"...You're not a fugitive anymore, but mighty among the Powers of Faerie. There are forty thousand individuals in this world who are above the law, and you are very nearly at the top of the pyramid. Everything you did is now as legal as the April rain. I do not pretend it's a fair system. But its unfairness if now weighted in your favor." With a rascally wink, he added, "So I believe I have well earned my fee today."
- Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Mother, p.348
It can be hard for those of us who haven't hit that concentrated dose of newness for years to remember what that was like, but the best stories for young people embody that sense: they're stories for people who are living newness all the time, building their selves day by day and figuring out what they think and feel about lots of things all the time.
So I try to keep that in mind with books for that audience: to think they way they would, and not the way I do. I'm probably not as good at it as I think I am, of course. But you always have to try.
Allergic is a graphic novel for young people. If you're dismissive, you could call it an "issue book." But everything's an issue book if it resonates with something in your life: an issue is just a thing that actually touches you. And this is a book that will touch a lot of people -- there are a lot of kids who suddenly realize they're allergic to something, when that something comes into their lives for the first time.
It could be peanuts or pollen or penicillin or a bee sting. It could be life-threatening, or annoying, or barely noticeable, or anywhere on that spectrum. It could be obvious, or sneaky and hard to track down. It could be something that kid loves, or something that kid wasn't that interested in anyway.
So it's a big "issue," that a lot of people need to worry about on a daily basis.
Writer Megan Wagner Lloyd and artist Michelle Mee Nutter have taken those facts, and an understanding of that young audience, and built them into a story about one girl -- because we all respond better to good stories, we all want to see someone else working through things to understand how we could do it ourselves.
Maggie is young -- just turning ten as the book opens. She's wanted a puppy for a while: she's planning to be a vet when she grows up; she loves animals, though entirely from afar up to now. And you can guess that it doesn't go the way she wants. She has a strong allergic reaction to pet dander. After a few tests, it turns out she reacts badly -- rashes, swelling, itching -- to just about any animal with fur.
So she goes through all the usual stages: anger (at her parents, at the world), denial (which doesn't last long; her skin gives her away if she's near a furry animal), bargaining (as she runs through a list of non-furry animals and finds them all wanting), and finally acceptance. She meets other young people, at her school and elsewhere, who are allergic, to other things and in other ways. She learns what we all learn: you need to find the ways your life can go around the roadblocks and detours every life throws up, to make the life that's the combination of what you want and what you can get.
Maggie's in a good position; she should have a good life. She has a loving family, good medical support, a new understanding of this annoying way her body works. And her story will resonate with a lot of other young people, struggling with allergies or other issues -- Lloyd and Nutter tell her story well, and tell a wider story than I'm focusing on. Maggie has twin younger brothers and her mother has a new baby on the way; she has friends at school and other activities. She has a life, and Allergic is about her life, not just this annoying skin reaction she has.
This is obviously mostly for young people: that's what it's for, that's what it does well. But if you have the care of a young person with an allergy, or any medical/personal issue that could be similar, you might want to take a look at it for yourself, and for that young person.
Note: I'm actually ahead of publication on a review, for the first time in a long time. Allergic officially goes on sale this coming Tuesday, March 2nd. If you order it right now, your bookstore will probably be able to have a copy for you that morning. (Or you can use my link and have a exploitative hegemonic megacorporation deliver it directly to your home: your choice.)
Although, come to think of it, the last decade of his work, focusing mostly on biographies of strong-willed but not necessarily libertarian people of the past, might show him starting to walk down a path of slightly less grumpiness -- and I emphasize slightly.
But here I am looking at Classic Bagge, the man who spent more than a decade making a comic book called Hate and meant it the whole time. So expect every page to be pickled in bile, to mix my metaphors.
Peter Bagge's Other Stuff is the odds-and-sods collection from the Hate era, gathering stories he did with other creators (mostly as the writer) or for other purposes, most but not all of which appeared, first or eventually, in the quarterly or annual Hate comics of the '90s and '00s. It is absolutely chock-full of grumps and cranks and losers and weirdos of all types: you would be hard-put to find a single functional human being on any page of this book.
So this may be a book best read in bits rather than straight through. Bile and spleen can be fun, but too much will curdle. And there's enough here to curdle the strategic federal cheese reserve.
What you will find in Other Stuff:
One interesting thing to note, for comics fans: as far as I can remember, avatars of the EC never fight with each other. They don't meet on opposite sides of a battle and then forge alliances: they're always on the same side from the beginning, as if cosmic forces will always line them up correctly. What side that is this time can vary - sometimes they fight for Chaos, sometimes for Law, and, more and more in the current crossover era, they fight for the Balance itself, the vague principle or physical manifestation of moderation and centrism. (Elric as Third Way Democrat: discuss!)
About a decade ago, Chris Roberson wrote and Francesco Biagini drew a particularly large EC crossover story, as a twelve-issue comics series called Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Balance Lost. (Colors were by Stephen Downer and covers by Francesco Mattina.) I posted about the first third of the series some time ago, and I'm back now that I've gotten through to the end. It's been collected as three trade paperback volumes, so if you wanted to buy them you would need one and two and three.
There are four main EC protagonists this time: there tend to be three or four in stories like this. (Only two would be a mere team-up; more is too complicated.) For whatever reason - market considerations or consumer knowledge or brand identification or Roberson's personal love or Moorcock's diktat - three of them are the Big Three: Elric and Corum and Hawkmoon, the pale prince and the maimed elf and the dull German. The fourth is a new, pseudo-reader-viewpoint character, Eric Beck, who comes from an Earth-Prime-esque world and who is fated to fight with his evil twin brother with matching Law and Chaos swords as part of the overall festivities.
As usual, it's not particularly clear why things are screwed up across the multiverse at the beginning of Balance Lost, but we can all tell it has been screwed up. Mere anarchy is loosed on the world, the falcon cannot hear the falconer - that whole deal. On some worlds, Chaos is triumphing and collapsing everything into primal soup. In others, Law is triumphing and imposing endless stultifying conformity. As usual, one of these things seems much worse, and much more outside normal sapient life, than the other, but leave that aside. It is basically that some worlds are being ruled by Big Brother, and others are being scrapped for subatomic parts.
Each of the four is pulled into that conflict in their own worlds, sometimes with devoted sidekicks as well. Each one has a whopping big chunk of metal with which to hit things, and hitting things with whopping great chunks of metal is a proven way to make things better in the Moorcock multiverse - as long as it's the right chunk of metal, and the right guy doing the whopping.
So, early in the second volume, they finally meet to join swords against whatever-it-is-this-time, after meeting in smaller groups previously. And it is a problem with the Balance itself this time: there is a gigantic physical set of scales in the center of the multiverse (not the same center where the city of Tanelorn is; this is a plot point, and infinite realms across infinite dimensions can have multiple centers if they want to) and is is actually broken, which is a thing that four guys with big swords can fix.
And that's lucky, because no one else can. When your multiverse is broken, the EC is your only option, so it's good if you have four of them spare at the time.
The four avatars make their way to various centers of the universes, battling foes old and new, gaining and losing important puissant magical artifacts, and being aided and guided by a whole lot of other Moorcock characters, to the extent that I wonder if Jess Nevins has made a concordance for this series.
They do make it to the capital-B Balance, see and learn why it is unbalanced, and the miscreants responsible for said lack of balance. They then Voltron up into the usual super-EC - several mountain-height guys pasted together at the back, so they can swing their swords in all directions at once and battle similarly statured enemies, of which there are always a plethora - to battle the baddies and make things right again.
We know that Elric survived this to die elsewhere, and so presumably know that his multiverse similarly survived. I trust that is not a spoiler; it's about the first thing anyone ever learns about Elric. And the point of an EC story is to save the multiverse, so of course that is what happens. It happens zippily and well here, with Roberson weaving in huge swaths of Moorcockian mythology and Biagini drawing endless bizarre things in ways that make them all look reasonable and realistic.
All in all, it's a good modern Eternal Champion story, of the usual multiple-EC style. It's a bit more baroque than the older versions, but a decent introduction to multiple flavors of Moorcockian adventure fantasy, and the only thing it's conceivably missing is an index to tell new readers what other books to find all of the various characters in.
[1] Aside from a few footnotes, they're still all guys. Female ECs exist, but they don't get to be part of the main action -- mostly there to die to motivate some male EC.
This is what happens here on Mondays where I don't have any new books: instead I dive into a random old year in my reading notebook to see what I can remember about some old books.
This week, the RNG gave me 2006. So here's what I was reading from February 16-22 of that year, most of which I covered only glancingly at the time:
Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (2/16, read to the boys)
In February of 2006, my older son was about to turn eight, and my younger son had just turned five. So they could read things themselves, and were -- but it was still the prime years for bedtime reading. Thing 1 was an and out of the nighttime reading in this years, but back in for this stretch, as I went back and forth between picture books, especially a shelf or three of big favorites, and reading longer books over multiple nights. (We did at least one Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and I forget what else - maybe The Hobbit?) But what they loved more than anything else, since they were boys of that age, were Dav Pilkey's massively popular Captain Underpants books, and here we see the beginning. I read them over about three nights each. There's one more later in the week; I'm pretty sure I bought that at a B&N in the city one of the nights in between to jump right into it - and I read more of the series to them, finishing books on Feb 24, Feb 27, Mar 2, Mar 5, and Mar 9, so I definitely bought a bunch of these quickly. This is a very silly series, not quite comics - heavily illustrated, but prose with pictures - about two wacky kids and their nasty principal, who also turns into a superlatively goofy superhero. I don't actually recommend these to read for adults for their own pleasure, but if you have young boys in your life - and possibly some girls with the right sensibility - this are a joy to read to together. They are dumb and silly and juvenile in all the best ways, and Dav Pilkey is a national treasure.
Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? (2/17)
I liked Powers as long as it kept the courage of its convictions: cops, without powers, in a world of superheroes, with real death and pain and danger. It lost those convictions somewhere along the way, with both of the main characters getting superpowers and the danger of the early volumes somehow never quite affecting the main characters quite as strongly as the secondary personages. And Bendis's very affected pseudo-Mamet dialogue often got to me: see my parody on Vol. 3 for my take on it. Powers did start out well, and Oeming delivered strong art the whole time. But, like all "real world with superheroes" books, it started off more "real world" and eventually saw itself dragged all the way to "superheroes." Nothing avoids the Great Attractor of American Comics: all will be assimilated if they come anywhere near it. It's best to just studiously avoid superheroes from the beginning and avoid heartbreak later.
Greg Rucka et. al., Queen and County, Vol. 7: Operation: Saddlebags (2/18)
Last week I tried to remember the second collection of this gritty comics series about British spies, Operation: Morningstar. This one was the seventh, with art by Mike Norton, and I can't remember which was which at this point. But I'm pretty sure the heroine, Tara Chace, was getting pretty battered and damaged by this point, since that's what Rucka does. Nothing else has stayed in memory.
Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (2/19)
Briggs' love story to his parents, or maybe their love story, if you prefer: the story of nearly fifty years of their lives (from their meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971), in a quiet undemonstrative British way. Briggs made this graphic novel more than twenty-five years after their deaths, in his own sixties, so it's very much a book looking backwards nostalgically. It's a national treasure in the UK, at least among a certain kind of people much like Briggs and his family - and I don't intend to characterize them any closer than that, since I don't really know - but not as well known in the US. It was turned into a movie that I never saw. As I recall, it's very small and quiet and British: all about making do and getting on with things.
David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, editors, Years's Best SF 11 (2/20)
That decade, there were two major American Year's Best books covering science fiction: Gardner Dozois had the gigantic bug-crusher, in trade paperback and hardcover, which was about twenty years into its life by 2006 and came out from St. Martin's Press. (Not its sister Tor, as some might have thought.) Hartwell, by this time joined by his wife and regular co-anthologist Cramer, edited a smaller mass-market paperback series for Harper, more specifically focused on science fiction - not always Analog-style flying slip-stick stories, but avoiding the more literary stories Dozois often included. It was a good choice to have, and they gave different views of the field -- I tended to like Dozois's book best each year, since I'm a literary guy, but Hartwell/Cramer always dependably dug out more sciency stories, and the stories that were pushing the ideas of SF the furthest. I have no memories of the stories in this particular one, but there's the ISFDB list.
Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets (2/21, read to the boys)
See above; this was the second book in the series.
George R.R. Martin, A Feast For Crows (2/22)
This I read for work, which may not be obvious -- most of the rest above was personal reading. (Not the Hartwell/Cramer, but everything else.) And I would not try to have any opinion about it on the internet fourteen years later, not having re-read it since then. I liked it, but thought Martin was losing control of his story -- well, I thought that more with Feast, but had thought that for portions of the book or two before this. This is not a wild or unusual take by any means. After fourteen years, I remember that it was about sixteen hundred manuscript pages of middle -- generally well-written middle, with interesting things happening on most of those pages, but all middle, and much of it middle that the larger story didn't actually need.
I knew I'd been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I'd attribute it to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than as an isolated event that I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted, but I can also be kind of an asshole. ("Kind of" = in the 70 percent-80 percent range.) I didn't know what to say but I didn't have time to do a search for relevant apology examples. (And it's not like I ever find any relevant examples that I actually want to use.) I said, "I'm sorry for...being an asshole."- Martha Wells, Network Effect, p.106
Rabagliati is a native of Quebec, who worked as a graphic designer for decades before turning to cartooning in mid-life. His books are about a man named Paul Rifiorati: Rabgaliati has generally admitted that they are mostly autobiographical, but there's also some element of fictionalization, or just of cleaning things up to make a better story. As of 2020, there have been eleven Paul books published in Quebec -- not all of them full-length -- and eight of them, more or less, have been translated into English. The titles sometimes shift in translation: for example, I believe Paul a Quebec became The Song of Roland in English. All of them are in a similar loopy art style with bold black lines -- I think of it as UPA-influenced; I don't know if Rabagliati would agree -- though this current book mentions that he tried different looks for the book I know as Paul Joins the Scouts but went back to his usual style midway through development. [1]
Paul at Home is the most recent book in the loose series: published in 2019 in French and 2020 in English. Previous books had moved backwards and forwards in time, but had mostly seen Rabagliati turning decade-old events in his life, most often from his childhood and early adulthood, into comics. But Paul at Home is more immediate: it opens in 2012 and Rabaligati started work on it in about 2016. And it's the least happy of the books.
Paul is fiftyish as the book opens, living alone and unhappy with it. His marriage has fallen apart: we don't get all the details, but it seems to be roughly mutual, and they're pleasant to each other when they have to meet now. Their one daughter, Rose, is nineteen and has moved out of Paul's house -- and will soon move to England for vague reasons, against the advice of both parents. His health isn't great, either -- there's major dental work, general malaise, ongoing damage to his drawing arm and neck from years bent over a drawing board, and a series of tests and appointments for what is probably sleep apnea.
So Paul isn't happy, and doesn't have much to be happy about.
His widowed mother, though, has it even worse: living alone in a small apartment. And her health problems will be much larger, and entirely insoluble, before the end of Paul at Home.
This is a book about the downhill side of middle age, that time when endings are coming much more quickly than beginnings ever seemed to. Paul does seem in danger at times of tipping over into being a stereotypical grumpy middle-aged guy -- swearing at parking tickets, complaining about French tourists, and endlessly grousing about bad fonts (because he's a graphic designer to the core) -- but it's more that Rabagliati is not afraid to make his stand-in less than heroic and entirely real.
This is the saddest, most depressing Paul book, because life does tend to get sadder and more depressing. As we get older, that's clearer and clearer: Rabagliati has seen it, and shows it well here. But it's not all sad, and it's only depressing if you let it be.
In the end, Rabagliati would likely agree with a certain porcupine's advice: "don't take life so serious, son -- it ain't nohow permanent."
[1] This is also as good a place as any to mention that I've tried to figure out which books are which, to the point of making a Google Sheet based on Rabagliati's bibliographie page, and that there are still things that confuse me.
Actually, you can differentiate them a bit more than that -- God is said to like beetles better, and Wilson was always an ant guy. Just in case the distinction becomes important in your life.
Edward O. Wilson is the towering biologist of the 20th century, which is particularly impressive since that was such a physics-heavy century. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for books he wrote, is responsible for hundreds of scientific papers and possibly the foundational biological theory of the era, and is one of the pillars of the conservation movement. Naturalist was his memoir -- the story of how he grew up, got interested in ants, got into science, and navigated most of his career. That book came out in 1994, when Wilson was 65, and just a couple of years before he retired from active teaching at Harvard -- but, as I said above, he's still going strong now at 91, and has published as many books since Naturalist as he did before it. So the idea probably was that Naturalist was going to be basically the story of his life, but he may need to add a second volume at this rate.
Naturalist has had a strong life, and has been particularly influential on young readers interested in science -- obviously those kids who like bugs, but also the ones who end up going into chemistry or physics or possibly even (gasp!) engineering. [1] So clearly someone -- maybe even Wilson himself, since he's obviously a smart guy with a lot of ideas -- thought it would be good to do one of those new-fangled "graphic novel" versions of Naturalist, since all of the kids love them these days.
(I may be deliberately making this sound silly for comic effect. But it was a good idea.)
However it happened, Island Press -- the nonprofit that publishes the prose edition of Naturalist -- found Jim Ottaviani, the premier and almost only writer of science in comics form, to adapt Wilson's book into comics and cartoonist, illustrator, and cartoonist C.M. Butzer to draw it. Colors are by Hilary Sycamore, but the pre-publication proof I read only features color for the first seventeen story pages, so I can't really speak to her work here as a whole. The graphic adaptation came out last November, and is widely available now -- so now there are two versions of Naturalist available to be handed to a budding scientist, one of which features lots of pictures of ants to go with Wilson's words.
As usual with Ottaviani's work, there are lots of caption boxes and dialogue -- he likes to get in as many of the real words of the books and scientists he's adapting as possible. So this will be a denser graphic novel than many readers are used to: I'd say that's no bad thing, since science is demanding and full of details that require close attention. Anyone looking for something quick and surface-y is not cut out for a life in science to begin with.
And, of course, this is the story of a life, and one intertwined with field exploration, collaboration with other scientists, and writing -- some of it is about external action, but most of what was important in Wilson's life happened in his thoughts, as he examined ants around the world, thought about them back in Massachusetts, scribbled ideas on a board with colleagues, and bounced their theories off the real world to make sure they actually worked.
I wish there were more graphic novels like this, and fewer about punching people, but that's the world we live in. Intellectual activity is always less popular than punching. But this one is out there, and it's really good at what it does. If you know someone who could be a scientist eventually, this would be a good book to give her.
[1] Note: your present writer's son is a budding engineer, in the second year of a five-year undergraduate ChemE program, and so he kids because he loves.
One suspects the relative political power of that real-world Klan, and possibly of the corporate entities that owned (then) National Periodical Publications and (now) DC Comics, are responsible for the switch from C to K. But that's outside my remit here.
That radio story has been mentioned as a major factor in the waning power of the real-world Klan in the post-war years. I'm not a historian, but it makes sense to me -- they are not generally called out as strongly active during the main civil rights era beginning the next decade, so the timing, at least, makes sense. And it's a comforting message to superhero fans: See! we can do good work in the world, and not have to make any effort at all! Just being a fan of Superman makes the world better!
This graphic novel is not driving that message. Stories themselves generally don't; stories are about action, not feeling good about yourself for liking those stories. The active verb in the title is there for a reason: this Klan of the Fiery Kross needs to be smashed, and it will not go away quietly by itself.
And, while Superman is the subject of the title sentence, he's not alone here: Superman alone cannot smash the Klan. That takes more people: a Black police detective, some familiar reporters named Lois and Jimmy, the members of the Lee family at the center of this story, and even a local white kid at first hostile to his new neighbors. One might even say it takes a city, or a village.
The Lee family are moving to a leafy Metropolis neighborhood in 1946 at the beginning of Smashes the Klan, moving out of Chinatown largely because the father, Dr. Lee, is taking a job as chief bacteriologist of the Metropolis Health Department. They meet their new neighbors, who are mostly friendly -- especially once it's clear son Tommy will be a big asset to the baseball team fielded by the local interfaith Unity House. But our viewpoint character in the Lee family is daughter Roberta, who is less sure about their new neighborhood and home.
Tommy's rocket arm dislodged Chuck Riggs, previously the star pitcher, from that position, which does not leave Chuck happy. Chuck's Uncle Matt is also coincidentally -- this is a Superman story -- the local Grand Scorpion of the Klan of the Fiery Kross, so he seizes Chuck's grievance and the Lees mere presence in their neighborhood as reason for an old-fashioned cross-burning and fire-bombing.
The Lee's house is saved by quick action by Tommy and by neighbors, including that Black detective, Inspector Henderson. (Whose help Dr. Lee at first does not want, when he thought Henderson was just a random local Black man.) Daily Planet reporters arrive the next morning to report on the situation -- of course it's Lois Lane and Clark Kent, since the Planet has never had any other reporters in seventy years of operation.
But Superman is dealing with assimilation issues of his own. The day before, he fought a Nazi would-be supervillain, Atom Man, and kept him from destroying the Metropolis Dam. But Atom Man is powered by a strange green crystal -- anyone who has ever consumed any Superman story is nodding right now -- and that gives Superman first a strange wave of nausea and weakness, and then continued hallucinations of two figures who claim to be his real parents, aliens who rocketed him to Earth from the doomed world Krypton. (Well, they're not that succinct and specific to begin with. But we know the story, and it is the same story.)
Tommy gets in more danger, the Klan continues to foment violence, and that green crystal will of course come back. Dr. Lee's employer, and some of his co-workers, turn out to be quite different than what we had expected.
In the end, Superman Smashes the Klan. But he can't do it alone. And he can't do it without confronting his own past and understanding who he is: without publicly claiming his place as an immigrant and alien. His story -- an immigrant, coming to a new place, and wanting to be friendly and helpful -- is explicitly twinned with Roberta's, and with all of the other people the Klan hates.
This is a story for younger readers, and a story about Superman, so you can be assured everything will work out for the best, and only the most unredeemable will be smashed -- anyone who can be brought around will be. Writer Gene Luen Yang will make sure of that, as he also makes his story deeper and more resonant than a Superman tale for pre-teens had to be. Art team Gurihiru gives it all a modern, clean, manga-lite look -- easily readable and dynamic.
This is a book a lot of Americans should read: there are far too many Chuck Riggses out there, unthinkingly racist and led by family members or friends or media to believe evil things and, in far too many cases, to do evil things. This story says that most of them are redeemable; I would like to believe that. But they have to want to be redeemed. They have to want to smash the Klan.
For those who do, this book is there for you. And if you're in a position to put this book in front of a Chuck Riggs, someone who might be amenable to it but does not, right now, want to smash the Klan -- doing that would be a very good thing.
As usual when I do a "Reading Into the Past" post, I run the random number, type it in here, and then look things up in my old reading notebooks to see if I can remember the books I was reading then.
This time out, the old RNG gives me 2003, and these are the books I was reading this equivalent week eighteen years ago:
Greg Rucka, et. al., Queen & Country: Operation: Morningstar (2/8)
I see I hadn't yet become enlightened about comics credits: I was still running on the book-world assumption of the writer being the most important person (or maybe the only important person). Let me say for the record that is wrong; artists bring at least half of the storytelling to the table in comics. This was the second collection of the Queen & Country comic; art was primarily by Brian Burtt. Q&C was a gritty spy comic, focused on wetwork and similar ops, with lots of blood and gore and horrible things, done to and by the main characters, in various locations around the world -- as the title implies, our spies worked for the UK. I don't remember details at this late date, but I liked the series for a long time, though I thought it got bogged down in its own misery- and trauma-drenched backstory as it went on. I think Rucka has a tropism for damaged characters, and he's honest enough not to magically fix the damage, so they just keep getting worse and worse, which can lead to diminishing returns in a long series.
Mike Mignola, et. al., Mike Mignola's B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth and Other Stories (2/9)
Ditto: this was written by Mignola with Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegowsi and drawn by Ryan Sook with some inks by Curtis Arnold. It was the first B.P.R.D. book, the moment where Hellboy left the team and Mignola or his editors realized they could do comics about both sides of that split, and so did. A lot of mythology spun out of the B.P.R.D. stories starting here, with multiple achieved or only slightly averted apocalypses, and there probably was diminishing returns there, too. But a lot of it was really good, and this is still a decent entry point, if people are still looking to enter the Mignolaverse.
Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark (2/10)
I see this is now billed as the second book of "The Inhibitor Trilogy," but I thought of it as a standalone at the time -- sure, Al has a common universe, and some elements come back in multiple books, but each book is an individual novel. My memory of the Reynolds books of that era are that Revelation Space was a hugely impressive first novel, Chasm City was even better, and this one was a bit of a plateau. Reynolds is still in my head as one of the better current Hard SF writers, but I haven't gotten to one of his books for a decade or more -- I have several on the shelf, and want to read them, but haven't pulled one down recently. Maybe I should check to see if he has any recent novellas-as-books; his novellas are always awesome (Diamond Dogs, Galactic North, "Troika," "Slow Bullets"), and I get to short books much more quickly these days. Anyway: read this, read something by Al Reynolds. I should do that, too. He's damn good.
P. Craig Russell, Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories, 1977-1997 (2/11)
I have no memory of this as a thing that ever existed in the world. According to what I can google, it's what the title says it is: a big collection of his collected works, from the first twenty years of his career (he's had another twenty since then, obviously). Looks like it's split between mostly early personal work, which is odd and spiky, and later mostly adaptations, which are individual and show his exquisite taste. All of it is in Russell's marvelous art, obviously, though some of the early pieces might be more oviously early. But, again, even the cover doesn't look familiar once I found it, so this has dropped out of my memory entirely.
Dave Barry, Tricky Business (2/12)
Barry was a longtime humor columnist for various US newspapers (syndicated, so probably most of them at his peak) who retired from that a decade or so ago and kept writing the same kind of books that used to collect his columns, only at a slower pace. He also wrote three humorous novels along the way: this was the second one. (Big Trouble was the first, and it could be the best Carl Hiaasen novel ever written by anyone else. Insane City is the third, and it's still on my to-be-read shelf.) As I recall, this was not quite as strong as Big Trouble, but still damn good -- though it clearly took more time and effort than Barry's usual collection-of-columns books. (And that may be why there were three of these in about a decade, and then no more: we all do the things that are easier and more profitable for us.) This is good, but read Big Trouble first if you haven't.
"Tucker Coe" (Donald E. Westlake), Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (2/13)
Westlake was a very prolific writer of mysteries and related books -- how do you genre-type Kahawa or Smoke? -- nearly all of which were good in one way or another, and a large number of which were sublimely wonderful. He was both the author of the incredibly funny Dortmunder series of crime capers and the incredibly taut Parker series of crime capers (as Richard Stark), and at least a half-dozen great one-off novels, of which I'll point to The Ax as possibly the best. He also wrote under a lot of pseudonyms: Tucker Coe was one of them, with a five-book hardboiled series about a former cop turned PI in the early '70s. (Some people confused this series for Larry Block's Matt Scudder series at the time, since the two series do have elements in common, but Scudder pulled away over time.) Kinds of Love was the first one, and I think this is as far as I got. This series has not been consistently reprinted, and old Westlake books are expensive -- I see a paperback of this now runs about $900. So I intend to read the whole thing, but I'd need to start over at this point.Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic I: Remnant (2/14)
See below.
Chuck Dixon, et. al., Robin: Year One (2/15)
Yeah, I was still neglecting to list artist: bad 2003 Andy. Art was by Scott Beatty and Javier Pulido. I don't remember this well at all, though I do remember the impulse to do lots of "Year One" and "Year Zero" and "Year Two" stories, so all of the third-generation artists could fix the stories of their youth and do them all the right way. Or maybe just to insert more stuff into continuity, since we all love that about superhero comics. I am substantially more cynical about superhero comics than I was eighteen years ago, and I was already reasonably cynical then. So my opinion on this is probably not a unbiased one, or useful for most purposes. Plus I barely remember it.
Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic II: Refugee (2/16)
Oh. Shucks. I thought this was a two-book series -- my memory is that "New Jedi Order" had a lot of two-book series within it, from various writers -- but it is actually a three-book series. (I did read the third one, Reunion, a little later, finishing it on March 3rd.) So I stretched this week in "Reading into the Past" to include Refugee for no good reason. Because I don't remember this series terribly well, and I don't want to say much about the depths of the Extended Universe at this point anyway. It's all out of continuity, so the excesses and odd storytelling choices -- which were myriad and sometimes baffling -- are all beside the point now. The only reason to come to this would be if you wanted to read the whole bizarre Yuuzhan Vong saga, and frankly there are much better things you could do with your time. There are some gems within that mass of books, but the ones that still stick in the mind almost twenty years later are by Matthew Woodring Stover. Williams and Dix did a couple of non-sharecropped trilogies before this -- both good, both worth digging out -- and Williams has gone on to a longer career afterward.
A certain magazine famously -- notoriously, you might say, and I do -- would have you set a diaeresis -- the double-dot thing you might tend to refer to as an umlaut -- in words with repeat vowels, thus: "preëxisting," "reëlect." That certain magazine also refers to adolescents as "teen-agers." If you're going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space.
- Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English, p.60
Benjamin Dreyer is that unlikely thing, the famous copyeditor. I think he was only mildly famous, in the usual literary circles, a few years back -- he was the copy chief for Random House, so authors would fight to have him work on their books. (Or, equally, fight to have him not work on their books -- authors and editors of all stripes are specific and quirky, and often do not get along with each other for very particular stylistic reasons.)
But then he wrote Dreyer's English, a compendium of his copyeditorial tricks and standards and notes. And the people who make strong, particular books about language into bestsellers -- remember Eats, Shoots & Leaves? It happens once or twice a decade -- did that again for Dreyer's book. So he is now at least somewhat famous.
As I said, Dreyer is a copyeditor. He will not give you advice on how to structure your novel, what voice to use, or how to sustain suspense across three continents and four generations in your family saga. He will tell you that you're using too many adverbs, that you should be more consistent in your treatment of numbers and punctuation, and that there are certain words (spelling and meaning thereof) that you just need to look up every single time to be sure. Names of people and places also benefit from being checked, he would add. In general, he will give finish-carpenter advice: these are the things to do to polish a manuscript of whatever kind once you have the general words down on paper, not things to worry about when you're staring at a blank page waiting for the blood drops to form on your forehead.
Dreyer is punchy and acerbic and deeply opinionated, like the best editors: you should never be confused where you stand with an editor, and you never are with him. There are things that may be style questions, but he will definitely have an opinion as to which style is right. (Did I mention that some writers will go out of their way not to work with specific copyeditors? That's one big reason: a writer needs a partner who believes she's doing things the right way for her piece of prose and will clear out the roadblocks on that path rather than trying to hack a different road through the jungle of words.)
If you are a writer on any level, you will find a lot of interest here. You will also find at least a few things you disagree with, mildly or violently -- for me, it was mostly on the mild side, since I haven't been a working editor for a decade and have mellowed with age. The core of Dreyer's advice is right for everyone, though: a piece of prose should be clear, and there are lots of grammatical and usage tricks you should know to help create that clarity. In the end, that's what he's all about -- a copyeditor's job is to make a piece of prose "the best possible version of itself it can be," as Dreyer puts it on page xi.
You have to care enough about words to read a book like this in the first place. If you have heard about it, and you think you might want to read it -- you do. If this is the first time you've ever heard about Dreyer's English, it is less likely to be for you, unless you are of tender years or recently emerged from a fallout shelter.
Yang was a math teacher at Bishop O'Dowd, a respected private Catholic high school in Oakland, California. The men's varsity basketball team there, the Dragons, had a strong program: they'd been among the best in the state (and California is a big, competitive state) on and off for a couple of decades. But they'd never won the state championship -- coming into the 2015 season, there were 0-8 in that big game.
Yang was coming off his previous graphic-novel project, 2013's double-barreled Boxers & Saints, and was still semi-aimlessly casting around for his next big personal comics project a year later. Of course, at the same time he was also negotiating to do more writing of other people's properties, which Yang puts into this story as a secondary plot or background flavor. [2]
So my guess is that this was a more general period of "what do I want to do with the rest of my life." Yang shows himself with four young children, and dividing his time in three: comics, teaching, and family. Turning comics into a day-job allowed him to simplify that down to just two divisions, which has to be appealing. His soul-searching over the Superman job is connected in this book to his being a teacher at the school: this is a book about the school and its basketball team, with Yang as the viewpoint character, rather than a story essentially about Yang's career and life, with the school as a main setting.
But that's what was behind it all. Yang wanted new projects, was probably already thinking on some level about needing to quit teaching to focus on comics fully, and wondered what the big deal was about the Bishop O'Dowd Dragons. So he went to talk to a fellow teacher, head coach Lou Richie.
And out of that conversation, and the events of the next year, he made Dragon Hoops, the story of primarily the 2015 team and secondarily about Yang learning about the history of the Dragons, about the players on the team in 2015, and about Richie. And then, tertiarily, about Yang himself and his career decisions -- those are the least connected to the team, so Yang keeps them appropriately less important. (There's also a minor thread about how Yang tells the story: there's one loose, unfinished thread of this story that he didn't want to include -- but the fact that he mentions possibly not including it tells we sneaky readers that he already has included it.)
Again, Yang is the viewpoint character, and our lens into this world: this is a sports book largely for an audience that doesn't deeply care about sports a lot of the time. But it's not his story, and he's not trying to make it his story. It's the story of Richie and his players: superstars Ivan Rabb and Paris Austin, younger players like Arinze Chidom and Jeevin Sandhu, and a half-dozen others. It's a book organized by the rhythms of a season: preparing ahead of time, early practices, the games of the season in order, and then (of course) the post-season, culminating in that big championship game again.
Yang was lucky in his story: teams fizzle out everywhere, every year. The Dragons could easily have ended up out of contention. It's the danger of starting to write about a story before the ending is clear -- Yang was something like a reporter telling this story, building blocks of how he wanted it to go while never being sure it would end the "right" way.
I won't tell you what the ending was, or even the middle: the Dragons played a lot of games that year. And the women's team, also called the Dragons, had some games that come in here. The story of whether or not the Dragons won is important, but more important (to Yang, at least, if not to many of the readers) is who these players were, how they worked, what they accomplished together, and how they came from different backgrounds to be part of something larger while still staying specific people.
Yang has always been interested in representation -- most obviously with Chinese-Americans like himself -- and Dragon Hoops is a book where he broadens that view to look more deeply at other ethnic groups in America. Most obviously, since this is about basketball and Oakland, Black Americans are central to Dragon Hoops. It was published in March of 2020, and so finished months before that -- the specifics of the American racial-justice landscape have shifted hugely since that point, though not in any way that damages Yang's story and understanding here. He is on the side of hyphenated Americans and ethnic Americans of all kinds, wanting them to have secure, real places in the world that are not reliant on the good will of white people.
Dragon Hoops never says the words "white supremacy." But Yang writes about it nevertheless: from his own point of view, and from the lives of the Black young men who make up most of the Dragons. There are several scenes of bigotry here, directed at the Dragons -- mostly trash-talking audiences at road games -- and Yang picks up the way hate grabs onto anything to demean and attack, that there will always be something that those bigots use, no matter who they're yelling at this time.
Because this is a real story. And a real story about a real basketball team of mostly Black teenagers in 2015 America is going to include some racial slurs. Maybe there will be a year when that won't be the case. Yang hopes so. I hope so. The Dragons players hope so. But we'll have to see.
[1] I frankly still don't care that much about basketball: even when I did care about sports, it was the one I never got into. But I liked the book, he said brightly!
[2] Everybody's got to eat, and everyone wants to do work that personally excites and speaks to them. So, if what Yang really wants to do with his life is write a bunch of stories about Superman punching things better, that's great. I generally have very little interest in punching-things-better stories, though, so those background negotiations can feel to me, and readers like me, like he's getting pulled into a sadder, lesser world after making personal stories and teaching for a living.
Well. Probably. If nothing else happens.
Maggy Garrisson collects three graphic novels about the title character in which a lot of things happen, all on the seedy side of London in the mid-teens. It all starts when Maggy gets a job, after a couple of years of looking, as secretary for a local detective, Anthony Wight.
Wight is beaten up and ends up in hospital almost immediately, but not before Maggy meets a couple of people in his world and gets caught up in some of his not-entirely-legal activities. It turns out Maggy has a real knack for detective work -- for social engineering and inventive problem-solving in particular -- which alternately gets her deeper into that world and helps her survive it.
She finds a new best friend in a female cop, Sheena. And a new boyfriend in Alex, a trained IT expert working as an enforcer for a minor local crimelord. And a lot more money and trouble than she knows what to do with...or how to hide.
The three original albums follow on from each other, covering in all a few weeks or maybe a month, and this might be the end of the story -- maybe not, but it could end after any of these three without any trouble. These are crime stories, about small-time people in a small-time world who dream of more but scramble like scorpions in a pit to stab each other over the little they have. Maggy is a smarter scorpion than most, and possibly not entirely a scorpion at all -- but, still, she ends up in that pit, and has to sting her way through it.
The three Maggy stories are written by Lewis Trondheim, and this is yet another very different kind of book from him -- unlike the kid's stories like A.L.I.E.E.N., unlike his autobiographical comics like Little Nothings, much more serious than the light adventure of McConey, and maybe closest to the darkness in the fantasy Dungeon series he wrote with Joann Sfar. But this is a real-world darkness: these are crime stories set in a country he knows but doesn't live in, a world he can make a little exotic and different for his original audience, like a thousand French noir comics set in a dark version of America.
The art is from Stephane Oiry, whose work I haven't seen previously. He draws a lot of detail, working from mostly a twelve-panel grid, full of dialogue and tight rooms and close-ups of faces. It's art drawn for album-size, taking advantage of the large pages to do a lot of story-telling in small spaces, and I'm glad to see that this English-language omnibus (from the fine folks at Self-Made Hero in the UK) kept that size.
Maggy Garrisson is a pretty dark book: darker than you'd expect from Trondheim. But he and Oiry navigate the darkness well, and keep the story in unexpected territory -- it's not a thriller, or even pure noir, but more of a slice-of-life story about a woman who falls into this world and finds that it both thrills and frightens her, that it gives her scope to use skills and insights that might have lain dormant before.
Those characters were often confused or wrong or lost or heading at high speed in entirely the wrong direction. Frankly, I could even argue that they were almost always at least one of those things.
Tonta, though, was Jaime's first non-cute protagonist. He draws her round-faced and gap-toothed, cross-eyed and eternally gawping, with a face that he previously reserved for old ladies. She's just as confused and wrong-headed as any of the other women in his stories, maybe even more so. But people take her less seriously, though there's still at least one boy lurking around, trying to get with her. (There always is, for everyone. In some rare cases, it's even mutual.)
Adding to the goofiness, Tonta is not consistently the main character of the stories in Tonta. Her older half-sister Vivian (aka "The Frogmouth," who is too pretty and too pushy for her own good) drives a lot of the stories here, and the rest of Tonta's complicated family is the engine of the underlying central plot. Tonta is the second youngest of a gaggle of half-siblings, who seem to be spread over something like twenty years, with the youngest in the mid-teens. They all have the same mother; most of their fathers are different. Most of their fathers are dead, frankly, and more than one has died in suspicious circumstances that seem to lead back to that mother.
That all comes out as the stories go on: when we first meet Tonta we know she's related to Vivian, but several other siblings show up in subtly different roles first and then seem to be retconned into the family story, as if Jaime thought of it after a few of the stories were already published. (Or maybe he was just being more subtle than I paid attention to; that's always possible.)
Tonta, the character, is somewhere in her high school years: she knows how to drive, but probably isn't supposed to be doing it. She's loud and goofily exuberant and crazy about punk and a boy or two. She wants to have fun and isn't all that clear about what's actually going on within her family -- again, she's a pretty typical Jaime protagonist, except his previous versions of that character tended to be drawn as femme fatales. Tonta is very much not that, though she's like to be, intermittently (at least for the right punky guy).
I'm not sure if the tone shifts entirely work in the Tonta stories: there's serious drama, with lots of family secrets, and then there's Tonta being super-goofy, making faces and being deeply confused. They're mostly not in the same stories, but Jaime works with lots of short stories building up to something bigger, so the goofy is right next to the serious, over and over again.
I don't think this is the end of Tonta's story; I think we'll see more of her and her family, and that she will continue to be the way into that story for readers. So, for now, I'll say that she's an interesting departure for Jaime, and that it's good to see him stretch in that direction...but that I'm not sure if the mixture is fully baked yet.
I'm out of the habit of doing these posts, because I haven't been reading as much the last two years. But I like keeping things tidy, and this is part of that for my reading life, so let's see if I can restart. I expect I will hide these on weekends, since no one else cares -- I do posts like these primarily as indices for my future self.
Here's what I read in January:
Jaime Hernandez, Tonta (1/1)
Chris Roberson and Francesco Biagini, Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Balance Lost, Vol. 2 (1/2)
Chris Roberson and Francesco Biagini, Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Balance Lost, Vol. 3 (1/3)
John Allison, Max Sarin, Julia Madrigal, and Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 10 (1/5)
Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Mother (1/10)
Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, and Michael Avon Oeming, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 2: Every Me, Every You (1/10)
Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks, Pumpkinheads (1/11)
Lewis Trondheim and Stephane Oiry, Maggy Garrison (1/16)
Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops (1/17)
Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, Superman Smashes the Klan (1/18)
Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English (1/23)
Peter Bagge's Other Stuff (1/23)
Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter, Allergic (1/24)
Gilbert Hernandez, Maria M. (1/30)
Georgia Ball and Chi Ngo, Clifford the Big Red Dog: the Movie Graphic Novel (1/31)
John Banville, Time Pieces (1/31)
If all goes well, there will be a similar post in roughly a month -- but I'm not going to claim these will start going up on the first of each month, like in the old days. (Not that anyone actually cares, either.)
Up till now, he had regarded Lord Emsworth as the most promising claim that any prospector for ore could hope to make out, but one glance at the latter's son told him that he had been mistaken. This was the mug of a good man's dreams. For a long instant he stood staring silently at Lord Bosham with the same undisguised interest which stout Cortez had once displayed when inspecting the Pacific. It is scarcely exaggerating to say that Mr Pott was feeling as if a new planet had swum into his ken.- P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, pp.178-179
Pumkinheads is pretty good on those grounds, though. It does all take place in one long evening, and could more-or-less fit into the four or five hours available. The cheating is more about what happens, so the reader just has to assume the management of DeKnock's World Famous Pumpkin Patch & Autumn Jamboree either somehow failed to noticed our two protagonists walked off the job at the beginning of the night or just couldn't find them amid all of the other hijinks.
But I seem to have gotten ahead of myself.
Josiah and Deja are friends and co-workers at the Pumpkin Patch, seniors in their last fall working there. They've worked as a team at the Succotash Hut for four years, and Josiah has been MVPPP (Most Valuable Pumpkin Patch Person) four of the last five possible months. But today is the very last night of this season. Josiah has been mooning over someone he calls The Fudge Girl -- she works at the Fudge Shoppe -- so Deja has switched them to work in the Pie Palace, right across the way, and is pushing Josiah to finally walk over and actually talk to this girl he's been obsessing about for much longer than could ever be healthy.
Deja is the outgoing, friendly, pushy one -- I don't know if every friendship has a person like that, but fictional friendship stories need someone like that, or there's not much of a story.
So Deja pushes Josiah, and he runs over on their dinner break (pretty early in the evening) to say hi to Marcy (Fudge Girl's name is Marcy), but finds that she got moved elsewhere in the Patch that evening.
Josiah would be willing to drop it, and spend the rest of this last evening selling pies, but Deja definitely will not. So they're off on an odyssey across almost all of the locations mapped out on the endpapers. (They, sadly, never make it into the Haunted Hacienda, and that's the only spoiler I'll give.)
This does mean dodging what seems to be at least the back half of their shift, but you only have one last night at the patch, right?
Do they find The Fudge Girl? Does Josiah pledge his undying love to a person he's never actually talked to? Well, maybe.
Do they spend a lot of time together, and talk more than they probably did while working? Definitely. Does that lead to interesting places? Of course it does.
And do I mean "interesting places" like the Freeto Pie Stop and the Corn Maze, or "interesting places" in their relationship? Well, can't it be both?
Pumpkinheads is sweet and fun and bouncy, propelled by punchy, teenager-appropriate dialogue and Deja's boundless energy and drive. Writer Rainbow Rowell clearly knows teenagers -- she's a noted YA writer, but this is the first time I've ever read her work. Artist Faith Erin Hicks -- whose work I'm more familiar with -- keeps it all real and grounded and gives a great sense of the physical layout of this place.
This is one of those books that's primarily for teenagers, but at least as much for anyone who can remember being a teenager. It's real and funny and frothy, not quite a romance but a little more than a story about friends. We all need stories like that once in a while, so grab this one of those days.
So, yeah, it's absolutely a superhero book.
Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye was a twelve-issue series -- I'm not sure, at this late date, if it was meant to be mini- or maxi- or ongoing, and frankly I don't care -- from 2016-2017, about the very minor DC character of the title, who had previously appeared in some forgettable '60s stories and a few random crossovers. It was part of the "Young Animal" line, which was an attempt to recapture the sales magic of Vertigo without the benefits of time, a deep bench of British writing talent, a healthier market, and (most importantly) Karen Berger. And, as I understand it, the Animals Which Are Young was modestly successful, but has not been a long-term sustainable thing -- not that very much in guys-in-tights-punching-each-other comics is "a long-term sustainable thing" this decade to begin with.
That twelve-issue series was collected in two volumes: Going Underground (ha ha ha) and Every Me, Every You.
Cave's dead wife -- every superhero has a dead wife or three in the fridge; it's standard issue -- turns out to have been the princess of a secret advanced subterranean race, because of course she was, and so Chloe is the heiress to Vast Powers and Responsibilities, including the only possible way to stop the aforementioned monster from snacking down on all of the worlds with Cave Carsons in them.
It gets weirder and more bizarre from there, in best Young Animal fashion, and there's a large cast of characters mostly so Rivera and Way can kill off lots of them in ways that make readers struggle to remember who they were and why we should care. (Was that jump-suited person still on Team Evil, someone who defected once Team Evil's evilness was clear, or an OG do-gooder? Does anyone care? Does anyone besides me find that several of them look distractingly like Ron from Kim Possible?) The large cast tunnels through the ground of Earth-DC (or maybe Earth-Young Animal?) and then through the contiguous grounds of several other alternate Earths, meeting a Cave Carson Jr. and eventually his father. Doc Magnus appears, and is even more of a dick than usual, while still not being particularly interesting as a character.
In the end, the multiverse is indeed saved from being eaten, as we all knew it would be. DC would not stop publishing umpty-zillion comics just because Cave fucking Carson couldn't save its bread and butter, now would it?
This is a loud, flashy, silly, overstuffed comic with some good moments and a whole lot of confusing action. It is somewhat more serious than the standard punch-fest, or at least aspires to be. I did not take it seriously for one second, but I did enjoy pieces of it, and was engaged enough to request the second volume from the library when I hit the end of the first one. And I have enjoyed dunking on it here. So it is not without its pleasures, even if those are highly particular and goofy. Caveat emptor.
But I dip back into it every so often, particularly when it crosses over to cartooning, where I've kept in touch with current state more consistently. (I haven't been to even a SF convention art show in five years or so now, or read Spectrum in about that long.) So that's the consumer warning: I used to care about art books, and this is one, but it's not the same kind that I used to care about, and that was in another country. (And the rest of that quote.)
That's how I came to Blitt, a coffee-table book collecting the covers, sketches, advertising pieces, random illustrations, and other drawings by Barry Blitt, best known for a series of New Yorker covers. (Particularly the "terrorist fist bump" one of Barack and Michelle Obama, if you're trying to place him.)
Blitt leads off with those covers, as you'd expect -- the first two sections are "The New Yorker" (mostly covers) and "Cartoon Politics" (largely New Yorker, and with a few covers as well). It gets more general from there, at about the halfway point, pulling out more obscure and odd work from earlier in Blitt's career (including a little illo I love, captioned "Burt Lancaster doesn't give a shit about you") through chapters about "Process" and "Not Rejected" and "Crazy Ideas."
Blitt is a great cartoonist and caricaturist -- not necessarily the same thing, but being good at the latter is a big bonus for the former -- who always seems willing to be looser and more energetic than a lot of his competition. And his use of soft colors (watercolors? I am no expert on art) is also great. A Blitt picture is funny and looks like it just happened, almost randomly, as he was attacking his board. (That is not how any great cartoons happen, of course, but being able to give that illusion is really powerful.)
Blitt includes a self-conscious introduction by Blitt himself and appreciations by New Yorker editor David Remnick, columnist Frank Rich, fellow artist/political cartoonist Steve Brodner, Steven Heller, and New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly. It's the first book of his work to be published, after a career of about thirty years in illustration and political cartooning and other stuff in that vague territory, so it has all of the big hits you'd expect, plus a lot of process stuff and quirky pieces from his earlier, jobbing-illustrator period.
It's a good book. If you like political cartoons or New Yorker covers or Blitt in general, you should read it.
I think the new regime is that I'm going to try to do a "Reading Into the Past" post on Mondays where I don't have any new books to list as "Reviewing the Mail". We'll see if that works, but RitP is somewhat similar to RtM, in that they're both random lists of books that I know or remember only scattered things about.
Under the current scheme, I use a RNG to pick a year between 1990 (when I started keeping a reading notebook) and 2010 (roughly when I started listing every last thing I read here), and then write about the books I was reading "this" week in that year.
And, this time out, I have...1994.
Karen Kijewski, Katwalk (1/25)
The first in a mystery series, about private eye Kat Colorado of Sacramento. (I think there's still room for a series about the PI Cat Kalifornia of Boulder.) I was reading a lot of mysteries in those days, particularly PI books, and I was trying to read as many female PIs as I could. That's mostly because the energy in the field was in women writers and women protagonists, in the wake of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller. I enjoyed this series, though I think it got more thriller-y as it went on -- but that happened to a lot of series in the '90s anyway. Kijewski wrote nine of these in a decade, and then apparently stopped. As I recall, they were good solid mystery novels, though they may seem seriously "of their time" thirty years later.
Lawrence Block, The Specialists (1/25)
Carroll & Graf (I think) were reprinting a lot of random Larry Block books around this time -- mostly the non-series books, since those were cheap, but I think they also did the Chip Harrison books -- as part of a general blast of Block going on in the market. I was then (and am now) a pretty serious Block fan, and in those days I could read almost as fast as books could be published, so that made me happy. This is an odd thriller from 1968, originally published as a paperback original, that I have to believe was supposed to launch a series but never did. A wounded Colonel gathers five of his men -- all Green Berets, all decorated veterans from Vietnam -- to do semi-legal activities to help regular people and hurt organized crime and other nefarious types. Block was morally certain someone read this book and crayoned the idea for The A-Team afterward, which is possible. My memory is that this is a pretty pulpy '60s paperback thriller, but just fine on that basis.
Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (1/27)
This was Murakami's new book, and it was published in hardcover in January. My guess is that we did not see it for the club -- and I was awfully junior at that point, without contacts to bug at Knopf to get a free copy -- so I just bought the damn thing myself and read it during the month of publication. That's slightly sad, since this is the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which had been not only a SFBC Alternate, but was my introduction to Murakami as a member of the SFBC. Well, I knew the deal when I went into the disreputable end of publishing. I feel like I need to re-read those early Murakami books -- Wild Sheep and this and Hard-Boiled Wonderland -- since they are in my head as the purest, most undiluted Murakami. I don't know when I'll have time to do that, but the urge is there. If you've never read this, read Wild Sheep first. If you've never read Murakami, in fact, read Wild Sheep. Start right now; the rest of this blog post can wait.
Paula E. Downing, A Whisper of Time (loose galleys, 1/27)
Well, the entirety of my memory of this is "SF in mass market from Del Rey." And that seems to be true, for what that's worth. Downing changed her writing name to first Paula Downing King and then just Paula King later that decade, but her career seems to have fizzled from this point -- this was her last Del Rey book, then came a SF trilogy under the King name from Roc (not a great sign in those days) and a decade later a fantasy trilogy as Diana Marcessas. According to descriptions online, this is the story of a young alien (totally humanoid, a la Star Trek) woman raised by humans and how she investigates the ancient ruins she was discovered in as a child. I have no memory of the story whatsoever.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II, No Happy Ending (1/28)
Another mystery novel -- Taibo is a Mexican novelist, and this is a translated PI story about his series character Hector Belascoaran Shayne. This may have been the only Taibo novel I read, or maybe I read one or two others -- I definitely did not dig in, but I don't know how much of Taibo has been translated, at the time or since. My memory is that it was interesting and distinct, deeply Chandleresque with deeply crooked police and a corrupt society that Taibo's hero fought against in the ways he could.
Lisa Goldstein, Summer King, Winter Fool (typescript, 1/29)
I don't remember this book -- about a god who falls in love with the human world, causing various problems -- clearly, but I've always been impressed with Goldstein, who doers something different every book and always writes clearly and very well. Seeing her name here makes me want to re-read this, or read other Goldstein books.
James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (bound galleys, 1/30)
One of the great SFF novels of the '90s, full stop. One of the most audacious novels, in any genre, ever written. It also won the World Fantasy Award, and deserved it. God is dead, and his immense corpse is blocking the shipping lane of the North Atlantic -- so it needs to be moved out of the way. Quite possibly the quintessential sour Morrow novel, as Only Begotten Daughter was the unexpected quintessential sweet Morrow novel. (Note: it's not all that sweet.) Read it if you haven't.
Jim Thompson, Cropper's Cabin (1/31)
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard was in the middle of a massive Thompson reprint project, and I was on board for all of it. Before my 2011 flood, I had (I think) every Thompson novel they published, all in those matching trade-paper editions. Since there were around thirty of them, I may now have some slight trouble remembering exactly which one this was. I believe this was a fairly early book, about a young man from a hardscrabble Oklahoma town (like Thompson was himself) battling his own father and his girlfriend's father and his own anger. If I remember anything about Thompson, it doesn't end happily.
And, just for completeness's sake, the next book I finished was Macintosh User's Guide to Macintosh Performa Computers on 2/3, because I either just had bought one or was just about to buy one. And I've always been a do-a-lot-of-research kind of person. So, yes, I did read computer books cover-to-cover, and then wrote them down in my reading notebook. (Note: from some googling, this appears to be the pack-in manual that came with the computer, which makes it even sillier that I read it cover-to-cover and wrote it down in the notebook. What can I say? I was 24 and in love with keeping track of things.)
