Just Friends by Ana Oncina

I'm trying to figure out if this sweet teen semi-romance about two girls at summer camp was actually published in an Asian country, to explain why it reads right-to-left. The author's site is less help than it could be, since she's Spanish and so is the site. (Weird how that works!) But that site seems to say that this book was only published in Spain and the USA, but also that it won the Japanese International Manga Award, and that at least the title of the book was also in Japanese on the Spanish-language edition.

How much of that is actually-for-Japanese-people and how much is looking-like-manga-for-a-Western-audience I can't say. But it was created in Spanish, it was translated into English by Nanette Cooper-McGuiness for this 2023 TOKYOPOP American edition, and creator Ana Oncina created the pages, as far as I can tell, with that right-to-left flow from the beginning.

Oncina is best known in Europe for her Croquette & Empanada series, which is also romance-adjacent but more heteronormative. (Not that croquettes are necessarily male-coded, but the one in her books is.) That series has run to several books in Europe - including, notably, one about a trip to Japan - but only the first one has been translated for American publication.

Just Friends tells its story in two timelines: in the framing story, it's around twenty years later, and Erika and Emi are meeting for the first time in a while. The bulk of the story is told in flashback, with Erika the central character, first being forced by her mother to go to this week-long sleep-away camp - against her wishes - and then her time there, meeting and being befriended by the more outgoing Emi immediately on the bus out.

The details are general or universal enough that it doesn't read as "foreign" to an American audience - maybe that same element helped it in Japan as well, assuming it did make it to Japan. Teens go to camps all over the world, to do outdoor activities under the guidance of counselors, to make friends and spend time with people they "like," to do some light making out when they get the chance, to drink furtively in tents or around campfires deep in the night, to talk deeply and seriously with people they might never see again, or might only see "next year."

Erika is quiet, introverted, an artist. Her mother thinks this week would be a good time for Erika to become better friends with Celia, who is in her class. Erika denies they're friends - this is true, but we learn more complicated details of their relationship later in the book. Erika thinks she's going to spend the whole week quietly by herself, and is resigned to that.

But Emi - another first-timer - gloms onto Erika on that bus, and they partner up, in the way of camp, for the rest of the week. Their relationship deepens over those days, though mostly driven by Emi. They both hang out with boys that they talk about "liking," but they have a stronger connection to each other, which comes out as the week goes on.

Meanwhile, in the frame story, we learn how Emi has bounced back into Erika's life every few years since then, for a quick fling, only to disappear for years again. This doesn't entirely connect to what we see of her at camp, but it does provide a larger structure to their relationship and gives Oncina some momentum in the frame-story to close out her book solidly.

Just Friends read like a genre exercise to me, like Oncina was doing her version of a yuri story - down to some details of phrasing that felt more like translated-from-Japanese than translated-from-Spanish. (Though those could be from Cooper-McGuiness, the translator, enforcing a TOKYOPOP house style.) It's a nice, resonant genre exercise, but still sits comfortably within the boundaries of a standard genre and doesn't try to push those boundaries or do anything particularly new or exciting with it.

All of This and Nothing: Under the Milky Way

"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.

As I look forward over my list of Famous and Obscure, I'm mostly seeing Famous songs that are old and Obscure ones that are newer. And I wonder if what I'm really cataloging is that I paid attention to popular music when I was young, and got stuck into quirkier side-streams in the last couple of decades. Or maybe that there used to be a big general culture, more or less, and now there's just algorithms and narrowcasting.

Well, with nearly half the year behind me, I'm not going to change it up now. So stick a pin in that as an interesting potential point, and keep it in the back of your mind as I pick another "Famous" song that was a single back in 1988. (And maybe argue with me, in your head or in comments, that it really doesn't count as famous almost forty years later.)

For this week, the song is Under the Milky Way by The Church.

It's an atmospheric song, on the quiet side - as the title implies, it takes place at night, probably a dark night. The singer is talking to someone - maybe himself, but probably not - in this dark, quiet place, and wondering what it's all about.

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find

I think this is a song inspired by a particular moment - "Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty," "Lower the curtain down on Memphis," and so on - probably after a concert, when singer Steve Kilbey was looking out over an empty, quiet space with a quiet dark sky above him. Or, at least, that's the story the song tells.

Songs don't necessarily tell the truth. They tell a story that the songwriter wants to put out into the world, and stories have their own shape. And that's the story this one tells: here we are, in a hushed, dark place. The singer (Kilbey) is talking to "you," about what seems like something broken or lost, and he's about to move on.

I got no time for private consultation
Under the Milky Way tonight

Books Read: April 2026

I am finding it increasingly difficult to believe my calendar. April 2026 just ended? Surely that's a science-fictional year, yes? Whatever month or year it actually is - the empire never ended - here's what I read over the past thirty-one days. I will add links later, once my posts actually go live.

Kenji Tsurata, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 (digital, 4/3)

Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart, Uri Tupka and the Gods (digital, 4/4)

Loïc Clément and Anne Montelk, Days of Sugar and Spice (digital, 4/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death (digital, 4/11)

Mark Twain, Roughing It (in Library of American omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, 4/11)

Pierre-Henry Gomont, Brain Drain, Part 1 (digital, 4/12)

Raymond Chandler, Playback (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 4/15

Philippe Riche, The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis (digital, 4/17)

Ben Sears, Young Shadow and the Watchdogs (digtial, 4/18)

Jordan Crane, Goes Like This (digital, 4/19)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (4/19)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 4: What Is Above (digital, 4/25)

Hope Larson, Be That Way (4/25)

Lauren Haldeman, Wild That We're Here (digital, 4/26)

I will read more books in May (May?!). Pretty sure of that, at least.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/2/2026

I think these two books actually arrived last Saturday (April 25), but I didn't get time to write about them until now. (Now being the next Saturday. It's all very Spaceballs.)

Anyway, two books came in from Tachyon, both of which were recently published. Here's what I can tell you about them:

A new collection of stories by Samantha Mills: Rabbit Test and Other Stories. I think this is actually her first collection, and it has thirteen stories: one of them original to this collection, the rest reprinted from the usual wide range of outlets from about the past decade. The title story won the Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards, and Mills has also won a Compton Crook award. This one hit stores on April 21.

And a debut novel told in a very modern epistolary way (emails, chats, and more exotic postings): Justin Feinstein's Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. This one came out on April 7th, and is a satirical novel about AI, in which a copywriter is training a new bot under pressure, as his company barrels towards an ever-accelerating product release. (There seems to be a bit of John Sladek in the set-up, which I am absolutely here for.)

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Shipboard Love

It was the fourth morning of the voyage. Of course, when this story is done in the movies they won't be satisfied with a bald statement like that; they will have a Spoken Title or a Cut-Back Sub-Caption or whatever they call the thing in the low dens where motion-picture scenario-lizards do their dark work, which will run:

AND SO, CALM AND GOLDEN, THE DAYS WENT BY, EACH FRAUGHT WITH HOPE AND YOUTH AND SWEETNESS, LINKING TWO YOUNG HEARTS IN SILKEN FETTERS FORGED BY THE LAUGHING LOVE-GOD

and the males in the audience will shift their chewing gun to the other cheek and take a firmer grip of their companions' hands and the man at the piano will play 'Everybody wants a key to my cellar,' or something equally appropriate, very soulfully and slowly, with a wistful eye on the half-smoked cigarette which he has parked on the lowest octave and intends finishing as soon as the picture is over. But I prefer the plain frank statement that it was the fourth day of the voyage. That is my story and I mean to stick to it.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat (from 1922), p.60

Quote of the Week: National Legends

In the United States, we have the tradition of the Lone Man. .... Usually our heroes and antiheroes follow their destinies alone. I think that's what caught my eye about the Bebo inscription - "I STAN ALONE" - and what appeals to me about the character of Gouverneur Morris. He was a lonesome person, suddenly going off by himself, or staying in Paris as the only remaining diplomat when chaos ruled. This sort of protagonist fills our national dreams. I like solitude myself, and I was eligible for social security before it occurred to me that a bunch of loners wandering around and doing as they pleased might not make for much of a society.

 - Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.437

The Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm still reading Wodehouse books I've never read before - he wrote around a hundred, mostly novels and story collections, so I have probably a couple of dozen to go - which means I'm getting into things that are called "minor" or "obscure" or other critical terms that mean "you might want to read this if you really like this guy, but be warned."

But Wodehouse was a popular, humorous novelist to begin with. His failure modes are nothing like those of more literary novelists, where "minor" tends to mean a book is half-baked, confusing, or just wrong-headed. "Minor" in the humorous novel implies things like "not in a major series" or "didn't make a splash when it was originally published" or just "about as good as a dozen other books by the same guy, with nothing really particular to make it stand out." Or, as is the case here, "is Of Its Time in ways that look quaint several generations later."

The Girl on the Boat is a hundred-year-old short, funny novel by a writer who was already a master of his craft by this point: it was published in 1922, when Wodehouse was about forty and had been making a living at writing for half his life. The problem, for some readers, will be that it's set in a world that no longer exists. Astute readers will realize the title implies that: no one meets on an ocean liner anymore, though that, and the inevitable shipboard romance, was a cliché of the time. I tend to think that's a minor problem with humor in general, and usually entirely beside the point with Wodehouse: nearly all of his book were at least somewhat anachronistic when he wrote them, on purpose. As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

The plot of On the Boat wanders a bit, starting in New York with a British Theosophist writer, Mrs. Hignett, arriving for a lecture tour but immediately abandoning her to focus on her nephew Sam Marlowe, who will be our romantic hero. Sam ends up on the boat of the title, rooming with his cousin Eustace (son of the domineering Theosophist) and falling in love with Wilhelmina "Billie" Bennet, who...

Wait, this is Wodehouse, so it gets complicated quickly.

Billie has been urged since practically birth to marry Bream Mortimer, a young man with a face like a parrot, because their respective fathers (rich American businessmen) are good friends. Bream and Billie and their respective fathers are on the transatlantic boat to spend the summer in England, where they hope to rent Windles, the Hignett ancestral manse.

Billie has been engaged to Bream, but not terribly seriously, and is not currently. She does not love him, doesn't consider him up to her Tennyson-inspired standards of dashing, daring knightly manhood, and won't marry him. She was also briefly engaged to Eustace in New York over the previous weeks, even though he is a weak neurasthenic type who is even further away from her ideal.

Anyway, Sam makes a big impression on Billie by making what she thinks is a grand romantic gesture towards her, but was actually more of a standard Wodehouse misunderstanding, as the ship pushes off from the docks in New York. They spend much of the journey together, canoodling as much as anyone canoodles in a Wodehouse novel, and are briefly engaged, though Billie breaks it off at the end of the voyage for her usual you're-not-Sir-Galahad reasons related to a very Wodehousian amateur-theatrical event Sam comes off very badly at.

Meanwhile, Billie's best friend, the big-game hunter Jane Hubbard, has also been looking for love. She's the kind of strong domineering woman who will grow into a formidable Aunt in Wodehouse, so she's looking for a fairly weak man she can take care of - and so she falls hard for Eustace, and he for her. Because of that, Eustace agrees to rent Windles to the Mortimer/Bennet party, but only if he can stay there as well to be close to Jane.

Does Sam find a way to get down to Windles himself and press his suit with Billie? Of course he does. Are there confusions and misunderstandings along the way? Yes, indeed. Are there impostors galore infesting Windles?

Actually, no. I regret to inform any reader hoping for impostors that all of the main characters already know each other well, so such subterfuges would not be possible. But Sam does hide in a suit of armor during a late-night search of the stately home, a scene that also includes Jane running around shooting at things with her elephant gun, if that helps soften the blow.

And, yes, of course the book ends with Sam and Billie motoring away to get married, as it must. Getting there is the fun: this is prime-period Wodehouse, with a lot of fun turns of phrase and some of his more amusing hey-I'm-writing-a-story-here sidebar commentary.

Even if you're a Wodehouse fan, you probably haven't heard of this novel. It's not famous, not in any of his major series. But it's a wonderful book from his interwar peak, with only minor flaws and not too much reliance on his standard material. (e.g.: the lack of impostors)

Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka made a lot of comics. According to Wikipedia, over 700 works, comprising more than 150,000 pages. I doubt even half of that has been translated into English. So the view any North American reader has of his work - unless that reader both is fluent in Japanese and has access to a library-worth of Tezuka - is going to be limited, tentative, and gatekept by other people.

I come back to Tezuka periodically, though I think I found the period and style I find most compelling first: Tezuka was inspired by the adult-oriented gekiga movement in the mid-60s, and changed up his style and concerns for at least one strand of his work going forward for the next twenty years. (Tezuka died of cancer, at only 60, in 1989.) Vertical published a lot of that Tezuka material, around fifteen years ago, including The Book of Human Insects, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha, Dororo, Black Jack, MW, and Apollo's Song.

There's probably more in that style - to say it again, Tezuka was ridiculously prolific - but I haven't seen anything newly-published along those lines in years. So I've poked into other Tezuka styles and series - the well-regarded early adventure Princess Knight, for example, and more recently the anthology Shakespeare Manga Theater and the odd One Hundred Tales. But the seriousness and darkness of those core gekiga works hasn't come out in anything else I've seen.

But I keep looking. So this time I grabbed Tomorrow the Birds, from the time-frame that also saw those gekiga books. It was serialized in S-F Magazine between 1971 and 1975, collected in Japanese not long afterward, and translated into English for this 2024 edition by Iyasu Adair Nagata.

It's somewhat more serious than the '50s-era Tezuka books I've seen - it comes close to the doomy gekiga, especially early in the book - but still has some goofiness in it. And Tezuka seems to have leaned heavily into the serialized nature of this story to tell very different kinds of stories - to the point that the back half of the book feels a bit like "well, here's a Western set in this world, and now here's a fable, and then let's try a ghost story."

Tomorrow is basically a future history, spanning what seems to be at least a thousand years, told in nineteen mostly short chapters. In the near future, magpies (maybe corvids in general) have gotten smarter, learned to harness fire, and start attacking humanity. Very quickly, over the course of the first four or five stories, Japan surrenders to the birds and helps them destroy other human nations - I expect this was a political dig - and human civilization ends. The birds turn into anthropomorphic birdmen in a mechanism Tezuka wisely does not explain - though, as you can see from the cover, he does note that their heads get substantially larger to house more complex brains.

There's also a minor thread of an alien civilization monitoring Earth, and how they have interfered to create the rise of the birds. This is another bit of Tazuka's SFnal satire, and also gives him his ending - I saw it coming, but it's well done.

Each of the nineteen stories in Tomorrow is separate. The first few, during the war between humans and birds, take place in a short period of time - maybe one generation at most - but the rest of the book stretches down long centuries, as birdman civilization grows, changes, and is expressed differently in different places on earth. As I said, we get a very traditional Western - with a human in the Noble Savage role - and several other clearly genre exercises, as if Tezuka was working down a checklist of kinds of stories to tell in this milieu.

The stories are mostly in the downbeat, tragic, or SFnal if-this-goes-on mode: things go badly for the main-character humans in all of the stories, and often not much better for main-character birds. This becomes a bit obvious once the reader notices it - and any reader will definitely notice how the first few stories are all "birds attack humans, humans lose" - but each story is strongly told, and all of this material does have a similar tone and sweep and seriousness to his core gekiga works.

It is a goofy premise, but Tezuka sells it well, and gets through the "birds destroy human civilization by setting things on fire" bits quickly enough that most readers won't argue too much. We take it as allegorical, accept the WWII echoes and the core Japanese-ness of the idea, and see where the story takes us. Tomorrow the Birds is not quite as darkly uncompromising as something like MW or Ode to Kirihito, but it's from the same strain of Tezuka's work and has many of the same concerns and ideas.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies by Doug Savage

This is the fourth in this middle-grade graphic-novel series; it follows the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, a book I haven't been able to find, and Time Trout. And, yes, the series is about a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes and his friend/sidekick, a slightly more reasonable and grounded rabbit without notable fantastic powers.

Well, so far. We've also got cyborg porcupines, time-traveling fish, and a racoon doctor in this series, so it's not impossible that Rabbit Boy will develop his latent mutant powers at some point.

As the Deer Flies continues in the same goofy-but-reasonable tone that creator Doug Savage has established in the earlier books. Strange things happen in the Laser Moose books, but Savage presents it all with a matter-of-fact tone; he's got a crisper, more understated kind of humor than, for example, someone like Dav Pilkey. [1]

This time out, LM and RB are out in the woods, going to visit the Old Oak, which apparently RB has never seen before. It is old and huge and impressive, and it will figure in the amazing action sequence at the end of the book. But, more immediately, when they head over to a nearby marsh to find some water lilies for lunch, they see their friend Frank the deer leap off a cliff.

Frank is seriously injured hitting rocks on the way down, but LM manages to laser-cut a bunch of branches so Frank survives the big bump at the bottom. LM and RB take an unconscious Frank to see Doc (the aforementioned racoon), where they insist Frank's injuries are not their fault this time.

Frank has a lot of broken bones, which Doc can handle. But he's also screeching instead of talking, and acting like a bird, so the three assume he bumped his head in the fall. The doc is going to try to do something about Frank's brain, while LM and RB go off to investigate the site of the fall - LM is sure that some villain pushed Frank off the cliff. (Because why would he just jump?)

There's no sign of a struggle at the top of the cliff, though - just clear prints showing Frank leaping off. 

Luckily, some new characters show up to explain: Gus the wolf and a talking eagle. It turns out that Gus is a tinkerer, and wanted to be able to talk to birds. (Birds and animals both are sapient in this world, but their languages are mutually unintelligible.)  So Gus tried to make a machine to translate from animal to bird, and got it almost working.

Stuck, he went to the other tinkering expert in the forest: Cyborgupine. (Who, yes, is an evil villain.) Cyborgupine was really helpful for a while, and the two got the machine working...as an upgraded mind-transfer device, which Cyborgupine used, in his sudden but inevitable betrayal, to swap the brains of Frank and an eagle.

Hence Frank shrieking like a bird and thinking he can fly. Hence an eagle who can talk and saying he's Frank.

LM and RB of course decide they need to confront Cyborgupine, get the mind-transfer device, and put the eagle and Frank back in their correct bodies. It does not go quite that smoothly, with one more mind-transfer and an extended chase sequence near the end of the book, with a lot of laser eye-beams lancing about and cutting things indiscriminately. In the end, of course, good prevails and everyone is put back into their correct bodies.

As usual, Savage ends the book with a short additional educational section - this time about tree rings.

These books are aimed at middle-schoolers. If you can't get past that, I suppose that's unfortunate. Savage has an accessible cartoony style and a dryer wit than usually seen in books for tweens, plus the expected wacky hijinks the form requires. Frankly, I don't see how anyone can miss a series called Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy once they know it exists, but it takes all kinds to make a world, I suppose.

[1] Example: when Rabbit Boy asks Laser Moose if he meditates, the Moose says "Meditate? I don't meditate. I just come here to sit quietly and focus my mind until I feel a peaceful sense of inner calm."

Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier's serious writings are about the places and people around him more than you might expect from a New Yorker writer and reporter. But I also mean "around" somewhat expansively - that Frazier looks around, from wherever he is at the moment, and writes about the distinctive things and people there.

I can most obviously connect Family into that scheme, and Gone to New York, which is largely the story of his life, also fits. Great Plains is somewhat less so, though I could make an argument it arose from Family, and from growing up in the Midwest and looking both East (where he went first, to Harvard and then New York) and West (to those plains and living in Missoula, Montana for what I think were two stretches of his life). And then On the Rez clearly followed Plains and was largely about one friend of Frazier's, an Oglala Sioux man he met on the streets of NYC and followed back to those plains to see where he came from and what his people were like.

I'm not sure quite what the deal with Travels in Siberia is, but I'm sure I can make it fit into this framework with a bit more effort, if the panel sees fit to extend funding.

Anyway, Frazier's newest book - which is also one of his longest - is somewhat in the same vein. Paradise Bronx is explicitly a love-letter to New York City's largest, most spread-out, most diverse borough, and the only one that's actually "on the continent," as Frazier puts it. Frazier never lived in the Bronx, but he lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and has spent the last twenty-some years (I think) in a New Jersey suburb, from which he's traveled into the city, and in particular the Bronx, what seems to be quite a lot.

Like Frazier's other long, serious books, this is a combination of the sit-and-research book and the walk-around-and-talk-to-people book. I suspect Frazier has had a number of New Yorker stories about the Bronx during the past decade or so, and that either the actual articles or new versions based on his notes have made their way into this book - I'd call that a large part of the walking-around aspect of the book. Frazier also notes he's a big walker in general; he's walked across the Bronx multiple times in multiple directions, including getting down under major interstate intersections and trying to figure out where various colonial-era events happened.

Paradise Bronx is divided into three sections. "Nobody, or a Nation" is the deep history - mostly that colonial era, where what was then just called "Westchester" saw a lot of activity, particularly during the Revolutionary War. It also follows the life and career of Gouverneur Morris, a mostly-forgotten (and hard-to-spell) Founding Father who wrote a lot of the Constitution, was an important envoy to France during their Revolution, and did a bunch of other interesting things along the way.

The middle section, "Paradise," is somewhat transitional, covering basically everything about the Bronx from the early 1800s through roughly 1970 and presenting roughly the end of that era (particularly the 1930s and 1940s, slightly less the post-war period) as something of a golden age: good housing, strong social cohesion, mostly friendly neighborhoods, relatively even-handed governance. Frazier did not himself grow up in the Bronx, but he did grow up at the end of that era, so some readers may detect in this a new mutant strain of Boomer Special Pleading, My Childhood Was The Bestsest In The Whole Wide World Division.

And then the last section is "Fall and Rise," covering the "Bronx is Burning" years of the '70s, the hip-hop revolution soon afterward, and what the modern-day Bronx is like. Robert Moses, the source of nearly everything modern New Yorkers hate about their city - as well as several things they love - comes in for commentary, though not in any depth; Frazier assumes we already know the story and arguments. Here's where the other voices show up most strongly: Frazier wandered around the Bronx for years and talked to a lot of people; he brings out many of their stories here.

Frazier is an optimist, and he sees reason to be optimistic about the Bronx. He was writing this book, from internal evidence, mostly about 2019-2022, through the peak Covid years, and still was optimistic. This is a positive, surprisingly sunny book about a place most people think of as a punch-line. (My own biggest memory of the Bronx is accidentally walking across more of the South Bronx than expected or wise after getting off a subway on my way to an interview in 1990. I accidentally turned the wrong direction and went completely the opposite direction from the office I was looking for. But I called them when I got back to a payphone, and I rescheduled the interview, and they actually eventually offered me that job. That was one of the vanishly few times I've been on the ground in the Bronx; I ended up taking a different job in Manhattan instead, even though it paid substantially less.)

Non-fiction books are for telling you things you don't know, and often things you didn't know you might have wanted to know. Paradise Bronx is a great example of that: nearly everything in this book is something you don't know that you don't know, and most of it is worth knowing. Even better, Frazier's attitude and viewpoint makes it all fascinating and uplifting.

All of This and Nothing: Why Didn't You Get a Haircut?

"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.

This one is even more obscure than most of my Obscure songs, I think - from Math The Band, which is indeed a math-rock outfit, and had gone from a one-man operation to a two-person band by the time this song came out in 2009. (It's since become more of a "real" band with even more people, as far as I can tell.) I don't think this was a single or anything: it's just the song that I glommed onto when I heard their record Don't Worry, semi-randomly.

Some songs we love because of their attitude, and the way that attitude is embodied in the sound. This one of of those for me. It's got that fuzzy chiptune sound that screams "late Aughts" to me, and lyrics that take direct aim the slackers of every generation. (There was a new group of slackers then; there's a new one now; there was one earlier that I was part of. There will always be another one as long as there are people to slack off.)

Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough is not good

This is another great song to play loudly in your car with the windows down, yelling along about how good enough isn't good enough. If you do that, it might help you even believe, internalize it.

I don't know if I entirely do believe that - "good enough" has often been just fine in my career - but I love the energy and enthusiasm and ambition, and I want to believe that attitude, that mindset. For a song, that's what matters.

Quote of the Week: The Newt-Fancier at Bay

Jeeves, in speaking of this Fink-Nottle, had, if you remember, described him as disgruntled, and it was plain at a glance that the passage of time had done nothing to gruntle him. The eyes behind their horn-rimmed spectacles were burning with fury and resentment and all that sort of thing. He looked like a peevish halibut. In moments of emotion Gussie's resemblance to some marine monster always becomes accentuated.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.95

I Am Their Silence by Jordi Lafebre

It's always an interesting question to ask what a creator is like - what kind of work do they do, what kind of stories do they tell? And does that change, depending on the circumstances?

In comics in particular, I think there can be an intriguing difference between the way a creator works alone and how they work with others - particularly interesting for those who both write and draw, and even more so for the ones who mix their work up depending on who they're collaboratorating with.

Jordi Lafebre has made at least two big solo graphic novels - there's two that have been published strongly in English, where I could see them, at least. He's also worked drawing other writers' stories, most commonly with Zidrou, I think. (With translations, there's a lot of "I think" and "here's what has made it to my side of the ocean" - it's a big world, and how someone looks at home is not always the same as how he dresses up to go visiting.)

Always Never was a sunny almost-love-story, told in reverse, starting with its sixty-something protagonists finally having time for each other and then immediately winding the clock backward, step by step, to show how they got there. From that book, I might have hypothesized that Lafebre liked complicated structures, hidden connections, and ambiguously happy endings - and that he would tend to tell those stories in sunny colors, with animation-inspired character designs with expressive faces, usually in well-framed panels at a middle distance, arranged into fairly straightforward gridded pages.

I Am Their Silence was Lafebre's next major solo book after Always Never, and it does have those elements, in a somewhat different mixture.

Eva Rojas is a noted psychiatrist in Barcelona, in her early thirties. As is the cliché in stories about psychiatrists, she's both not entirely mentally well herself - she's subject to strong bipolar episodes, and sees visions of dead women from her family during those times - and is in this story herself under the care of a psychiatrist. Well, not exactly "care," I suppose - she's being interviewed by a colleague, Dr. Lull, as part of an evaluation process after temporarily losing her license.

Lafebre frames the story with that session between Eva and Lull - we start there, we drop back to that room repeatedly, the story is narrated by their conversation, and the story ends in that room. In the middle, though, he flashes back and forth as Eva describes the events of the past week - a very eventful, busy, surprising week, as might be expected from a woman experiencing a manic episode.

Eva went with one of her clients, Penelope Monturose, to a family gathering in the middle of that week - Penelope's grandmother, the matriarch, was going to read her will, and the whole family was going to gather. Eva was to be there as support for Penelope, but...Eva, at least in her manic phase, seems to have trouble letting anyone else be the center of attention or to have the last word. (Which strikes me as not-ideal personality traits for a psychiatrist, but the narrative declares her to be brilliant, so perhaps her manic episodes are usually less common and/or less severe?)

Anyway, she meets her client's complicated family, makes a big impression, and is there when one of the three brother-heirs (children of that matriarch, all in late middle age) is shockingly murdered. Worse, she's so nosy and manic that she becomes the primary suspect in that murder, which means she just has to investigate it herself to clear her name. (Well, to be fairer, it's more that she's still manic and so overwhelmingly nosy that she can't help herself but to investigate - I get the sense that Eva can no more stop poking her nose where it doesn't belong during a manic episode than she could flap her arms and fly away.)

Eva narrates the increasingly dramatic events of the week, as she gets more and more enmeshed in Monturose family schemes and is repeatedly warned away from the case by the serious police detective who looks a lot like Angela Merkel - and so is called "Merkel" consistently, since Eva is narrating the story.

To that point: I don't think Lafebre is trying to make Eva an essentially unreliable narrator - that's more difficult to do in comics, where the reader assumes what he sees in a panel is real, and not just what the narrator is describing - but it does shade a bit in that direction. We are meant to realize that Eva carries everyone, not least herself, along on the wave of her manic episodes and part of that mania is the urge to explain and categorize and nail down every last detail.

In the end, the reader already knows Eva wasn't the murderer. She might be manic, she might be often-inappropriate, we might have doubts at how successful a psychiatrist she actually is - she does not cover herself in glory with the one patient we see her interacting with in this book - but she definitely did not kill anyone. And, eventually, that's clear to the important people in the book as well, and Eva's investigation, such as it is, wraps up successfully.

I've focused on the main plot, but - as you might guess - there's also more details about Eva here; she didn't randomly become bipolar, but was driven into it by early trauma. That intertwines with the main story throughout - often in ways we readers see but Eva does not explain to Lull, so as not to look even "crazier" to him (although she is, to be clinical about it, severely impacted in her daily life by bipolar episodes, so it is a major problem for her) - and reaches its own climax in a way that Eva takes to be triumphant but seems to me to break several laws and irrevocably screw up the evidence in this case.

But then I think I found Eva less charming and more of a frightening loose cannon in this book than Lafebre intended. As Lafebre presents her, Eva is only just barely able to life an independent life, and is teetering very unsteadily on the verge of a complete breakdown - on top of the "repeatedly interfering in a major police investigation" stuff, of course. I don't know the Spanish standard of care, but my guess is that Lull really should call for her to be confined under observation for at least the duration of a full bipolar cycle, to get a better handle on how Eva is actually living her life.

I doubt that will happen - Eva solved the crime and it is funny! - but Eva is still very much not well at the end of this book, even if she is slightly closer to well (maybe) than she was at the beginning. I also still have serious doubts that anyone with her massive failures in tact, decision-making, and information-handling can be any good at all as a psychiatrist, but I suppose that is a premise, and I try not to argue with premises.

Still, this is a smart, engaging, fast-moving story with a fascinatingly complex main character - full of flaws, as I keep saying, and doubly fascinating because of them - told brightly and compellingly by a great maker of comics. Just don't assume that Eva is right because she's the protagonist, and you'll have a magnificent ride.

Elric: The Dreaming City by Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell

Most of the Roy Thomas-scripted adaptations of Michael Moorcock's Elric novels came out as individual comics issues - five or eight or so for each novel - and were eventually collected into book form. But The Dreaming City was instead a single graphic novel from Marvel in 1982 - maybe because this is the original 1962 novella "Dreaming City" rather than the alternate-title-for-the-first-novel Dreaming City, which has confused several generations at this point.

To be clearer: the novella "Dreaming City," when I first read the Elric books, was collected in The Weird of the White Wolf, at that time the third "novel" (actually a fix-up, like many of them) in the series, and now I think fourth. There have been remixed editions of the series since, so it also sits in different books with "Elric" in their titles.

I suppose the important thing to note about this adaptation is that it is the third in the recent Titan unified-covers reprinting of all things Moorcockian and Eternally Championing, Elric sub-series - third by internal chronology - but that it was first in the sense that Thomas wrote it first, P. Craig Russell drew it first, and it came out into the world four years before the adaptation of the first novel in the series, Elric of Melniboné.

(Also see my posts for the first two books in this Titan series: Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. Though both the original Moorcock stories and the vicissitudes of publishing adaptation series makes the timeline and details too convoluted to easily follow.)

I should also note that the next volume in this Titan series reprints the Thomas-scripted adaptation of The Weird of the White Wolf, which I expect - I haven't read it since about 1986 - also includes an adaptation of "The Dreaming City," in the context of that fix-up. So I have that to look forward to.

"Dreaming City" was one of the very earliest Elric stories, and, as many have noted repeatedly since then, Moorcock started out with the most dramatic, central story of his doomed albino hero, and has spent six decades since filling in smaller, lesser stories around them. What that means is: if you only read one Elric adaptation, it should be this one: it's early enough to be unfussy, it has some of Russell's most energetic artwork, and it's early-80s full-of-captions style captures the feel of Moorcock's prose well.

So this is shorter than the other Elric adaptations, tells a story of tighter scope - originally a novella, not a fix-up of short-fiction like the "novels" - and is one of the major events of this doomy, gloomy albino's life.

In Dreaming City, for good and sufficient reasons which are not provided here, Elric leads a large force of Sea Lords - pirates, basically - from the Young Kingdoms to plunder his homeland, sack its capital city Imrryr, slaughter basically all of his people, and depose his evil cousin Yyrkoon. He does succeed in those things, though he also intended to save his cousin and lover Cymoril, who does not survive this story.

He also does not succeed in getting more than a tiny fraction of his human forces back from Imrryr alive, in keeping with Elric's usual results to his actions: pretty much everybody but him dies, usually in horrible ways that make him sad. But that's the deal with Elric, and this was one of the first stories to codify that. Thomas and Russell turn Moorcock's often-purple prose into equally grand and exciting pages here; I'll repeat that, if you're interested in either Elric in general or the comics adaptations thereof, this is a great place to start.

Insectopolis by Peter Kuper

So Peter Kuper had an exhibit at the New York Public Library about three years ago. And his new book, Insectopolis: A Natural History, has various characters wandering through an extensive exhibit in that building.

But the exhibit seen in the background of the panels of Insectopolis - usually pretty clearly; the reader is meant to be able to follow most of it - is not the exhibit Kuper actually put on. And that gets us into the story of Insectopolis.

In the present day, a brother and sister - unnamed, not clearly seen - are walking together to the NYPL to see a big exhibit about insects. She's an entomologist, possibly involved with the exhibit's creation, and is excitedly giving her not-nearly-as-engaged brother the historical background on the evolution of insects as they head cross-town. (From the East, so I guess they're coming from Grand Central and upstate? I always head to the NYPL from the opposite direction, from the bus terminal or Penn Station.)

Then something unspecified interrupts them, there's a vague but massive crisis, and in a couple of pages, the entire human race disappears very quickly but leaves all their stuff behind. 

The bulk of the book continues the story of insects with a more appropriate cast: a host of insects of all kinds descend on the NYPL "much (much) later," finding the computers are still functional and AI-powered enough to respond to bugs and, I suppose, have input mechanisms bugs can use as well. Oh, and the bugs all talk in colloquial English - to each other, to various ghosts and those computers. What I'm saying is: this is not a realistic story; the narrative is just an excuse to roll through a giant catalog of Bug Facts, laid out on big pages full of color and motion and visual interest.

Kuper divides the book into themed chapters, most of them focused on particular kinds of insects (ants, flies, bees, several sorts of beetles, cicadas, butterflies, and so on), but a few of them on human scientists and other visionaries (including Osamu Tezuka, semi-randomly). Each chapter sees some reasonably-interested characters - generally the same kind of insect - come into a specific gallery or space at the NYPL and start examining the exhibit there, which turns out to be All About Them. Kuper mixes up that model somewhat as he goes on, and has some mechanisms for more-knowledgeable narrators among his bug tourists, but that's generally what Insectopolis is: a bug goes to an exhibit all about her and her species, learns how awesome and ancient and interesting she is, and then she flies away to allow the next bug to take her place for the next room.

It's all very educational, in both the positive and negative senses - you will learn some Bug Facts by reading Insectopolis, and some of them may stick with you for several days after reading. Kuper does make it all visually compelling, taking advantage of all the colors nature offers him. But there's also a lot of spinach here: insects have been dying off due to human activity, which is one of the spines of this book, and Kuper, as always, is not shy at unleashing the J'accuse where he feels it appropriate.

This is most likely to be loved by younger readers - I'd peg the perfect age as upper-elementary or possibly middle-school; old enough to absorb all of the facts and innocent enough to be appalled at the things mankind has done. For adults, it's full of interesting facts but the way it murders you and everyone you know off-page may perhaps be less appealing.