Moebius Library: The Art of Edena by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

I don't want to say "art of" books always come out as line extensions after a creator has died and can't produce new work, but...it's pretty darn common.

This book, for example: The Art of Edena, part of the vague "Moebius Library" (which seems to be primarily, if not entirely, posthumous itself). It was assembled in 2018 and credited to Jean "Moebius" Giraud, who had died in 2012. It also lists "Commentary by" Isabelle Giraud (his widow) and Moebius Production, which I suspect is the actual entity that assembled this stuff, signed publishing contracts, checked proofs, and so forth.

It is, as the title implies, an art book related to his graphic novel series The World of Edena - it has four short comics stories set in that world, plus a bunch of paintings, some rough pages, and more than a little text by someone clearly not Moebius about how awesome he was and how special and wonderful his characters Stel and Atan are in these stories.

Luckily, it's the kind of art book that is mostly art, and the art is presented clearly and well on large pages. The text is a bit much, particularly for those (like me) who think the Edena stories are goofy and weirdly lumpy, lurching from one Moebius obsession to another as they were created over a few decades, and not actually reaching a solid ending, either. But you have to assume that the marketing entity set up to exploit a dead creator's work will consider him the best things since spreadable cream cheese, so we just roll with it.

As usually, I find Moebius's art lovely, detailed, and particular while finding his ideas often second-hand, sophomoric, and faintly embarrassing. The stories here - I don't want to claim much; they are short and may be the main selling point but are not a majority of the book - are mostly wordless, which is always a big plus for Moebius.

Potentially positive: this book explains the plots of the Edena books in greater clarity than the books themselves did - at least to me, when I read them. So it does function as a solid companion to the series.

So, all in all, this is a nice book, of most interest to big Moebius fans obviously, with a lot of striking art and a fair bit of broad claims that the reader (if anything like me) will not entirely be able to swallow. Again: a posthumous "art of" book; that's what to expect.

Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine

I used to be able to do cast-offs, a quick calculation to estimate how many words are in a manuscript or published book. I could probably figure it out - everything is on the Internet, so I'm sure someone has explained the numbers somewhere - but it's mostly dropped out of memory from years of disuse.

I say that because Old Me would have done that calculation, and given a rough ballpark word count for Alex Irvine's 2020 book Anthropocene Rag. It's a 250-page book that I think claims to be a novella, and my (now unsupported by data) opinion is that it's probably north of the 40,000 words that was the traditional SF marker of "novel," renowned in song and story and Hugo rules. What I mean is: if Irvine had somehow written and published this in the 1950s - quite unlikely since he, like me, was born in 1969 - it would have been considered a novel then.

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.

This is a post-Singularity story, set in the vaguely near future. The actual Boom happened sometime in the mid-21st century, and is maybe twenty years in the past. Our main characters are all about twenty - Irvine doesn't underline this, but they were all born around the time of the Boom and have lived their entire lives, growing to new adulthood, in this transformed America. And it's structured like a novella, though with a fairly large cast, so we don't get all of the details and explanations.

The narrative voice does point out that there are still millions of people living normal lives in this nano-transformed USA, which I suppose is meant to be reassuring. I instead remembered that there are well over three hundred million people in the USA right this moment, and going from there to just "millions" is a die-off unprecedented in human history. Perhaps that's not what Irvine, or the narrative voice, meant. But life is clearly contingent and random in this newly transformed world: traffic across the country is rare, and I don't see how large-scale business entities can still be operating. (SF is always good at small business - shops, places to get a meal, small marketplaces, artisans and individual tinkerers - but often is more cartoonish, dismissive, or simply ignorant of larger enterprises.)

As the book goes on, the narrative voice makes a distinction - not always clear, as it's not necessarily clear to the entity telling the story - between what I guess I might as well call sentients and sapients. (The book does not.) Sentients have minds, and models of the world, and affect change; various constructs and elements of the Boom, or its echoing and constituent Boomlets, are sentient. They are self-motivated actors doing things in the world, the constructs in the form of humans or other large organic entities, and others seemingly entirely in the software spaces of a world saturated with nano. Sapients are aware of themselves, their choices and options, and can question what they're doing - all humans are sapients, and one construct wakes up along those lines during the course of the action.

We do learn the origin point of this world, how this specific Singularity happened. I won't spoil it completely, but it was a combination of a natural disaster (made worse by global warming) and an arrogant billionaire's technology. We don't know if it's worldwide; we only see America here. Canada is mentioned, but may be quite different. The rest is blank spaces on the map.

So we should start with the legend, the story as told: Monument City is a myth, but possibly real. Built by Moses Barnum somewhere in the Rockies, containing many of the greatest major structures of mankind, in the immediate aftermath of the initial Boom. A city of mysteries and wonders, forbidden to almost everyone. Once in a while, Life-7 - which may be the main AI entity dominant in America after the Boom, or maybe just the entity that runs Monument City - sends out a construct to invite a small group of humans to Monument City, for whatever reasons that time.

The construct this time is Prospector Ed: he's the one that starts developing self-doubt and awareness. The invitees are six people, from across the country: Teeny from San Francisco, Kyle from Orlando, Henry from New York, and three others. All orphans; all orphans of the Boom. All get a Wonka-esque ticket, which only they can touch, which will help them get safe passage to Monument City.

It's a short book, so it happens quickly. They get their tickets; they set off. Well, mostly. Kyle is a twin, and isn't all that interested in cross-country travel - so his twin, nicknamed Geck, grabs the ticket and heads off instead. But Kyle's girlfriend Reenie hates that, and spurs the two of them to follow. So there are eight people, in various permutations and circumstances, traveling from various points across America, all trying to find a place they all think is probably mostly myth.

They all get there. They meet Moses Barnum, who I should say is not nearly as horrible and self-centered as some real-world tech billionaires, which is a small comfort. They also meet Life-7, going though some transformations of its own, and also not nearly as unpleasant as so many AIs from past SF stories - mostly benevolent, even.

The ending is quick, more evocative than explanatory. I don't know if Irvine plans more stories in this world, or had planned for this one to be longer and more detailed. He does end this story well, but he ends it like a novella, with more questions than answers.

It's a kaleidoscopic, phantasmagorical journey through a transformed America, full of mythic and historical wonders, full of transformative entities that can remember and change and build but not plan or understand or reflect. I think it changes again at the very end of this story, but that's always a question for individual readers: a story can never tell you what happens after the end. You have to decide that for yourself. 

Better Things: An Introduction

Two years ago, I started posting one song each Monday. The first year, the series was called This Year, and there was one song for each year of my life (with several asterisks, starting with the fact that I was fifty-three when 2023 started) to fill up the year. Last year the series was Portions for Foxes, which had songs by women or women-fronted bands in alphabetical order. (The only-one-per-year, only-one-per-artist, in-order thing was too much of a pain to do again.)

This year, since I like posting songs and saying random things about them - and it's my blog, so I get to do things I enjoy - I've got a new series. Like last year, it's alphabetical by artist. Like the first year, it's vaguely themed: primarily songs I put on the list for that first year but didn't make it for the aforementioned overdetermined-parameters reasons.

This year, I'm still keeping to just one song per performer - I've still got a lot of people I like and haven't gotten to yet, so that's no problem. I'm hoping it's not a total sausagefest after I cleared out fifty-plus women artists last year, but that's the danger.

But, otherwise, there's no theme. These are songs I really liked, that mean something to me, the way songs can mean something to any of us. They don't mean the same thing, or any consistent thing.

This Year was titled by the number of the year, because that was obvious. Portions for Foxes was titled for the artist, since it was artist-focused. But this time, this year, the titles will be the song titles, since it's their turn, and the point is the particular song.

And the series is called Better Things, because I want to look forward to better things, because I think these songs are themselves better things, and because calling it that allows me to add one extra, foundational, song - first done by one of my favorite bands, but then covered, in a version I like much better, by another of my favorite bands:

Favorite Books of the Year: 2024

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

(I'm somewhat shakily back on this horse for the past three years after a couple of disastrous ones - disastrous for my number-of-books-read, which I trust many of you will appreciate is truly disastrous.)

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

January

I read several good old books this month: Jack Vance's The Star King kicked off a re-read of the whole "Demon Princes" series this year, which I won't mention every time but do recommend as smart SF adventure that hasn't dated much at all. I also read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse this year - like most years - and won't mention them all, but I will mention the short-story collection A Few Quick Ones. And I went back to Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency, which does still read a bit like outtakes from Doctor Who (which it was), but not in a bad way.

A lot of what I read this year, and in general these days, was comics-format, so that will fill up a lot of this last. Notable ones this month were two true stories: the biographical Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff,  and the autobiographical A Fade of Light by Nate Fakes.

And the best thing, I think, was Elizabeth Pich's Fungirl. It was also comics, and so uniquely itself and transgressively funny that I wouldn't dream of putting anything above it.

February

Let me start with the old stuff again - and it's really old this month. I'm still not sure if I ever read James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice before, but I'm happy I got to that noir classic this year. I know I never read Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises before, despite having an English degree from a well-respected college. But I think hitting it much later in life was better for both of us.

Over to comics, for two very different memoirs that are both compelling, personal, and intensely imagined: Tessa Hulls's generational investigation Feeding Ghosts and Zerocalcare's Forget My Name, which I insist is deeply confabulated, because otherwise lies madness.

For an actual contemporary genre book I read and liked, there was Jeffrey Ford's short and atmospheric fantasy Out of Body.

My favorite of the month was the unique, wacky YA series-ender (I'm 99% sure) Making Friends: Together Forever by the inimitable Kristen Gudsnuk.

March

I read the moderately old (from my own youth) Yobgorgle by Daniel Pinkwater, the sage of weird kids for the last generation or three. And I also read the vastly older (100+ years) The People of the Abyss, by Jack London in best rabble-rousing mode.

I also saw a couple of solid comics projects, both of older material originally in strip format: Jeff Smith's Thorn, collecting the college-strip version of stories he later reworked massively into Bone; and Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell, collecting the late-Aughts webcomic by Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan.

And my favorite of the moth is the hard-to-describe, imagistic, deep graphic novel Totem by Laura Pérez.

April

More old books - I sense a theme this year - with Gene Wolfe's first great work, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a SFnal fix-up of three novellas that is greater and more mysterious than the sum of its parts. And with the even older - I've been reading a bunch of books around a eighty or a hundred years old, for whatever reason - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a masterpiece of closely-examined rock-bottom life by Horace McCoy from the depths of the Depression.

Let me also mention a book I liked, but not quite as much as I hoped: the new SF novel from Lavie Tidhar, The Circumference of the World.

And then comes the tough choice. I read two great graphic novels this month, both by women, both long in coming - and very different from each other. And I think I need to come down on the word "favorite" here to make the decision and let one pull ahead, ever so slightly on points.

Leela Corman's Victory Parade is intense and precise and deep, a WWII homefront story unlike any you've ever seen before, but it's not the kind of book that engenders love.

So I'm going to give the laurel to a happier book - not entirely happy, but with more happiness and forward looks to it - the young-adults-exploring-NYC Roaming by cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

May

Stewart O'Nan's Ocean State was a fine literary novel about real people that I found just slightly derivative of earlier O'Nan books. Nate Powell's big graphic novel Fall Through, about rock 'n roll and endless days and the road and (just maybe) alternate universes, also didn't quite hit the things I was most intrigued about the premises.

Jesse Lonergan's, Hedra was a wonderful, wordless, visually exciting SF graphic novel, hitting a whole lot of my buttons brilliantly. Lewis Trondheim's Ralph Azham 4: The Dying Flame ended a big, complex fantasy series well, in what was retrospectively both the only way and the perfect way.

My favorite was a surprise: a book by a creator I'd never read before, that I picked up randomly. (Take that as a nudge to do the same in your own life, when you can.) It was a comics memoir, searingly honest and told with precise words and lines: Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness.

June

The obligatory old book was another really old one, Jack London's John Barleycorn, in which he unconvincingly argues for several hundred pages that he's not an alcoholic for various reasons.

A book I respected the hell out of - especially its ambition and scope - but couldn't believe in its fictional vision of Hollywood for a second: Erased by Loo Hui Pang and Hughes Micol.

And then there was a graphic novel I'm not ashamed to say I didn't entirely understand but thought was awesome: Daria Tessler's Salome's Last Dance.

A couple of more conventional graphic novels were also really good: Sophie Adriansen and Mathou's semi-autobiographical story of post-partum depression, Proxy Mom, and Jeff Lemire's dark fictional story Mazebook, also about a parent and a child (he said, elliptically).

Hey, another random SFF book I read and loved! Steven Brust had a new book in he Vald Taltos series, and it was Lyorn.

My favorite for the month was another one that surprised me, and another graphic novel: Yves Chaland's Young Albert, collecting a series of half-pagers from Metal Hurlant about a kid who is more radical, in a world that is darker, than it seems at first.

July

It's mostly comics this month, starting with the creepy (and older than I thought) Ripple by Dave Cooper. Also older - because it's a career retrospective - is Ed Subitzky's Poor Helpless Comics!, with what seems like thousands of tiny little boxes fileld with people doing neurotically funny things.

Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati delivered a thoughtful, true-as-far-as-I-know story of one woman suffering from dementia, and how Villieu, a visiting nurse, helped care for her, in Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces. Cathy Malkasian told a fable mostly about social media in Eartha. Jesse Lonergan had another excellent SFnal graphic novel (also a few years old; I'm catching up) in Planet Paradise.

And this is another month where I have two options two choose from: two genre novels, each a decade old. Will it be the SF or the mystery?

Again, I think I have to judge it on points. Jeff VanderMeer's Authority is brilliant and chilly and overwhelming, but is the middle book of a trilogy - it begins in the middle and ends in the middle.

So my favorite instead is the mystery, just because it's entirely self-contained: the brilliant, deep, amazing When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson.

August

Starting with the old - I finally caught up with Carol Emshwiller's quirky feminist fable Carmen Dog. And I re-read the hundred-or-so-year older The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, one of the great all-time grumps of the world.

I like to call out books that I thought were really interesting and knotty, even if I didn't quite like them as much as I wanted to - and one of those was Lisa Goldstein's fantasy novel Ivory Apples, which has a lot to say about art and creators and audiences and families, among other things. Another was the new graphic novel by Charles Burns, Final Cut - a big, mostly realistic work from a great creator that did some of the things I was hoping it would but not all of them.

I read two books by Julia Gfrörer this year, and the first one was Black Is the Color. I'm listing that because the impact of her work - dark, creepy, historical - is even stronger when you first see it.

Peter and Maria Hoey had another great graphic novel with In Perpetuity, using their unique chilly art style to tell the story of a Greek-style afterlife in modern America.

I got to Kelly Link's recent short-story collection White Cat, Black Dog, which was just as brilliant as I expected, and as her earlier stories were.

And my favorite was a graphic novel memoir - though not exactly the memoir of the creator. I won't tell you more than that Axelle Lenoir's Secret Passages: 1985-1986 is the story of a couple of years in a brilliantly imagined and deeply remembered and amusingly transformed life, and, I hope, only the first of several.

September

The old this month included the oddball afterlife fantasy The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien and the quirky travelogue novel The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.

Similarly quirky, though newer, was the prose memoir - based on a stage show, I believe - Vacationland by John Hodgman, which was emotionally deeper than I expected.

More traditional was the very well-done alternate-worlds fantasy The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and the comics-biography Is This Guy For Real? (about Andy Kaufmann) by Box Brown.

Another pair of books, with nothing I can think of to link them: the crime graphic novel Two Dead by Van Jensen & Nate Powell and the how-animals-interact-with-human-laws non-fiction book Animal Vegetable Criminal by the always amusing Mary Roach.

My favorite - and I know this is getting to sound like a broken record - was a surprise, from a creator new to me. Tim Bird's Adrift on a Painted Sea was a small memoir, the story of his mother's love of painting and how that affected his own work - it's the kind of book that makes smallness and specificity the highest of virtues.

October

I couldn't make Kate Atkinson two of my favorites this year - well, I guess I could, I mean it's my blog and my rules, but it feels like cheating - so I'll mention that I also read her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Library, a literary award-winner that's now about a quarter-century old, and so counts for the "old" slot this month.

Otherwise there's not as much to call out. I really liked the collection of Reza Farazmand's webcomics, Hope It All Works Out! - he's got a great sarcastic turn of phrase. And John Banville's mystery novel Snow was good but a little too obvious.

Speaking of breaking rules, my favorite for the month - and I've looked at the list for a while trying to figure out alternatives - is an old one. Jack Vance's 1981 SF novel The Book of Dreams ended his "Demon Princes" series brilliantly, and its last lines are still perfect.

November

I mentioned P.G. Wodehouse back in January, but I also read a surprisingly good novel of his towards the end of the year - Piccadilly Jim, which has a lot of great sentences and a wonderful impostor-pretending-to-be-himself plot. Also old, and somewhat more famous, is the minor fantasy classic Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirelees, which I finally read.

A couple of comics projects to mention: the second collection of the modern Nancy reimagining by Olivia Jaimes, Nancy Wins at Friendship, and a fun camp story by Axelle Lenoir, Camp Spirit.

And my favorite was an stuffed-to-the-rafters SF novella published as a book - I have my suspicions it originally wanted to be longer, so the author compressed it like a diamond - Alex Irvine's Anthropocene Rag. I love books, especially SF, bursting with concepts and characters and ideas, and this delivers massively.

December

The really old book I read and liked a lot - unsurprisingly - was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which is famous for a reason. But it is still worth reading (counts on fingers) eighty-five years later, which is a big deal. Not quite as old, but still closing in on forty years, was Paul Theroux's travel book about spending what seems to be most of a year, right after a divorce, paddling a canoe around the pacific: The Happy Isles of Oceania. (We read books, I firmly believe, largely to experience the lives we think we would love and know we'll never get.)

Susanna Clarke's short story published as a book, The Wood at Midwinter, is fine for what it is, but it is a very small thing, so I had to kick it out of contention for that.

In comics, there was the latest installment in Budjette Tan & KaJo Baldisimo's Philippines-set urban-fantasy series, Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight, just as good - and getting deeper into its specific lore - as the previous books. Guy Colwell had a very interesting book about artistic creation, Delights, telling the story of how Hieronymus Bosch created his most famous painting. And there was the deeply creepy horror comic Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall.

But my final favorite for the year is a book about books: Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the memoir of how he came to work at a famous London antiquarian bookseller and what that world is like, in prose as sparkling and self-deprecating as you could possibly expect from a smart bookish Brit.

Top 12 of 2024

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird
• Young Albert by Yves Chaland
• Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
• Making Friends: Together Forever by Kristen Gudsnuk
• Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness
• Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine
• Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir
• Totem by Laura Pérez
• Fungirl by Elizabeth Pich
• Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki
• The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I read 217 books last year - not as many as back when I was reading for a living, more than some years. These are the ones I want to point other people to, the ones I'd mention if we were friends and talking about good stuff we've read recently. I hope there's something on this list that will spark your interest - and, even more so, I hope you find books, as serendipitously as I found a lot of my 2024 favorites, that you will love and find unexpected depths in.

Awkward Pause by Ryan Harby

I'm still finding collections of random webcomics that I don't read regularly, which is fun. There has been a lot of doom-mongering about the death of short cartoons, and it's true: the market for single panels disappeared even before the periodical ecosystem did, and newspaper strips are mostly dominated by a few, often-lousy, zombie strips. But some people will always be crazy enough to want to make funny little stories, and the web makes it possible for them to do so and push them out into the world.

I'm pretty sure there's very little money in it these days, though: that's one big difference. Forty to a hundred years ago, a cartoonist could make a good living by selling regular single panels or having a moderately popular strip. Now all that money goes to a few big tech companies, which they like to claim is "progress." Well, they would, wouldn't they?

Anyway, my point is: stuff exists because cartoonists are crazy.  (Otherwise known as Popeye's Axiom; see below.) It might not be an ideal state, but at least the work exists, some of it gets collected into books, and I assume at least a few creators are selling enough books to buy, I don't know, some avocado toast every now and then.

That all brings me to Awkward Pause, a 2021 collection of Ryan Harby's comics. It looks like this was originally Kickstarted, and then transitioned to the small Canadian press Renegade - Harby himself is from the fine city of Winnipeg, out in the cold frozen tundra. (I kid Canada.)

Harby originally used the series title Honey Dill - apparently a local sauce little-known even in the rest of Canada - but seems to now just be posting cartoons on his own site as "comics." (Sometimes in-jokes run their course, I suppose.)

And I was happy to see that Harby takes full advantage of web publication - these strips are not all the same length or in the same format. Cartoonists spent a hundred years fitting their jokes into specific boxes - single panels, daily strips - but they don't have to do that anymore, and it's refreshing to see cartoonists who understand their new freedom and just work out this joke in its best length and style. Harby does that: he has a lot of square four-panel comics, but plenty of longer ones and a few shorter.

His line is cartoony and softly rounded, usually with fairly bright colors. And his stuff is funny, both the drawing and the writing, in a modern quirky "wait, what was that?" kind of style popular with the Kids These Days.

So go buy his book, or check out his comics online, or buy a sticker - they look pretty cute, actually - Harby does know how to "draw pitchers" and does it well.