Muybridge by Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle's new book last year - his first graphic novel since 2021's Factory Summers - was something of a change of pace.

Delisle, to this point, had mostly had two strands of his career - the short books of funny strips like the four "Bad Dad" collections and some early work, and longer, more integrated books that told single, essentially serious stories. Up to this point, all of those longer books had some connection to his life, and most of them were autobiographical to some degree: Hostage was the outlier, about a Médecins Sans Frontières worker (like Delisle's wife), living in a foreign and in some ways dangerous country (not unlike Delisle's travel books), and retelling the story that man had told Delisle.

Muybridge has a vastly smaller connection to Delisle personally; near the very end, he mentions that he, and thousands of other animation students over the past century, bought and studied Eadwaerd Muybrudge's two books of photographic motion studies; that those books are standard references for that entire industry and have never been out of print. Delisle does appear in this book: on that one page.

Otherwise, Muybridge is what it looks to be: a biographical sketch in comics form of the photographer who, more than anyone else, froze time in his pictures. Delisle ranges more widely than Muybridge himself at times, but his focus is on the man himself and his career, with some material on his personal life. (It was scandalous, but not terribly happy: he married a much younger woman, who had an affair and then a child - parentage never entirely clear, decades before genetic testing - while Muybridge was traveling to photograph various things. Muybridge tracked down the seducer, shot him dead, and was found not guilty by a jury. His wife tried to divorce him multiple times after that, was rebuffed by the state of California each time, and died soon afterward of typhoid fever. Her child was stuck in an orphanage, and last saw Muybridge at the age of nine.)

Delisle also shows other photographic pioneers of the era - the late 19th century - and some painters who worked in related areas, as well as a lot of material on Muybridge's relationship with railroad tycoon and later Senator Leland Sanford.

The book is organized chronologically, with sections set off with the years they begin, but it falls into roughly three sections. First is the early, pre-photography life of Muybridge, which is the shortest and gets him from his youth in England to San Francisco (and back, and back again). Then there's the long years of trying to show exactly how a horse gallops, which was a matter of much scientific, gambling, and artistic debate in those days. Muybridge's work, bankrolled and supported by Sanford, proved how a horse's gait really looks when frozen.

And then the last third of so of Muybridge is everything after that - a stretch at the University of Pennsylvania doing stop-motion photography of all kinds of animals and people (scandalously, many of them naked!), other advances in photography and how it affected painting, and finally, how it all led to the motion-picture industry at the turn of the century.

Muybridge was central to most of that, but not the only central figure, so he's at the core of the book but not always the focus for specific scenes. Delisle named his book after his main character, but his story is wider than his hero.

This is more distanced and less personal than Delisle's previous books, and I might have felt it slightly lesser because of that. In all of Delisle's books before this, the creator was intensely present - even is Hostage, he was telling the story, and had a "that could have been me" frisson throughout. Muybridge is a fine graphic biography of an interesting, important figure, but it feels more like a book that any one of a dozen cartoonists could have done, more or less.

(Compare it to Bill Griffith's Photographic Memory, another book about a 19th century photographer that came out at nearly the same time - Griffith was writing about a family member, and intensely present in his book; Delisle was writing about a world-famous figure, and keeps it all on that level.)

Muybridge is excellent at what it does; Delisle even turns his pages into facsimiles of Muybridge's motion studies a few times, with more panels than usual showing small changes in motion of a figure. His art is inventive; he makes the grumpy, self-centered Muybridge a sympathetic figure; and he covers a lot of strands of a complex story well. I just felt that his previous books were more specific.

(Throwing this in at the end, since it didn't fit elsewhere: Delisle works in France and creates his books in French. Muybridge was translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall for this English-language edition.) 

How I Make Comics by Kim Deitch

Kim Deitch's work has been largely of a piece for the last thirty or so years, going back to A Shroud for Waldo. Deitch himself is a character in his work, often the main character in the modern-day sections, investigating or just discovering mysterious stories about old entertainment, obscure Hollywood movie-makers or vaudeville or carnivals or similar things from the early 20th century. But the meat of the story is in that past world, with supernatural entities and midgets and mysterious technology and reincarnations of the same people over time.

For a while, the stories centered on his trickster character Waldo, something like an evil Felix the Cat, but I think Deitch has been deliberately playing down Waldo over the past decade or so, to tell different kinds of stories using other elements of the same mix.

How I Make Comics is his most recent book, from earlier this year; it follows in that tradition while being a little lighter and more accessible. Despite the title, it's not a how-to. It might be a series of examples, though: it's explicitly a linked collection of shorter pieces, like beads on a string, which connect loosely to each other to tell a series of stories about Deitch in the present day and the same sort of past events - some of them possibly true, or partially true, but it's never clear - that he's turning into his stories. As always, we see the Deitch-created versions while he tells us that he's presenting the true history, but, this time, his wife Pam is a more major character, and she acts as his first reader and sounding board (both, we understand, in life and in the fictional versions in this book), commenting on the stories in the middle of them and between them.

Of course, Pam here is a fictional version of the real Pam, as the Deitch here is a fictional version of the real Kim Deitch. He does draw their real apartment, with all of its knickknacks and oddities, and details their conversations - but never forget that it's all a story being told, and that this is the same thing Deitch has been doing for decades. He slides from modern domesticity into stories about reincarnated rats and flying cars seamlessly, with the reader left wondering which bits are "real" and which are invented.

So the first story dives right into a 1952 taping of Howdy Doody in which an eight-year-old Deitch was bullied by a six-year-old Donald Trump. If I had to untangle truth from fiction, I'd bet Deitch was in the audience for Howdy Doody that year, and maybe Trump was, too, but that the rest is modern fabulation. 

The rest of the book is similar, with probably-true bits about cartoonist Harold Grey being inspired by news reports of a woman's passionate courtroom speech in a case about a midget couple involved in a fatal bombing and definitely-fictional bits about that couple's (normal-sized) son becoming a superhero with a flying car and his father-reincarnated-as-a-rat sidekick. The stories aren't quite complete: there are a lot of anecdotes and beginnings here, but no real endings.

How I Make Comics has a dozen sections: a few of them are clearly interstitial material - titled "Interlude" and "Appendix" and "Preview" - but most are stories, or partial stories, with that mixture of probably-true and obviously-fiction. They circle or cluster around the same concerns as Deitch's prior work, but don't really build or combine. They stay mostly separate pieces, as Deitch pitches them to Pam and she finds faults in most of them. The last section, the one called "Preview," might be the topic of Deitch's next book, a collection of stories from storytellers in a park he frequents.

So this could be a bit disappointing to some Deitch fans, especially the ones that want the wilder mythology of Waldo and the time-hopping, integrated plots of his bigger books. On the other hand, it has lovely art on its big pages, quirk to spare, as it tells the kinds of stories that only Deitch can. And for a guy in his early 80s, that's impressive - I'll take whatever odd stories Deitch feels like telling now.

Much Obliged, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

This is the fourteenth of the fifteen books primarily about Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. Others may argue with that number, since it includes several short-story collections that are mostly Jeeves but include other stories, and also includes the novel Ring for Jeeves, which does not feature Bertie. But it's about that many, and this is near the end but not the actual end. It was originally published in 1971, near the end of author P.G. Wodehouse's long life and career, and was known as Jeeves and the Tie That Binds Us in the US for its initial life.

The UK title was Much Obliged, Jeeves, under which title I first read it in the early '90s and under which title it appears these days.

It's shorter and slighter than the best of Wodehouse's work - he was ninety the year it was published, and so possibly slowing down just a bit - but just as funny and sprightly as he ever was, with a fine example of Bertie Wooster narration. (Though Bertie is possibly overusing the narrative tic of using a letter to stand in for a word here - a little of that can go a long way.)

Like all of the Bertie-and-Jeeves books, it's explicitly set in sequence, and starts off with references to the plot of 1963's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, the prior book in the series. None of the plots are terribly dense or difficult to understand, but the recurring motifs and plot devices can be slightly confusing, I suppose. (Not many impostors in the Bertie stories - those are mostly at Blandings Castle. Bertie's troubles often start with aunts, though. He also ends up stealing, or being accused of stealing, various expensive objects a lot, and of course has a whole herd of young women who think he wants to marry them and will "allow" him to do so if not stopped. Also, everyone else in the book thinks Bertie is mentally feeble, which is not exactly correct but also not entirely untrue.)

This time out, the Aunt is Dahlia, the nice if loud one, who drags Bertie down to her historic pile outside Market Snodsbury to help out Bertie's old university chum Ginger Winship, who is standing for Parliament there. Ginger is affianced to the formidable Florence Craye, and is being supported in his political battle by the odious Roderick Spode (now Lord Sidcup), who is also joined by his fiancée, Madeleine Basset, who famously believes the stars are God's daisy-chain.

Both Florence and Madeleine are former fiancées of Bertie's, and both could potentially re-establish that connection if their current beaus disappoint.

Meanwhile, the club for butlers and gentlemen's personal gentlemen, the Junior Ganymede, has a book in which members are required to write down everything "interesting" or relevant about their current employers, which means there's a very long section about Bertie's various escapades. Even worse, there's a section about Ginger, and his former man, Bingley, has absconded with that book and is offering it for sale to various persons around Market Snodsbury.

There's also an unpleasant American businessman in a Panama hat, who wants to sell a valuable silver thingy to Aunt Dahlia's husband. Dahlia also wants him to bestow a large quantity of money on Tuppy Glossop, another chum of Bertie's, whose father developed a fabulously successful product for the American and who is looking to marry Dahlia's daughter Angela. (Angela and Tuppy do not appear on-page at all in this novel; there are complications here that are mostly formal.)

Wodehouse runs through his usual type of scenes to get to the requisite happy ending - as I said up top, a bit quicker and less impressively than some earlier novels, but still breezily and deeply amusingly.

Don't start reading Bertie-and-Jeeves with this book. You don't actually need to read them through in order - the details rhyme more than they build - but start with Joy in the Morning or The Code of the Woosters or The Mating Season or one of the short-story collections, and then move on as you feel inclined. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic writers of the 20th century, if not all time, and his worlds are sunny and enticing, particularly when the real one is neither of those things.

The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier & Scott McCloud

If you knew nothing else, and heard that Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud had made a graphic novel together under the title The Cartoonists Club, what would you think?

Most of us would say something flippant like "Oh, it must be Understanding Comics, but for pre-teens, and in Telgemeier's art style!"

And...that's pretty much exactly what The Cartoonists Club really is. There's a fictional story wrapping it all together, but that's mostly an excuse to investigate the various worlds of comics, with a focus on how to make them. (Creators have the unshakeable belief that all of us really want to spend vast hours making stories, which is an adorable misconception. As my old boss would say, why spend a year writing a novel when a really good one only costs a few dollars? Most people think that way.)

How was this book made? Luckily, they tell you: Telgemeier and McCloud co-wrote, co-thumbnailed, and co-scripted. Telgemeier laid it out and did the main-character art, inked by Ray Baehr; McCloud added all of the metacomics (ones made by characters in the book) and similar stuff. It was colored by Beniam C. Hollman and lettered by Jessie Post. There's a process section in the back detailing how all of this worked, listing people and stages and activities and even the tools used - this book very much aims to be used as a model or template by a generation of wannabe cartoonists, so it's explicit in many places about how to do these things.

The story itself is about four middle-school students - Makayla, Howard, Art, and Lynda - who start the title club with their school's media specialist, Ms. Fatima. They each have different styles and ideas and concerns, but all four really like to draw and really want to make stories once they realize that's possible. Once they meet and form the club, the book is a series of chapters, each one of which introduces another aspect of comics - including tools, minicomics, genres and types of stories, showing feelings through facial expressions and body language, how comics tell stories through separate drawings, the splendor of the blank page, art styles and collaboration, and showing off your work at a local comics show.

It is all encouraging and positive and age-appropriate and enticing. If you have any impulse in you whatsoever to make comics - my drawing skills are sub-basement-level; don't ask me - it will make you want to pull out that vague idea you used to have and see if you can sketch it up. It does assume an audience of people who want to tell stories and can draw, which I suspect is vastly less common than Telgemeier and McCloud believe. But, for those who fit into that intersection, or are just interested in how comics are made, it's an energetic exercise in you-can-do-it!-ism.

All of This and Nothing: Alarm Clock

"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.

Back to Obscure this week, which as usual means a song I found semi-randomly by a band that I can't tell you all that much about.

This time out, it's Alarm Clock, by the British band The Rumble Strips, from their 2007 debut record Girls and Weather. It's poppy without quite being power-pop, driven by some nice horn work and an appealingly distinctive vocal performance by the lead singer.

And it's a fun, zippy song that's about exactly what it says: the singer's alarm clock, which was annoying and now no longer works:

Well I don't like doing things
That other folks tell me to do
So I hit it with a hammer
And now he's quite subdued

That's it: a fast-paced, fun, horn-driven pop song about a guy who doesn't want to get up in the morning. If there's a Platonic ideal of the relatable song, this is right up there.

Well my alarm clock he ain't working
But I don't really mind
'Cause he ain't no friend of mine
He kept waking me up all the time

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 15, 2026

I was out at the library, and vaguely unhappy with the choices I had at home for my next book to read. (Three big bookcases just isn't enough choice, I guess.) So I was poking around the new arrivals shelves there, and came away with one book:

Joshua Kendall's Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography is just what it says it is, a biography of Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau. It came out a couple of months ago from Abrams, and is heavily illustrated, which is a big plus for a biography of a cartoonist: Kendall can describe a strip, and then show it. I'm about halfway through right now, and it's pleasant, though I'm realizing Trudeau had a boring life - a major hazard for the lives of creative types, who mostly live in their own heads. So far, Kendall is impressively well-informed, with lots of interviews of all sorts of people (including the publicity-shy Trudeau himself), so I might just be complaining about Trudeau's actual life, not the book about it.

Quote of the Week: O Pioneers!

It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says "Well, that is California all over."

 - Mark Twain, Roughing It, p.840 in The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Lone Wolf and Cub is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early '70s in the aptly titled Weekly Manga Action. Now, each installment is long: fifty pages, sometimes longer. But they often tend to be separate, each one an adventure or encounter of the main character, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō.

But, sometimes, the stories in a particular collection - I think the English-language editions of this series actually are in tankōbon format, unlike most manga, which is closer to bunkoban or the US-specific "Tokyopop trim" - are more closely related, and form something like a story arc.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child is one of those. It starts with a massive battle, in "The Yagyū Letter," which is, if I recall correctly, the first big battle between Ittō and the forces of the evil ninja Yagyū clan. Since there's still several thousand pages of story to go, neither Ittō nor Yagyū Retsudō, his nemesis, are completely victorious, though they do get to cross swords in between Ittō killing just about everyone else in the scene. (Samurai stories, like cowboy stories, usually have a character who is vastly better at dealing out death than is plausible - it's just a trope of the genre, and we have to accept it.)

In the aftermath of "The Yagyū Letter," Ittō is separated from his son Daigorō, and the narrative hints that he might be dead. (Of course he isn't; that's the whole point of this series.) But we get two stories of Daigorō's adventures without his father, and then two more showing what they do separately as Ittō  follows the tracks of his son's path. Daigorō is saved by a former samurai, whose death - and that of his mentally disabled son - allows Daigorō to flee. In the second all-Daigorō story, various peasants are amazed and astonished at his shishōgan eyes and calm demeanor, while a temple priestess (I think) loudly insists they should send the kid away because he's bad luck.

She is correct, but that's kind of the point of every Lone Wolf and Cub story: crossing the paths of either Ogami is likely to shorten your life, often down to the next few minutes. 

The last story here sees a starving and nearly-dead Daigorō picked up and nursed back to health by a bandit as a "straw boy" - he and his two henchmen can travel more easily if they're not obviously a band of thugs, and a little boy helps sell that story. Since this means Daigorō is "working" - he's a look-out for the gang, among other things - the kid then allows himself to be fed and regains his strength. The authorities are close on the bandit's tail, though, and everyone but Daigorō dies in the end.

Daigorō has not reunited with his father Ittō yet; I assume that will happen in the next volume. And Yagyū Retsudō and his remaining forces are still nearby - I think; it can be difficult to follow the geography in this series - ready to attack once again. So danger still lurks, as always, but Ittō and his fancy sword will be slicing torsos for another eighteen volumes to come.

Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Last novels are often incomplete, fragmentary, not fully formed. Details might be fluid in different chapters, as if the author hadn't fully made up his mind, or changed it. Characterization could be sketchy, with motives left murky. Transitions may be abrupt, leaving lingering questions.

Of course, all of those things were already true of Gene Wolfe's novels to begin with. So it is difficult to say which aspects of Interlibrary Loan - his final novel, though reportedly turned in to his publishers as final before his death - are muddled because of finality and which are muddled on purpose because of Wolfe being Wolfe.

I'll also say that, though I'm fond of many of Wolfe's books, I've found his late work - roughly since the death of his longtime agent Virginia Kidd in 2003, though I have no idea if that means anything - to be lesser and thinner. I went through those points with A Borrowed Man, the 2015 novel to which Interlibrary Loan is a sequel. My main concern is that none of these books seem to be informed by anything that has happened in the world past about 1950: they're all retro-futures, populated by men with hats on the side of their heads and the dizzy dames that befuddle them. (Oh, and those dames are essentially unknowable: that's the biggest thing. Women aren't people.)

Here's a quote from p.30 of Interlibrary that alludes to that:

If I said "girl," it would sound like nineteen or twenty with curves and makeup, right? So I won't. Let's call her a kid. 

No. No one born since 1960 would automatically think "girl" means "hot babe I want to fuck."

And here's another bit, from p. 165:

Audrey had been good for sex most nights, but that was bound to stop sooner or later. When it did, would Ricci and Idona be around? And willing? Maybe so - and maybe not.

Ricci would be cozy and a lot of fun, but hard to get rid of if I ever wanted to get rid of her. Also she would make every guy who saw her jealous, which might get me in a lot of scrapes. Idona would be hell on wheels. Sometimes that means lots of fun in bed, but she would be hell on wheels twenty-four/seven.

Um, yeah. So that's the mindset of Late Wolfe: a certain WWII-era boyishness that also comes out in stated desires to keep a really cool knife he comes across and a wish that he still had a neato rifle he once had. I don't think Wolfe intended to make his hero a sex-mad teenager, but his hero does think and act like one.

Like Borrowed, our hero here is Ern A. Smythe, the "reclone" of a once-popular (at least a hundred years before) mystery writer kept as a circulating resource in the Spice Grove Public Library. Oh, and the name says "public," but authors require large fees - particularly deposits - to be checked out, so it's not "government-funded and free" in the way that "public" means these days.

I spent a lot of words on Borrowed Man about how implausible this world is, in so many ways - take all of that as read here.

This time, Smythe and two other reclones - by the way, either Wolfe or his characters have the usual confusion between an author and their work; in the real world, a detective writer is not a detective and a romance author is not a whore - are transferred, in a complicated way, though the big central library at Niagara Falls to a small town called Polly's Cove, which seems to be in what was the Canadian Maritimes.

There, he gets caught up in the affairs of the Fevre family. It's all Wolfeanly vague in the end - one or more of these people may be duplicates, or reclones, or both - but most of them are women so they only get broad characterization to begin with. (Matronly and good at cooking, or hot to trot, or comradely and willing to fuck Ern.)

Dr. Barry Fevre is a professor of medicine at a university in Spice Grove, the name of which is never mentioned. He mostly does anatomy, and apparently spends a lot of time trying to get cadavers for his students to dissect. He married Adah more than a dozen years ago, and abandoned her (according to her) at the birth of her daughter Chandra. But Adah is a Wolfe woman, and her one character trait is manic depression - Wolfe doesn't use the term; he always avoids using specific words that mean exact things when he can be vague and allusive instead - so we are not to believe what she says. Their daughter Chandra is twelve, and so, as noted above, is too young to fuck, so is mostly colorless and barely present in the book.

Barry, when Ern finally meets him, says his wife has a mental condition which, alas! the laws of their society require that she be the one to address, and she refuses to, so he is estranged from her and hasn't seen his own daughter for seven or twelve years. (And I mean "seven or twelve" very deliberately here: those are the options.)

Barry has also been mining ancient corpses from an Arctic island called Licholm, where the locals have been chucking their ancestors into an ice cave for a millennium or so. There's a clear discussion that the locals really like their ancestors, and would be very against such mining, but the book also makes it clear that Barry has been mining those corpses for the medical students of Spice Grove to practice on, without ever squaring that particular circle.

Ern is mostly concerned with acting like a detective to figure things out, but those things always turn out to be unimportant or just quickly dropped by the narrative. He also, as I expect most reclones are, is worried about his number of check-outs and vaguely grumpy about the poor living conditions of his kind and annoyed that his conditioning forces him to speak like his original wrote. Oh, and Polly's Corner had an Ern Smythe copy already - a much older, one-armed "earlier edition." That edition dies, possibly murdered, before he can talk to our narrator Ern. None of that has anything to do with what seems to be the main plot of the book.

That main plot is mostly going on in the background. Barry is mining corpses on Licholm this year - he seems to do this during his his sabbaticals, every seven years. He also has discovered that some corpses are not really dead, and can be revived even centuries later with no problems - the Ricci and Idona of the second quote above are two such. Does Barry distinguish between ice-corpses-suitable-for-dissection and ice-corpses-suitable-for-revivification? Not as far as we can see, which is worrying. Perhaps he's just reviving the women with nice tits, since that's the main thing Wolfe tells us about Ricci and Idona.

Barry is also somehow connected with some kind of technology that connects to alternate universes - or maybe just portals to other planets in this universe; Wolfe, as always, will not specify. A big mook comes out of one of those portals and kills Barry, for reasons we never find out. But Ern and a lady cop semi-randomly find one of those portals, wander through into a world of gigantic trees, and kill a guy they're totally sure is the same mook, so that's OK.

Oh, there's also a box that needs to be kept flat or else reality starts to shift around the holder - presumably it's the way portals are made, or otherwise similar tech. It doesn't even get a name other than "the box."

None of that leads to anything. Slightly later, Ern is in Barry's big house, and Barry shows up. Is it a clone, a twin brother, an alternate-universe version? Your guess is as good as anyone's.

And then the novel ends abruptly. None of the various things that might have been its plot are really resolved. I could blame that on last-novel-itis, but I think Interlibrary Loan is mostly the book Wolfe wanted it to be. I think, if he'd lived longer, it would have been 10-15% longer, with some more connective material and slightly less vagueness, but Late Wolfe is inherently like this. Loan is just the culmination of his direction for the last twenty years of his career.

If you're in the mood to untangle some Wolfe, I'd suggest one of the series with "Sun" in the title, or The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Secondarily, anything published in the last century.

Seek You by Kristen Radtke

One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the "here's a trend; what does it mean?" book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; breezy or deep; based on research or vibes. But I don't think it's been presented in comics form much, if at all.

Kristen Radtke, though, seems to be carving out that as her niche. Her first book, 2017's Imagine Wanting Only This, was largely a memoir - a genre very common in graphic books for the last thirty or so years, post-Maus - but also an examination of what it means to want things, and how we know what we want.

Her second book came out four years later, and had many of the same elements in a different mix: less memoir, more research, more rigor. Seek You feels like a book that could have been done in prose, possibly by someone like Mary Roach, but the comics format adds depth and focuses attention in ways that prose can't. (Every format has its strengths; the same story can be told well in opera, film, or lyric poetry but it won't be told well the same way.)

Seek You is about loneliness, in particular the oft-remarked "epidemic of loneliness" in American life. Radtke's touchstones include scientific research (especially the monkeys of Harry Harlow), ham radio, laugh tracks, gun culture and the image of the cowboy, the rise of the Internet and mobile technology, romantic comedies and the image of the princess, changing ideas about child-rearing in the 20th century, and Casey Kasem's long-distance dedications. It's explicitly in the line of modern books starting with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, that say "Americans are more separated than ever; here's the reasons I think matter most." There's a bit of politics in it, but not a lot: there is clearly an element of politics over the past two generations that has deliberately fomented anger and distrust among Americans, which directly led to increased loneliness. Radtke points to that, more visually than in her narrative, to note that it exists and is one strand of this story.

Radtke starts with specifics and builds up to her central theme: this is a book about connections, if mostly about the lack of them, how they have thinned out over historical time and inevitably thin out towards the end of a person's life. It's broken into sections in clusters centered around the senses, about ways to connect - Listen, Watch, Touch. The sections connect loosely to form the full picture - and I mean "picture" deliberately; Radtke uses the comics format to include images the reader will recognize, explicitly or vaguely, as she tells her overall story.

Some books in this genre have an answer, a solution to the problem they examine. Those tend to be the more facile ones, and often the bestsellers. Radtke has some ideas, and some thoughts, and plenty of evidence and details, but she doesn't have a fix to this problem - it's not something that can be fixed quickly or easily. But she does explain what we know, and where the answer likely might be.

Seek You is focused on Americans - the subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness" -  but I think the problem isn't purely American, or even more American than general. But Radtke is American (as so am I), and a book can't be about everything, so it's a natural focus.

A different version of this book, by someone else, might have compared nations, and national spirits, to examine which are the most lonely, and what that means. Radtke, instead, wants to chart American loneliness over time - has it been this bad before? who was lonely then and who is now? how personal is it and how systemic? She does this well, with a lot of research informing a fairly long (350 pages), fairly wordy graphic novel - it's serious and thoughtful without being weighty.

If you've ever felt alone, and wondered how to change that, Seek You is a good book for you - Radtke has a lot of ideas, and a lot of research, and a lot of pictures, and a lot of words that might help.

Planeta by Ana Oncina

I'll admit I don't always understand what makes a book "manga" in the American market. Translated from Japanese - sure, that's obvious. Korean and Chinese comics get more complicated, since those generally read left to right, but getting fussy about "manhwa" or "manhua" smells a bit too much of the lamp.

But if a book is by a Spanish creator, why are the pages organized in an English-language edition to flow right-to-left when each page reads left-to-right (like the Spanish read, like English-language also reads, like most European languages), and why is it called a manga?

At that point, I start to think it's purely a marketing slogan, detached from the actual content of the book. Doesn't mean anything negative, but it has stopped imparting any useful information to the reader other than "the publisher thinks you will like this if you've liked other stuff they did." 

That brings me to Ana Oncina's [1] 2025 "manga" Planeta, a science-fiction story by the creator behind the cozy Empanada & Croquette series and the 2023 teen-lesbian romance Just Friends. It was published in a romance line, Love Love, though I would not characterize it as a romance. On the other hand, it is largely about the relationship between the two main characters, and they do meet and form a relationship over the course of the book.

Well, in one reality, they do...

Planeta takes place in two realities. Valentina is a young woman living in a small cabin in the woods with her dog Soup, near a small town she visits regularly for supplies and human contact. She makes pottery, and sells it both online and at local craft fairs. It's heading into winter. The time is "now," as far as we can tell.

VAL3 is a young woman in a medium-future universe where humans have fled a devastated earth. Everyone lives in couples, each with a small module inside a transparent bubble, on the inhospitable planet Nebulon, or "Planeta." The couples are matched to each other from birth, and grow up together under the care of robots. Their society is like Asimov's Spacers, but even more so: they never meet anyone else outside of VR. VR is their main way of experiencing everything; Oncina doesn't show any of them working but does imply money still exists.

VAL3 is matched with AN3. The two are in love, as they must be. They have been very happy together. We don't know how aging works in this world, or how old they really are, but let's assume they are fairly young, as they look to be.

Valentina is dreaming of being VAL3, and vice versa - or the same mind is switching between the two realities every time she goes to sleep.

And then Valentina sees another young woman in that small town, who looks exactly like AN3. Her name is Anna; she's staying at a B&B in town for an extended time. The two fall in love - as we see in the other reality, they're perfectly matched for each other, right?

VAL3 isn't happy anymore. The life as Valentina, in a living world, is more compelling than her entirely-VR life in the sterile module. Oncina doesn't directly compare the relationships in the two worlds, but I had to wonder if the newness and surprise of Valentina's new relationship with Anna was also a factor, compared to the inevitability and day-to-day-ness of VAL3 and AN3.

VAL3 withdraws, spends all of her time in bed, trying to get back to the other world. She neglects her partner AN3, her friends, everything about her life. She consults with an AI therapist, which doesn't help. She just keeps being told this is her life; it's wonderful and as good as human could ever wish for; she must be grateful and live this life or else.

That escalates; the implied "or else" is the way the book ends.

There's a version of this story where Valentina/VAL3 is inspired by her double life; where she takes ideas from one back to the other; where being with the same woman in two worlds means they're meant for each other and that brings them closer together. This is not that story. This is the story where a cold SF world is inherently off-putting, wrong, inorganic, sterile, stifling - and the reader is supposed to see and sympathize with that, and not with poor neglected AN3.

I found the ending of Planeta strong but a bit unearned, and quite a puzzler for a book published as a romance. It also collapses the essential question of which world is real, when an ending that kept that ambiguous could be more interesting.

But Oncina tells the story she meant to tell well, with crisp art, cleanly differentiating the two worlds through color - but still making them parallel as well. (The book ends with schematics of the cabin and the module - our heroine's homes in both worlds - which emphasizes how similar they are.) I might wish she had made different choices, but it was never my choice.

[1] Translated by Diego Jourdan Pereira, which I didn't find room to fit in anywhere else.

All of This and Nothing: One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

"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 like self-indulgent media more than most people, I think - long rambly shaggy-dog stories in whatever format, from MST3K's sublime "A Joke by Ingmar Bergman" to Tristram Shandy.

This week's song is the musical equivalent of that: a fifty-year old version of a much older blues song, by what was then called George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers, from their 1977 debut record. (Some of you might prefer the John Lee Hooker version; that's valid but I don't agree.)

This week, we've got "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer." No "and" in the title - it's late, and you gotta get some drinking done, so there's no time for wasted words.

The "song" is actually a medley; the story-song portion that opens it is a different Hooker song, "House Rent Boogie" - but who cares about that at this point? It all goes together, and it all tells one story. You want to nitpick?

I said I know,
everybody funny, now you funny too

Thorogood was in peak form here, in his early incarnation as a bar-band slide-guitar hero - before the blandness of the '80s took over his schtick. The guitar work is blazing, and his singing is just perfect for the song: dismissive, offhand, barely engaged until the subject of alcohol comes up.

No I ain't seen my baby since
Nigh on a week
Gotta get drunk man
Till I can't even speak

Blues songs are like noir in that they're about the main character doing things the wrong way, or for the wrong reason, or just ruining things - getting blotto drunk in some dive bar because his girl is off somewhere else doing something else. And, if you don't have your girl, what else is there in life? That's the blues.

One drink ain't enough
Jack you better make it three
I wanna get drunk
I'm gonna make it real clear
I want one bourbon,
one scotch and one beer

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Reporting, Circa 1996

Price had taken what the police had told him and gone straight to work on it; the thought that there might be more to discover would never occur to him. His job wasn't to find things out, his job was to 'make' stories. Some innuendo here, some association there and voila: you had fifteen pars on the front page that suggested much but actually told you fuck-all.

The success of popular reporting since the Eighties has lain in the practice of massively increasing the ration of column inches to facts. Facts were both expensive and time-consuming to procure, so you had to use them as sparingly as possible.

 - Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning, p.38

Quote of the Week: Not Bad for Government Work

General Stubblebine countered by setting his psychic spies on Noriega. This was the Fort Meade team, who worked out of a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Maryland and who, as a result of not officially existing, had no coffee budget, a fact they had come to resent. They were also going stir-crazy. Their offices were claustrophobic, and many of them didn't much like each other to begin with. One, a major called Ed Dames, had taken to psychically spying on the Loch Ness monster during the fallow months, when there wasn't much official military psychic work. He determined it was a dinosaur's ghost. This finding irritated some of the others, who considered it unscientific and frankly implausible. Another psychic spy, David Morehouse, was soon to check himself into a psychiatric hospital as a result of an excess of psychic spying.

 - John Ronson, The Men who Stare at Goats, p.80

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking they looked like fun, and having to go back to reading things for my program instead. I think, over the last few decades, he became just a standard Big Thing in much of the English-speaking world, though sadly not a Thing at all in the USA.

Looking him up now, I'm seeing his major series - which started with this book, his first novel - with radically different cover treatments on current editions, and many of them showing up for sale in their UK editions here. That's a sign the US market has not been kind to Brookmyre, for whatever reasons.

And that's disappointing, because on the evidence of Quite Ugly One Morning, his 1996 debut, Brookmyre is something like a Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen, with funny, fast-plotted thriller novels with a political undertone, smart-ass characters who get themselves into more trouble than they expect, and amusingly baroque levels of violence.

It might be the "Scottish" bit that caused the trouble - parts of Quite Ugly get into nearly Trainspotting-levels of Scots dialect and spelling. I found nearly everything clear from context, but a few random words were puzzlers - and there's a Black LA police detective, in one flashback scene, who does not talk like an American at all. It's the kind of thing that can bounce American readers out of a book, I suppose.

The series hero here is Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist with a talent for getting himself into trouble, not least because he's good at burglary, which we are told he only uses (these days) in the line of duty. He got into hot water in London for exposing the wrong people and fled to LA, where the same things happened - and more seriously, since the wrong people in LA hire killers, and one tried to murder Parlabane.

So now he's newly in Edinburgh, having just landed a day or two before and about to look for newspaper work there. (This is 1996; newspapers were still booming.) But there was a horrific murder in the flat one floor below his last night, which he did not hear because of the usual all-too-Scottish over-indulgence in alcohol. So he wanders into the crime scene, in his underwear, hungover but endlessly inquisitive.

He's briefly a suspect, but, more importantly, it triggers Parlabane's need to get to the bottom of things. So he starts investigating on his own.

At the same time - this is a thriller, not a mystery - we get scenes from the POV of both the murderer (mostly a Standard Thriller Thug with Scottish Characteristics) and his boss, a deeply Tory and horribly self-satisfied wanker who is head of a NHS Trust and looking to use that to personally enrich himself. There is, of course, a nasty scheme behind the murder of Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby, and Parlabane connects with Ponsonby's ex-wife, the anesthetist Dr. Sarah Slaughter, as they both have separate clues that can join up to help solve the crime.

Among other major characters, there's a few cops, including a youngish lesbian woman who is willing to listen to Parlabane's theories and is not immediately dismissive of them. And this is a short novel, so it rattles very quickly through a lot of scenes - often very colorful, in language or violence or setting or all three - on the way to a big ending with Slaughter, Parlabane, the murderer, and the wanker.

It is a fun romp, the more so if you are inclined to align with Brookmyre's regular, quite pointed, but often sidebar attacks on Toryism - our villain is very much like the guy in this meme:

I'm going to be looking for more Brookmyre books myself - I've got thirty years to catch up on - so take that as a recommendation if you like.