Hundreds of nuns are in town this week. I've seen nuns with green habits, pink habits. Bad habits! Nuns vaping, nuns cutting in line. Right now, nuns are running, laughing, elbows pumping and veils flying. The security gates on the north side of St. Peter's Square just opened, and a group from the front of the line are rushing for front-row seats at whatever services Pope Francis is about to hold inside the basilica.
- Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.232
Well, This Is Me is the first collection of his work, gathering about a hundred and fifty cartoons plus three new interstitial pieces (Introduction, Interlude, and Epilogue) in which a cartoon Perlman talks about his work in an deliberately humorous over-intellectual style to another character who gets fed up with that.
Back when I was a wee lad, cartoon collections like this just shoveled the cartoons in willy-nilly, and didn't show any evidence of organization. You got two hundred Charles Addams cartoons, in whatever order they were in after the editor dropped the file three or four times, and you liked it. Nowadays - my theory is because desktop publishing makes it easy to move things around, but that explanation is a good thirty years old now - cartoon collections tend to have thematic chapters, as if we all think "OK, I want to read a bunch of Peter Arno cartoons right now, but only if they are all about animals."
Whatever the reason for it, that's what Perlman does: there are four major sections. The first one is titled "Well, This is Work" and the others cover Play, Love, and Life. They are vague, and a really argumentative reader could probably find a few to insist they should really be in another category. But the categories are broad enough that we don't get, say, ten doctor's-office cartoons in a row.
Perlman is smart and funny and has both amusing wordplay and amiably dumpy people in his cartoons: he's good at all of the pieces of the cartooning gestalt. He writes funny and he draws funny. There are a dozen or more cartoons here that I let out audible noises while reading - maybe not a full guffaw, but some variety of quick laugh. And there are about as many cartoons where I thought the idea and the specific wording was brilliant - some of these are the same cartoons as the forced-me-to-make-noise ones, I guess.
Anyway: funny, smart, amusing. If you like New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons at all, you'll like this book.
But most lives aren't that big. What's interesting about them is the succession of small moments, the choice of paths, what it meant to the person at the time. Keeping that focus, and being both honest and interesting, can be tricky.
Rick Parker walks that tightrope with his memoir Drafted. There's material that lets the publisher (Abrams) be a bit expansive in their marketing copy: Parker was drafted in 1966, during the Vietnam era. As it happened, he never went overseas, but he didn't know that's how it would be at the time. And he's telling this in order, so on every page we only know what Parker knew at the time.
This was a brand-new book in 2024, so it's clearly Parker looking back a long ways. He wrote and drew this in his seventies, telling the story of himself at the ages of eighteen to about twenty-one. (To put it into personal perspective, Parker's entire military service happened up to about six months before I was born, and I am by no means a young man.)
It's a straightforward, crisply-told book. The young Parker was a bit naïve and sheltered - or, at least, older Parker presents his younger self that way - and there are multiple scenes where I wondered if young Parker didn't realize what other people were hinting about at the time, and Parker-the-creator resolutely doesn't explain or add context in retrospect. (In particular, on the day he musters out, there's a long, weird interaction with a fellow soldier and his wife that could have been a backhanded attempt at a threesome or a clumsy badger game - I'm not sure which, but young Parker doesn't seem to see either possibility, and Parker-the-narrator doesn't comment, either.)
Parker runs through those three years in the US Army chronologically, with a brief prologue about his childhood and seven numbered chapters for the major phases of his military career. He goes through basic, gets trained to drive a tank, is approved for Officer Candidate School and passes that, is commissioned as a first lieutenant and assigned to a missile program in the New Mexico desert, and does a few other odd assignments during his enlistment. It's all carefully observed, narrated with a lot of captions mostly in a factual vein, and in a precise, meat-and-potatoes style for both art and writing. Parker isn't trying to be fancy here, despite his long career as a fine artist. This is the clear story of what happened to him, with both the boring and unpleasant parts kept in for maximum transparency.
Drafted isn't quite what I expected, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it comprehensively, and tells a story that's both particular and general - Parker was one of more than two million draftees during the Vietnam era, so a lot of elements of his story will be familiar to many of those vets, and of interest to later vets and others.
This is a noir novel, I should say. Actually, I'd qualify that: it starts out a fairly straightforward, well-framed story of life on the bottom rung, wanders into noir as stories that like often do - particularly in mid-century, when there was a huge market for such - but then veers again, in the late chapters, to what I can only call anti-noir.
In a noir novel, everything conspires against the hero. The entire world seems to bend to hurt him, to break his will, to force him to do the unforgivable thing, to destroy him utterly in the end. There is no way out, no matter how much he struggles - whether he gleefully engages in crimes, or tries to stay honest and keep his head above water, it will come out the same way in the end: he will either die at the end of the book or be on his way to death.
Charles Willeford follows that model closely in the middle chapters here, but then - and I really can't put this any other way - turns it absolutely inside out at the end. That's the anti-noir bit, as if the universe is conspiring to clear this protagonist, to move obstacles from his way in much the same unexpected, doom-laden way as traditional noir. And that sting ending makes the anti-noir turn that much more puzzling: I don't want to overexplain or hint, but the sting is the kind of thing that would have fit much more comfortably in a traditional noir, the way the book was going already.
Pick-Up is the story of two alcoholics, who meet in the first chapter. Harry Jordan is the first-person narrator, a former painter and currently working at random odd low-level restaurant jobs in San Francisco. He would say he's not an alcoholic, and maybe he's right, technically. But he spends most of his time drinking or waiting to get to the next drink. Helen Meredith is an heiress, who spent her whole life under the thumb of a domineering mother and had a brief, horrible marriage. She's much worse than Harry, needing to drink vast quantities every day.
They meet, they fall in with each other, and Helen moves into Harry's flat in a roominghouse. They're happy, more or less. Harry paints a full-length nude portrait of Helen; we think this could potentially be the spark that puts him back on a good path, doing something more productive with his life.
But they're alcoholics. Helen much much worse than Harry: the kind of mid-century woman drunk who wanders off with any man (or three Marines, in one scene) willing to buy her drinks. Harry can't leave her alone, even to go to work for the day, and they're dirt-poor.
They're both also mildly suicidal: they have one shared attempt early in the book, which leads to a stay in a local mental hospital that doesn't help either of them. And this is noir, so things keep getting worse, more constricting. Until there only seems to be one way out.
It doesn't go the way they hope: things get worse for Harry. And then there's the turn at the end.
I suspect Willeford wrote Pick-Up to deliberately tweak the standards of its genre. I don't know how consistent he was in that. And I'm not a major scholar of his work: I read his late PI novels, and a bunch of his early noir, in the 90s when he had a revival soon after his death, but nothing since then, and I didn't make a particular study of him at the time.
This is a quirky, gnarly noir novel that does interesting things with the form. It has a weird ending, which readers sometimes react strongly to, one way or the other. And it's short, told quickly in the first person, in that traditional noir style. So it's a book that you might as well just read, if any of the above sounds intriguing. I knocked it off in two or three hours: it's worth at least that much time.
(I read this in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. As far as I know, the text is the text, no matter what edition. The cover above is what it looked like the last time I read it, in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime edition in the '90s. I suspect it doesn't look like that these days; books don't keep covers that long.)
I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber doesn't quite explain all of the things it should have - but it's close, and some readers might find the way it implies its world is just fine. So let me just note that, and note that this is writer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou's first graphic novel, and point out that traditionally ties go to the runner.
I have no quibbles about the art by Juni Ba, which is detailed in quirky, grotesque ways that fits this world perfectly. Also, I should say that the lettering is by Otsamane-Elhaou - the sound effects are particularly fun, and he makes the captions and dialogue slightly italic to give the book a distinctive look, too.
I don't know if this book is specifically for younger readers, but it has a vibe that upper-elementary-school kids will probably enjoy, and the professional-wrestling influences also tend to make the violence stylized and bloodless in ways that are young-reader-friendly.
We're in a world of monsters - think Monsters, Inc., where everyone is a slightly different kind of creature, and you'll be close - where strength and fighting ability seem to be prized above all other traits. (Or, at least, this story deals with that side of this world.) A young, small monster named Felix is timid, bullied by a gang of other monsters from his school. They dare him to ring a random doorbell; he does. A craggy old monster answers the door, and seems to want to talk to this random small interloper for reasons that are never clear. He grabs at Felix, who runs away immediately, and loses his backpack to the old guy.
This is all heavily narrated, mostly in ways that tell us things we can already see on-panel rather than adding detail to the world - it's a very story-book voice, as if telling the story many years later.
Anyway, Felix is bullied at school and browbeaten by his parents and denigrated by his teachers: he's the usual mousy little guy who needs to learn to stick up for himself. In trying to get his backpack back, he accidentally stows away in the old guy's car - I suppose I should make it clear that the old guy is Macabber, the other half of the title - as he goes back to the town of his birth.
Macabber is the former World Champion of Monstering, hugely dominant in his era. Monstering is basically pro wrestling, only in a society of monsters where everyone has completely different bodies from each other. He left this town to go off for the big fights, leaving his former best friend behind. He never returned - until now, of course - in however many years it's been.
The town is a dump now, which everyone living there blames Macabber for. There's no reason for this I can figure out: it's a weird mix of "you're supposed to support the old neighborhood" and "you left us behind." And everyone is much more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts by punching rather than talking about things, which may be one reason why we don't get any clear, or convincing, explanations.
Anyway, the local hooligans - little guys in knight's armor - find and harass and then recruit Felix, again for murky reasons. Macabber meets his once-best friend, sort-of apologizes for having a successful career elsewhere, and feels guilty. We get a lot of flashbacks to Macabber's fighting career, which was zippy and action-packed.
That portion of the story doesn't exactly resolve, but we flash forward suddenly, to see that Felix also goes into Monstering, and is even better at it than Macabber was - we get a few of his fights, too - but we mostly see him at the end of his career, rich and successful and done with it all.
Felix does not seem to have run away from any towns, or beaten up any of his best friends to do so, or run his career in any ways that would make us dislike him. But he has the same sad attitude at the end of his career Macabber did - not sad because it's over, not sad because he stomped over people to get there, but just generally sad because he's not sure if he's a good or bad person, I guess.
I want to say that the lesson Unlikely Story is trying to make - or the lesson it comes closest to making - is that fighting people for a living is a bad idea; that violence is never the answer, little trooper. But it's so clearly a book about how Monstering is fun and exciting and awesome that doesn't really seem to fit.
So I'm puzzled by Unlikely Story. It seems to want to give me a Lesson About Life, but its two characters are not parallel in any ways that reinforce the Lesson it seems to want to push. What they have in common, at the end of their careers, is a habit of speaking in vague circumlocutions - this may be more Otsmane-Elhaou's writing style - and a sense that they are sad because it's all over and they're no longer Monstering Champion of the World anymore, which, um, yeah, would be sad, wouldn't it?
"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.
As we get into the cold time of the year, here's something appropriate: a song of sadness and lost love and broken promises, about how everything gets worse, more complicated and more difficult as you get older, written by a great songwriter and sung by a great singer.
They're both the same person: Tracey Thorn. The song is unironically titled Oh, the Divorces! and it's from a record called Love and Its Opposite, which is mostly about the opposite.
It starts like this:
Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along
The singer is not the one divorcing, which is unusual for a song like this. She's watching, seeing her social circle change and break - and there's an undertone of "how can I know I won't be next?"
Oh, I know we shouldn't take sides
But that one was his fault
This one is her fault
No one gets off without paying the ride
And oh, the divorces!
It's a quiet song, the kind of quiet that's all-encompassing and devastating. It's just Thorn's voice, close and confiding, over piano at first and then some light strings later, like you're listening in on her internal thoughts.
And it's a deeply adult song, in a way that feels rare: a song talking about a stage of life and a worry that's just not part of normal pop music. You have to walk down a lot of road to get to a song like Oh, the Divorces! That's one of the things I love about it.
I'm already halfway through Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the 2022 memoir of bookselling by the guy who runs the Twitter feed for Sotheran's, a venerable London antiquarian bookshop. (Well, I think he still runs it, and I think it still exists after the X-odus, but I'm petty enough not to give Musk any traffic right this second by checking.) Darkshire has a great smart-but-not-fussy, self-deprecating style that always feels quintessentially British to me, and it comes through in the book as it did in shorter Internet posts.
It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn't snow.
- John Banville, Snow, pp.13-14
Nell wasn't a great one for compliments, she didn't like people getting above themselves. Nell had adopted the philosophy that, generally speaking, things tended always to get worse, rather than better. This pessimistic outlook was a source of considerable comfort to her - after all, unhappiness could be relied upon in a way that happiness never could.
- Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, pp.85-86
I suspect that means this was an offshoot of the Black series - about a pathologist in 1950s Dublin called Quirke, who is mentioned but never appears in Snow - and that Banville, or his agent, or his publisher, decided somewhere along the lines that it was different enough that it would be a Banville book rather than a Black book, but that they would also call it a "mystery."
The main character is a detective, as is tradition for the form: St. John Strafford. (Pronounced "Sinjin," as he has to repeatedly note. With an "r" in the last name, ditto.) We are mostly in his head, in a limited third person narration, with a few literary-novel eruptions into other viewpoints that work but made me wonder if they were necessary. (Literary novelists sometimes err in the direction of expansiveness, trying to show all the world and make clear all the issues. And sometimes they err in the direction of hermeticism, leaving only clues and breadcrumbs to be as pure to their concept of the story as possible. Banville leans towards the former pole here.)
Strafford has been sent to a big manor house in the Irish countryside - Ballyglass House, in County Wexford (Banville's own birthplace). A priest, Father Tom Lawless, has been murdered there in the night. It is a few days before Christmas. (To the title: it has been snowing, and it continues to snow, off and on, throughout the novel. As Strafford literarily puts it "Snow was general all over Ireland.")
There are two kinds of mystery novel: the ones in which a good person was murdered, and ones in which a bad person was murdered. Tom Lawless was a priest in Ireland in 1957, and is the murder victim in a novel that came out in 2020. I'd say I'll let you guess what kind of victim he was, but a Catholic priest in a 2020 novel is 99% certain to be a villain. And he was, as we eventually learn.
Banville's deviations from his focus on Strafford - an opening two pages, detailing the murder, and a coda about three-quarters of the way through the novel, flashing back to Lawless a decade earlier (though, somewhat inconsistently, pretending to be a document he wrote sometime soon before his death) - are largely to make that villainy more obvious, especially that heavy-handed coda.
So we the readers start off with one question: why was Lawless murdered? If we are as cynical as I am, we quickly figure he was diddling someone, and then move on to the next obvious question: boys or girls?
Fairly early on, we learn that Lawless spent some years at a "school," and I'll avoid giving details to leave the previous question somewhat open. But Lawless, we eventually learn, was a piece of work, the kind of murder victim we are happy to see put in his grave.
But Strafford still has the job of finding out who and why, which he pursues through the aristocratic Catholic Osbourne family, Father Tom's hosts the night before, and through the local town. Neither group is particularly forthcoming, as is to be expected of a small town and an aristocratic family in a mystery novel. And Strafford declares himself not to be all that good at this detecting thing, as well - perhaps false modesty, since he does figure it all out by the end of this short novel.
Banville is a fine writer as always, but Snow has some deeply obvious things at its core that are somewhat unfortunate. His style keeps it from being the kind of thumping dullness that another writer might inflict, and the question of who actually killed Father Tom - in best mystery-novel fashion, nearly every character has a decent reason to have wanted to - is solidly mysterious until Banville reveals all at the end. But I thought Banville was trickier than this: the story of the murder of a sexually deviant Catholic priest in 1950s Ireland is the kind of thing I thought he'd leave to the more sensationalist crew.
I expect most of the volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub will be like this: fine storytelling; intricate, dynamic art; deep psychological insight; inventive fighting implements used in interesting ways; glimpses into a distinct, particular historical world seen clearly and unsentimentally; stories of sudden violence about a man seeking vengeance in a dark and corrupt world. Those are all excellent things; the series is known as a masterpiece for a reason. But they won't be new things.
In the first, title story of Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol 4: The Bell Warden, Ogami Ittō is hired to "test" the three sons of the current bell warden of Edo - the man responsible for the network of towers that toll the hours and tell everyone what time it is. In typical fashion for this era and this people - or maybe just in this series; I don't have a separate deep knowledge of 18th-century Japan - the warden takes his role very, very seriously. (In this series, there are the good people, who think that what they do is the most important thing on earth and are willing, even happy, to die in the commission of their duties, and the bad people, who do absolutely anything and are driven by their desires.) So he is basically making a bet: at least one of my sons will be skilled enough to beat and kill one of the premier swordsmen in the entire country, and thus be worthy to continue the family line.
Spoiler! He loses that bet. Of course. The premise of the series is that Ogami Ittō wins. Every time, one way or another, up until the final battle with his ultimate enemy. And "winning" in this context always means killing the other guy. A samurai adventure series could hardly operate differently.
The three other stories have similar depth, and are similarly entangled in that Edo-era conception of propriety and right action and inevitable glorious death. It is, of course, a very dark, gloomy series at its core, set among men who dedicated their lives to slaughtering each other mostly for the benefit of a few feudal leaders. I'm finding reading one of these books about every six weeks to be about right: going much faster than that would be too much, a flood of stories too similar in tone to stand out from each other at that pace.
You may have seen Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines comics before - I seem to mostly see it on Facebook, because I Am Old, but I think it has an even larger presence on Instagram (which is probably also tending to the older side these days). Anyway, there's a website, and comics are posted and reshared in the usual social places, and then the great unwashed grab the comics they like and repost them all over the place - which is what I've mostly seen.
Farazmand self-published a few collections of the strip over the years - looks like four of them - but Hope It All Works Out! is the official fancy debut big-company collection, published by Simon & Schuster on September 24th. I see they're also doing a desk calendar for 2025, which I point you towards if you want Poorly Drawn Lines on a daily basis in the new year.
(You may say, "Andy! I thought S&S was a serious, literary, words-on-paper kind of publisher. Isn't this out of character for them? Aren't they too stuffy for cartoon publishing?" And I would smile and gesture vaguely at you, like the old guy on Kung Fu, because I know the ancient secrets - S&S was founded to make a buck as the first people to publish crossword puzzles in book form, and was famously trend-chasing in their earliest incarnation. So this is entirely in character, and shows they are still in touch with their deepest, most primal impulses as a business. Namaste.)
Poorly Drawn Lines is a gag-a-day strip, which are hard to write about - you may notice I'm vamping and throwing in my own gags here, which I often do with books that don't have a clear narrative I can just describe - but, basically, it's another modern strip with a cast of oddballs and a mildly sarcastic tone. In the modern straightforward way, the main characters are Mouse, Snail, Turtle, and Bird, who are each those things. Mouse is the Charlie Brown of the strip, I guess: he seems to be the closest thing to a central character, and the most introspective.
Farazmand's drawing is crisp and straightforward - thin lines, clear colors, almost design-y in its instant readability - as a frame for his mostly wordplay-based humor. I'll throw in an example here - it's on page 155 of the book, for those following along at home, and also available on the aforementioned website.
So check it out. Or don't. I'm not your mother.
But it does leave you with at least that one big question.
In this case, for me it was: what does the title mean?
Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel, winning the Whitbread in 1995. It's not about a museum.
It's set mostly in York - the old one, in Yorkshire, in the north of England - where there's a locally-famous York Castle Museum, I find doing some searching after reading the book. York Castle seems to be more focused on ordinary people's lives than the typical museum, which is one clue to the title. But I've never been to York, much less seen the museum exhibits. And my mental image of "museum" is big and old and probably just a bit dull, monumental stones and ancient gewgaws and random bric-a-brac once owned by some guy famous for killing a bunch of people.
This is not a novel about anything like that kind of museum. Again, it's not about any kind of museum. But it's a family saga, which means a novel about several generations - and, as usual for a family saga, mostly about the women, and often about the things that go wrong and how they struggle through life.
It's told by Ruby Lennox, starting with the moment of her conception in 1951. She is our omniscient narrator - well, omniscient when telling us about what's going on when she's in utero, and omniscient in the alternating Footnote chapters, which tell stories of other family members of the past, up through their own ends. She's not omniscient in her own life, in the numbered main chapters that march forward in time from 1951 through the next two decades.
Her voice is candid and discursive, friendly and engaging, immediate and funny. It's much stronger in the numbered chapters; she drops back a bit into the background when telling us about people who aren't Ruby Lennox.
I said this was a family saga, which back when I was in publishing we used to joke was code for "three generations of women." It's not quite code, and not quite three generations, but that's broadly true: this is the story of several generations, mostly of women, seeing them both as daughters in their childhoods and then as mothers, after their inevitable not-quite-right marriages and they try to raise children but turn out to be temperamentally bad at it. We see the men, too, but more from the outside - as fascinating, attractive figures as young men and as infuriating, often-unfaithful liars in their later years.
This is a big family, with a couple of dozen major characters across the three or four generations. But don't worry: a lot of them will die young. That doesn't mean they become less important, or stop being mentioned - the narrative bounces through timelines as it goes back and forth between the forward motion of the main numbered chapters and the historical Footnotes. And the dead are always there in a family: always remembered, as real as the people left behind.
Atkinson is amazingly funny here, particularly for a book with so much death and sadness in it: the historical timeline includes the two World Wars, both of which wallop this family, and plenty of smaller, more personal calamities. Multiple family members run off, never to be seen again. Several hallowed family stories - two of them about deaths - turn out not to be actually true.
You might have guessed I'm not going to give a plot synopsis. It's not the kind of book where that would be useful, and even the question of what order to tell things in would be fraught. But this is a big, funny, sad, true book, both mournful and joyful, that ends on a perfect note and is told beautifully in a glorious voice. I can easily see how it won an award, and I can easily see the strengths Atkinson brought to the later novels I've already read. As long as you accept that women's stories are worth telling, and telling well, in a literary novel - I don't think that should be controversial, but there are still troglodytes lurking here and there - this is a major, impressive, wonderful one.
"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.
This week the song is Medicine, a great rousing tune by Alex Winston, off her great 2012 record King Con, which is full of great music top-to-bottom and should be much better known than it is. (Looks like she finally had a second record earlier this year: I'll have to check it out.)
Yes, I used "great" three times in one sentence. It's allowed when it's true.
I get a feminist, don't-push-me-around vibe from a bunch of Winston's songs - mostly wrapped up in great tunes and metaphors and quirky ideas - and this is definitely one of them:
I won't take my medicine
I won't settle my debts, no
Sell your house
Sell your kids
Don't settle for less no uh oh
This one has a happy, positive vibe - a handclappy slow syncopated rhythm with light instrumentation for the verses, a bigger punchy sound swelling up for the chorus. It feels like a traveling song, like Winston and her band are skipping down the lane somewhere, calling out to the locals and dragging a swelling crowd of revelers behind them.
I don't know what it means; the words get tangled and obscure in the verses. But it's crisp and precise and I have a strong feeling Winston knows exactly what she means, what she wants, and where she's going. And that's enough for the song, and for me.
Don't settle for less.
In the Mad Mountains, a reprint collection of H.P. Lovecraft-inspired stories by Joe R. Lansdale. It has eight stories that originally appeared - mostly in anthologies, mostly from small presses - between 2009 and 2015, and the titles look varied and obscure enough that probably only the very most passionate Lansdale fans would have all of those books.
This book, on the other hand, is a new trade paperback, from Tachyon Publications, available wherever books are sold at a very reasonable price. It was published in October, the traditional time for spooky stories.
I personally have not read much Lansdale, and keep thinking I should. So having this on the shelf will be a good inducement - that may work for you as well.
To relocate the scent, good hounds will run a zigzag, sweeping wide left and right until they pick it up again. I tried this on a street near my office, after a young man passed by in a reek of Axe body spray. I let him turn the corner and disappear from view, then waited a few minutes. By zigzagging hound dog-style, I was able to track him to his destination, a cheesesteak place on the next block.
- Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.128
Julia Gfrörer draws thin lines, mostly all the same width. Her stories are set in the deep European past, told straightforwardly with a cold but not unsympathetic camera-eye. They are about death most of the time, I think.
Laid Waste was her 2016 graphic novel; it followed Black Is the Color, and - if Wikipedia can be trusted - is still her most recent book.
It's set during the plague: probably the 1300s, somewhere in Europe. In an unnamed town, there's a woman named Agnes who seems to be immune to the plague - well, we first see her "die" of it as a baby, and then be pulled out of her grave, so the scientific explanation is that she survived it once and afterward was immune.
There could also be a supernatural explanation. The people in this world are more likely to believe that one. It doesn't comfort them - nothing would comfort them right now, as all the people around them are dying, one by one, painfully and hideously, and the dogs and rats flourish, growing more bold every day.
The dead are all around. We see people die, we see the bodies piled in the churchyard and a ditch. We see the dogs fight over those bodies. We see the survivors - the current survivors; this isn't over yet - continuing with their lives, milking cows and tending crops. Even when the world is ending, they still need to eat.
And we see Agnes at the center of this: strong and capable and healthy. She's holding her older sister when she dies early in the book; she sees other deaths, lugs other bodies. What she's going through is unendurable, we think - but what's the alternative? She is still alive. So many others are dead.
The other main character is Giles, a neighbor. He also seems to be a lucky one, still healthy as we see him. But death strikes his family as well: no one in this village is untouched, not the children, not the plague doctor with his pointy mask.
Agnes and Giles connect: I'll call it that. Cling to each other, I suppose, as two of the few people healthy enough to keep things going. As the ones who have to keep things going, until they fall themselves.
Agnes and Giles, and the rest of their village, believe in the supernatural - Death personified, saints and angels. They see and talk about that; it may be "real" in the world of the story, but it's not nice and it's not comforting. This is a hard world, full of death and woe, and no one talks about the joys of the afterlife, seeing their friends and family die in pain.
Laid Waste is a short book: about eighty pages, covering just a few days. It looks unflinchingly at this world of death and sadness, and we see it through the eyes of the inhabitants. It is powerful and chilly and unnerving and, maybe, with just a tiny bit of hope at the end. (If I had titles for these posts, this one would be "Let Me Walk You Home.")
There are exceptions, of course - what we might call "poor-me" memoirs, for example, that are all about wallowing in the horrible things the creator did. Even there, it's firmly past-tense, with the focus firmly on "look how brave and honest I am to tell you the horrible things I did; I'm clearly a really good person now."
New Life doesn't venture that far, but writer and main character Xavier Betaucort is remarkably comfortable depicting himself as deeply self-centered and grumpy. (The art is by Yannick Marchat, who draws Betaucort subtly differently from other characters - he has a shock of white hair, which is thematically important, and Tintin-esque oval eyes, deep wells of light blue, unlike the more realistic eyes of other characters.)
It starts with a mid-life crisis. Betaucort isn't quite this blunt, but the version of him in the book is unhappy in his marriage and unhappy in his job. So he quits the job for the freelance life, and quits the marriage to start playing the field. The ex-wife gets barely any dialogue and no name, and the break-up, as presented, is all on his side - he's sick of it, he moves out, and it's done.
Soon afterward, forty-eight-year-old Betaucort - one major running thread throughout the book is his age; he has a brother who just died and he's feeling the "less life ahead than behind" so common in late middle age - meets Lea, and starts a new relationship. (She seems to be a fan; he meets her during a signing - this would be a potential red flag in a more serious, comprehensive book.)
Lea is slightly younger - just forty - and the two start building a life together, slightly hampered by the fact that Betaucort lives a couple of hours away from Lea, and apparently (being a freelancer now) can't just move to where she is. Lea has no children, and has been told by her gynecologist that she can't have children; she's accepting of that.
And Betaucort thinks of that part of his life as done, and is happy that way: he had one kid, the kid is now grown-up, mission accomplished.
But New Life is about an "oops." Lea does get pregnant, it is a healthy viable fetus, and this is the story of the nine months of turmoil and change, mostly about Betaucort acting out all of his mixed emotions until, finally, at the very end, the baby is born.
Again, Betaucort comes across as somewhat of a jerk. During the "late but not confirmed" early section, he muses how they've talked about children, but it's "a complicated issue, given my age."
Let me reiterate that Lea is forty. If anyone's age is an issue in a pregnancy, it would be hers. I can't tell if Betaucort never thought about that (or cared) in his actual life, or if he's presenting himself that way because the book is entirely about his ambivalence, but the character of Betaucort has some pretty major blinders on, and this is not the story of how he takes them off. Lea never pushes back much against Betaucort's neurotic worries and passive-aggressive attacks - she comes across as the perfect supportive spouse, magically fertile and endlessly patient while this guy figures out what he wants.
I did find this Betaucort to be a bit of a jerk, and I hope the real-world Betaucort actually loves his new girlfriend more than he shows his semi-fictional avatar to do. But it makes a better story this way, so whatever qualms I may have about him as a human being, he more than makes up for as a comics creator. Since I'm very unlikely to ever meet him in person, cynical and self-centered me is happy that he prioritizes the things that make his books better, and I entirely approve.
I was a long-time Hellboy fan who lost the thread when the two major stories basically "ended" - Hellboy himself died and went to hell, his former organization the B.P.R.D. failed to stop a couple of major supernatural apocalypses and the fictional world was plunged into megadeath and chaos - and also, maybe about the time we learned various sordid details of the working life of long-time editor and sometime cowriter Scott Allie. But even if the main stories ended, that doesn't mean comics stopped appearing, since companies in the business of publishing comics gotta publish comics, and they tend to want to keep doing the ones that sell well and make money. So there's been a flurry of what seem to me secondary and odder Hellboy-universe books over the past five years or so, including Hellboy in Love.
At the same time, I randomly rediscovered Jesse Lonergan. I'd read a couple of his creator-owned books a decade ago, including All-Star, thinking he told good stories and had an attractive flexible drawing style. And then I came back to his work this year with Hedra and Planet Paradise, two interesting but unrelated SF stories from 2020.
So, when I realized that Hellboy creator Mike Mignola wrote and Lonergan drew a four-issue Hellboy-universe story last year - which was collected as Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea in January - I thought that I might as well read that book, too.
It's set in one - well, two; I'll get to that - of the quirkier niches of this particular fantasy universe. You see, ages ago, before the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars...and so on. Yes, Conan's Hyborian age, with only a slight shift in spelling, took place in Hellboy's world as well.
Both Howard and Mignola are very fond of evil snake gods, so it works pretty well. (There's one here, of course.)
Anyway, we don't start there. The titular Miss Truesdale is a London-based follower of a secret society, the Heliotropic Brotherhood of Ra, in the Victorian era, and is in Paris to meet the organization's head, Tefnut Trionus, when the book opens. Teffie - no one calls her Teffie but me - gives a portentous speech to Miss Truesdale (who does not seem to have a first name), all about how they are both reincarnations of women who were around in the last days of the ancient Hyperborean empire. (Teffie is also the reincarnation of Eugene Remy, the founder of the Brotherhood, which is why she's the figurehead leader now. Souls are valuable; you gotta re-use them as much as you can.)
All those thousands of years ago - after the drowning of Atlantis and so forth - Miss Truesdale was the doughty warrior Anum Yassa, a powerful woman with a gigantic hammer-axe thing she used to win glory in the inevitable gladiatorial combats she was thrown into after she was captured as a slave by the obligatory evil and cruel overlords of the empire. And Teffie - again, only I call her that - was the new slave girl who warned Anum Yassa that said evil and cruel overlords were going to have her quietly murdered because, of course, she had gotten Too Popular With the Groundlings, and Threatened The Established Powers by being so good and honest and true while killing other slaves with a big hammer-axe thing.
There is a snake god behind those evil and cruel overlords, and Anum Yassa will eventually get a chance to whack it with her hammer-axe thing. But first! She has to escape, fight various pursuers, muse on the fickleness of fate, and do all of the other standard Conan-style bits of business.
That's about half of the book - the more exciting and fun parts. We also see Miss Truesdale, mostly after having returned to London and falling into a swoon or coma as she relives Anum Yassa's life (or is thrust back in time to live it for the first time? I'm not clear on how time in general, reincarnation, or mental time-travel works in this universe). Anyway, it's the standard "collapse on the bare floor of your tiny cubicle, behind a locked door" thing, with her Brotherhood compatriots first worrying about her and then breaking down the door to offer her succor during the strange episode they do not ken.
(You may notice that, while I enjoyed every bit of Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea, I didn't take any of those bits at all seriously. Your mileage may vary.)
Lonergan, here with colors by Clem Robins, is a bit more energetic in his art than I've seen him before, to fit the tone of this story. He does fine Mignola-esque monsters and evil men, and gets the required dynamism into his layouts as well. (Books about whacking people with giant hammer-axe things need to be zippy and full of action.) I find the whole thing just a little bit silly, frankly, but it's the fun kind of silly.
This was a five-issue series in 2018, collected in one book early in 2019. It's mature Chaykin - maybe even somewhat mellowed and ruminative Chaykin - with a complicated structure that becomes repetitious but firecracker Chaykin dialogue and great Chaykin faces and figures (and he's back in the mid-20th century, so he can draw leggy dames in tight dresses and dapper fellas in double-breasted suits a lot of the time).
It's one of those projects where all of the pieces are done well but you start to wonder: both what the point of the whole exercise was, and if doing it this way was a good idea.
Chaykin has an afterword where he insists that he really did fictionalize more than you, the reader, thinks. And that may be true for the central characters - I'll get to them in a minute - but the background details are all entirely on-the-nose and obvious to anyone with even a vague knowledge of the real history. Yankee Comics is DC; Verve is Marvel. Bob Rose and Sid Mitchell are Stan and Jack. Ron Fogel is Bob Kane; Siegel and Shuster are Irwin Glaser and Ira Gelbart. Dan Fleisher is Will Eisner. We see covers of the comics from this fictional world, with Powerhouse (Superman) and the Astonishing Tarantulad (guess) and Our Pal Percy! (teen humor a la Archie, down to the red hair).
Admittedly, Chaykin is telling a story of three composite characters - Black Ted Whitman, woman Benita Heindel, and Jewish Ray Clark, to be really reductive about it. Ted, Benita and Ray are friends, in as much as we see them being friendly to each other, and we follow them through the ups and downs of the comics industry from WWII through their own deaths in the early 21st century. But the point is to cram in references to as many scandals and events and market changes as possible, so they stay pretty much Everypeople, each with a couple of easily signposted traits (mostly their identities) and different career paths so that Chaykin can have scenes in all of the permutations of the comics industry.
So let me get to that structure. Chaykin opens in 1967, with the Broadway debut of a musical which is his fictional version of It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman. And it ends in 1939 with Siegel and Shuster Glaser and Gelbart excitedly signing the contract that doomed the entire industry to focus on long-johns characters owned by big corporations. There's also a scene somewhere in the middle set in 2015.
But, otherwise, and overwhelmingly, each of the five issues is made up for four long scenes: 1945, 1955, 1965, and 2001.
In 1945, the war has just ended, and the industry is shrinking. Work is hard to get for the GIs coming back and trying to jump back into their drawing careers. Crooks and more traditionally shady (I'm not saying "Jewish," Chaykin isn't exactly saying "Jewish," but some of his characters are comfortable being that bigoted) business types dominate the companies that have work available.
In 1955, things are getting bad again, after a minor boom in the in-between years. Seduction of the Innocent and the related moral panic is happening, exactly as in the real world, and the comics industry is once again contracting.
In 1965, Marvel Verve is booming, with Bob Ross making speeches on college campuses and its line expanding. Ross is of course minimizing the contributions of his major collaborator Sid Mitchell, and is a mildly slimy glad-hander at best to boot. The gang is scattered, doing different things, to show the depth of the industry - advertising, the Eisner Fleisher comics-for-the-government operation, Bob Kane's Ron Fogel's crappy animation studio, and so on.
In 2001, we mostly see funerals, because everyone is old. Ted, Benita, and Ray show up to all of these, mostly, as they say, to make sure the bastards really are dead. The eulogies are contrasted with their pointed whispered remarks to each other of what the dead men really were like.
All five issues follow that structure. They have slightly different focuses - I think Chaykin would say that each issue has a very different central theme, to be honest, but I didn't think that was a distinction with a difference - but in practice, reading this as a single volume, it's basically the same thing five times in a row.
Chaykin has never been a particularly subtle maker of comics: you don't come away from his stories wondering what his point was. And he's been fond of formal structures before - Hey Kids! Comics! is very Chaykin-esque, both in tone and style, and will bring a lot of enjoyment to any Chaykin fans who missed it the first time around. But, like a lot of Chaykin stories, it's overly complicated - this time structurally - and spends a lot of time saying the same things over and over again.
"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.
It's another obscure one this week, a song I loved but know essentially nothing about the singer and band. But that's the way of the world, isn't it? There are billions of people, living their lives and doing things - some of them make art, some of that art is breathtaking, but only a subset of even the breathtaking stuff will stick with a larger audience. Not to be a Pollyanna, but it's a vast ocean of wonders.
Anyway, the song this week is C'mon Baby Say Bang Bang, a quiet smoky tune sung in an undertone, from a band called Jane Vain and the Dark Matter. According to a quick Wikipedia check, they're supposedly still active, but haven't had a new record since 2010. And the band was, or maybe still is, mostly one person: Jaime Fooks, originally from Calgary but residing in Montreal the last time someone updated the page.
It's a dark song, full of elusive lyrics, with a late-night sound.
let’s stay up all night and figure
whose guns are bigger
you can put yours right between my eyes honey
if you promise to pull the trigger
It's all a metaphor, of course. She's not singing about a real gun. Absolutely. Not a chance. Entirely about shallow party people trying to one-up each other with their clever remarks. Nothing else.
Right?
Here's what I read last month. Links will follow once the posts go live.
Asher Perlman, Well, This Is Me (11/2, digital)
P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (11/2)
Tony Lourenço, Thierry Lamy, and various artists, Pink Floyd in Comics (11/3, digital)
Elias Grieg, I Can't Remember the Title But the Cover Is Blue (11/9, digital)
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two (11/10, digital)
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (11/10, in Complete Novels)
Ryan Harby, Awkward Pause (11/16, digital)
Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag (11/16)
Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Moebius Library: The Art of Edena (11/17, digital)
Olivia Jaimes, Nancy Wins at Friendship (11/22, digital)
Axelle Lenoir, Camp Spirit (11/23, digital)
Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (11/23)
Sarah Andersen, Adulthood Is a Gift! (11/24, digital)
Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 1 (11/28, digital)
Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid (11/29, digital)
Julian Hanshaw, Space Junk (11/30, digital)
Reading will continue as long as I'm physically capable.
Gersen boarded the bus, which suddenly lurched into motion. The border station under the sprawling blue linglang was left behind. The landscape was now that of Maunish, different from that of Lelander, whether by reason of psychic shift or immanent character or altered references Gersen, who had experienced such shifts many times before, had no way of knowing. The country seemed bigger, the sky more open. In a new clarity of atmosphere the horizons seemed both far and near, in a curious visual paradox. Along the plain trees grew in private clusters and copses, each to its own kind: ginsaps, orpoons, linglangs, flamboys; the shadows below were a dense darkling black which seemed to glimmer with a strange rich color without a name. The farmhouses were both less frequent and older; high and narrow for no obvious reason and set far back from the road in jealous seclusion.... The country became softer. The bus rolled through orchards with black trunks and effulgent pink of yellow foliage, across brimming rivers, through hamlets, and at last into Cloutie, to halt in the central square.
- Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams, p.304 in The Demon Princes, Volume 2
In the mid-80s, Donald E. Westlake, a bestseller of humorous mysteries under his own name and a respected writer of dark thrillers as Richard Stark and an occasional screenwriter and a writer doing other mystery-adjacent books of varying levels of seriousness, like Kahawa and High Adventure, decided he wanted to see if he could be yet another successful writer. (His Wikipedia page has a long list of his pseudonyms - admittedly, a lot of them are because he came up in the soft-porn world of the late '50s and early '60s, where fake names ran like water, but Westlake had more pseudonyms in his mature career than any other three writers.)
So he invented "Samuel Holt" - the credited author and first-person narrator of what turned into a four-book series. Holt was a former cop turned TV detective, made rich enough not to have to work by five years as Jack Packard and completely typecast so that he can't get any other acting work afterward. Holt stumbles into various mysteries, and, of course, solves them. The series was supposed to be completely separate from Westlake, but, of course, his publisher's salesforce used the Westlake connection to get bookstores to buy the books, which ended up souring Westlake on the whole project.
This time around, I'm noticing that Westlake set up each book to be a somewhat different sub-genre in the larger mystery/thriller area. The first book was an thriller of international intrigue, the second a hardboiled mystery, and this third one is a locked-room cozy. Westlake was always an inventive and quirky writer, but I wonder if he really thought he'd be able to keep that up, and keep finding new sub-genres, if he'd kept it going.
What I Tell You Three Times Is False sees Holt travel to a remote Latin American island, to film a short film for the American Cancer Society, alongside other typecast actors playing Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple. They arrive as a major storm is blowing up, and the roughly dozen people on the island - hosts/producers, the director, a few staffers, the actors and their significant others - are thrown into a panic when the deaths start.
The four "detectives" try to solve the case, more or less - one of them more than the others at first, and, no, it's not our hero - and it does all lead up to a scene with the surviving characters in a drawing room, as the dramatically-revealed evidence j'accuses the guilty party.
I'm not normally a reader of locked-room mysteries or cozies; they've always seemed artificial to me - or maybe I prefer different flavors of artificiality, I should say, since I do like funny-Westlake, which has nothing natural about it at all. This seems to be a solid example of the form, mostly played straight, by a deeply professional and always-entertaining writer - but it's also buried in a mostly-forgotten, very secondary series under an assumed name. So I think it's mostly for fanatic Westlake fans at this point, or maybe people who really like locked-room stories.
In case you came in late: this is the fourth book in a six-book series (all originally published in the Aughts, and reissued a few years later in the current editions with colors by Nathan Fairbairn), all about a Toronto slacker (the Scott Pilgrim of the title) in a comics world with manga-inspired art and Street Fighter-inspired conflict-resolution methods. In the first book, he met cute, mysterious American deliverator Ramona Flowers, and fell for her. They're now dating, but she warned him, up front, that to keep dating her, he will have to fight and defeat her seven evil exes.
This is the premise of the series, so we don't want to question it. It also seems to be fairly reasonable to Scott and his friends - of course, you're going to have a few choreographed boss fights at the beginning of a new relationship; that's just understood.
So Scott defeated Matthew Patel in Precious Little Life, Lucas Lee in Vs. the World, and Todd Ingram in The Infinite Sadness. There has been some minor relationship turmoil along the way: Scott makes diffidence and distractedness into a lifestyle, and Ramona likes playing the Secretive Secret Woman With Many Secrets a bit too much.
And that brings us to Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, in which, yes, actually, he does.
Scott uses the "l-word" - no, not "lesbian," but I'll get to that. This leads to the aforementioned level-up, which he needs to fight Evil Ex #4, since this particular level-up - O'Malley wisely doesn't tell us what level Scott is, or his stats, just the changes - comes with The Power of Love, which is, as it must be, a sword with a handle that looks like either a heart or Scott's balls, depending.
Scott, even before that, gets an actual daytime job - and fights to keep it when his fighting-exes life spills into that workplace.
Scott's band is recording a record, after drummer Kim Pine moves to a new house with new roommates, including a guy with a home studio. This may not seem like "getting it together" as much, but it's clear Scott has at least vaguely formed ideas of where the band should go and a somewhat-surprising work ethic ("why aren't we practicing?" "why aren't we playing shows?") at least when it comes to the band. And that is mildly surprising; Scott previously had been defined mostly by not caring about things or noticing the world about him.
And, most importantly, this is the Lesbian Book. There's a minor background make-out session I won't spoil - I don't remember if it leads into anything in the last two books, so I might need to come back to it - and, more centrally, we learn that Ramona had a thing with her college roommate, Roxanne Richter. Which means that the "half-ninja" Roxie, and her sword, are Evil Ex #4, and Scott will need to fight a girl before the book can end.
(There's another person with a sword chasing Scott around earlier in the book, for a different reason. Scott may be conflict-avoidant and a world-class slacker, but he also generates drama around him almost without trying to.)
Also in the Getting It Together mix: Lisa Miller, a high school friend of Scott's who had a crush on him (then and now) is in town, hanging out with Scott and flirting so much he almost notices. This makes Ramona jealous. Meanwhile, Roxy is staying with Ramona on her own visit to Toronto, which makes Scott jealous. Scott and his roommate Wallace Wells are getting kicked out of their horrible basement apartment, and Wallace semi-secretly wants to move in with his new boyfriend but doesn't want to "dump" Scott.
That all comes together in Scott's l-word announcement at the climax of Gets It Together, after which Scott can battle Roxie and, of course, defeat her.
So he and Ramona have a slightly stronger relationship, and are mostly happy - although she does mention that her next ex is actually twins.
(I may as well throw this in here, since it's been rolling around my head: I kinda want O'Malley to do a middle-aged follow-up, with a different cast. I really want to see what a new relationship, and evil-ex-fighting, looks like for a fifty-ish person with, say, two failed marriages, four or five other major relationships, a few short-term fuck buddies, and who knows how many random hookups in their past. I think it would either be a forty-volume epic or a ten-page comedy piece.)
As before, O'Malley has a masterful control of tone and material here - he's pulling together quirky, disparate elements but has a clear overall vision of how his world works and how his people interact, which is always compelling and true. This whole series is one of the best comics of the new century, and is holding up well as it hits its twentieth anniversary.
I have been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am done.
Where other authors would be triumphant, Vance instead shows us the deflation of his hero, a man who focused his entire adult life on one thing...and has now done that, so there's nothing left. I thought that was interesting when I first read The Book of Dreams as a teenager, and it's fascinating now as an older man.
That melancholy, that lurking worry behind the drive for revenge, was an undertone in the first four books on the Demon Princes series - The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, and The Face - and is still an undertone here, though closer and closer to the surface until that last sentence.
Kirth Gersen survived an assault and massacre in his youth: the settlement Mount Pleasant, on a remote bucolic planet a thousand or so years in the future, in a human-dominated galaxy, was attacked by a group of gang leaders calling themselves the Demon Princes. The five Princes each led large criminal organizations, trafficking in slaves and drugs and other illegal things in the wild stars Beyond the civilized worlds ruled by law, and they came together for this one massive operation. Gersen and his grandfather were among the very few to escape; his grandfather spirited the two away to old Earth, where the young Gersen was trained up to be an instrument of vengeance, to eventually find and kill all five of the Princes.
The series of books that bear their collective name starts when Gersen is about thirty, and cover a few years of time - how much isn't clear. Maybe two years, maybe five. Not much more than that.
And The Book of Dreams is the last. As it opens, there's only one Demon Prince left.
The Princes were never close associates, though. The reader gets the sense that Mount Pleasant was a quirky one-off. They didn't work together any other time, and they don't care - or possibly even notice; there's no sign in the series that Gersen's destruction of earlier Princes is known to them or society at large - that someone is hunting them.
The last one is Howard Alan Treesong, who organized the group to take Mount Pleasant. It would be a cliché to say he was the worst, the most megalomaniacal. And not really true: each Prince, as Vance made clear throughout the series, is uniquely horrible in a different way. Treesong is a schemer, who desires power. He's also - Vance doesn't underline this, but makes it clear - possessed of, or possessed by multiple personalities, who seem to mostly do what the core Treesong wants but with their own separate whims and manias. He's mercurial, changing, many men in one.
And, as this book goes on, Gersen learns Treesong had two major plots recently - one of which Gersen foils in the novel - to take over two of the political and social pillars of the human universe. If Treesong had succeeded, he would have been not just a Demon Prince, but something like emperor of all humanity.
As in the last two books, Gersen uses his pose as Henry Lucas, special writer for a major galactic magazine - which Gersen secretly owns - as a way to lure his quarry out of hiding. A picture supposedly showing Treesong in a group of people comes into his possession, almost randomly, from the magazine's archives. And Gersen-as-Lucas launches a massive contest to identify all of the people in the phot, which, as expected, attracts Treesong's attention.
As in the other books, there's a fair bit of cat-and-mouse, as Gersen tries to keep his interest secret and to ferret out Treesong, and Treesong uses agents to get closer to the contest and find out who is investigating him.
We know how it ends. We know how it must end. This is a five-book series about revenge, and that means Gersen will kill Treesong in the end, and be finally free.
Or "done," as he puts it. Whether that's done like a necessary task, or like a steak, is up to the reader to decide.
(Consumer Note: I read the whole series in the two-volume Tor omnibus editions - Volume 1 has the first three books and Volume 2 the last two. Above, I've linked the current single-volume edition, from the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. Either one would be a decent choice; these books are also available used fairly easily.)
And these are clearly still comics originally aimed at a younger audience: there are many indications, but one of the most subtle and telling is that the year begins in "Fall." For kids, that is when a year begins.
Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For All Seasons has just about a hundred comics pages - say twenty-ish for each season, plus some half-titles - and the gags are along the same lines as the first book, which I read earlier this year.
Philippe Coudray's art is charming in that old reliable style, with backgrounds a bit more detailed than the relatively simple, straightforward figures, all held together by strong, confident lines. And his gags are a little smarter and quirkier, often relying on odd bits of cartoon physics or changes in perspective, than one might expect.
I did a little exploring, after reading this book, to see if Coudray had made comics for adults as well - when you enjoy one book by a creator, it could be a fluke, but two is a good basis for confidence - and I see that this fellow is named "Barnabé" in his homeland. Also, some of his stories were translated earlier as "Benjamin" Bear - looks like there were a couple of short volumes from Toon Books. So I wasn't successful in finding anything Coudray made for people my age translated into English - he seems to have mostly spent his career working for younger readers, and mostly had parts of this series translated - but if your knee-biters are looking for more Bigby, they might be pleased to find Benjamin.
And they probably will, if they have taste: these are fun little moments in an engaging style, pitched at the kind of smart, inquisitive elementary-schoolers who want to know the why of everything and delight in seeing problems solved in quirky cartoon ways.
"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.
When does a gimmick start being just the way this band operates? Or is there really any difference?
Tilly and the Wall was a band with a gimmick: their rhythm section was a tap-dancer, Jamie Pressnall. (They eventually got a drummer, too, but Pressnall was still a major piece of the band's sound, giving a rat-a-tat, staccato rhythm to a lot of their best songs.)
They had a decent career for a decade or more, including this song, which I loved when it came out on their 2008 record O and still love now: Pot Kettle Black.
It is a snarky, mean song, calling out an unnamed person in a very catty way - whoever they're singing about clearly had an acid tongue:
Pot kettle, pot kettle black
Talk that, talk that smack
This is not a song with a deep meaning. You don't need to explicate it. It's Lyin' Ass Bitch - slightly slower, different rhythm, same energy - for a new generation. (And now I feel old, because both of those generations are solidly in the past.)
But it's stompy and it's gnarly and it's a hell of a lot of fun, with that great rat-a-tat rhythm that's like no other band's songs. And that's what great music is all about: songs that are purely themselves, giving you something you don't find anywhere else.
