime stories. They were mostly Hunter Rose for the Aughts and into the Teens; Wagner seems to have shifted back to the end of his timeline more recently. (A lot of those stories over the past twenty-five or so years have also been crossovers with other properties, too, which are, as far as I can tell, roughly in continuity in the sense that the Grendel in question did go over to the other universe, did some stuff, and came back to say "that was weird" and then never talk about it again.)

Grendel: Devil's Odyssey was an eight-issue series, starting in 2019, and collected in this form soon after it was finished in 2021. There's already been the first of three follow-up series, still focused on Prime, so Wagner is clearly back into the thick of Grendel these days, adding on new stories to the end of his timeline.

Grendel stories can sometimes - especially in the interstitial stories of the '80s as Wagner moved from one crapsack future to another future, crapsack in excitingly different ways - turn into tours of the steam-grommet factory, with Wagner infodumping all of his ideas about this particular society and all of the ways in which it is horrible. Odyssey is not exactly in that vein, but it comes out of the same impulse in Wagner's storytelling: showing us one society after another, through the eyes of Prime and his flying drone companion Siggy.

It's another couple of hundred years on after Prime reinstated the Orion dynasty, and, inevitably, the world has fallen into strife and corruption. (Democracy has never and probably will never work in Grendel's world - it's just a succession of strongmen, and things are "good" for the world when the particular strongman is basically honest, smart, and hard-working. These people, in Wagner's world, are very rare.) Prime has become a legend, off doing whatever in the hinterlands, but the Last Good Ruler calls him, using the Secret Codes of Yore, and tasks Prime with finding a new home for humanity among the stars, because that's exactly the kind of job where you want a murderous and unimaginative centuries-old cyborg inculcated with a toxic mindset.

Anyway, there was a Secret Starship built, filled with shiny technology and the requisite embryos (of clones of Orion and his sisters, as the assumedly-best human beings ever) to re-establish the human race somewhere else. Prime agrees to fly on this ship to find New Earth (no one calls it New Earth).

The ship launches, and, of course, to do that the besieged palace of the Last Good Ruler needs to drop its shields, which means this is not only the Last Best Hope of Grendel-kind, but also the immediate death of the Last Good Ruler and all of his loyal lackies.

Most of the series is taken up by a series of planetary visits. Prime is immortal, and it's not clear how long this is taking during the bulk of the series - at least months between planets, maybe longer if this universe is more relativistic and less skiffy. (We do get a how-much-further-in-the-future-it-is update near the very end.) He lands on planets, meets the natives, assesses the situation, and usually ends up killing a lot of creatures, many of which are sentient.

The first two major worlds we see are resource-constrained: the first has plants that sequester water in fantastically efficient ways, and the second is an icebox with a massive sophisticated population that each spends 99% of their time in coldsleep. Then we get a planet where, essentially, virtual-reality AI took over and then everyone died from a vaguely-defined "virus," leaving a robot-populated world still chugging along. Prime does not understand these worlds as well as he thinks he does, but comes to realize they're bad candidates, and so moves on.

Next up is a medievaloid world with three sapient races living in harmony, which is nice, but it's under a regime where trial-by-combat is the only way of adjudicating anything. We get a little Heinleinian "an armed society is a polite society" chatter, but Wagner - and, more importantly, Prime - thinks this is not a good thing, so Prime turns himself into the leader of a movement to get rid of this central tenet of the entire global civilization. It does not go wrong because of that, though, but instead because the head of this culture - at least the big guy locally; the global situation is very vague - is a very obvious Trump parody, and Prime's tactics don't work on idiots.

So Prime and his flying robot buddy have to leave that planet, too.

Last, they're zipping through the ether when they get confronted by a vast Armada from the Consortium, the vastly more technologically advanced mega-civilization of the galaxy, which has been watching Prime for some time and now have come to judge him. It does not go well; the Grendel mindset assumes physical force is the best option, and he's vastly outclassed. So Prime is shooed back to Earth and his mission quietly cancelled by the actual adults of the galaxy.

There, he gets a quick glimpse of what new crapsack thing has happened there in the intervening centuries - spoiler! it still has to do with goddamn Grendels, who are the cockroaches of this particular future. And we assume the next series will be Prime fighting to free this world, once again, from some non-Grendel tyrant and installing a proper Grendel tyrant, the way it's supposed to be.

Wagner's art is strong, his dialogue is quirky and specific, and his characters are interesting. This is an episodic story that doesn't really move anything forward, but it's told well and is entertaining in that cynical Grendel manner throughout. I could wish that Wagner would finally get beyond Prime, but that clearly is a vain hope. I'm not even going to pretend that a Grendel story with a happy ending, or a functional human civilization, is even possible: the point of the series is entirely in the opposite direction.

All of This and Nothing: Deny All

"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.

Nothing particularly fancy this week - no deep personal meaning, no lyrics that mean something entirely different than they seem. Just a straightforward rock song, loud and strong and wonderful, by a band with twenty years of history when they hit this point and more than that since then.

It charted; I think it was decently known at the time. But, fifteen years later, I'm comfortable counting it on the Obscure side of the list for this year.

This week's song is Deny All by the Dutch band Bettie Serveert. It's in English, and the singer was originally American, but the lyrics have that odd obscure quality that makes me think that they can understand and speak English but maybe don't think in English, that metaphors and turns of phrase and ideas are being subtly translated as they go.

You've got to make a choice, that's your life
How many times did it pass you by?
Grab it by the throat, grab it while you can
Don't say that you don't understand

I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what's being denied here - well, all of it, of course, but what does that mean? But I don't care: this song rocks, it's evocative and powerful, and that's more than enough.

Deny all (if you cut it like that)

Quote of the Week: The Inevitable Duck and Cover Joke

Atomic war was part of the school curriculum in the fifties, most notably in the form of the famous "duck and cover" drills, in which we students would practice crawling under our desks to protect ourselves in the event of a nuclear blast. We really did that. It seems pretty stupid now, but back then - when the threat of nuclear attack felt very real - it also seemed pretty stupid. I think we all knew, deep in our hearts, that school desks did not provided meaningful protection against atomic bombs; if they did, why not erect giant school desks over major cities? But we didn't really mind the duck-and-cover drills,. They were more entertaining than, for example, school.

 - Dave Barry, Class Clown, p.29

This Country by Navied Mahdavian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Clown by Dave Barry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Hammer: The End by Jeff Lemire & Malachi Ward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of This and Nothing: The Bad Touch

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

No one can be serious all of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Read: February 2026

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

Here's what I read last month.

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

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

Juan Barrio, Kiosco (digital, 2/8)

Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance (2/8)

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Atkinson, Big Sky (2/16)

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

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

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

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

In March, I plan to read more books.