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.

Quote of the Week: A Fine Excuse for Any Circumstance

Glinnes looked out over Ambal Broad in bemusement., "I admit to perplexity. Alastor Cluster is thousands of years old; men by the trillions fill the galaxy. Great mentors here, there, everywhere across the whole pageant of existence, have propounded problems and solved them. Everything conceivable has been achieved and all goals attained - not once, but thousands of times over. It is well known that we live in the golden afternoon of the human race. Hence, in the name of the Thirty Thousand Stars, where will you find a fresh area of knowledge that must urgently be advanced from Rabendary meadow?"

 - Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262, p.90 in Alastor

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format - maybe just from an assumption that's how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains is Jeff Lemire's memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he's done, so I hope that isn't hubris - I'd like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it's not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues - but that's a very small part of the book, partially because I don't think Lemire's readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic - or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that's what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir "how I got to zero" section, covering his childhood and education and all of that - up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic - Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts - and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs. From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County and The Nobody, on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder and Trillium and Roughneck, on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender, Gideon Falls, and Plutona), on Black Hammer and Royal City, one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook, on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That's a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work - a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There's not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you're a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you'll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors - there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he's talking about - and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There's some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines - but I'm not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire's comics, you'll probably like hearing how he made them.

Sergio Aragones' Groo: The Hogs of Horder

I sometimes look at a Groo book and think "that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about." And then I'm wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now.

Groo looks quick and breezy, but it's a wordy comic, and creator Sergio Aragones, for all his speed and facility, draws a lot of detail. So the pages are engaging and light and fun, but they demand more attention than you expect. And then I remember, after finishing reading, that Groo (the character) is aggressively stupid, but Groo (the comic) nearly always has a point of view or moral or life lesson it's trying to impart, and untangling that takes effort.

The Hogs of Horder was the new Groo series in 2009-2010; its four issues started in October of '09 and the book came out in August of '10. So it is absolutely the "the Groo take on the Global Financial Crisis" book, just to warn you.

Aragones (here, as usual, assisted by Mark Evanier on something vague related to scripting, Stan Sakai on letters, and Tom Luth with Michelle Madsen on colors) is not a subtle or nuanced creator. And, in Groo stories, there can be villains, but most of the problems in the world will be caused by Groo himself. So Hogs of Horder both wants to blame some general long-term economic shifts (moving production overseas to a lower-cost country, for one main example) for the woe in this world and also wants to make Groo personally responsible for the shift, because he's an idiot who sinks ships and destroys stuff.

This means that we have a lot of panels with lots of mercantile folks - in Groo's medieval-ish world, carriage-makers and home-builders and flask-makers and so on - gloating about getting loans from bankers to spend on making their stuff, but more importantly "high salaries for ourselves" (even though, if they are the owners, what they actually get is a return on their invested capital, and if they are not the owners, how come we never see the owners?) after Groo breaks things.

This runs round and round for a while, as Groo goes from the cheap foreign country to the US-analogue, breaking things and causing all of the business owners/leaders to go to the banks for loans to rebuild everything they're doing and/or to set up new operations in that cheaper nation. It is all pitched in that speaking-to-children tone Groo often uses, and is about that level of sophistication; even readers who think capitalists are typically rapacious and destructive will find this version really overly simplified and silly.

But "silly" is the point of Groo. He breaks everything, and it is funny, and then he walks away to break something else somewhere else. Oh, and there are jokes about mendicants and cheese dip along the way. If you want a Groo story, this is one. I haven't yet figured out a good reason to recommend any one Groo story above any other one, so just pick the Groo thing closest to your hand at the time, if you want to read one. That's basically what I did. Maybe I'll take a longer break before doing so again, this time.

Trullion: Alastor 2262 by Jack Vance

I may discover differently as I read the rest of them, but my memory is that the Alastor books by Jack Vance are perhaps the least "series-y" of his many series - a sequence of three books set in the same stellar cluster that I think are basically separate novels connected by the involvement of the head of the government of this vast and vague nation.

Trullion: Alastor 2262 was the first of the three, originally published in 1973 as a serial in Amazing and then as a Ballantine paperback. Alastor is "a whorl of thirty thousand live stars in an irregular volume twenty to thirty light-years in diameter," with about five trillion people on about three thousand inhabited planets, all loosely ruled by the Connatic, whose succession mechanism is not describes but sounds vaguely hereditary. Like many Vance universes, pirates are a problem - here they are called starmenters and are hunted down zealously but still manage to attack and despoil settlements on random worlds fairly regularly.

The Connatic is a minor character here; I think he appears in all three books and affects the action somewhat. But the story of Trullion is about one family on the bucolic planet of that name, where the land is fertile and the people mostly indolent and happy because of it. That family had three sons: one older, and then twins. One of the twins, Glinnes Hulden, went to space to join the armed forces, the Whelm: the story proper begins when he returns, having resigned after ten years soon after learning of the death of his father Jut. 

He returns to find that his older brother Shira is also missing - Trullion has a native race, the merlings, who live underwater and have a long-running low-level conflict with humans; both sides kill individuals when they get the chance, and everyone assumes Shira fell victim to them. Glinnes is the older twin, so inherits the land, but his melancholy twin Glay has sold off half of the land as part of his joining a burgeoning movement of ascetics called Fanscherade.

If, or once, Shira is proved dead, Glinnes will be Squire of Rabendary, and is basically that in any case. But he wants to reclaim the lands Glay sold to a newcomer, and is stymied by Glay's recalcitrance and the fact that Glay has already given the money to his Fanscherade comrades.

The plot ambles from there, mostly focusing on Glinnes's new career as a player of hussade, a team game something like a gang version of the much later TV show Wipeout - played on walkways and trapezes above a tank of water, involving padded sticks with which they whack each other - as he tries to get the money to reclaim his lands. Meanwhile, somewhat in the background, Fanscherade is growing among the youth of Trullion - in a permissive society like this, the young rebel by becoming strict and rule-bound - and the racial sub-group Trevanyi (Gypsy-coded: secretive, clannish, nomadic, prone to schemes which may turn violent) are also causing some friction, particularly one group near Glinnes.

There are local aristocrats who sponsor hussade teams, not always well. There's a locally-famous man, Janno Akadie, who works as a mentor, something like a combination of independent arbitrator, lawyer in an advisory role, and notary. There are conflicts with a group of Trevanyi squatting on Glinnes's land.

There are a lot of hussade games detailed, as Glinnes plays on first one team under a local aristocrat who over-estimates his own skill as a captain, and then for a better open team. We learn most of the rules of that game, including the role of the shierl, a young woman - proverbially virgin, though Trullion society makes this reader cast some doubts - who is a "member" of each team, as essentially the goal-posts. (The cover above shows a shierl in a decent indication of her game costume - that white dress is designed to come off at a tug on the gold ring, and that moment is the standard ending of most games.)

All of that comes together near the end, with a starmenter attack during a major hussade game. Glinnes learns the truth of his brother's death, reclaims his land, and may have found a woman to share his life at the end of this short novel.

One of the things I appreciated here is that Glinnes is fairly ordinary: he's good at hussade, but as a position player. He's not the captain, not the top scorer, not some magnificent master. He's fairly smart and skilled from ten years in the Whelm, but he makes mistakes, misunderstands things, and is the hero of this book mostly because the book focuses on him. He doesn't track down the starmenters; he doesn't save the world; he doesn't even have anything to do with a major conflict between Trevanyi and Fanscherade near the climax. Trullion is his story, which means it's all about things that are important to him - but he's not important, other than being locally famous as a good player at a popular sport and owner of a major piece of land. For a series of books about a society of five trillion people on three thousand planets, that's about right, and entirely appropriate.

Note: I read this in the omnibus Alastor, which has all three novels. Trullion is also available separately, published by the Vance Integral Edition. Either way is fine, but, for me, I'll always pick the larger package.

House of Women by Sophie Goldstein

As I understand it, Sophie Goldstein has been making comics for about a decade and a half (along with teaching comics) and has at least two solo books and two collaborative projects. I've seen the two books she made with Jenn Jordan, the collected webcomic of Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell and the recent An Embarrassment of Witches.

House of Women was right in between those two projects - Darwin ended in 2013 and the book came out in 2014;  Embarrassment was a 2020 book; House hit in 2017. (There's also The Oven, just before House, and maybe projects more recent than Embarrassment.) House is a solo book, but her collaborative work has an asterisk: Goldstein was always the professional, trained comics-maker of the two; Jordan is a historian (described as a doctoral student during the Darwin years, which I choose to believe means she's a post-doc or working academic now) and, I think, the folklore expert.

So House is interesting for me to see what Goldstein does when she's not collaborating. Her art is basically the same, though this particular project is black and white - with particularly stark blacks at times. The story and the telling of it are driven by conversation, as the collaborative books were, but I feel like there are more silent pages, more sequences of motion and action, more pure comics panels without people talking.

And, while the two collaborative stories were contemporary and fantastic, set in a modern urban society like our own, differentiated from our world because basically every folkloric or mythical thing was real, House is medium-future science fiction. Four emissaries, all women, of "the Empire" arrive on the distant frontier planet Mopu, to "civilize" the natives. There was a previous expedition, which built or furnished or appropriated a large hilltop palatial compound, but it disappeared without a trace some time ago.

The only other person in the vicinity - possibly on the entire planet - from the wider Empire is Jael Dean, the representative of Grendel, Inc., who presumably exports some materials from Mopu for sale in the Empire - we don't see him do anything like this, or any ships come to gather his shipments. His role in the book is to be The Man - mysterious, sexy, knowing, possibly already "gone bush" in good or bad ways, the local guide.

We don't know if the fact that all of the emissaries are women is standard, or important. We suspect their modest, constricted dress - hoods, corsets, dresses with floor-length skirts and long sleeves - is important, and gives us a sense of the culture of the Empire. We're prompted to think of them as colonizers: benign ones, in their own minds, but looking to mold the natives in a particular way to fit the purposes of a larger human polity.

The main activity of this outpost will be to teach young natives civilized ways. The students are all female: again, we don't know if at first this is just because the emissaries are female, but we come to understand, later, that the Mopu natives have some kind of complicated transformational lifecycle, that perhaps they all begin as female and some or all change to male later on. All of the native girls are given human names; most of them are just background characters but one, Zaza, already knew some of the common language and is their leader and translator and exemplar and possibly student teacher.

(Sidebar note: some reviews have noted that House draws some inspiration or themes from the movie Black Narcissus; I don't know that movie but, at a glance, the parallels are really obvious. There's also more than a bit of Ursula K. Le Guin in House's influences, and second-wave feminist SF in general.)

Tensions rise, as more than one of the emissaries is interested in Dean and the lifecycle of the natives comes to be more clear. Everything comes to a head, and not all of the emissaries make it out in the end. As usual with stories of colonializers trying to change native populations without understanding them, it all ends badly.

House is a bit derivative, and a tad obvious in retrospect, but it knows the story it wants to tell and tells that story well. Goldstein's art is particularly impressive here, full of repeated motifs and intricate page designs. Anyone looking for Le Guinian SF should check it out.

Better Things: Bad Luck

"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.

Social Distortion started out as a punk band. They were one of the stalwarts of early LA hardcore. But, by the time I was listening to them more regularly in the '90s, they were much more like a mainstream hard-rock band. (And, still, when I think "hardcore," it's bands like Suicidal Tendencies and maybe Dead Kennedys.)

Don't get me wrong: they rocked. And they rocked in an era when rock was getting to be outdated and niche. (See the video for this song, below - they were already leaning into a retro, vaguely '50s look in 1992.)

This slot almost went to Story of My Life or I Was Wrong, but, instead, I went to the song that isn't about singer Mike Ness talking about himself: Bad Luck.

The song doesn't explain the exact why of it, but Ness is singing to some guy for whom everything goes wrong, and we think it's because of his attitude:

You got a nasty disposition,
No one really knows the reason why.

And the song is straightforward from there: this guy has bad luck, in all of the ways, and we run through the traditional three verses of details, with a great chorus (Social Distortion was always ready, willing, and entirely able to raise the roof) in between. It's not super-deep, it's not intricate, it's not a puzzle - this guy gets in his own way, no matter what he does, and we're watching him and shaking our heads.

It makes a great song, and maybe even a lesson for our own lives, if we can figure out how not to be this guy ourselves.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 20, 2025

It tends to be feast or famine in the Reviewing the Mail fields - mostly because, when I do buy books, I tend to make a major frenzy of it. So then I often dole those out over several weeks, partially because I suspect no one wants to read a long list of books someone else just got and partially because doing a long list of books somebody (me) just got is tedious and tiring.

This week, I got one newly-published book in the mail, from the usual publicity channels: I'll give the details in a moment.

I also got a big box from Midtown Comics, which was my "local" comics shop on and off for maybe a decade and a half, when I commuted through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Midtown recently had some sort of clear-out-the-overstock sale, with some big discounts on specific, mostly fairly obscure, books, and I took advantage of that to buy fifteen of them. Those books arrived this week, but I'm going to space them out over the next three Sundays, five at a time, for the aforementioned reasons.

I don't think you care, but I might read this myself, two or three years from now, trying to remember when I got The Disappearance of Charley Butters. And so now I'm telling future me, and you're welcome, future me.

The newly-published book is from Tachyon: The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale. The official publication date is October 8th, but I have a real book in my hands, so you might be able to find yourself a copy right now, too. It assembles sixteen stories from Lansdale's whole career - including some of the obvious choices, like "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks," "Bubba Ho-Tep," and "Night They Missed the Horror Show" - along with a new intro by Lansdale (as they say) hisownself and an appreciation by Joe Hill.

I am not much of a horror reader, but Landsale is one of the major names in at least one sub-segment of that area for the past four decades - I know that much. So I imagine this will be a welcome find for a lot of people - and, as is traditional for horror, it's being published just in time to read it at Hallowe'en.

Quote of the Week: Childhood Idylls

In the mountains of Central Spain, set high in the hills above Toledo, was the village of Arabella. It was very small and the air was always clear. That was all you could say that was good about Arabella: terrific air - you could see for miles.

But there was no work, the dogs overran the streets and there was never enough food. The air, clear enough, was also too hot in daylight, freezing at night. As to Inigo's personal life, he was always just a trifle hungry, he had no brothers or sisters, and his mother had died in childbirth.

He was fantastically happy.

Because of his father. Domingo Montoya was funny-looking and crotchety and impatient and absent-minded and never smiled. Inigo loved him. Totally. Don't ask why. There really wasn't any one reason you could put your finger on. Oh, probably Domingo loved him back, but love is many things, none of them logical.

 - William Goldman, The Princess Bride, p.89

Asterix the Gladiator by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

I thought I wanted to read the whole Asterix series, like I did with Tintin a few years ago: it could be a fun way to wander through other people's childhoods, to engage with famous popular works that I wasn't familiar with. But I'm starting to wonder if Asterix is more review-resistant than Tintin, so much its own comedy universe that I have nothing to say.

I did read an omnibus of the first three Asterix books two years back, and had my usual grumble that smaller-format omnibuses might be OK for young readers with eager eyes, but it's not the best way to present works created in album format. Large-size omnibuses would be just fine, but I think those are massively out of fashion - or maybe economically infeasible.

I've now read the fourth book, Asterix the Gladiator, which is the third in a row where the main plot is set in motion by one of the Gauls getting kidnapped. That is still an odd thing to be so central, though this time it's at least a different character: the humorously incompetent bard Cacofonix rather than the kindly druid Getafix. It's even more of a random plot McGuffin this time: the local Roman Prefect (Odius Asparagus, ha ha ha) is heading to Rome, which means he needs a fancy gift for Caesar. He wants "an invincible Gaul," which presents obvious issues - they're invincible - but Cacofonix is mostly harmless and easily nabbed.

The actually invincible Gauls discover the loss, and are offended: Cacofonix may be a horrible bard who only makes unpleasant music, but he's their horrible bard who only makes unpleasant music, so he must be rescued. And so, inevitably, Asterix and Obelix set off Romewards to rescue him.

They take a merchant ship that is soon afterward attacked by pirates, which attack they foil handily. This also has the additional benefit of showing the merchant captain that his original plan to enslave these Gauls would have been a very bad idea, so he delivers them intact and happy to the capital.

There, the two rubes are impressed by the width of the roads, humorously slightly misunderstand some things, and are caught up in some hugger-mugger about attempts to capture them to fight in the Colosseum. There's a big Games coming up, at which the useless Cacofonix will be thrown to the lions amid other acts, and our heroes eventually do get into gladiator training, which they engage in spiritedly but not in line with expectations.

Eventually, the Games come, and It Is Funny. There's a funny chariot race, some funny fights, etc. The Gauls are indominable, unstoppable, and slightly misunderstand nearly everything - in the end, Caesar lets them go back home with their bard.

It's all amusing, but essentially weightless. The narrative knows the Gauls will always succeed in every last thing, there will be no moments of tension, and their slight misunderstandings will be funny. It's not quite digging the reader in the ribs every page, but it's close, like a friend who raises his eyebrows after every supposedly "funny" line, begging for a laugh. Albert  Uderzo's art is solidly amusing, too: his people a bit cartoony without going full rubber-hose.

But there's not a lot of there there. No tension, thin plot, bland worldbuilding - this is a sitcom in comics format, and one made for younger readers to boot. It's definitely fun, and reading one Asterix book is recommended - but, so far, I'm not seeing that additional books add anything new or different, just an opportunity to see the same thing all over again.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I thought I'd reviewed this one at some point; you'd think I would have, by now. But I read the novel when the SFBC did it in 1995 - I might even have bought it for the club then; I can't remember - and the copy I have is of that edition, with a cover by Ruth Sanderson that now makes me feel bad. (The SFBC sometimes got good covers, but we regularly had tight schedules and we generally paid on the low end of acceptable, which combined meant that we could get artists who do good work - like Sanderson - but often couldn't give them the time and space to deliver that good work for us. But then, life is pain, isn't it?)

So this book has sat on my shelf for thirty years since the last time I read it. I've seen the movie several times in that stretch - I think once even in a theater, for some anniversary or other - and author William Goldman has died since then. For whatever reason, I picked it back up.

The Princess Bride, the novel, is subtly different from the movie Rob Reiner made from it - the movie is a somewhat simpler, less gnarly thing, with screenwriter Goldman taking out all of the bits author Goldman put in about his fictionally unhappy life. The book has a lot of digs about Goldman's fictional wife, Helen the psychologist (not Ilene the model) and about his fictional son Jason (not his actual daughters Jenny and Susannah). The frame story is more complex in the novel - it's not just a grandfather reading to his grandson, but a fictionalized Goldman deliberately trying to recreate the "good parts" version of the (fictional) S. Morgenstern original that his father read to him while he was young and sick, after discovering the "real" book is full of long, tedious details when he tried to get his son (the aforementioned fictional Jason) to read it. All of the editorial commentary came out for the movie and most of the metafiction - a little metafiction goes a long way in a visual medium.

The core story is exactly the same: if you've seen the movie (and who hasn't, at this point?), you know all of the beats of the story and all of the good dialogue. Goldman wrote a lot of strong, memorable lines into Princess Bride, and he recognized that when he turned it into a screenplay - he even repositioned my favorite line (the aforementioned "life is pain" bit), which was in the Inigo flashback in the novel.

That's my favorite line partially because it's more important in the book. The movie gestures towards the idea that stories don't necessarily have happy endings, and that life is unfair, but the book has those themes embedded deeply and consistently. The last lines of the novel make that clear:

I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

Otherwise? Princess Bride the novel is deeper and wider than the movie, as novels - even fairly short ones, like this - have more space and more words to do that. As Goldman's fictional barber father puts it in the book, this story has "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

If you've only seen the movie, you're definitely missing things - whether you'll be happy with the additions, I can't say. (But, again, life is pain: expect it.) It's a smart modern fantasy novel that's more complex than it looks, that balances sweetness and cynicism brilliantly, and an interesting object lesson in how a very good novel can become a very good movie, and what had to change to make that happen.

Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson's great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang, a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder - especially in his comics - than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he's a child with a child's enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics, belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello's introduction to this oversized single-volume collection - they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly - sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn't have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I'm shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That's not something this world's DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves...though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

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.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You'll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes - not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for "Sunday comics" here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that's essentially a single issue of story for each one of them - call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page - Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn't flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert's (impeccably drawn, I'll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I'll be frank: there's not a single story here I'd pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker's work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman - that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it's all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope's mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don't love the art-style, but it's different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods - there's even a "new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified 'they're the real bad guys' reasons," as required for any project like this - but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys - which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don't need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.