Nineteenth Anniversary Post

Today is the anniversary of Antick Musings! I first posted on this day in 2005; that first post is very tentative and pointless.

In the heady first decade of this blog, I pulled out all the stops for the big anniversary post every October 4th, with long lists of links and pointless statistics that I don't think any of you actually read or cared about. More recently, I've forgotten to do the post entirely about half the time, and have (this may be psychologically important) missed or bobbled all of the round-number anniversaries - five, ten, and fifteen.

This year, this anniversary post will probably turn into something - I'm starting it over a month ahead of time, so with luck I won't forget it - but I make no promises.

History of the Blog: Links to Links

First, though, let me link to the past installments of this annual post: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. and seventeenth.
Each of those is itself mostly a list of links, making this section the most purely blog-like thing I do regularly. (Remember: I started off in this world writing the SFBC's blog, which was a major link-fest, like so many things of that era. We spent our time pointing to things, and we were happy to do it!)

I usually try to explain that history or origin in more detail here, so maybe one or two more sentences: I started Antick Musings as practice, since the book-club company I worked for was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the SFBC. That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times and has continued to...let me be kind and say "transform;" I think a few people I knew still work there - so the fact that my personal blog has kept going, even in so ramshackle a state, is a testament to something, I suppose.

Anyway, this was...not an afterthought, but definitely not meant to be a specific thing. It turned into a book blog, which was the one thing I was absolutely sure in 2005 it would not be; I read and edited books for a day-job, so touching that more than very, very lightly here would have been a bad idea.

Such are the dreams of our youth.

I will also point out here that I'm still using the template I picked, nineteen years ago. It's not currently available in the Blogger console, and it's probably broken in at least a few ways - the blogroll, in particular, has not been touched in the slightest since about Year Three. But every time I look at the array of possible Blogger templates, I hate all of them and find them all ugly and generic. If I had a lot of energy and time (and a willingness to spend money of it), I'd port the whole thing to WordPress, refurbish from top to bottom, and have something that looked nice.

That will never happen.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

I've consistently thrown into this annual post my one random metric: the number of posts each year. It means essentially nothing, but it's a tradition, and nineteen years later, traditions are pretty much all I have. So here goes:

• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I had another blog for a couple of years about a decade ago - Editorial Explanations, where I made fun of editorial cartoons at pretty much exactly the point when they began their own extinction event. I enjoyed doing it until I didn't, and then I stopped. It was a long time ago, and it doesn't matter now, so I've stopped adding them in to the blog-post totals. That blog itself is still available for anyone with an interest in decade-old political bullshit. (I will note that bullshit of that era feels almost quaint and homey these days.)

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

As I said above, this turned into a book-blog after I lost my editorial job - and I did wonder, years later, if my opinions here did contribute, in some small way, to my never getting another editorial job despite trying off and on for a few years. (Probably not: it's a ferociously competitive field, and almost impossible to get back on the horse once you fall off.) 

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

It's not very long, it's funny on every page, and it's true in ways that will sour bad books for you forever - which is a good thing, since who wants to waste time on bad books?

Those are the things that are assumed to be central to an American identity: what's on the left side of the "something-American" hyphen?

The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment - a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

And if you're looking for a comic strip way more centrally about cannibalism than you suspected was possible, it's really your only choice.

I really like how cartoonists are no longer tied down to linear time. In the bad old days, a comics story might have a flashback - one big one, with huge caption boxes and every other signpost the creators could think of - but that was about it; the audience was assumed to be too young and/or unsophisticated to handle complicated transitions.

Ackroyd is faithful to the religious tone of Mallory's original: they all praise God a lot and are firmly convinced that beating someone up in a joust proves that you're true and righteous, which is a comforting thing for bullies and the strong to believe in all ages.

Reader, there is nothing here you will not predict, nothing that gives a true moment of surprise or wonder, nothing that isn't entirely derivative and utterly pre-determined. This is a piece of product, an engineered jigsaw puzzle piece that slots in exactly in the middle of all of the other pieces to make a bland picture of people punching each other.

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

Bagge's worlds are full of mildly updated '50s gender-essentialism: men are hot-headed and often physically violent, because They Are Men and the World Is Frustrating. Sometimes they are divided into the smart ones (effete, tentative, too weak for this world, typically wearing glasses) and the strong ones (stupid as a post, addicted to incredibly counterproductive ideas, full of zeal and energy for all the wrong things, typically wearing mullets).

You might say, "that's a mighty big topic to cover in one l'il 200-page book, now, isn't it, pardner?" (If you weren't pretending to be a cowboy, you might use different phrasing, admittedly.)

But you would think that a class of people who are often annoyed by the "where do you get your ideas?" question would be somewhat more reticent to spin complex tales of "here's how this guy got his ideas." You would think, but you would be wrong, because it happens a lot.

Today, I have a book that kicks that door open, rips it off its hinges, chops it up for firewood, burns it down, dances on the ashes, and then falls over, awkwardly, to get bruised and covered with schmutz.

The creator is Zerocalcare - apparently, that was the jingle for a cleaning product, which the guy named Michele Rech started using as an online handle and then just kept using when he started making comics. (As someone with a blog and other social accounts under the name "G.B.H. Hornswoggler," I understand the impulse.)

So this is a book about, mostly, crazy optimists who are mostly in their mid-twenties, mostly have never failed at anything in their lives, and mostly have never seen a problem they couldn't just solve by working harder. 

There might be some element of the "British phrases help sell humorous SFF to Americans" engine working here - people like me who have read a lot of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are prone to think phrases like "luck's not a wheelbarrow; you don't want to push it" are interesting and quirky rather than (as Brits I suppose might) some dull thing Uncle Rupert says every damn day.

But one weird thing about getting older is that I find it's easier to see creators at different points in their lives - that parallax of my own life making it clearer that this is a young man's book and that is from the older version.

The whole point is that people can't take it, of course. They collapse, drop out. You can't have an elimination competition without eliminating people.

It must be nice to be a world-famous and -popular writer. You can get nice little additional revenue streams from normal life stuff such as "owning a lot of T-shirts" and "talking to a guy from a magazine."

What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm.

A baby is a wrinkled, red-faced, crying lump, capable only of wanting things. That's not inherently lovable.

Just so you know: I wouldn't pay attention to me about superhero comics. If I wasn't already me, I mean.

When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest."

But that's always the way: no one is as radical as they think they are, no one is as fearless at confronting their real flaws as they want to believe.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I do, occasionally, post about other things. This year and last, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays - I like music, though I think I write about it substantially more awkwardly and less well than I do about books, so I try to keep my illusions very minor.

When I get new books - however I get them, after some waffling about tags and titles a few years back - I post a list here under Reviewing the Mail, a title I stole from Chuck Klosterman. I don't claim to do that quickly - lately I tend to take bigger book-shopping lists and break them over multiple weeks - but I do it, eventually.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and whatever Sunday is closest to Independence Day.)

But...that was pretty much it. I'm still, a decade later, surprised that my absolutely-no-chance-it-will-turn-into-a-book-blog did exactly that, but there's a limit to how surprised anyone can be by the same thing over an extended period of time. It is what it is.

Valediction

That's it. Year Nineteen is now over, and I guess I'm into Year Twenty. If I keep to form, you won't have to worry about a post like this next year, and then I'll be back at the end of Year Twenty-One with a weird apology. Or maybe noticing the pattern will stop it?

Who knows. I hope the self-indulgent things you do are equally fulfilling to you, now and into the future. Now go forth and read somebody else's blog.

Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein

The hardest books to write about are the ones you mostly like but think they have something centrally not right about them. Those are the books that make the editor's pen itch, that start the mind to composing an editorial letter about potential rewrites - and that's really not useful to anyone, especially in reference to a book published five years ago. 

I'll try to mostly avoid that urge, as much as I can. Maybe I should just say, up front, that Ivory Apples is an interesting, compelling contemporary fantasy novel from Lisa Goldstein, but that its main action takes place over about a decade, with the passage of time not always clearly signposted (or important in the ways I wanted it to be). I wished for a book with a bit more structure - maybe three parts for Before, During, and After; maybe something different - and a bit more clarity and attention paid to the passage of time. Ivory Apples instead just rolls on, chapter after chapter in sequence, one day or scene after the last. There's nothing wrong with any of that: it just felt like there was a more precise, pointed book lurking just underneath, that almost came to be.

The first-person narrator is Ivy Quinn, oldest of the four daughters of engineering professor Philip, in Eugene, Oregon. Her sisters - each two years apart - are Beatriz, Amaranth, and Semiramis; their mother Jane died when Semiramis was born. It starts in 1999, when Ivy is eleven.

The family has a big secret: their "Great Aunt Maeve," who lives in a house far out in the countryside a couple of hours away and who they see about once a month, is actually the famous and reclusive author Adela Madden, who wrote a book called Ivory Apples. Think a fantasy analog of Catcher in the Rye, for the cultural importance and continuing sales, and that's about right - with the caveat that Madden is much more comprehensively hidden than Salinger ever was, even with a dedicated fanbase continuously researching the book and making theories and searching for any proof that Madden is still alive, somewhere.

Madden's Ivory Apples was published sometime in the late 1950s, about forty years ago as Goldstein's Ivory Apples begins. Maeve herself is old, Ivy thinks, but the narrative doesn't make it clear how old. She's got to be at the very least mid-sixties, but she's slow and muddled in her thinking, which makes her seem substantially older than that.

Philip handles Maeve's correspondence and finances, all of her communications with the outside world, and the girls are sworn to secrecy about their Great-Aunt - it's possibly the most important thing in their lives, keeping this secret.

On one trip to visit Maeve, Ivy wanders off, into a strange grove, and meets a group of odd beings cavorting there. One of them "slams into her," somehow going into her body and taking up residence there. She can't get him to leave, and the quick conversation she can have with Maeve is unhelpful. (This bit is closer to horror than the book's tone for these creatures later; there are multiple odd tone shifts like this throughout.)

Ivy eventually names the entity Piper, after Maeve gives her a bunch of mostly-folklore books to read and continues mostly being unhelpful about what happened to her. Substantially later, Ivy learns that Piper is a muse - like the ancient Greek ones, and in fact descended from them - who live in groves scattered about the globe and sometimes bond with humans who come to seek them, giving creative insights to their chosen ones. Adela Madden was the host of a muse, for example, and - tediously; I always hate when books do "here's the secret magical explanation for human creativity" bullshit like this - so were probably every famous creative person you've ever heard of.

That's one of the two main elements driving the plot; the other is much darker.

Later that year, when they're all back in Eugene, a woman named Kate Burden - that name is just a little too on-the-nose, I'm afraid - "serendipitously" meets the four girls in a local park and befriends them.  She is low-key obsessed with Adela Madden and Ivory Apples, Ivy realizes. Over time, she gets invited to their house and meets Philip. (This is one of the sections where time passing is a bit vague - again, the book covers nine or ten years, not always cleanly.)

Ivy is suspicious of Kate from the beginning, but the plot wouldn't work if Kate's plots didn't move forward, so they do: Kate lures Philip to her house on a pretext, and Philip tragically dies in a fall down the basement stairs. And the girls are surprised to learn that Philip has a brand-new will, making Kate the girls' guardian and giving her control of all Philip's assets.

Kate at this point suspects a connection between Philip's family and Adela Madden - in retrospect, it's not quite clear how her "kill Philip, something to do with underpants, profit!" plan was supposed to work - but the secret is still secret. None of the girls talk about Great-Aunt Maeve, apparently Philip had no records of the post-office box that he used for her correspondence or anything else in his actual house, and Kate is frustrated.

For a few years the girls live with an increasingly nasty and vindictive Kate: she seems to know Ivy is the key to finding Adela Madden but - despite some clearly supernatural powers mostly manifesting as creepy noises from the basement - isn't able to bend a twelve-year-old to her will.

Oh, and the clearly-incapable-of-handling-her-own-affairs Maeve somehow muddles through for two or three years in the background. There's a whole lot of "somehow" in the timeline of Ivory Apples.

Anyway, Ivy can resist Kate because she has a muse, and, at about the age of fourteen, runs away, to spend the next two years living on the streets.

Kate becomes even more monstrous in Ivy's absence, but the other three girls never give up Madden, which seems really unlikely. Eventually, Ivy feels guilty and tries to find her sisters, first finding their old house empty and abandoned. More time passes, Ivy meets a sidebar character who also has a muse and provides some background, and eventually saves her sisters from a horrible supernatural warehouse/prison where Kate had them penned up, living entirely within illusions generated by the hordes of muses Kate has captured and controls.

OK, wait: Kate already has what seem to be dozens of muses under her total control, and evil-wizard levels of reality manipulation. The fact that she's still looking for a muse to bond with her, and somehow need to find this particular grove, doesn't actually make sense. I don't think the book ever explains how Kate got all of these muses or the power to control them: she's just evil and monomaniacal and our villain, so of course she has massive powers, and all the magic here comes from muses, so therefore she has a mass of captive muses. But how muses are said to work - and do work for Adela and Ivy and others - is completely different to how Kate uses them, for no stated reason, and no one in the novel seem to even notice.

Anyway, Kate has now achieved the full Evil Wizard package, and is still searching for the girls.

The girls - the younger three fairly traumatized - move in with Great-Aunt Maeve, who is dehydrated and medically shaky, and who they have not seen for...three? four? years at this point, and who somehow took back control of her literary and financial affairs along the way, which she's still completely incapable of doing. Another couple of years passes, with conflict among the girls, until, after a I-want-a-muse-too tantrum, Amaranth runs away.

Ivy hires a private detective to find Amaranth, who went back to Eugene (and got in touch with Kate, of course). Eventually - though I think this is at least six more months later; Ivy is now about nineteen - Kate finds her way to Maeve's secluded house, captures all of them with her evil magic, and sets everything on fire before dragging them all to the grove.

(We're supposed to have some sympathy for Kate, as someone obsessed with her favorite book and with wanting to be creative - in a world where creativity is de facto locked by ancient Greek spirits who choose what humans will be able to create anything worthwhile - but she's so cartoonishly evil, vindictive, and destructive by this point that it would be a rare reader who doesn't just want her to die in some horribly suitable way.)

Kate destroys nearly everything this family ever had: killed their father, trashed their house, ruined their relationships with each other, stole their childhoods, supernaturally tortured them for years, stole their inheritances, and even burns down about half of Maeve's house and does some fire damage to the grove as well. She is finally stopped, and in a state where she won't hurt anyone anymore...but it's not particularly satisfying.

In the end, Ivy is writing poetry - remember, she has a muse, so she's able to be creative, unlike the vast majority of humanity - and the four girls have settled into adult lives that aren't completely horrible. The muses are saved, more or less, but still seem like selfish, arbitrary flittery things that are only worthwhile because, again, there's no creativity without them.

And I might need to revise my earlier note: maybe this is a horror novel. The muses are practically horror even in the best light - they take over people, do whatever the hell they want, and it's hinted they can burn out their hosts. Ivory Apples has a horror-novel ending: a few survivors try to rebuild their lives after everything they cared about was trashed by a malevolent supernatural force.

Ivory Apples has interesting things to say about creativity and obsession, about that One Book that changes your life - but I'm not sure if I can buy the things it says about any of them. And I do think its timeline is too extended, too attenuated: there's a version of this book in some other world, told from the point of view of all four girls (to get the different ages and perspectives) that takes place all within maybe one year. The version we got, though, is gnarly and quirky - for me, more a book to argue with and work through than to love, though I see other readers have loved it.

Superman Isn't Jewish (But I An...Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I'll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that's pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we're being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it's not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel - or bande dessinée, since it's originally from France - is in the "Life Drawn" series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as "Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human" - and, more specifically, Wander Antunes's adaptation of Twain's short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as "Life Drawn" would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only...kinda.

Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father's side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he's happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth - which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn't need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers - and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up - undertones of how much "Jewish" means "Zionist" to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that - but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn't Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don't see a whole lot of Benjamin's young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There's a moment where he's pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn't quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn't make it into Benjamin. But that's the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn't it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet's art - that's a fine thing to have.

In Perpetuity by Peter & Maria Hoey

The Hoey siblings, Peter and Maria, make graphic stories set in worlds ruled by impersonal forces, with events that are just this side of predetermined and characters who have only a small bit of freedom to choose their fates. It's not quite that everything is foreordained: the details might change slightly. But they're still all doomed to suffer what's coming, one way or another.

That fatalism is clearest in their longest works; the very title of The Bend of Luck implies it. And their new book this year, In Perpetuity, offers another view, a slightly different Hoey world, another way that fates can be sealed and main characters trapped forever.

In Perpetuity is set in a classical underworld, with a dark sun and generally sad air. The shades who live there don't eat or drink, but they do smoke cigarettes and otherwise have lives much like those of living people: apartments, jobs, boxy cars filling freeways with congestion at all hours. The ruler of the afterlife is called Hades; by the end of the book we learn that, yes, it's that Hades, an actual person who is the Greek god. (And presumably the other gods are lurking somewhere, though the only other major classical name we meet, or hear referenced, is Persephone.)

We see them in a city, spread out over hills and valleys near a dark sea. There may be more to the Afterlife than this, but it's what these characters know: A.L., the post-life equivalent of Los Angeles. It's implied that the geography of the Afterlife precisely maps onto that of the living world, but this city is the core and center of the Afterlife as we see it - even Hades' mansion is nearby.

There are police in A.L., patrolling everywhere all the time, and everyone reports regularly to their parole officers, to make sure they're following the apparently draconian laws of their new home. Being dead in A.L. is not the worst possible thing; there may be more punishing realms, plus the constant threat of being "jarred," disembodied and trapped in a vessel for all eternity.

Jim lives in A.L., in a dumpy small apartment - but we get the sense that all of the A.L. is dumpy, all of it faintly disappointing and unhappy all of the time, that this is the kind of world where happiness is just not possible. He works at a gas station, cleaning windshields and checking oil and doing fill-ups, and spends his nights mostly working crossword puzzles that fill the newspaper. (Like a lot of the Hoeys' work, this world is locked fifty or seventy years ago technologically and somewhat socially - with the added twist here that everything, of course, is sadder and duller and less pleasant than anything in the living world.)

But Jim was involved in some minor criminal activity in the living world, and some of his old compatriots find him in the A.L., to drag him into different criminal activity here. It turns out he is a connector, one of the rare people who can be transferred by a medium back to the living world (at the moment of someone else's death, or near-death), do things there, and then send himself back to the A.L. from any convenient patch of real-world darkness.

The criminals' plot isn't clear in all of its details, but there's money smuggled from the A.L. back to the living world, shades who pay to have time in real-world bodies, and a forming larger and more lucrative idea to make movies with stars who died young and gorgeous - since shades stay exactly as they looked when they died, forever.

Jim's initial visits back to the living world are all to meet Olivia, a young woman subject to anaphylactic shocks from bee-stings - and so someone this criminal group can induce to have near-death experiences at will, no matter the damage to her health. 

A noirish plot spins out from there, with Jim - and, to a lesser extent, Olivia - trying to find ways to escape this gang. But, as usual in a noir, there's official corruption as well, and Jim only get snared deeper. Jim makes many trips to the living world, but the criminal gang reaches there as well; there's no place in A.L. or L.A. safe from them. Jim and Olivia do get dragged in front of Hades eventually, and the fact that they're essentially innocents doesn't help.

It ends appropriately, if not what I would call happily. Does any story set in the realm of Hades ever end happily? That sounds like a contradiction in terms.

And, as usual, the Hoeys tell this story in their slightly chilly, formally strong, cleanly structured way I'm still impressed how their style looks like no one else in comics; I could almost take In Perpetuity as an informative handout given to new shades, warning them against getting involved in illegal supernatural activities. It's a good lesson, well told.

Hellboy in Love by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Matt Smith

I have completely lost track of the Hellboy universe: I have to admit that. Last time I paid attention, Hellboy was dead and had just gone to Hell, his former compatriots in the B.P.R.D. were dealing with their...I want to say third?...supernatural apocalypse, none of which they actually managed to avert, and the energy of the larger universe seemed to have been diverted into almost a dozen oddbar side-stories about characters like Mr. Higgins and Frankenstein.

It looks like Hellboy-verse books have continued to appear - and several audio dramas, just to make things even more confusing - but that they are all flashbacks or sidebars these days, and they all have series creator Mike Mignola involved to some degree but not doing more than co-writing. (Which Your Cynical Host takes to mean "approving the scripts and cashing the checks," possibly because the ongoing movie-reboot drama is taking most of his time.)

However the work gets divvied up, we got this book last year: Hellboy in Love, collecting five issues and three short series, all set in 1979 and featuring Hellboy's previously never-mentioned great love, the archeologist Anastasia Bransfield. (I say "never-mentioned," but the Hellboy universe is so continuity-besotted that she probably did get a footnote or two somewhere that I'm forgetting.) It's written by Mignola with long-time collaborator Christopher Golden, drawn by Matt Smith, and colored, as usual for this universe, by Dave Stewart.

And...they're pretty standard Hellboy stories, with an added flavor of "the girlfriend is along for the ride." Anastasia is smart and knowledgeable, though without any supernatural abilities or monster-fighting prowess of her own, so Hellboy has to keep her safe during the inevitable punch-the-monsters sequences, and I have to guess that her story eventually ends, however many years later, when Hellboy isn't able to punch one particular monster in time. (The monsters in the Hellboy universe are typically pretty nasty things, and the body counts, even in these somewhat more love-oriented stories, are quite high.)

So Helly and Ana meet cute on a British train when a band of goblins steal something valuable she's transporting, and they chase the goblins across hill and dale to the inevitable secret auction of supernatural materials organized by Shadowy Forces, where they retrieve the goods.

They enjoy each other's company, and so stick together in London afterward to do boyfriend/girlfriend stuff for a few pages before jetting off to Turkey to deal with murderous shadow puppets at a dig: that makes up the second story.

Anastasia's particular area of study is a semi-conspiracy theory - which, in this world, is clearly absolutely true - about an early-medieval global network of magicians and their methods of long-range communication. This theory has very little evidence, has been pooh-poohed by the finest minds of her time, and the reader is morally sure that not only is it completely accurate, but the organization still exists, is active, and probably at least mildly malevolent.

In the third, shortest story, there's another potential breakthrough - an ancient gigantic skull inscribed with mysterious messages in multiple wildly distant languages, which would prove that Anastasia's theory is true. And, of course, there's some kind of supernatural entity - Delilah, who was at the auction in the first story, and has some kind of demonic/vampiric thing going on - who wants the skull even more so, and is able to take it away.

My sense is that Anastasia's theorized ancient society of magicians is yet another still-extant, vaguely apocalyptic cult that threatens the whole world, and that we'll get subsequent stories to show how Hellboy thwarted and possibly destroyed them, though Anastasia nobly sacrificed her life in the process. I may be overly cynical here.

These particular stories are just fine, though the relationship stuff feels a bit shoehorned in, as if Mignola decided thirty years in that Hellboy really should have had a personal life at some point, and is now making up for lost time. And we all know the rules of flashbacks, especially long flashbacks about The Love of My Life. So expectations are definitely set, but this is fun and diverting for now, and a pleasant corner of this universe that isn't too burdened by the weight of apocalypse at the moment.