The Left-Handed Dollar by Loren D. Estleman

Way back in the early days of this blog, I caught up on Loren D. Estleman's private-eye novels - his main character is Amos Walker, of Detroit - in a big batch of posts in August of 2007.

Well, time flows on, and Estleman kept writing about Walker, and I put those books on a shelf, perhaps hoping to do the same thing again. But it's now been more than fifteen years, and there were nine books on that shelf - not everything in the series since 2007; I missed a few - so I figured, let's try to read one book; surely I can do that?

The Left-Handed Dollar was the new Amos Walker book for 2010, and the next book in the series after I caught up in 2007; my copy still had a publicity letter in it. (I've already dropped it into the recycling bin, to stop myself from profusely apologizing to whatever publicist sent it to me those fifteen years ago with the vain hope I would publicize the thing at a time when it would have been helpful.)

Walker is a little bit of a clichéd old-fashioned male gumshoe - Estleman doesn't give him a specific age, but the novels started in 1980 and Walker is a veteran of Vietnam, so in 2010 he had to be at least mid-fifties, and possibly a decade older - with an aversion to cellphones and computers, a network of now-aging (and often getting pretty senior) contacts in various law-enforcement forces, and, in best Detroit style, a car that looks battered and old but is actually powerful and responsive.

This time out, he's hired by a lawyer, Lucille Lettermore, a defense attorney often in the news for high-profile cases (as Walker puts it on the first page, she defends "Communists, terrorists, Democrats, and other enemies of the social order"). Her client is an ill, aging mobster, Joseph Michael Ballista aka "Joey Ballistic," who's facing a third-time-unlucky rap - but "Lefty Lucy" thinks she can unravel some of his priors and put the kibosh on the worst of the current prosecution.

(Lucy also complains a lot about RICO, although nothing Walker investigates in this book or that Joey Ballistic is accused of doing seems to fall into things that are only illegal because of RICO. As often happens with detective novels, there's an element of editorializing from the narrative voice about what is Good and Right in society and how to get rid of the Scum that Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. Since most of the characters are white this time out - there's some gratuitous Orientalism around a couple of secondary characters, for spice, but it's quick and easy to skim over - it doesn't get into anything particularly racist, but it does make me wonder what's coming up in later novels.)

Anyway, Joey was convicted, around twenty years before, of planting a bomb that nearly killed Walker's best friend, the investigative reporter Barry Stackpole. Lettermore wants to hire Walker to shake that tree - to find the police informant who fingered Joey, to see if he can poke any holes in the official story. Walker agrees once he has a meeting with Joey himself - Walker has a massive confidence in his ability to tell if people are telling the truth to him - and gets himself punched in the face by his old buddy Stackpole for being involved.

Walker chases down the detective who did the arrest, now retired and running a bait shop out in the sticks. From a chance phrase in that conversation, he thinks the informant was a woman, and so chases after Joey's ex-wife, two mistresses from that era (one of whom is now the receptionist in the ex-wife's interior decorating business), and, somewhat later, a dragon-lady type who ran the Chinese heroin connection in those days.

But, in the middle of that legwork, the bodies start popping up: first one of those old mistresses, then an ex-cop, whose body is discovered by Walker himself. The Detroit cops, in the person of Inspector John Alderdyce, an old acquaintance of Walker's, pull him in for questioning and put him on the usual short leash.

There's more complications and running about, but Walker does solve the case - there's a shootout at the end with the current perp, and Walker also learns the truth about the old case. Walker's voice has a lot of potshots at the then-current Mayor and administration - mostly for being lazy, vain, and useless, not for actual malfeasance; I have no idea if it's related to a real person but it feels like a fairly standard list of complaints from the right to balance Lettermore's even more obvious lefty complaints.

This is a solid mystery, only slightly creaky with the weight of accumulated genre expectations and told well in a distinctive voice. I don't know that I trust Walker quite as much as he trusts himself, and I'd need to read a few more recent books to get a good sense of how much Estleman trusts him, but I still like the way these stories are told, and Estleman keeps it all modern enough and full of telling details. 

Bad Break, Chapter #2 by Philippe Riche

I still don't know what "Bad Break" means, exactly. At times in this book, it seems to be the name of a person, in flashbacks. It's also the last word spoken in the story, in the metaphoric sense, as a zinger that demands to be punctuated by a David Caruso CSI: Miami meme. I suspect creator Philippe Riche doesn't care all that much: he's going for style and energy and vibes here, not so much a story that's completely coherent, consistent, and satisfying.

(See the cover? Notice how all three main characters are naked? You probably wonder why. They spend most of the middle of this book naked, actually. It's not a good reason, but I won't spoil it here. But, if you are putting naked + French + adult + comics together and getting anything that = sex, I sadly inform you that you are completely wrong.)

On the positive side, Bad Break, Chapter #2 [1] is actually stylish and energetic. It adds more depth and detail to the three characters we met in the first book - they even get names, Ernst-Lazare and Simon and Rebecca X - as they chase three old tattoos that will, we learn here, lead them to something vague and secret from the god Patakyuku. Patakuyuku was the creator-god of wherever the antagonist gang of head choppers are from: somewhere tropical and fairly "savage" fifty or so years ago, probably in the French sphere of influence. Mythologically, Patakuyuku bequeathed his seven major powers to his sons, but then took those powers back, and his sons' heads, when they fought each other. Those seven actual heads - whether divine or just dead-human is never clear - are the McGuffin that Ernst-Lazare is looking for, or rather the biggest piece of the Patakuyuku legacy that he thinks he'll find all in one place.

Riche keeps a lot of this vague, so we don't know what Ernst-Lazare thinks he can do with the heads. He may think those supernatural powers will be available to him, and, within the story, may even be right - even though, if his story is correct, those heads sat in a random tribal village for thousands of years without giving anyone any superpowers. Or, since he's a dealer in "antiquities," which seems to be mostly human remains, he may just think he can display and/or sell them.

Anyway, our three main characters chase up the third tattoo, get naked for an insufficient reason, have to flee the head choppers naked, and come back to where the story started for the big ending, all the while Ernst-Lazare tells stories of Patakuyu and flashbacks about the three old men that had the tattoos. They do steal clothes, among other things, along the way. And they do find what they were looking for, more or less...but it's a "bad break."

YEAAAAHHHHHH!

Bad Break is yet another object lesson that it's much easier to start a noirish, stylish story than to finish one successfully. It's not bad - don't get me wrong - but it's a bit unsatisfying, vague, and confused by the time it's done. The fact that Riche draws two of the characters in the flashbacks to look exactly like Simon and Rebecca X never becomes important, either - are they reincarnations? Does that matter, in some way? (There's no other hint of reincarnation anywhere in the story.) Or is it just the way Riche draws that kind of character?

We also seem to quietly forget in this book that Ernst-Lazare is immortal, and don't learn any explanation for that. Are we mean to assume he is Patakuyuku, who lost his powers to his sons and is questing through the ages to get their heads and retrieve his godhood? Again, Riche will give a lot of style and a lot of vibes, but somewhat less in the way of detailed explanations of what happened and what it all means. But, if you want a twisty, flashback-filled French crime story drawn in moody tones and featuring three people who spend a lot of time naked, go check out Bad Break.

[1] Online catalogs tend to name this book as Vol. 2, but the cover clearly says it is "Chapter 2."

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I think this is the first half of the story - there is one more volume out, and there's not a lot of plot in this one, so I find it hard to believe it runs much longer than that. Also, creator Kenji Tsuruta is only intermittently a maker of manga - he also works as a very in-demand SF illustrator - so his solo comics projects tend to be few and separated by years. Wikipedia says it ran in serialization in Japan from 2011-17, and the two collections were published in English - translated by Dana Lewis - in the fall of 2017, but does not say the story is complete or ended...but Wikipedia has also not been updated since then.

So this is definitely a beginning, but I can't say if there is an end. I guess I'll find out.

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 is a very Miyazaki-influenced story, about a young woman, Mikura Amelia, who runs a floatplane package-delivery service down the sparsely populated Izu and Ogasawara archipelagoes, which stretch from just south of Tokyo harbor down hundreds of miles to the south. As the book opens, her partner in the business, her grandfather Brian, has just died - from that point, it's a one-woman operation. (Unlike Miyazaki, there is not a plucky mechanic character - Mikura seemingly does all of the maintenance herself.)

There are a few other characters in Wandering Island, but they've very secondary - people Mikura interacts with, people she delivers packages too, her parents glimpsed quickly once or twice. The pages focus on Mikura herself, her cat Endeavour, her classic Fairey Swordfish plane, and the landscape around them. I didn't make a count, but at least half of the pages are wordless - this is a largely a story of emotion and image, driven by Mikura's grief over her grandfather.

In her grandfather's papers, Mikura discovers references to Electric Island, a mysterious place she's never heard of before, and a sealed package to deliver there. This island moves - how is never explained in this book - following the North Pacific Gyre, and coming close to Japan every three years.

Soon after her grandfather's death, she sees the island, and tries to land near it, but her plane crashes. She wakes up on a rescue vessel, some time later, the island nowhere in sight. Tsurata skips some amount of time - later in the book three years have passed, and Electric Island should be coming by again, but he doesn't give details of when those years passed, and Mikura looks no different at any point. Her plane also gets repaired somehow between scenes.

Mikura becomes obsessed with Electric Island - perhaps because her grandfather was, perhaps just because this is a book about an obsession, so one must develop. She neglects her business to the point where her electricity is cut off at least once - again, this is during the middle stretch of the book where three years pass somehow, so it's hard to tell if this was a week or a month or two years of mania and obsession.

At the end of this volume, Mikura has gotten some clues, and thinks she's mapped Electric Island's path this time. She sets out in her plane to find it again, to land and investigate, and, presumably, to deliver the package. That's where the volume ends - on her flight out to whatever.

Tsuraua puts Mikura in a bikini most of the time, which seemed reasonable for what seems to be mostly a hot climate and a woman mostly alone. I do see that his work has been criticized as male-gaze-y more than once - the skimpily clad girl and her cat seems to be a repeated motif - so it might not be quite as matter-of-fact as I gave it credit for. Other than that, he has a slightly scratchy line that I appreciate, and falls towards the detailed, even cluttered, side of manga, with lovingly-drawn airplanes and topographic maps and landscape seen from the sky.

This is a lovely book, but, as I said up top, it's not particularly plotty. It moves slowly, and most of what happens is in Mikura's head, as she pulls together clues and hints to figure out where this island has been and will be. The motifs may be Miyazakian - floatplanes, mysterious islands, plucky girls running their own businesses - but the tone is less so. 

Better Things: Goin' Southbound

"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.

Several times this year, I've mentioned that Better Things has given me an opportunity to revisit favorites under slightly different names - solo acts instead of the main band, things like that. (See Richard Thompson and Kristin Hersch, for examples.) This is another one of those.

I had Wall of Voodoo in This Year - I picked two songs for 1982 and none for 1981 to bend the list enough to fit Call of the West in; that's how important and major that song is to me. But their singer and main songwriter Stan Ridgway also had a fine solo career, with a number of great story-songs - besides this one, Drive She Said is just as propulsive, Harry Truman is dark and foreboding, and Don't Box Me In (with Stewart Copeland) is a spiky wonder - over a couple of decades after he left Voodoo.

The song I want to talk about today is Goin' Southbound, from the 1989 record Mosquitos. (And you can definitely hear the '80s in the keyboards in this song - I think it adds to the atmosphere; you can make your own decision.)

Ridgway was mesmerizing in his this-guy-talking-to-you songs; this is one of his best, with a driving beat to back up the compelling situation. The speaker is recruiting someone - you the listener, if you like - to take a package. It is definitely not legal.

It's a strange weight from an exotic locale
Don't worry about the cops, 'cause they're in on it, pal
Just pick it up no later than tonight at three o'clock
And bring it to the warehouse––here, put this in your sock

I love songs that tell stories or set up situations - the ones filled with details and words - and this is one of the best, told smartly and tautly by a singer/songwriter at the height of his power.

You've got this job
But you don't know how
And everybody does
What nobody will allow

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 11, 2025

And this is the third weekly installment listing books I bought from a clearance sale from Midtown Comics a few weeks back - so not "the mail" this precise week, but in the mail not too long before. This time, I have the last five books that were in that big box, the end of the alphabet:

When I do orders like this, I tend to pick odd things I don't know much about - works that strike me interestingly, that look like something distinct. So I often say things like "I have no idea who this creator is" or "this book is about something, but I don't know what." For example: Dear Beloved Stranger is a Xeric Award-winning graphic novel from Dino Pai, published in 2013, which is probably autobiographical, somewhat fabulistic, and otherwise mysterious to me.

From the German cartoonist Ulf K. comes the wordless collection of strips Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007, all about a little man in a hat who works in some sort of an office and I bet has various travails.

A big biographical comic from two French creators is next: George Sand: True Genius, True Woman, written by Séverine Vidal and drawn by Kim Consigny, about (of course) the 19th century feminist novelist and playwright.

Next up is a book for younger readers, translated from the German - Box by Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschӧtter. The kid on the cover, I gather, meets that magical box, and then they build stuff - I imagine it gets more complicated from there.

And last - for today, and overall - is Zach Worton's 2015 graphic novel The Disappearance of Charley Butters, which I saw on some best-of list around that time and had on my "buy this if you see it" list since then. I don't think I ever saw a copy of it in person, but I've got it now...now what (besides the disappearance of the title character) is it actually about? I guess I'll have to read it to find out.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: More Policeman Than You Expect

The policeman touched his cap. He was a long, stringy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit neatly into the general scheme. He had large, knobby wrists of a geranium hue and just that extra four or five inches of neck which disqualify a man for high honours in a beauty competition. His eyes were mild and blue, and from certain angles he seemed all Adam's apple.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor, p.13

Quote of the Week: Talk of War

There was a blare of heated rage mingled with a certain expression of intentness on all faces. Many of the men were making low-toned noises with their mouths, and these subdued cheers, snarls, imprecations, prayers, made a wild, barbaric song that went as an undercurrent of sound, strange and chantlike with the resounding chords of the war march. The man at the youth's elbow was babbling. In it there was something soft and tender like the monologue of a babe. The tall soldier was swearing in a loud voice. From his lips came a black procession of curious oaths. Of a sudden another broke out in a querulous way like a man who has mislaid his hat.

 - Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, p.113 in Prose and Poetry

The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm sure this novel originated in someone talking about "a small bachelor apartment," which got Wodehouse into thinking about who would obviously live in such a place. Well, actually, The Small Bachelor was originally a 1917 musical comedy by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton before Wodehouse novelized it a decade later, so it might have been Bolton who had that thought.

But you know what I mean: someone made that leap, saw a title in it, and, after the writing mills had ground sufficiently, first the play and then the novel emerged.

The novel was serialized in Liberty magazine in 1926 and published in book form a year later, so it's nearly a century old. Some of the details - that was the era of Prohibition, and a raid on a restaurant that provides illegal libations is prominently featured in the climax - are a bit outdated, but Wodehouse's love stories and his broadly-drawn characters are as close to universal as anything is in this world.

The titular bachelor is the timid George Finch, a young man from Idaho who inherited a pile of cash from a relative and moved to Greenwich Village to become an artist. We don't see him paint or interact with models; the narrative and several characters declare he's a lousy artist, but his career (or lack thereof) is mostly a signpost rather than a plot element. He lives in a small penthouse on top of the Sheridan Apartment Building, well-provided with a sleeping porch that will be important to the action and with a fire escape that leads down to the aforementioned restaurant, the Purple Chicken.

George, in best Wodehouse manner, saw a young lady (Molly Waddington) on the street and fell in love with her. Luckily, she reciprocated almost immediately; she's been looking for a small cuddly man who gets flustered when she smiles at him.

Unluckily, Molly is provided with a formidable stepmother and a formerly rich and now henpecked father, Sigsbee H. Waddington. Both have odd manias: Sigsbee is obsessed with The West (as in the romantic image of cowboys from Zane Grey novels and Tom Mix movies), and Mrs. Waddington is hellbent on getting her stepdaughter married to a young English nobleman, Lord Hunstanton. She also takes against George immediately, mostly because he's an artist and so (she assumes) both poor and licentious - neither of which are even close to true. 

Also: there's nothing really wrong with Hunstanton, and he doesn't get a lot to do in the novel - he's not a villain, just the wrong guy for Molly.

That's not nearly enough complications for a Wodehouse story, so George's valet, Frederick Mullett, is also a reformed burglar affianced to a very successful pickpocket, Fanny Welch. A policeman who wants to be a poet, Garroway, also figures prominently. The glue bringing most of these characters together is the successful self-help writer J. Hamilton Beamish, who lives in an apartment downstairs from George. Oh, and also Mrs. Waddington's favorite medium, Madam Eulalie, who Beamish falls in love with and also coincidentally comes from the same small Idaho town as George. Also important, very Wodehousianly, is a sheaf of stock certificates in a motion-picture company which are currently valueless and which Sigsbee wants to unload on someone, as well as a supposedly very valuable pearl necklace, meant to be part of Molly's trousseau, which Sigsbee had replaced with a cheap fake in order to get the funds to buy those stock certificates.

About midway through the novel - I'm going to guess to be the big scene before the intermission when this was a play - there's a Long Island wedding, at which Fanny Welch is hired by Sigsbee to pretend to be an abandoned love of George's and steal the necklace in the ensuing confusion. The wedding doesn't happen, of course, and the action shifts for the rest of the novel to primarily that small bachelor apartment and nearby environs, where policemen are assaulted, gossip columnists are plied with salacious details of the busted wedding, various characters hide under beds or are locked in the apartment, the Purple Chicken is raided by a large number of brawny policemen with several major characters present, windows are used for illegal entry and hot soup is very nearly stolen.

In the end, Sigsbee regains a fortune, Mrs. Waddington is humbled, and George heads off into wedded bliss with Molly. Along the way, Mullett and Fanny have already married, and Beamish and Eulalie are on their way to the registrar as well - I can't recall a Wodehouse book with such a blizzard of wedding rice at the end.

This is not one of Wodehouse's very best books - there are a number of elements that aren't leveraged as well as they could have been, and others that a maturer Wodehouse would have made more out of - but it's a solid B- Wodehouse, funny and quick and amusing, particularly for being a century old.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition - it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo, from Mirage - but, within the story, there's no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn't reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when "long-running" was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn't manage to publish any collections - this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there's been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That's the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death, which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn't say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress - there's no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don't directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who's solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, "Shades of Green" and "Shi," are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more - the wordless "The Lizards' Tale" and the flashback "Battlefield" - are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, "Jizo," "Usagi's Garden," and "Autumn," are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit - a kit, I suppose - learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it's always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, "Shades of Green."

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that's how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn't "the end" - Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I'm not sure that he isn't still adding more on, even now) - but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it's pretty successful artistically - as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Writing about a book you last read at the age of about fourteen feels like returning to book-report days. Maybe even more so when it's clear why that book is given to so many fourteen-year-olds: it's short, focused entirely on one character, and its themes are so high in the text even relatively dull readers can identify them and, one hopes, write semi-coherently about them.

I picked up The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's most famous bit of literary output, largely because I'd just read a batch of Ambrose Bierce stories about the Civil War, and this Crane novel - in the form of the Library of America omnibus Prose and Poetry, which I think is basically the complete Crane - was on the next shelf. Secondary reasons include the fact that it is short - and I'm all about short books these days, to keep myself motivated - that I hadn't read it since the mid-80s, and that I'd been vaguely thinking about reading a recent graphic-novel adaptation, so it was already in my head.

This is the story of one young man, Henry Fielding, during two days of an unnamed battle sometime towards the end of the US Civil War. Crane is remarkably vague - I should probably say deliberately non-specific, but it often comes across to the reader as vague - throughout, with Henry consistently called "the youth" and other characters named once or twice at best but regularly tagged as "the tall soldier" or "his friend." I assume Crane did this to maximize the Everyman-ness of Henry and universalize his experience; it came across to me, reading it as an adult, as well-meaning but a bit clumsy and convoluted.

Red Badge is also from that 19th century stream of writing that tried to present colloquial speech through typography and spelling, which was a valiant effort but can lead to things such as this (on pp.198 of the edition I read):

"Well, sir, th' colonel met your lieutenant right by us - it was damndest thing I ever heard - an' he ses: 'Ahem! ahem!' he ses. 'Mr. Hasbrouck! he ses. There, Flemin', what d' yeh think 'a that? 'Who was th' lad what carried th' flag?' he ses, an' th' lieutenant, he speaks up right away: 'That's Flemin', an' he's a jimhickey,' he ses, right away. What? I say he did. "A jimhickey,' he ses - those 'r his words. He did, too. I say he did. If you kin tell this story better than I kin, go ahead an' tell it. Well, then, keep yer mouth shet...."

A little of that goes a long way; the part I quoted goes on for another fifteen lines. Red Badge is a short book, but every time one of its enlisted-man characters speaks - the officers have dialogue that's a bit easier to follow - it's like that.

But Red Badge, again, is not difficult to read: the dialogue does take some getting used to, but it's straightforward and mostly clear. Once a reader realizes "the youth" is our hero, and that term is always used for him, Crane's prose is close enough to the modern American idiom that even those legions of fourteen-year-olds can understand it all without too much effort.

Crane runs his hero through a lot of experiences in those two days, back and forth both alone and in company, as the army moves forward, engages the enemy, pauses, fights again, and maneuvers some more. Henry runs away from battle once - that's the great theme and motif and concern of the novel; how a fighting man can know, before the fighting first starts, if he's brave enough to stand up or if he will run away. (Crane, I think, was trying to show all sides of the story, so Henry both runs and is brave, in turn: that may be the point, of course, than all men run away sometimes and stand up other times, and the difference between those times may not be clear or explicable to anyone.) So there is a lot of both activity and philosophizing, as Henry waits for things to happen, and engages when they do happen, and thinks, all the time, of what he should and will and did do. His psychology is also modern and specific enough that a teen reader of today or the 1980s will understand what Henry is worried about and why.

I don't know if Red Badge is a great novel, in world-historical terms. It's a pretty good American novel of its era, tied to a major event in national history (though written three decades later by a young man born after the war), with a lot of hooks that makes it easy to teach and useful for pedagogy. So I expect it will continue to be served up to fourteen-year-olds for quite some time: it's not a novel most Americans of the past couple of generations needed to go out of their way to read; they'd get it, whether they wanted it or not.

Murderburg by Carol Lay

I thought this book collected Carol Lay's single-page strips - the "Murderburg Chronicles" that have been running in her weekly strip Lay Lines for at least the last year or two. And those pieces are a lot of fun, but they're a bit dense, so I didn't get to the two-hundred-and-fifty-page Murderburg quite as quickly as I expected - I almost read it a couple of times, but put it down for something I thought would be zippier.

Reader, Murderburg is actually a collection of six comics-format stories about the inhabitants of Murderburg. It is zippy and fun and just a bit dark, and I wish I'd jumped and read it as soon as I heard it was published in March. So if you're waiting as well, stop reading me right now and go grab Murderburg instead.

Lay published these stories in various places - the book doesn't say where - during the 2010s, under the overall title "Murderville." (A Netflix series has since jumped up and taken that name, forcing a slight rebrand.) It's set on a bucolic island off the coast of Maine - actually named Muderburg, after the founder, but nick-named Murderburg over the years, for various reasons.

The stories all center on Mayor Leo Scazzo and his family: Leo was a mobster but has semi-retired, or perhaps gone into hiding, depending on how you look at it. Many of the other inhabitants of Muderburg have similarly complicated pasts - the current strips Lay's doing for Lay Lines get into that, one person at a time - and Muderburg is both a somewhat sleepy town dependent on the flow of tourists and a pit stop for "retiring" ne'er-do-wells who need new passports and faces and such.

Leo is central to all of the stories, with his wife Antonia and teenage vegan daughter Isabella also taking major roles in some of the tales. The younger kids, twins, are mostly hellions running about and getting underfoot. Muderburg has plenty of other colorful characters - again, see Lay Lines for many of their backgrounds - from a coroner and a lighthouse keeper to a ferry operator and a B&B owner.

Not all of the stories see the locals needing to actually kill from-aways, but it happens more than once. And some of the worst offenders are from the richer, less pleasant town Snobunquit - Lay is wonderful with names - which is right on the mainland near Muderburg, sending pretentious yuppie-types who annoy Muderburgers and wreak havoc on their landscape.

Interestingly, the postulated retiring-mobster pipeline in Muderburg doesn't come up directly in any of these stories; Lay has saved herself some story material for a sequel if she wants it. The wonderful map - tucked in between the first and second stories - also includes a number of places that could be triggers for additional stories if Lay wants: Lost Girls Island, The Downfall, Folly Ledge, Devilled Rocks, Widow's Walk.

So read and/or buy Murderburg: it's by Carol Lay, which means the art is stylish and precisely cartooned, the writing is pointed, the dialogue is sharp and amusing, the world capacious and interesting, and the stories energetic and amusing. Let's make this so much of a success that Lay is inspired to do a Murderburg II.

Better Things: History Never Repeats

"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.

I don't know if this is my favorite Split Enz song - there's a part of me that will always hold out for Dirty Creature, far darker and starker - but it's a wonderful bouncy pop song that's just about perfect.

History Never Repeats was a hit, I think - maybe more in their native New Zealand than over here in North America - and gave a title to at least one of their greatest hits records. And, like so many of the songs I've been writing about, it's largely a break-up song - the history that will not repeat is that

There was a girl I used to know
She dealt my love a savage blow

The song is straightforward from there: a fine pop sound, circa 1980, with a video (linked below) even more of its time, in all of its splendor.

Good pop music is like a soap bubble: shiny, shimmery, floating on its own power, gorgeous to look at and even more exciting the more light plays on it. But poking at it will only make it burst and disappear. So I think I'll leave it there, with this very very early-MTV video, that I have to imagine all of the participants now look back at and regret:

Books Read: September 2025

I do this every month, and it's boring this time as always before. This is what I read; once the posts go live, I'll add links. I don't know if this is actually as useful as an index to the blog as I say it is, but it's a thing I do consistently, and I'm old and set in my ways enough to be very fond of consistency.

Cathy Malkasian, The Heavy Bright (digital, 9/1)

James Thurber, The Seal in the Bedroom (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

Thijs Desmet, Smoking Kills (digital, 9/6)

Tony Millionaire, Drinky Crow Drinks Again (digital, 9/7)

John Updike, Bech: A Book (in The Complete Henry Bech, 9/7)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Casual Fridays (digital, 9/13)

Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsh, The Baker Street Peculiars (digital, 9/14)

Evelyn Waughh, Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad, 9/14)

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie? (digital, 9/20)

Renaud Dilles, Betty Blues (9/21)

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 9/21)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/26)

James Kochalka, Quit Your Job and Other Stories (9/27)

Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschötter, Box (9/28)

Next month I will probably read more books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 4, 2025

This is the second of three weekly posts listing a big box of comics-format stuff I got from Midtown Comics about two weeks ago now. I'm breaking them into five-book chunks to keep me from typing for too long on a sunny Saturday morning and just because I can. This time, I have the middle of the alphabet, authorially:

I have two things written by Matt Kindt; I've mostly read the stuff he draws, too, but I gather that, like a lot of people in comics, he does other kinds of projects to make money and keep a career going. (Throwing no shade there: my own career wandered away from a "creative" field into  a deeply dull, B2B end of marketing that pays nicely but no one cares about.) First up is Apache Delivery Service, where the art is from Tyler Jenkins and the colors by Hilary Jenkins. This is some kind of thriller or horror story, set in the jungles of Vietnam (the war as well as the country, as I understand it), with two men (soldiers?) searching for a lost treasure.

The other Matt Kindt-written thing is Bang!, where the art comes from Wifredo Torres, and the colors are from Nayoung Kim and Bill Crabtree in various permutations. This is some kind of spy thriller thing, though I think each issue might start from a different starting place, and some of the storylines might be fictional within its overall world. Anyway: looks twisty and complex, and the quotes are mostly in the "this is awesome!" mode without giving details, so I suspect Big Reveals and Shocking Twists starting pretty early.

I had James Kochalka's Quit Your Job and Other Stories on my list of books to get for a long time - so long that I don't remember why, exactly. This is the 2015 edition - possibly expanded, or at least with a new introduction - of a book Kochalka originally published in 1997. My guess is that this was "adult" Kochalka - or maybe I mean a Kochalka book from before he started doing so much specifically for young readers, not that it's necessarily anti-kid - and I wanted to dive into that end of his work. I guess I'll see.

I thought Be That Way was a graphic novel, but it isn't, exactly: this 2023 Hope Larson book mixes comics pages, longer prose sections (in what look like a lettering font), spot illustrations, and some design-y pages to tell the story of one teen girl's life in the early '90s through her diary. So it's denser than I expected: good for depth, possibly not as good if I wanted to just read it quickly.

And last for this batch is Graylight from Naomi Nowak. I read one of Nowak's books back in the Aughts, and reviewed it for ComicMix then. This book is from the same era, so I decided to check it out. From a quick google, it looks like Nowak is mostly making paintings and jewelry these days, rather than comics, but I count "making art the way you want" as a win, no matter the form. Maybe she'll come back to comics, or some other narrative form, eventually. The description of this book is very vague, so I have almost no idea what it's about - which is also a good thing on occasion.

The Unexpected Antick Musings Twentieth Anniversary Post

Twenty years ago today, I set up a blog on Blogger, using a random bookish template (which I'm still using today; if I tried to change it now, it would either break everything or require massive amounts of work) and put up a quick test post.

And, though it surprises me to realize it, I'm still here, using that same template, with a grotty old blogroll in the left rail that I really should just delete one of these days. (There's a lot of aspects of this blog I keep thinking I should modernize and update and clean up, and then I remember this is a hobby that brings in no income, and so I'm only going to do the bits that I actually enjoy.)

Every year on October 4th, the Glorious Blogiversary, I intend to post a long retrospective post, with lots of of links and pointless numbers and suchlike.

But, because of a flaw in my character, I have botched or entirely missed all of the previous "big" anniversaries so far - fifth, tenth, and fifteenth. (I'm as astonished as you are that anyone's flaw could be that precise, but it did happen.)

On the other hand, I'm getting older, and I keep hoping that means I'll change in some way, maybe even develop different, exciting new flaws in my character. And so, this year, I'm thinking I will have an anniversary post (this very thing you're reading now), and break the weird pattern I've set.

It will still be massively self-indulgent, and quite likely not all that interesting to a random reader. But - and this is the point I will focus on - it will be a thing I planned to do, and I will have done it.

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 (published two months late and substantially shorter than the others), eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth (a quick list of number of posts, done because I'd completely forgotten the blogiversary was coming up), seventeenth and nineteenth.

(You will note there are no links to the fifth, sixteenth, or eighteenth anniversary posts. Those are the ones I missed entirely.)

Each of those is itself mostly a list of links to posts from that year of the blog; I don't expect anyone to actually trace that backwards. It's mostly a signpost, to say this is a thing I do, and these are the times I did it.

I then typically explain what I grandly call The Myth of Antick Musings. I started this blog as practice, since the book-club company I worked for at the time 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  - I think it still exists in some form, but that is a much attenuated and sad form that I try not to think about. So the fact that my half-assed practice blog is still running while the SFBC itself seems to have died, well, that's a sign of something in the world, I guess, though I don't count it as a win.

After I was cast out of the SFBC (and, though I didn't realize it at the time, editorial work and the SFF field in general), this blog turned into exactly what I thought it never could, should, or would be: a book blog. Oh, well.

I used to watch moves and write about them here. I used to post notes and links to random things actually happening in the real world, too! We truly are living in the worst possible timeline.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

At this point in the annual post, I have a table with the number of blog posts each year. Why? Would any reader care? I doubt it, but, somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose I see it as a measure of my productivity, and so I must track it.

• 2024-2025 -- 407 posts
• 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

If post-count means anything, it's clear I soured on blogging - or ignored it, or got busy with other things; take your pick - several times over these two decades, most strongly in 2019-2020. I also posted nearly twice as actively the first four years as any time afterward; lots of us were posting random thoughts into the ether in those days, in ways that have mostly migrated to social media owned by megacorporations harvesting our attention for megabucks in more recent years. (Again: worst timeline, hands down.)

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

Antick Musings did turn into a book blog, first slowly after I left the SFBC (and thought I might have a chance to get another editorial job) and then more comprehensively (once it was clear that I'd fallen off the horse and the horse had run away, never to be seen again).

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.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. 

Books by writers about how they work almost always turn into advice. I understand that: the audience for work about how novels get written is mostly people who desperately want to write novels themselves.

I am perhaps not as invested in the idea of two half-naked guys whacking each other for three minute intervals until one of them falls over as he was, but I can appreciate his knowledge and enthusiasm even as many of the technical details are lost on me.

There's a difference between formula and genre. I don't know if I can explain it, clearly enough, but it's real. A formula is a cheap shortcut, a template for a kind of story to make it easier to knock off, while a genre is a territory, with clear boundaries and sometimes required landmarks, which a story is free to navigate in its own way.

But I often find myself wishing books were different than they are, and it's not a useful wish.

We all are not reading millions of books, every second of every day. It's the default state of humanity.

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's also got one of Wodehouse's most amusing impostor plots, with Jimmy Crocker pretending not to be Jimmy Crocker to woo the girl he loves but then posing as Jimmy Crocker to infiltrate her house.

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.

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year.

That and $12.95 will get you a ham sandwich at a deli, but I like to mention random things like that. It makes me relatable as a blogger and helps pad out the word count, neither of which is an actual concern for me.

The three talk in the ways that people who smoked an awful lot of pot for an awful lot of years talk, and similarly believe themselves to be profound.

So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

What I'm saying is: I feel like I used to be smart and connected and in charge.

I don't want to pretend to give advice to someone dead for forty years. That's the temptation with anyone's memoirs: it's so easy to see other people's mistakes, and point them out in clever or cruel ways, to show how they could have had much better, more fulfilling lives, if only they'd known to do...whatever.

We can note that '60s Marvel comics were a major advance over the competition, with more realistic motivations and characters that spoke more clearly to the teen and young adult audience of the time,  and that they were popular and a welcome surge of energy for the field, while still pointing out that they were not very good, and that the things that came afterward in the same style were not even as good as that.

Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind.

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics - more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless "who would win" arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains - is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn't accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I have posts about other things - not as many, and not as much as in the early days of the blog. In 2025, for the third year in a row, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays. I think I'm not as good at writing about music as I am about books - some of you may have unkind thoughts, wondering if that is even possible, but I will ignore you - but I do it because I like these songs and I want to surface things I like here.

I post lists of new books - only physical books, but however and whenever I get them - I post a list here, under the overall title Reviewing the Mail (which I stole from Chuck Klosterman, who doesn't seem to be using it anymore). I've called those posts different things occasionally, too - mostly by mistake.

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 the Sunday closest to Independence Day.)

I don't post about much of anything else, these days. I did rant about gerrymandering this past summer, not that it did any good.

That was pretty much it for Antick Musings in Year Twenty. It bores me to say it; I can only image how it seems to you folks.

Whither Antick Musings?

So that was Year Twenty: big round number. Scary to think this has been going for more than a third of my life already. But I am massively a creature of habit, so I think I'm going to keep doing the same things, in mostly the same ways, in the next year.

But I could always be hit by a bus. I've also been under the care of a heart doctor for even longer than I've run this blog - since 2002 and an episode of heart failure - which is probably more likely than J. Random Bus to suddenly cause massive problems in my life. Who knows.

Antick Musings is deeply self-indulgent, I know. There will likely be more of it, in the same style and the same place. over the next year. I just hope the self-indulgent things that you do are equally fulfilling to you. 

Quote of the Week: He Also Wore An Onion on His Belt

Not to harp on how difficult the world was then, but in those days, if you wanted to watch TV, you really had to watch TV. You couldn't just pull a computer out of your pocket and watch Lawrence of Arabia on your phone the way the kids these days do. You had to find an actual television screen on an actual television. You millennials have no idea what things were like back then. Everything was slightly harder, but you're too young and inexperienced to even appreciate the experience of living in a world that's a tiny bit more inconvenient than the world you live ion, Your generation has experienced only one or two things, whereas my generation experienced three or four things, so show some respect, damn it.

 - Frank Conniff, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever, p.15

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.7: Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There are twenty-eight volumes collecting the whole Lone Wolf and Cub series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this is the one-quarter mark. When it was published in English translation, back in 2001, we knew that. I don't know if the original Japanese book audience would have known that,  or how soon this book first appeared after the stories were originally published in a Japanese magazine in the 1970s.

In any case, it is largely middle - muscular middle, full of strong stories, but still middle - and writing about middle means either being vague or getting into great detail. I'm thinking, as I putter slowly through Lone Wolf and Cub this time, I'm going to be vague.

Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger collects five stories - as is fairly typical, one of them is part of the overall larger story, with the Yagyu ninjas trying once again to kill former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, and of course failing. The other four stories are standalone pieces, each a case where Ittō is either hired for an assassination or just happens to be somewhere when other violence is happening.

The stories are atmospheric and grounded, each one featuring specifics of life in this chaotic period of Japanese history - stories that only work because of those details, of the allowable punishments for children or how a dragnet for "undesirables" actually operated. I still wonder how strange and foreign this world seemed to the initial Japanese audience - they were separated from this phase of their history by a few hundred years and a lot of urbanization and other changes, but it still was their history, and that can resonate in a culture even when it's not current.

So this is still as good as the previous books - let me throw in links for the first volume and the previous one - and, although there is, to some degree, a longer overall story, that is a fairly thin thread most of the time. Nearly all of the books, aside from the first and the last, can be read as standalones. I don't know if I'd recommend that, but it is possible.

In the Midst of Life by Ambrose Bierce

I'm not the only one to remark that Ambrose Bierce really was the writer some people think Mark Twain was: a San Francisco resident, a cynic, a misanthrope, beset by family tragedy, mostly a journalist, uncompromising to the end. He spent most of his career as a critic - of literature but even more often of the world at large - and columnist, for Hearst newspapers during most of his career and at the time when working for Hearst meant working for Mr. Hearst.

In the Midst of Life, initially published as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, was his first book under his own name - in the 19th century fashion, he'd had a few books of his criticism and satire come out in London in the 1870s, while living there, under the name "Dod Grile." I read it in the Library of America Bierce omnibus The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, which uses texts from the 1909 Collected Works. (Bierce selected, edited, and corrected all the texts for that twelve-volume set, so that's a good choice.) This version of Midst has twenty-six stories; a few that had been in the 1891 edition, or added in subsequent editions, were moved to the Can Such Things Be? collection for the 1909 text.

There used to be a good Doubleday edition, edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, that collected all of Bierce's stories - I used it when I wrote my thesis on Bierce back in my college days - but I can't find that, or any similar thing now. There's a lot of shovelware editions of his writing, mostly digital, since Bierce is solidly out of copyright. At this point, I recommend the LoA edition for Bierce, unless you have access to a library with the 1909 Collected Works. Though I also recall those books being a fussy size and format; not terribly pleasant to read decades later.

As the initial title hints, Midst is made up of two sections: first fifteen stories of the Civil War, and then eleven more various stories set in civilian life at various points in the previous forty or fifty years. But, more fundamentally, the stories are all about death. The war stories obviously so: war is always largely about death, and the US Civil War was one of the first mechanized, industrial-scale "modern" wars. The civilian stories tend to be psychological, about people in unusual situations, from which they do not necessarily emerge.

Bierce was both a decorated veteran of the Civil War - he worked as a topographical engineer, sketching and detailing landscapes that would very soon be the locations for battles, racing just ahead of or in between armies on the move - and a dark, cynical writer with a mania for concision and precise language. The war stories are generally stronger here; I found the civilian stories often rely on specific superstitions that are no longer current, making more of an effort for the reader to get into the right frame of mind, while the war stories are about their time and place in ways that make them universal.

The stories are all dark - Bierce's most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is second here, and many readers may know that one. The war stories have a similar tone and style: precise, unadorned, factual, like a dispatch from the actual war, in which horrible things happen inevitably because huge groups of trained and well-equipped men are working very diligently to kill large numbers of each other. Or, more accurately, because men, as Bierce saw them, are stubborn things animated by counterproductive ideals that drive them to do horrible actions against their own best interests.

I won't talk about details: the endings of these stories are not exactly surprises, especially after the first one or two, but they're generally snappy, tight summations or reversals, and listing them would be dull and mostly pointless. 

Bierce was one of the great short-story writers of the late 19th century, and the first person to both fight seriously in a modern war and write well about it afterward; his stories, especially his war tales, are very much still worth reading now. But you might need to be in the right mood for them; they are dark and uncompromising.

Yeah! by Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez

I never want to discourage creators from stretching, from trying new things and talking to new audiences. But, sometimes, it just doesn't really click.

In the late '90s, Peter Bagge had been making sarcastic comics about grumpy twenty-something slackers in Hate for more than a decade; his work was really closely associated with not just a particular adult audience, but a very specific tone and style. It's no surprise that he wanted to do something different.

What he did was surprising, though: he wrote the all-ages, Comics Code-approved girl-band comic Yeah! for DC Comics, collaborating with Gilbert Hernandez. (Hernandez's career has taken a lot of odd turns, and he's worked with a number of writers over the years, so this was not quite as much of a departure for him - I've always gotten the sense that Hernandez just has the desire or need to generate a lot of work, to keep himself engaged and happy, and the more different the better.)

Bagge's introduction in this 2011 collection of Yeah! - notably from Fantagraphics, longtime publisher of both Bagge and Hernandez, not DC, which is a big signpost to the fortunes of the series for those who can read tea-leaves - notes that he had an eight-year-old daughter at the time, and had gotten happily into "girl culture," which reignited his love of pop music. There always are reasons and explanations for specific projects; they always make sense to the creators at the time, and enough sense to the publishers that they make it out into the market. The question, always, is how that market responds.

Yeah! was not a success in the market. It ran nine issues, and was only collected a decade later by a different publisher. (And here I should also note that the collection is in black-and-white, but I think the original comics were in color, since characters make comments about the colors of things pretty regularly, and 1999 was awfully late for a book for tween girls without color.)

And the comics are...OK, I suppose. Bagge is a wordy writer, and this reads not too differently from his better-known work, to the point that the regular Bagge reader starts wondering if these characters are actually being honest and straightforward, or if Bagge has just unlocked a previously inaccessible level of sarcasm. There's one backup strip at the end that Bagge draws himself, and it's really hard not to read it like a Hate story - Bagge clearly intends for it to be taken straight, but regular readers will assume spleen and bile in his phrases.

Yeah! is the name of the band: Honey, Woo-Woo and Krazy, three best friends not quite out of their teens, a few years into a music career. They are struggling on Earth but the biggest act in the galaxy, beloved by millions across dozens of alien worlds. (But this was a contemporary Earth that hadn't had a first contact yet, so there's no commerce with those alien worlds, so the vast loot Yeah! brings in is useless. They don't seem to even bank it on an alien world so it's available for tours or such, like the old Soviet Union; they just give it away or ignore it.) They also have an old, nutty guy as their manager: Crusty; his inventions got them out into the galaxy but his general incompetence can't get them any good gigs on Earth.

The nine issues are each basically standalone, with goofy adventures either on Earth or in space - including the inevitable flashbacks to reveal Who They Are and How They Got Here - as Yeah! chases fame and fortune here (with little success) and gets involved in odd alien things out there. On Earth, they have a rival, Miss Hellraiser, and a band of boys, The Snobs, who always beat them in battle-of-the-bands situations and one of whom has a crush on Woo-Woo. In space, the characters are all one-offs - there's the driver of their space limo who shows up a couple of times without actually getting a personality or anything to do. The stories are all wordy, and all full of the cultural assumptions and ideas of a guy Bagge's age (early 40s around this time), including a bunch of hippie jokes.

This is all fine: it's amusing and entertaining, and the gestalt of Bagge's writing and Hernandez's art works well together. It is too wordy, in that old-fashioned comics style, full of long captions and long dialogue balloons that say a lot of the same things over and over again. And it all comes across as something like a generation-later version of Bob Hope: goofy, sui generis comics that are meant to appeal to a younger audience but are full of the ideas and plot devices of old people.

Yeah! is basically forgotten, for good and sufficient reasons. It might not quite deserve that, but most things get forgotten twenty-five years later. If you really loved Josie and the Pussycats (the movie, the concept or the comics) and wish there was something else sorta like that, you might be in luck.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the MST3K writers & performers

I was a fan of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show back in the '90s - my town didn't have Comedy Central when it was on that channel, but I saw it a couple of times at my in-laws house (only people who know my family will see how very, very odd it was that I watched MST3K only at my in-laws in Haledon) and then got more obsessive for the last three years when it ran on the (then) Sci-Fi Channel.

I had this book at the time - I might even have bugged a publishing contact to send me a copy for free, and possibly (I hope not) even pretended that I was interested in it professionally for the SFBC. (It could have been vaguely plausible, since I think we did at least one of the Nitpicker's Guide books by Phil Farrand, which I could probably spin a line of bullshit as being similar to the gestalt of MST3K.)

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then - the show was revived almost twenty years later for two Netflix seasons (which I've seen most of) and then one Kickstarted pandemic-era season (which I own but haven't watched any of), and the final cast of the show has regrouped as Rifftrax and done about a thousand movies, including a series of annual live events (which I've taken my two kids to pretty consistently for a decade). There were quirkier offshoots, too, in The Film Crew and Cinematic Titanic, which I've seen less of.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide is a 1996 production, coming right as the team was creating the shortened Season 7 - their last for Comedy Central - and prepping their one and only theatrical movie for release. It is deeply out of print: I got this copy for slightly more than I wanted to pay, and it came with a noticeably rolled spine (which I've been attempting to coax back into shape by leaving it under one of those gigantic bug-crushing DC Comics omnibuses).

I read this again because I've been watching random old MST3K episodes with my kids: we do a "Movie Night" on Wednesdays, and I'm mostly alternating MST3K and "real" movies (like Beverly Hills Cop and The Big Lebowski and the like - originally, all three of us were going to suggest movies and go in a rotation, but it's all fallen to me as The Dad, so, by gum!, I am going to indulge myself). So I'm thinking about the series, and when I think about things, I want to read books - it's just how I'm wired.

This book was written by the main cast/writers - the two were basically the same - of the time: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Michael J. Nelson, and Mary Jo Pehl. It has thumbnail descriptions of the plot of each episode's movie (and short, where applicable), descriptions of that episode's host segments, and reflections by an initial-credited member of the team listed above. There's also some front matter - a jokey/silly/odd intro piece by each of the above and a quick history of how the show came to be, plus a list of "characters" as of Season 7. Back matter includes explanations of what are credited as the 50 most obscure jokes on the show, slightly jokey bios of the writers, a FAQ, and a description of the first (of two) conventions the show put on during its life.

This was a basically comprehensive view of MST3K, from the creators, as of when it was created. It's less comprehensive now, obviously, due to the passage of time, but it's still fairly definitive as far as it goes. If you like the show, you'll have to seek out a copy of this, and probably pay more than you want for it, but it's a quintessential big-fan thing, and does not disappoint on that level.

Better Things: Sometime to Return

"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.

OK - nothing against Grave Dancers Union. It's probably the most consistent record in Soul Asylum's career, with four songs that would be on any band's lifetime list. (Runaway Train, of course, Somebody To Shove, Without a Trace and 99%.) It is an awesome record.

But before they hit that, they were scrappier and a bit quirkier - Hang Time and And the Horse They Rode In On aren't as consistent (there are a couple of real clunkers), but We 3 and Gullible's Travels are two of the greatest heartfelt hard-rock songs ever. And their first song to get major national airplay - the one I want to celebrate today - is even more anthemic than that.

Sometime to Return is an almost Platonically perfect Midwest rock song, three and a half minutes of guitars and drums and propulsive force It's a song about that moment before you make it, when you think you might not make it, when you wonder what's going on and what you should be doing.

If someday comes early
Comes whipping comes whirling
To take you for all you have learned
The tables are turning
My bridges are burning
My destination sometime to return

And how do you deal with it?

Get up and do something
No time to choose it
Do it do it do it do it

That's how. This is a great song from a band on the cusp of something awesome, just reaching out to grab it and getting their first taste of that lightning.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 27, 2025

As I said last week, this is the first of three posts listing the books I just bought from Midtown Comics - "just," in this case, meaning "arriving Sep 15 and ordered Sep 2" - broken out into batches of five for my personal convenience. This first one has the beginning of the alphabet, according to author name.

I read a bunch of Art Bathazar and Franco's comics for younger readers - primarily Tiny Titans, but including other stuff - when my own kids were younger, and liked their energy and style a lot. And I am coming to realize, as I get older, that I don't need to stop doing things I enjoy just because they're supposedly for people a generation or two behind me. So I just got the Bathazar/Franco 2020 book ArkhaManiacs, which seems to be a goofy take on kid Bruce Wayne (not sure if it's pre- or post-orphaning, but I bet the book will resolutely not make that clear) and kid versions of his major villains.

I read Ludovic Debeurme's Lucille over a decade ago, and even, at that time, noted that the sequel, Renée, was on its way. I don't know why it took me that long to actually get Renée...well, yes, actually, I do: I forgot about it. The world is full of books, and we forget most of them most of the time. But I remembered this one, eventually.

I know very little about Betty Blues by the French creator Renaud Dillies. It's about a bird that plays jazz trumpet, and some kind of love affair either gone wrong or never actually started in the first place. But the art looks inky and complex and fun, and it's a big-format album, and I figured why not?

Similarly, I liked the energy of the cover of Robin Enrico's Life of Vice - about a reporter trailing along with celebrity Becky Vice on a trip to host an award ceremony in Vegas - even though I don't think I've read Enrico's work before.

Last for this batch is All the Presidents by Drew Friedman, one of his recent series of "I'm going to do a bunch of really detailed headshots, in my inimitable photorealistic style, of a specific group of people with some connection" books. This one was from 2019, and covered the first 45 Presidents, as the title makes clear.