The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series - in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s - in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the '90s. And so, for no good reason, I'm taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe - some of it under an "Incal" title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski's work, though I've mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius - he's also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I've seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a "Class-R" private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story - which might even be mostly true - about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying "mutant," or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren't clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it "The Light Incal" in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It's the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a '60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we're not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has "meta" attached to it - but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we're pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I'll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren't for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius's art is detailed - maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of '80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

The Worst We Can Find by Dale Sherman

Hey! I have a tag for things having to do with TV! I'd almost forgotten that, and haven't used it much in recent years. But it is appropriate here, so I dragged it out of the vault.

The Worst We Can Find  - subtitled "MST3K, RiffTrax, and the History of Heckling at the Movies" - is mostly a history of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show, but it starts before that show begins, with details of other people doing similar things in the years before, and other influences on what everyone abbreviates as MST3K, and runs on after the show's 1999 cancelation to cover what the major forces behind the show did afterward, much of which (spoiler alert!) also involved making commentary over bad movies.

It was written by Dale Sherman, who has a long career in mostly media-related non-fiction: Amazon tells me this was his sixteenth book. And it was published by Applause, which - back in the dim misty days when I worked in publishing - focused more strictly in works on stages rather than screens, but has always been a respectable and solid outlet for material about the performing arts.

I found Sherman a bit of a meat-and-potatoes writer, gathering all of the obvious material in a solid, readable manner but without putting a lot of spin or new details in. There's an extensive list of sources at the end; it looks like Sherman ran down basically every interview or media mention of the show, and also did an impressive job of teasing out the multiple strands of influences. I don't think he did any original research or interviews; I doubt an Applause budget runs to such things.

This is a 2023 book, so it's still current, covering through the three seasons of the resurrected show on Netflix and via crowdfunding on their self-created Gizmoplex. There are other books about MST3K, but this one looks to be as definitive as you can get.

Not to retell his story, but Sherman starts off with a long chapter about other people who heckled movies professionally, or made commentary on movies and similar media properties, mostly through the '70s and '80s. Then he details how the small, struggling TV station KTMA in Minneapolis needed programming in the late '80s, and staffers Jim Mallon and Kevin Murphy turned to local comedian Joel Hodgson. Hodgson, with some input from the others and from his eventual fellow cast-member/puppeteers Trace Beaulieu and Josh (later J. Elvis for TV credit purposes) Weinstein, came up with the concept: a guy was stuck in space with two robots, forced to watch bad movies by mad scientists back on earth as part of a vaguely explained experiment.

KTMA broadcast one season of the show in 1988-89, and almost immediately - not because of the show - fell apart. But the cable industry was booming, so MST3K went national on first the Comedy Channel, and, several years later, found a second home on what was then the normally-spelled Sci-Fi Channel for its last three seasons. All in all, it ran for just over a decade and made nearly two hundred episodes, which, as the creators tended to say, isn't bad for a puppet show from the midwest.

I'm a fan of the show, obviously, which is why I got this book to begin with. I don't know it if told me a whole lot I didn't know or couldn't find elsewhere, but it put everything together in one nice package, covered the show from before the beginning to after the end, and had a very Minnesota-appropriate even-handed, let's-everybody-work-together tone throughout. And that's darn-tootin' good.

Gerrymandering: A Rant

First off, foundationally, districts are reconfigured within a US state once a decade, after the most recent census. Doing it at any other time, for any other reason than "we now have better data on how many people live where," is inherently illegitimate.

Which, of course, is why Texas Republicans are doing it - they've never seen a naked power grab they didn't like. If it spreads, and lots of states do it as well, that will be yet another breakdown of norms, another signpost that the US is speed-running through the Collapsing-Democracy Playbook. So that is bad, obviously.

But there's a lot of talk essentially assuming gerrymandering is magic - that just drawing the boundaries some secret way ensures the people drawing them will win. And that's not the case. 

The other incorrect assumption is that gerrymandering creates "safer" districts: ones more ideologically committed to the governing party. That it tends to reinforce the echo-chamber effect, to lock in ideologically extreme candidates. Again, that's not true.

Gerrymandering - as we're discussing it right now, meaning an effort to maximize the number of districts in a state that are favorable to your party - tends to make districts less safe, on purpose, to make more districts that a particular party has a solid chance of winning.

The opposite strategy is to make districts where your party can't possibly lose, where the voters break for your party overwhelmingly. Democrats have tended, over the past few decades, to create that kind of district, at least in some cases - usually as "majority-minority." (And, yes, that will and has tended to dilute their overall statewide voting power - yet another example of how Dems will always bring a flower to a knife fight. Also, yes, there are other voting systems besides first-past-the-post, and it's really nice that you support them, but you do realize Texas is never, ever going to spring for approval voting, right?)

Especially in larger states, both strategies can be in play - a governing party can "pack" a few districts with their opponents, maybe also "pack" one or two on their side to protect specific incumbents, and then "crack" the rest of the map into districts that are mildly in their favor.

But remember that, no matter what you do in a gerrymander, there's still the same number of voters overall - what gerrymandering does is turn a state with (to make up numbers) twenty districts from this evenly balanced list:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 10
3	R + 10
4	R + 10
5	R + 10
6	R + 10
7	R + 10
8	R + 10
9	R + 10
10	R + 10
11	D + 10
12	D + 10
13	D + 10
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

to this list, where one party is dominant in more districts:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 5
3	R + 5
4	R + 5
5	R + 5
6	R + 5
7	R + 5
8	R + 5
9	R + 5
10	R + 5
11	R + 5
12	R + 5
13	R + 5
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

But note that the totals - my example uses partisan lean as the metric; in the real world it's actually the number of voters, and gets very data-wonkish very quickly with race/gender/propensity overlays - are the same in both cases. Gerrymandering does not invent voters, it moves them to be more efficient for the party in charge.

Gerrymandering is a bet - that you'll take a somewhat smaller chance of winning each of a larger number of districts, and that you can do so while keeping the partisan lean higher than the potential swing in any given election.

Because, in the state above, if "partisan lean" has a 10-point error bar, every district could potentially have been a toss-up in Scenario 1, and Scenario 2 would give the R team a chance in any given election to shoot themselves really badly in the foot.

But if the error bar is more like 3 or 4 points, a +5 district is pretty much optimal for your side. You'll win those nearly every time, and any higher lean in your direction is "wasted."

(Note: I am not a data scientist and this is not my area of expertise. I make no claims about what the typical error bar is, or the partisan lean of existing or proposed districts in any state. I do expect the experts know these things, and make their plans based on decent data and reasonable assumptions.)

The more aggressive you go in gerrymandering, the more likely you make it that any given election - possibly the very next one - will shift enough in the direction of your opponents that you will lose power.

This nuance tends to get forgotten in discussions of gerrymandering: that the more you push it, the higher the chances it will go wrong. Yes, we do have really powerful computers, robust data models, and all kinds of insights, but it all still relies on what a large number of people will do on a specific day in the future, so wave elections - and we've had a succession of wave elections for more than a decade now - can be enhanced by an aggressive gerrymander.

Now, Texas Republicans have other tools besides gerrymandering, of course - have we mentioned intimidation and voter suppression lately? - so I'm not trying to say it's sunshine and roses. They do intend to make it harder for groups they think will vote against them to get to the polls, and shifting districts is good cover to do that. (If the gerrymander goes through, expect polling places to tend to move toward red areas and mysteriously disappear or lose hours in blue areas.) And if those ICE raids sweep up citizens, or make citizens less willing to put their necks out, that's good for their side as well. It is, and I don't want to minimize this, a comprehensive "flood the zone with shit" plan, with multiple levels of bad actions.

All I wanted to point out is that gerrymandering, itself, is just one piece of that plan, and that basic arithmetic applies to gerrymandering. It doesn't break the laws of physics; it doesn't invent voters. And doing it really aggressively because one fairly stupid and narcissistic guy insists does not necessarily mean they will win all of those districts in the next election.

Love Languages by James Albon

One minor organizational note to start off with: I tag books based on the author, rather than the content. So James Albon is British, like his protagonist in Love Languages, and I tag it that way. But the book mostly takes place in France (untagged), and the other main character is from Hong Kong (also untagged). There is a method to it, you see.

Love Languages is a lovely, painted story of two people who meet as foreigners in Paris, becoming friends, and, eventually, more than that. Sarah Huxley is working for some multinational company doing something complicated in an office filled with annoying young Frenchmen - she's British, and is, or at least recently was, on the way up in this company, doing whatever it is she does as part of whatever it is they do. She's probably around thirty - young enough that advancing quickly still feels like the standard, old enough that everything seems to be settling into patterns she's not sure she likes. (Albon keeps it all on the jargon level, so it's annoying and all-encompassing and messy but entirely opaque, like other people's weird jobs.)

Sarah is feeling unhappy, disconnected, dissatisfied. Her French isn't as good as she'd like it to be; conversation flows around her, at work and in the streets, and she catches enough to get by but not enough to feel part of anything. One day she runs into another young woman, Ping Loh, outside a patisserie. Ping is working as an au pair for a rich couple; both she and they are from Hong Kong.

Sarah and Ping bump into each other again, and pick up a friendship - meeting and talking regularly. Ping speaks a little English; Sarah speaks a little Cantonese from a Hong Kong trip a few years back; they both are OK in French but not as fluent as they want to be. So they talk in a personal pidgin or creole, hopping languages to use the right word and teaching each other. Albon presents this on the page with the actual words they say and then flagged with the meanings in English for the reader - so we know both what they're saying and how they're saying it; it's an elegant and powerful style.

There's a subplot about a slow-moving crisis at Sarah's work - something went wrong, and the company is trying out various explanations, none of which seem to be working. It's all in that opaque style, so we never know what the issue is - we don't even know what this company does - but we can tell that the major activity within the company, and particularly within Sarah's department, is trying to assign blame to someone else, to dodge responsibility. And this is making Sarah more and more frustrated as the book goes on: she wants to do things, to be useful, not to just make pointless documents and maneuver in the Superior Working Strategy Group Direction Meeting.

That slowly boils in the background as Sarah learns more about Ping's life and the two of them get closer and more comfortable with each other. We readers know they are closer than they're admitting to each other; Albon signposts it with a scene where they talk about how one says "I love you" in their languages - Ping says that it's basically never said out loud in Hong Kong, that people "just know."

But then there's a crisis in Ping's work as well: she's annoyed her never-seen dragon-lady-ish boss, the mother of the baby she takes care of, and she loses her job. She moves in with Sarah briefly, as her best friend in Paris, and the two have a moment...which sends Ping flying back to Hong Kong, incommunicado.

But of course a love story can't end there, and it doesn't. This is a sunny, beautiful story - both in the colors and the story - and Albon knows what he needs to do for an ending. He does: it ends really well, and the reader is happy for Sarah and Ping. Love Languages is a love story mostly set in Paris with two people from elsewhere who learn to talk to each other more deeply, and in their own unique way, unlike anyone else in the world - it's a wonderful, lovely gem of a story, at its core positive and happy and bright.

The Provocative Colette by Annie Goetzinger

The Provocative Colette has a preface by Nathalie Crom - who is not credited in the book but seems to be a French literary journalist - talking about the image the public has of Colette as an old, immobile woman, and contrasting it to the portrayal in this book. But I doubt most English-language readers have any image of Colette that strong - here, she's known primarily as the author of Gigi, and maybe of Chéri as well. I don't think I've actually read any Colette, and I knew only vaguely about her career - married to an older man, originally writing works published under his name, a vague sense that she had a lot of stereotypically French scandals, a vaguely Belle Époque timing.

That's not incorrect, but BD creator Anne Goetzinger goes into a lot more detail here, in a book that covers Colettes's whole adult life but focuses most closely on the initial phase of her career. Whether you have the presumptions of the French or the Americans, Goetzinger will set you right with detailed, well- constructed pages and long narrative captions to explain it all.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1871; this book begins on her wedding day in 1893, to the popular writer Henry Gauthier-Villars - who, in a fortuitous bit of foreshadowing, met Colette's family because the wet nurse for his illegitimate son was part of that household. Colette and family live out in the countryside, but marrying Gauthier-Villars - who wrote under the pen-name "Willy" - means she will move to Paris immediately and be part of Willy's high-society life.

Willy is a notorious libertine, the kind of man whose sole hobby and pastime seems to be having sex with other women. (That has always seemed exhausting to me, but I suppose everyone has the things they love most in life.) Colette doesn't realize this for a while, but eventually does, and reacts badly, with what seems to be a psychosomatic illness her mother has to come and nurse her out of. Afterward, Colette starts having affairs with other women herself - Goetzinger doesn't say so here, but I suspect lesbian dalliances were seen, by Willy and Frenchmen in general, as not "real" in the way a woman's affairs with men would be. I have no idea how the young Colette would have characterized her sexuality in a modern context, but she does seem to have slept with men exclusively after her marriage with Willy ended.

On the professional side, Willy was a "novelist" something in the James Patterson mold - he had ideas, and hired jobbing writers to actually write the books for him. Along the same lines, he encouraged or pushed or forced Colette to fictionalize her life into a series of novels about "Claudine," published under Willy's name and very popular. The Paris crowd seems to have fairly quickly realized Colette was the real author - I think they all knew Willy didn't really write his own books to begin with - and she also developed a second career as an actress, often as Claudine.

Those are the two themes of Colette's life, and of the book: her various affairs, first mostly with women and then with men, who did not get older as quickly as she did; and her various careers, as a journalist and novelist and dancer and actress and general stage performer. Goetzinger's hundred pages here carry Colette up to 1924, when she was just over fifty and when she broke up her second marriage by carrying on an affair with her husband's teenage stepson. As I understand it, Colette's biggest literary success and acclaim was in the 1920s and '30s, so Goetzinger deliberately cuts her story short at that point - this is explicitly the story of what formed Colette, and turned her into the woman who wrote the books than French audiences would recognize.

From my seat, a hundred years and an ocean away, it seems that Colette was scandalous for being a famous French woman who behaved exactly like a famous French man would, and did. I might think the whole thing sounds hugely tiring - all that running about, slamming bedroom doors like a farce - but it is oh-so French, and we have to allow nations their characteristic quirks.

Goetzinger, as I understand it, is one of the greats of French comics, working mostly in historical formats, like this book and Girl in Dior, the only other book of hers I've seen. She's had a forty-plus year career, of which (I think) not a lot has been translated into English. But this is a fine biography of an interesting writer who had a quirky, particular life, and Goetzinger's art makes it engaging and lively.

Better Things: Outside of the Inside

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Another semi-cheat - I had a Richard & Linda Thompson song in the This Year series, but not one by Richard solo. Given that his career has been so long and so full of great music, I feel it's justified to give him another slot under a slightly different name.

Even only counting my five-star songs, there are thirteen to wrestle with, to pick from. Would it be the stark Hope You Like the New Me? Any one of the three excellent versions of Cooksferry Queen? The amusing Let It Blow? The angry Dad's Gonna Kill Me?

No - for Thompson solo, I had to go with Outside of the Inside. Maybe just for that perfect opening couplet:

God never listened to Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker lived in vain

This is a song from a point of view, sung by Thompson but not him "speaking." The speaker is some variety of religious fanatic, cataloging all the things that are unneeded in the world because of his faith.

What's the point of Albert Einstein?
What do we need physics for?

And

Shakespeare, Isaac Newton
Small ideas for little boys

And

Van Gogh, Botticelli
Scraping paint onto a board
Color is the fuel of madness
That's no way to praise the Lord

It's a stark, uncompromising vision, one of the best evocations of the fundamentalist mindset in popular culture, enlivened by Thompson's acerbic voice and magnificent guitar playing. It is uncompromising but never breaks character, like Thompson's best work.

And when I get to heaven
I won't realize that I'm there

Quote of the Week: Sensible Middle-Aged Love

My feelings for her were not the same as the ones I had at seventeen for that girl. That was clear. Those overwhelmingly powerful feelings, a laser-like focus on one object, etching it into me, would never return (and even if they did, I doubt I could handle the intensity). The feelings I had for the coffee shop woman were more diffuse, more sensible, wrapped in soft clothing, restrained by a certain wisdom and experience, something to be grasped over a longer time frame.

 - Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, p.398

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami has spent a lot of the last decade or so writing things that aren't fantasy. Well, let me back up: he never wrote genre fantasy, and I'm sure plenty of readers would violently disagree that his odd, drifting surrealist narratives are what they would call "fantasy" to begin with. But his most characteristic books feature strange dislocations, alternate worlds, inexplicable disappearances, places that correspond to mental states, and other clear elements of fantastika. If we describe a writer or work as "Murakamian," that's what we're talking about: a set of tropes that reflect a non-realistic world.

I still haven't read his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, so I can't speak to that. But, in the past decade, he's had a couple of collections of mostly-literary short stories, Men Without Women and First Person Singular. He's done some odd little non-fiction things, Murakami T and Novelist As a Vocation. And, possibly relevant to this book, the even-quirkier-than-usual novella The Strange Library.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is his most recent novel; he was writing it during the pandemic. It was published in Japanese in 2023 and in English, translated by Philip Gabriel, in November of 2024. It is an expansion or alternate version of an early Murakami novella of almost the same title - the novella has a comma after "City" - and somewhat related to the early Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a different reworking of that novella.

And it's a disappointing book. Inherently so, since it sets off telling one story, and abandons that entirely. I don't want to completely spoil the ending, but the ending does not answer any of the major questions raised by the opening or resolve the major relationship detailed there. Some books circle, some spiral - this one wanders, sometimes seeming aimless as it goes over here for a while, then back over there again, then off to another place.

It also made me very salty about a fantasy trope I've seen several times before, turning me super-literal as I read. You see, there are people in this book who do not have shadows. All very quirky and mysterious, yes. But how does that work? Does light just not illuminate the fronts of these people? Are their faces always dark, because the light wraps around them to shine just as brightly behind them?

It annoyed me because a shadow is not, despite fantasy thinking, a thing. A shadow is an absence, a place where a light doesn't shine because something is in its way. For a shadow not to be there, the thing that casts the shadow has to also not be there, or otherwise be made transparent to light.

Yes, I know it's a metaphor - a tedious, dull, obvious one, which we've all seen a thousand times - but it's a stupid metaphor that doesn't match anything about how the world actually works, and it physically pains me to see it running out at length in fine prose by a writer I otherwise respect.

Anyway, The City opens archly, with an unnamed boy and an unnamed girl in an unnamed region of Japan in an unnamed time some time in the past few decades. They meet as winners of a a school contest, date for about a year without getting physical, and then the girl stops responding to the boy's letters.

Spoiler alert: the actual, live girl never shows up again in the novel. Not once. Not at all. We never learn what she did, where she lived, what happened to her. The boy is obsessed with her for the rest of his life, but that's entirely about him, in that very Murakamian male-narrator way.

The girl explains a fantasy idea she has, and that she believes. She is not a real person; she is the shadow of someone else. The real her lives in an unnamed town surrounded by an ancient, unbreakable wall, somewhere not directly reachable from the normal physical world. Everyone in that town lacks shadows.

The boy comes to believe in this town, too. The title calls it a "city," but the book always refers to it as a "town." I don't know if that is meant to be significant. It also seems like a small town, one contracting and dying slowly over time, partially since it, by definition, has no connection to any other place. I also don't think Murakami meant the fact that this town is slowly dying to be meaningful; I'm not sure he realized he described it as dying, frankly.

Most of the people in the town do things the narrator doesn't care about, presumably agriculture or something, though people in this town also don't eat very much. But the girl - or the real version of the girl - works as the librarian there. And the boy somehow, many years later, finds himself at the gates of this town. He has his shadow cut away by the Gatekeeper, and moves into the town to work as the Dream Reader in that library.

To explain a bit more: the girl in the town is the same age as she was when the boy met her, as if she never changed. It's possibly no one in the town changes, but Murakami doesn't make that clear - and he does make it clear that the town has been shrinking in scope and population for a long time. So maybe people stay the same age, but sometimes suddenly die or disappear? The girl doesn't know the boy; she's the other version - even less does she know the middle-aged man he grew into. But her job is to keep the library, a big building filled with egg-like objects. And his job is to fondle those objects, which are Dreams, and then describe the dreams they embody, so they work together for an unspecified time.

But his severed shadow, which is living in what sounds like a paddock just outside the town, is dying, in a very slow, vague Ali MacGraw-kind of way. And it pushes the narrator to reconnect the two of them - which is supposedly impossible, a breach of the agreement he made when he came to the town - so they can return to the real world.

The narrator eventually agrees, and the two go to a deep dark and very symbolic pool in a disused corner of the town, where the narrator then suddenly balks at leaving. But the rules change yet again, and the shadow can now leave on its own and the narrator will stay behind.

But instead the narrator - or a version of him; it's not clear how he or we could be sure he's the only one - finds himself back in his old life in the real world, with a shadow that doesn't talk back or have an independent existence.

By the way, at this point we're only about halfway through the novel; there's a lot of semi-aimless Murakamian conversations full of people repeating phrases back to each other and vaguely philosophical Thoughts About Stuff both before and after here.

The narrator decides to find a job in a random library somewhere in the countryside, because he liked the Dream Reader gig. Because this is a Murakami novel, that random change of career for no particular reason does actually work, and he finds himself the new head librarian of the town of Z*, somewhere very rural and mountainous. The previous head librarian, who he does not realize for quite some time is already dead, gives him advice and guidance.

We get a lot of day-to-day life in Z* and day-to-day running of a small library and day-to-day chatting with a dead guy, and some day-to-day maybe-sorta flirtation of the narrator with a café owner who could become a love interest, for quite a long time, while what we thought was our plot disappears over the horizon. Eventually, a teen everyone calls Yellow Submarine Boy, after a "parka" he always wears - it sounds more like a sweatshirt or hoodie, since it's worn under a coat and needs to be washed semi-regularly, but anyway - rises up in the narrative, with a sheaf of vaguely autist behaviors, and, after even longer, learns about the walled town from our narrator.

Yellow Submarine Boy declares that he and the narrator are the same person, and that they need to merge and go back to the walled town so they can be the Dream Reader. Because this is a Murakami novel, this is actually true, and happens.

In the short last section, Yellow Submarine Boy and the narrator do live in the town again, do perform brilliantly at dream reading, which still seems as pointless and unconnected to anything else as it ever did, and then, very quickly, separate once again at the very end of the book.

At the very end, either Yellow Submarine Boy kicks the narrator out of his own life and purpose and the narrator dies, or the narrator goes back to the real world yet again for another period of tedious living that Murakami will not describe for us, or maybe something transcendent happens that Murakami will also not describe. Then we get an afterword, with Murakami explaining the various lives of this story, and how he wrote this one. Since he is a Big Name Bestselling Author, he doesn't mention anyone pointing out that this novel doesn't actually resolve the situation it sets up at the beginning, or answer any questions about the girl, which the narrator spends the entire book thinking about and obsessing on.

The City, like a lot of Murakami's work, runs largely on vibes. If those vibes connect with you, you will enjoy it. If, like me, they seem arbitrary and capricious where they actually make sense in the first place, you will be annoyed by the plot and ending even if you enjoy the language and writing. Keep that in mind if you consider reading it.

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn't get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn't. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren't completely explained or fleshed out here - but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn't. Who Is AC? is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it's just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst - location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn't over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He's got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He's also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things - but that's the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby - clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book - tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that - he's called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin's secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn't cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn't have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it's not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It's not quite a complete story, but it's fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 4: Holiday in Budapest by Yves Chaland

This fourth Freddy Lombard book has me rethinking the whole series. The first three books didn't say when they took place, so I assumed they were "contemporary" - set roughly when they were written, in the '80s. That seemed plausible, in that timeless Eurocomics way, and the '80s is pretty historical to us today anyway.

But the fourth book, Holiday in Budapest, is explicitly set in 1956 - that and "Budapest" will tell the more historically-minded of you some major events in the bande desinée - and they've got the same car as in the first book, and are wearing the same clothes as before. So maybe the whole thing was historical all along, and I just didn't realize it. (The previous books are The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, The Elephant Graveyard, and The Comet of Carthage.)

It's the summer of 1956, and our three heroes - Freddy, Sweep, and Dina - are in Venice. Dina is giving Latin lessons to Laszlo, the fifteen-year-old nephew of a Hungarian politician, staying in a grand hotel with his aunt in something that isn't meant to be exile yet but could turn into it if necessary. Freddy and Sweep have no prospects as usual, and are camping by a lake and working on their car in a desultory fashion.

They're poised for a new adventure, in other words - or at least Freddy and Sweep, the less forward-thinking and disciplined characters are. Dina seems to be doing just fine, and could probably have a normal life if she didn't keep getting swept up with these careless, thoughtless young men into danger and trouble.

Lazslo's parents died in one of the many Russian crackdowns in Hungary; his uncle is a politician who we readers can tell (even if Laszlo doesn't appreciate it) very carefully navigates his complex political environment to keep his family as safe as possible. Though "as possible," right now, is "not very," which is why his wife and ward are in Italy, outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dina somewhat indulges Laszlo's romantic and revolutionary notions, but it's Freddy and Sweep who offer him their car and their company for a roadtrip to Budapest, to get him close to the action and (they think) get them some of the family money for their help.

So Laszlo runs away, with Freddy and Sweep thinking their helping him back to Hungary will get them in good with a new government and lead to big payouts. Dina chases them, getting to Budapest first to warn Laszlo's uncle.

And things are uneasy and unsettled in Hungary. There is a popular uprising, bubbling in both the political class and the general population, but the Russians and their political officers are solidly in charge currently. Opinion on whether the Soviets would just let Hungary peacefully go its own way are divided - the firebrands insist that the will of the people cannot be stopped, even if the streets run red with blood.

Laszlo would be a firebrand if he were a little older; he's an attempted firebrand, at least. His uncle locks him up to keep him safe, but again Dina indulges him, and again Laszlo finds a way to sneak out to find more trouble.

About the same time, the Russian tanks roll in.

The last roughly third of Holiday in Budapest is full of street-fighting and armies, sieges of offices and running around to get forms signed to, they hope, save Laszlo from being shipped as a political prisoner to Siberia. (Because of course he got picked up and detained by the invading forces almost immediately; he is young and strident and doesn't have the sense God gave a horsefly.)

There's a lot of action and color and interesting moments and historical detail here. The historical event is the center of the book; Freddy himself is secondary at best in his own story. (Sweep, being more hotheaded, drives more of the action - and Dina even more so.) And creator Yves Chaland draws it all magnificently, with great architectural and military details that never detract from his clean, crisp story-telling.

I still have a hard time getting my head around what the point of the Freddy Lombard series was - my sense is that it was reacting to and reworking ideas and styles and viewpoints from the history of Belgian and French comics of the previous forty years, so each book should probably be seen as a counterpoint to specific older works. If so, it's not something a monoglot English reader could trace forty years later, so I'll just gesture in that direction, and note that an answer might possibly be found in that territory, if my guess is correct. If not...I'm open to other theories.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

I've been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big '90s crash. I'll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days, so I don't really know either way. But my point was that captions were useful, and did work well in a lot of the iconic '80s stories, so, geez, maybe don't throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Well, I hadn't taken a look at any bathwater for a while. My opinion may have shifted somewhat.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1 is the first of three fairly large volumes collecting their combined run on the Daredevil character, from 1979 through 1982. Now, there's an asterisk there - several asterisks, actually - since this is corporate comics, and it was created assembly-line style. Janson was the inker before Miller joined as penciler, working over Gene Colan, and took over as penciler/inker afterward. And Miller started off as "the hot new artist," picking up co-plotting after a few issues and eventually taking over as writer as well. So what most readers think of as "the Frank Miller Daredevil" starts up about halfway through this book.

But comics fans are completionists, and this is a complete package, so that's a good thing. It also has extensive credits of who did what - something comics weren't good at for a long time, but they made up for it starting sometime in the 1970s, and became obsessive about it in the flood of reprint projects starting in the '90s.

Included in this book are:

• Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man issues 27 & 28, written by Bill Mantlo and inked by Frank Springer; it's basically a Frank Miller try-out, I guess, since Daredevil guest-stars
• Daredevil #158-161, 163-166, written by Roger McKenzie (with Miller contributing for 165 and 166)
• Daredevil # 167, written by David Michelinie and Miller
• Daredevil #168-172, written by Miller

Now, Bill Mantlo has definitely written better comics than this. So has Michelinie. I don't know McKenzie's work well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But the stories here - even the ones when Miller takes over at the end - are filled with long, verbose, tedious captions that "set the scene" and "provide color commentary" but mostly tell us what we're looking at and repeat standard phrases about the character and world.

Daredevil doesn't have a single phrase that gets beaten into the ground like Wolverine's "I'm the best at what I do and what I do isn't pretty," but both "man without fear" (including related references to DD never giving up on anything ever) and "hey, don't forget this guy is, like, totally blind!" come up like a bad penny every few pages.

The stories are also...what's a more polite word for cliched and standard? There were a lot of comics like these in the 1970s and 1980s, and only slightly different before and after that - superhero yardgoods, rolled out to fill up pages and entertain an audience that just wanted to see this guy in this costume punching a particular group of villains and repeating his catchphrase.

Miller was an solid artist from the beginning, which is good. And Janson supported him well. They worked well together to make eye-pleasing pages full of superhero action, only slightly marred by the reams of words pasted on top of all of it.

Once Miller starts writing the stories, the elements of his later work slide in. The last five issues here are one plotline, in which The Kingpin - up to this point entirely a Spider-Man villain, and at that point retired in Japan - comes back to New York for a vaguely described plea deal in which he will hand over a dossier on his successors to the Manhattan DA in return for complete immunity on all of his previous crimes. (Which is, what thirty years of murders and gang-lord-ing and attempted spider-squashing? Nice deal.) We also get a flashback to Daredevil's college days, to meet the One Great Love of His Life, Elektra, the beautiful daughter of a Greek diplomat who drops out of school when Daddy is murdered by terrorists that not-yet-Daredevil isn't quite able to stop. She drops out, of course, to become an international assassin in a skimpy costume made up of mostly red straps.

As, of course, you do. In superhero comics, at least.

Bullseye, the most iconic Daredevil antagonist - basically his Joker or Lex Luthor - turns up several times, with a lot of hugger-mugger and opportunities for Daredevil to emote and express his pure goodness and desire for justice, including during the Kingpin plotline at the end. (I do have to admit that Miller makes better use of him, with less histrionics, than McKenzie did.)

So the front half of Vol. 1 is just a slight step up from a standard Marvel comic of 1979 - Miller is energetic, but there were plenty of good, energetic artists then. The end shows more promise, but Miller is still working in the same mode: characters talk too much, and the narrative voice might be pulling back just slightly, but it's still too intrusive, and spends far too much time telling the reader things he should already know or can see right there in the same panel.

I'm assuming all that gets better in Vol. 2; I'll have to take a look.

Better Things: Here Comes a Regular

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

We're getting deep into the list at this point, hitting songs and bands that I keep being surprised that I didn't fit them into the original This Year series. (But that's the point: any list is limited, and leaves a lot off - there's always more good stuff than any one list can contain.)

For this week, it's The Replacements, who were the best band in the world, at least intermittently, one night here and there, for a while in the '80s. And, again, there's all the other songs that almost took this place - The Ledge most obviously, though loving that song, forty years later, might be holding onto something far too teenagery. But there's also their awesome covers: the goofy strut of Cruella DeVille and the breakneck thrill of Another Girl, Another Planet. The song that came second - and was knocked out mostly on points, since it's an alternate version that came out much later and I didn't hear until the 00s - was I Can't Hardly Wait (The Tim Version).

But for the 'Mats song I loved at the time and kept listening to for years, it has to be the boozy, depressive Here Comes a Regular.

Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst
After a hard day of nothin' much at all

It's got some of Paul Westerberg's best lyrics: precise, true, world-weary, knowing, allusive.

Opportunity knocks once then the door slams shut
All I know is I'm sick of everything that my money can buy

And it's one of the saddest, bleakest songs I know. I don't know what it says about me that I gravitate to that kind of song, but this is one of the best, the truest.

I used to live at home, now I stay at the house

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 2, 2025

Two books this week, both of them from the library. And both of them are somewhat oversized - one much more than the other - which is the reason why I went for physical copies rather than trying to read them digitally.

I guess I'm trying to read the Asterix series. Asterix the Gladiator is the fourth one, by original creators Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (I think Goscinny was involved, however old he was then, in the most recent new material, but Uderzo has left us). Gladiator was originally published in 1964, with this English-language edition coming in 2004. I read the first Asterix omnibus almost two years ago - I thought it was much more recently than that! - and have had the next ones in my library app, to get to "eventually." Eventually came a few weeks ago, but I found cramming Uderzo's album-sized pages down to my tablet - and especially their smallish lettering - was not going to be a good experience. So, instead, I checked to see if a real ink-on-paper edition was in my reach, and this one was. It's a pretty battered thing, from the YA section of a random library in a town near me, but it'll do.

The other one is a gigantic oversized thing: Wednesday Comics, which reprints a project that presented a bunch of DC superhero comics by major creators on tabloid-sized newsprint, as if they were Sunday newspaper comics. Now, as far as I can see, the content of these stories is all very standard DC - guys in costumes punching each other until the bad guy gives up - which is slightly disappointing. (How awesome would it be to have Superman and Lois goofing around a la Blondie, or Krypto in Marmaduke situations, or Zatanna doing Broom Hilda? But no one ever asks me for my crazy ideas.) So this is a big, physically unwieldy thing that exists to showcase the same kind of art and stories, just bigger. And Big Two stuff always wants to be bigger anyway. So I didn't want to spend money on this, or try to store it, but getting it from the library is just about right.

Books Read: July 2025

This is what I read this past month. I post these as indices, mostly for my own benefit later, and add links when the posts go live. Apologies for interrupting your Sunday-morning browsing with such trivia.

Dale Sherman, The Warost We Can Find (7/1)

Alexandro Jodorowski and Mœbius, The Black Incal (digital, 7/4)

Julian Hanshaw, Free Pass( digital, 7/5)

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973, 7/5)

Manuelle Fior, Hypericum (digital, 7/6)

Chris McCoy, Safely Endangered Comics (digital, 7/7)

Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days (in Waugh Abroad, 7/7)

P. Craig Russell & others, Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? (digital, 7/12)

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (digital, 7/13)

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 7/17)

Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, Dante's Inferno (digital, 7/19)

Tom Fonder, Business Cat: Hostile Takeovers (digital, 7/20)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Man With Tow Left Feet (7/20)

Jaime Hernandez, Life Drawing (digital, 7/25)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and P. Craig Russell, Elric of Melniboné (digital, 7/26)

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Wears Hats (digital, 7/27)

In August, I'm pretty sure I will read more books.

Quote of the Week: The Economic Half-Life of Bad Movies

Pod People was rare for an MST3K film in that it was released in the 1980s, a time when it became less likely that we'd be able to license the rights to a given cheesy movie. Once you get into the modern era, severe mediocrity becomes more expensive. It's just a fact of life, although something like Pod People has a cheapness that transcends era and epochs. Its shittiness gives it a timelessness that says, "You will ALWAYS be able to afford the rights to this."

 - Frank Conniff, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever, p.28