Pop Gun War, Vol. 2: Chain Letter by Farel Dalrymple

What's important here, I think, is that it's a delayed sequel. One that came a decade later, after other stories. Everything else flows out from there: this is not the next thing, but a later thing.

Pop Gun War, Vol. 2: Chain Letter was collected in 2017, from material that mostly appeared in ISLAND magazine the previous three years. I was confused by the notation in the app where I read it (Hoopla) that it collected issues 4, 5, 10, 14, and 15, as if those were the issues of Pop Gun War - those are the places this appeared in ISLAND.

It's more Farel Dalrymple, vague drifting stories that take SFF adventure story tropes - often deliberately as if conceptualized by children - and mix them with a vaguely existential strew of ennui, angst, and confusion. There are plots, sort of, of a kind, but they start aimlessly, run for a while, and then get abandoned. There are characters, and we hear their interior concerns and worries, but they're not all that rounded: each one is a fragment or facet or avatar. There are places, striking and strange and weird, but we don't learn how they connect to each other, or any serious background details - they are creepy or shiny or bland places where things happen, nothing more.

I could link back to my post on the first Pop Gun War collection, but this is only loosely related. This is, maybe, what happened to Sinclair's sister Emily at some point during the events of the first book. Or maybe not: Dalrymple is rarely all that definitive.

Anyway, Emily - who here seems to be smaller and younger than I thought she was in the first book, a prepubescent girl barely older than Sinclair and not the teenager I thought she was - is on tour with her band, which is otherwise all young men, of the typical kind that form bands. Their van has broken down in some random town. She goes out for a walk, sees mysterious figures sneaking into a sewer, follows them.

There's a confrontation, eventually, with those creepy men and their boss, but more important is that Emily finds a room, in those comic-booky high-tech underground corridors, where screens show her visions of the past, present, and future. Most of this book are those visions: other characters doing other things other places, which Emily witnesses and is the frame story for.

She sees Sinclair and Addison, from the first book, briefly, but they don't do much. She sees private detective Ben Able, who tries to free a group of kids - maybe kidnapped, maybe just playing, maybe something else? - from a creepy haunted house. She sees a cyborg astronaut battling, gladiator-pit-style, in what seems to be Proxima Centauri (maybe connected to that Dalrymple book), managed by a girl of her age, Gwen Noiritch, who has a cyborg/magic eye. Oh, and there's a fat kid in a super-suit, Hollis, who bounces into their plot and get the three of them chased around for a while.

None of those framed stories really end, but none of them started cleanly, either - Emily tunes into them at a particular moment, watches for a while, and then something else gets her attention.

Dalrymple's material often seems like the ideas of a hyperactive kid, someone who's read masses of SFF and is mix-and-matching all the stuff he loves best with silly names and crazy ideas and not all that much worry about consistency and plot. But the style is more contemplative and adult, looking back at those silly names and superpowers with a wry, forgiving but distanced eye, as if wondering if he ever were that young. I think it's meant to drive specific emotions, to evoke complex feelings of nostalgia and regret and discomfort. I still couldn't tell you the why of any of that. But it's what I think he's trying to do, and he's pretty successful at that quirky, counterintuitive thing.