The Earl of Louisiana by A.J. Liebling

A.J. Liebling was a New Yorker feature writer - he covered politics and WWII and boxing and the media, among some other things - from 1935 through his death in 1963. He's famous enough, even sixty years later, that the Library of America has published two big volumes of his writings.

I've been working through the miscellaneous one - the other covers his WWII writings; authoritative non-fiction about big wars will always command a huge audience among middle-aged dads everywhere - for much of the past year. So far, I've read The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Sweet Science.

This time out, I have The Earl of Louisiana, a 1961 fix-up of New Yorker articles from 1959 and 1960 that were - I assume - supposed to showcase what Liebling thought would be Earl Long's re-election run for Governor of Louisiana. (Louisiana, in those days and maybe still even now, had a rule that Governors could only serve one consecutive term, but Long was planning to resign the day before the primary, roll to victory, and pick back up - in the event, things went differently.)

I'm finding books about the politics of sixty or a hundred years ago weirdly soothing right now: huge swaths of the US were deeply, horribly corrupt, run as fiefdoms by little dictators (like Long, though he's fairly benevolent and his core aims are ones Liebling agrees with), and discussions of politics were nakedly about power and influence. The media landscape is different than now, but there's still cynical big outlets (here the major New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune). And the racism is frankly shocking in the later parts of the book: Long himself, as Liebling presents him, was about the most successful possible left-wing politician in the Deep South of that era, doing that mostly through a kind of verbal judo of racism. One major plank of the campaign - across all of the candidates - was how strongly they all were for segregation and how strongly they condemned the NAACP as evil Northern agitators and tools of the international Communist menace. (I am not exaggerating by a single hair.)

So the US has had absolutely horrible, evil politics within living memory: if your grandparents lived in the South, and were white, they were probably segregationists, just by the law of averages. (And the odds aren't necessarily vastly better if they lived in the North, either.)

Earl starts with Long just getting out of an asylum, into which he was forcibly consigned by his wife and some of his appointees. The rabble-rousing Long gets some great stump speechmaking out of this, talking about being dragged through three hospitals in Texas and Louisiana without "clothes to cover a red bug." That sets the tone for the rest of the story: Louisiana politics was then (and might still be) combative, personal, and full of the same major characters for a couple of decades. In that era, it was dominated by the Democratic party, and organized around a two-primary system: the first had the huge list of candidates, the second just the top two vote-getters, who then schemed to get the followers of the losing candidates through granting favors and promises of jobs. The actual real election was a formality; there were hardly any Republicans at all, and whoever won the second Dem primary was guaranteed to win, in every race. (My sense is that something similar still occurs, in many states, though primarily under the aegis of Republicans these days.)

Liebling was an energetic, lively writer - he was a horseplayer, and wrote about politics like a horse race, which is not just traditional, but worked well for this era of Louisiana. This is a book full of colorful characters, but none more than Long himself. And it's a book of retail, brass-knuckle politics, over the course of one year, with a lot of changes and surprises along the way. The favorite - whichever favorite, at whichever point - doesn't win, and many of them don't even come close. It's a great view of a kind of politics that in these specific details is gone, but the spirit and style of which will always live on, and can help illuminate later iterations.

And just knowing that it used to be like this is oddly comforting: politics can be corrupt, and personal in the worst ways, and nakedly about the abuse of power, for an extended period of time, and that's "normal." There never was a golden age; it's abuses of various kinds all the way down. 

Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get...let me say "fussy"...in his designs - he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I've occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals - it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books - they're books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd's instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book - much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts - and that's the point of the book. It's a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What's Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist's widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the "Wimpy Kid" creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words - or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz's captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It's the kind of work that doesn't get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn't have a formal organizational principle for the book - it's roughly chronological by phases of Schulz's career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there's a lot of ancillary materials - comic books and magazine covers, games and toys - as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn't take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it's harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work - otherwise you just read the work. But if you've dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) by Alan Grant and Jon Haward

This appeared somewhere else first. It's a bunch of short strips - many of them single-pagers, but with longer installments as it goes along. It was collected in this 2012 volume from the small Canadian company Renegade Arts Entertainment, but I'm pretty sure it ran in a comics magazine - I doubt 2000 AD, but probably something British - for a year or three or five previously.

The book doesn't say where or when that happened, assuming it did happen. Well, this digital edition I read doesn't have any previous publication information, but it also is missing at least a few pages in the middle (a multi-part epic about Hercules jumps from Part 1 to Part 3, with some disjoint pages in the middle that might be from Part 2), so it could be missing more pages than that.

So what I have is just the stories, and I'm not confident (see above) I have all of that. Let me assume there's just one clump of missing pages - probably only two or three - and go from there.

Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) is a jokey series about a fat little guy who has the physical appearance we expect from traditional representations of the Buddha, but his personality, especially as the book goes on, is much more of a good-time-loving, pot-smoking, relatively smart Scots layabout.

It was written by Alan Grant, drawn by Jon Haward, and (I think) colored by Jamie Grant - there's a page with author bios at the end, but no clear title page (maybe that's missing as well?) or copyright.

So Buddha - I feel like I should call him Siddhartha, since he's not Buddha because he's not enlightened yet, but the book calls him Buddha throughout - gets annoyed in his meditations under the tree, and decides to wander off  and do other things. He meets the Hare Krishnas, and doesn't like their vibe. He spends a few strips with Jesus, who he gets along well with, but that dude is eventually crucified, and Buddha has to move on. He has a few random one-offs, then dives into a longer series of stories with Hercules. After that, it gets very various: Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, the Mexican Day of the Dead, Shangri-La, Merlin, Elvis, Santa Claus, Prince Harry. (There's a few other things in between as well - the edition I read had fifty-eight pages of comics, and probably several pages missing- and the stories top out at maybe four pages.)

It's all random, with only a vague sense of a sequence. Buddha is in a different time period for almost every story without any clear mechanism, except for a weird time-travel bit to introduce the Elvis strip. The point is to have this slacker pseudo-Buddha character meet a whole bunch of religious, mythological, and historical characters.

He is not very much like any version of the Buddha any of us has ever seen before. He's very little like the traditional image of the pre-enlightenment Siddhartha, either - that guy was a young noble, deeply concerned with the plight of the poor, not a fat bald pleasure-seeker. But that's the joke, here - you buy into that, or you're not interested.

This is all amusing, but it's a lot of essentially the same joke over and over again. If Grant had Buddha meet some ascetics, or maybe Greek philosophers in general, there might have been some tension with Buddha hedonistic world-view, but that's not the vibe he was apparently going for - this is goofy, pleasant humor, stoner-adjacent, with a strong British flavor.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This is a short, funny, inoffensive novel by one of the biggest bestsellers in SF today: it does everything it sets out to do, does that well, and has delighted the author's many fans in the year since it was published. It's light SF adventure, humorous division, of the "what if <insert standard media trope> was actually real, and a normal guy fell into that world?" type.

I intermittently read books like this - just days before it, I hit Tom Holt's Barking, which is a fantasy version of exactly the same thing - and I struggle to say anything interesting about them. I find myself dragged between the opposite poles of pointing out how silly and referential those books are - which is the point of the exercise, and I know that - and just pointing and saying "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like," which is deeply unhelpful.

Anyway: Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It's got a cat on the cover! Cats are important in the book as well, in what I don't actually think was a cynical play for the famously cat-loving SF audience.

Charlie Fitzer is the usual protagonist for novels like this: early thirties, with one career (business journalism) and one marriage (heterosexual, of course) in ruins behind him, living somewhere comfortable that might not be good for him (his childhood home in Barrington, Illinois, after the death of his father), stuck and sad-sack and beaten down by the world. He wants to buy the local pub, as a random next thing to do in his life, but it costs over three million dollars and his only major asset is one-quarter of the house he's living in and not consistently paying his bills for. So the local bank is friendly but not particularly encouraging.

But his uncle Jake Baldwin - only sibling of his mother, who died when he was five - his just died. Uncle Jake, as far as the world knows, owned a large collection of parking garages across the Midwest, and was considered to be a billionaire. (Charlie, since he is a Nice Guy - or maybe just dense - doesn't immediately think, "Hey, I'm possibly the only living relative of a dead billionaire, so there's probably a way I can pry at least some cash loose from his estate, and I might even be an, or even the, heir.")

Luckily, Charlie doesn't have to do anything to chase that estate - because he's not the kind of guy who ever would. Uncle Jake has actually already left something to Charlie, and it turns out to be bigger and messier than "to my darling nephew, I leave the Dyna-Top Parking Complex of Boise and all its revenues," which is what a slightly smarter Charlie might have anticipated.

Uncle Jake, as the title of this novel implies, was a supervillain. Volcano lair in the Caribbean, giant satellite-killing lasers, intelligent spy cats, private bank stuffed with trillions, fiendish plots worldwide - that whole deal. And Charlie - this is before he learns the supervillain thing; I'm condensing for simplicity - is asked to run his funeral in Barrington. Charlie does, and sees a large number of clearly minion-coded thugs arrive, not actually mourn the deceased, and make sure Jake is actually dead. Charlie has to stop one of them from stabbing the corpse, actually, in the first of several very important random events in the novel, all arising from Charlie's immediate reactions to unexpected, usually violent, situations.

(The moral of Starter Villain, if I may be so bold, is "Good Guys will do the right thing automatically, and will be rewarded for it." It's downright medieval when you think about it.)

So Charlie learns about the supervillain thing, is whisked off to the secret lair, gets a whirlwind tour of same and a quick precis of Uncle Jake's vast shadowy holdings and business interests, and then jets off to a conclave of supervillains at a fancy Italian resort. (This is a short, zippy novel full of quips - the plot has to happen at speed, and it does.)

Things escalate from there, as they must, but Charlie several times instinctively does the Right Thing when confronted with sudden violence or other surprises - the Right Thing as defined by Scalzi, of course, being generally nice and positive and pro-humanity, including caring for cats and being in favor of union organizing - which means he is victorious in the end, almost in spite of himself.

I won't spoil that ending, but I will note that I don't expect any direct sequels, which is mildly disappointing. Scalzi set up a world that he could have spun out for more than one book if he wanted to, and then basically blew it up, at least as far as Charlie goes. I also don't believe one element of the very last chapter for a second, but this is a book for cat-lovers, and they will eat that up.

So this is a fun book that does amusing things with a neat and not over-used premise; it's very good for this sort of thing. This sort of thing may seem pretty small to many readers, and it kinda is, but, at this point in my life, I don't discount the power of a funny, short book that hits exactly the goals it has for itself and entertains readers just the way it plans to. 

Better Things: Brat in the Frat

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

I was a teenager in the '80s; I grew up in New Jersey; I have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. So obviously I was a fan of the Dead Milkmen.

Sure, they were uneven. Yes, they peaked early, and, like a lot of bands, the ten-year mark is the outer limits of their Good Stuff (and, yes, they kept coming back after that, not all of which I kept up with). But, at their best, they were the snottiest, funniest, punkiest band imaginable, for a particular moment and a particular time.

A lot of their stuff is still awesome forty years later: Big Lizard is almost touching, Life Is Shit actually is touching, Bitchin' Camaro is the quintessence of teen-boy-dom for my generation, Punk Rock Girl is a nearly perfect pop song, and Sri Lanka Sex Hotel a magnificent pseudo-apocalyptic vision.

But snottiness is best in small doses, so the purest Dead Milkmen songs, to me, are the short ones. Stuart can be hard to listen to these days, so I'm going with Brat in the Frat, the outsider's big two-middle-fingers-up at all the assholes in his way.

Hey!
I do not like you college brat
I do not like you and your frat
I do not like you at the shore
I do not like you drunk on Coors

I knew that guy - I hated that guy too. And the Milkmen perfectly encapsulate that youthful feeling of I don't want this; I don't like anything about this. That's what punk is for.

Quote of the Week: I Say, I Mean, I Say, What?

You can send an Englishman cryptic notes, carried by crazed ex-dentists. You can lure him to inexplicable trysts and stand him up. You can shoot at him with silencers and silver bullets. Waste of time, if you're hoping to shattered his imperturbable Saxon calm. The only way you'll achieve that is to try and stick him for six pounds seventy-nine for a coffee, a sausage roll and a slice of caramel shortbread.

 - Tom Holt, Barking, p.221 

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I may be running out of new things to say about the Scot Pilgrim saga with this, the penultimate book.

But it does give me the chance to use one of my favorite words - penultimate, which is almost as good as the sublime "antepenultimate," a wonderfully precise word that is useful almost exactly never. But I see I'm digressing already.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe is the fifth of the six books by Bryan Lee O'Malley (which I read in the slightly newer edition colored by Nathan Fairbairn), in which Scott battles the twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi, as he comes closer to the end of his not-all-that-new-at-this-point girlfriend Ramona Flowers' trail of evil exes.

(One bit of dialogue in this book reminded me of something I'd forgotten - these are Ramona's evil exes, not all of her exes. She dated other people who were not evil. And, presumably, when starting a new relationship in this world, if your new love dated five or six people before you, but they were all, say, Chaotic Good or True Neutral, you wouldn't have to fight any of them.)

The big parallel here between Ramona and Scott - I won't say there's one central parallel in each book, since I don't want to dig to prove that right now, but I'm thinking it pretty strongly - is the double-timing thing. Scott famously started the series dating the teenager Knives Chau, and, when Ramona finally confronts him on that in this book, he notes that he never cheated on her; he cheated on Knives with her. (Which is about as reassuring and adult as you might expect.) And Ramona, as we learn this time out, was dating Kyle and Ken simultaneously but secretly.

So maybe, to pull the threads together, we're all evil exes in our breakups, since we all did shitty things to our partners. Well, when we're in our early twenties and thoughtless, like Scott. I'd like to hope not everyone is a Scott Pilgrim, and possibly even that Scott himself can and will grow out of this phase of life.

Anyway, Kyle and Ken come to town, they challenge Scott, and they send ever-larger robots to fight him, mostly during parties. Meanwhile, the Scott/Ramona relationship is hitting a particularly bumpy patch, over the two-timing thing, which leads to first Ramona kicking Scott out of their apartment and then her disappearing entirely. In other news, the recording sessions are finally over, and Sex Bob-Omb's record is being mixed or something, and might eventually see the light of day.

Of course Scott eventually defeats Kyle and Ken - if he didn't, we wouldn't get to the sixth book - but that doesn't make everything all right, and it doesn't bring Ramona back. If we know the Hero's Journey, we expect this: the lowest point, when everything is lost and the loved one in the hands of evil, is right before the big final confrontation.

That will be the sixth book, which I'll re-read in another month or so. This one ends on something of a cliffhanger, but that's pretty common for penultimate books. You should expect it by now.

(Oh, and here are links to my posts on the first four books, which I didn't mention above: Precious Little Life, Vs. the World, The Infinite Sadness, and Gets It Together.)

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

No one should be surprised: this is a small book, only sixty pages long in a small format with printed boards, like a thousand other small books that sit next to the cash register and promise to be entertaining but not take much of the reader's time. And it does say "a short story" on the cover.

But so many people first encounter books electronically these days. Even if they're getting a physical book to read, they find it on a website and order it to be shipped. As I've said before, online every book is exactly the same size. (They aren't, but taking note of the difference is a knack most people either don't have at all or don't bother to use.)

So plenty of people have been surprised, that a short story - originally written for a BBC Christmas radio broadcast two years ago - is short. They might even be doubly surprised that the last nine pages are an afterword from author Susanna Clarke, meaning the actual story is even shorter than the book that contains it.

The Wood at Midwinter, according to that afterword, is set in the same world as Clarke's big debut novel Jonathan Strange &Mr Norrell. There's nothing in the story itself to prove that, but if the author says so, we have to believe it.

It's the 18th or 19th century, probably - two young sisters are riding in a horse-drawn carriage, in the woods near the city they live in, as the story opens. The sensible one is Ysolde Scot; her sister is Merowdis. (And I think I would be very difficult if the world had saddled me with a name like Merowdis, frankly.)

Merowdis has visions; she doesn't perceive the world like most people and has trouble fitting into society. In a modern context, we'd call her neurodiverse. In this world, there may be a supernatural explanation. She has few life-options in the world she lives in, and none of them appeal: she wants to spend her time with her animals (who talk to her) in the woods. Her sister calls her a saint, and the narrative (and Clarke's afterword) generally agree - or, to be more specific, think that saints are people who don't fit into society, are possibly neurodiverse, and see visions.

She has a dream: she wants a child. But not a human child, and not one, we think, born of her body. She has a vision of the child she will hold one day, in this story. It's so short I won't tell you any details. The actual child is in the future, beyond the story. The story is about learning it will happen, about wanting it and realizing this is a true vision.

Again, this is a short story published as a book. More than that, it's a heavily illustrated short story - the forty-four small pages that contain the story also contain art by Victoria Sawdon, and the art is dominant on many of the pages. (At times, it resembles a picture-book in format.)

It has chilly Clarke prose, a spikily intriguing character in Merowdis, fine atmospheric art by Sawdon, and a seasonally-appropriate mood (I read it on December 29th). As long as you're clear about the size of the whole package, it's a fine little thing.

Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer by Pilippe Coudray

The subtitle explains it: these single-pagers take Bigby, and occasionally his friends as well, off to further-flung regions than their usual mountains and forests.

As far as I can tell, creator Philippe Coudray has been telling stories about this bear for some time - he's called Barnabé in French, and some of his stories were translated as "Benjamin" a few years back by First Second. These three books from Humanoids - I've already covered Vol. 1 and For All Seasons - may collect some of the same material as the First Second volumes, or may be entirely separate. But, either way, this is a world Coudray has returned to over a period of time: this book lists original copyright dates of 2012-2019, and was published in English (translated by Miceal Beausang-O'Griafa) in 2020.

That gets me to Bigby Bear, Vol. 3: The Explorer. It contains ninety-nine single-page stories about Bigby, often featuring Rabbit, who I guess we call his best friend. There are other rabbits, small bears, and other creatures, too: Bigby has a fish and a bird (non-talking, most of the time) as pets who are part of some gags. Bigby's explorations include space, in rocketships sometimes shiny and modern and sometimes rustic and handmade, so there are aliens a few times as well. Oh, and a Yeti. And even a few humans, just in case we thought we had a good sense of how this world works.

I should say that Coudray clearly made these stories originally for younger readers. They're inventive and fun, with a delight in reversals and transformations, often wordless and never very wordy - though Coudray, or maybe Beausang-O'Griafa, doesn't avoid longer, more complex words and ideas; I just flipped randomly to one about an Electroencephalograph. There's also a vague sense of education or learning - the smaller creatures look to Bigby to explain things to them, and he's spending a lot of this particular volume going to new places, in space or under the ocean or just further away than normal.

Coudray has a confident, simple cartooning line, with medium-bright, high-contrast colors - it's not a hugely cartoony world, but it is a somewhat cartoony one, clearly a bit simplified from a realistic view. And his pages here are quirky and interesting - pitched at a younger audience, definitely, but not talking down to them or limited to them. This is an amusing series, on a light, accessible level, full of mild but thoughtful gags and a anything-is-possible attitude.

Barking by Tom Holt

This is a very random Tom Holt book: he's done one something like this pretty much every year for the past forty, and this is the one from 2007. I came to it because I found it randomly and cheaply a few months ago, and I'd read his When It's a Jar equally randomly early in 2024 and liked it.

Barking is...just fine. I found it somewhat less interesting than Jar, though it's a perfectly cromulent humorous fantasy that does everything it needs to do and tells a pleasant story well. I may need to check to see which Holt books are generally considered best and read those first: anyone who does so many books in the same genre is going to have a lot at about the same level of ambition and a few above or below that.

(I might have been hoping for more, since the books by Holt's alter ego, K.J. Parker, have all - at least the ones I've read - been spiky, interesting, smart things. But Holt is much more crowd-pleasing than Parker is, and I get the sense that his books have, not so much a formula, but maybe a recipe to make sure they have the things his audience wants.)

Anyway, Barking is about a lawyer named Duncan Hughes. He works at a horrible London firm doing tedious work, and is what I think is the usual early-thirties sad-sack Holt protagonist, with a failed marriage behind him and nothing whatsoever interesting in his life. But he lives in a Tom Holt world, so he's thrown into supernatural doings.

His old pack of schoolmates have formed a highly successful firm, and their leader, Luke Ferris, is suddenly trying to recruit him, really hard.

I don't want to say all of Holt's books get schematic, but this one definitely does. You see, both werewolves and vampires are real, and both of them run law firms. As far as we see, the werewolves are all men and the vampires are all women, and they are mortal enemies in a very British, fair-play kind of way, not so much trying to kill each other (both groups are very very very resistant to harm) as trying to get one over on the others. Oddly, this doesn't seem to come out in legal ways - Holt doesn't talk about major litigation or complex M&A work to confound the other side.

(Holt himself was a lawyer in Somerset. I don't want to cast aspersions on his knowledge of the field he worked in in his own country, but none of these big high-powered London law firms feel big or high-powered; they seem to be organized like a minor city's second-tier solicitors, and do that kind of work. And none of the lawyers seem to actually be experts in their practice areas the way I'd expect.)

So the werewolves/men are eternally feuding with vampires/women - we also learn that there are other packs of werewolves (one is made up of dentists, so maybe it's just these two firms of lawyers? There's a lot that's vague and half-explained in this world, to keep it light and amusing.) Holt is otherwise resolutely heterosexual here - there's not an inkling that all these furry men who spend all day every day with each other, bonding and running in the woods and doing all sorts of physical activity together, are more than just mates. Although...Luke does very very strongly warn Duncan away from "their sort," and that seems to mean women as much as it does vampires, inasmuch as the book makes any distinction between the two, which is not a whole lot.

There are further complications, of course. But that's the beginning: Duncan becomes a werewolf, becomes a partner in a better firm, turns into a dog in the moonlight to chase foxes with his pack, is warned to avoid vampires because they have cooties, that sort of thing.

He of course has A Destiny because he Is Special. There is a unicorn that signposts this and keeps showing up throughout the novel, which leads into the main plot, which I won't go into great detail about. Of course Duncan wins free in the end, conquers all enemies, and wins the appropriate gorgeous female (who otherwise barely shows up in the book and doesn't have an appreciable personality) as his trophy.

Again, I found this pleasant and entertaining but also facile and obvious. And these lawyers are working at a much lower, duller level than I expected, from doing marketing to actual high-powered lawyers for the past decade. So I may be back for more Tom Holt, but I expect to be substantially pickier the next time.

Better Things: I Want Everything

"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.

Some songs are koans, statements, mileposts. They say what they say in a way you immediately agree with, and take to heart, moving around furniture in your head to make room for them, so they can sit in the place they should always have been.

This is one of those songs for me: I Want Everything by Cracker.

The verses are allusive - I don't know what they mean. The singer is somewhere, thinking about someone. And "someone" is a huge question mark - it could be another person, personified nature, a god, nearly anything at all.

But the refrain is what matters most: that title, over and over. In a voice that doesn't demand, doesn't implore, doesn't whine. It just states: this is what it is, this is what I want, this is where I am.

I want everything

He's singing to someone; he's saying this clearly, powerfully, as directly as he can. Again, it depends on who you think he's singing to what it all means - what kind of everything it means he wants - but it works, no matter who you think it is. No matter how much everything includes or doesn't.

And I agree. I want everything. Not to take from anyone else. Not exclusively. Not in any negative way. Just in that sense of openness, of being part of the world: all of it, here and now and later and forever.

I want everything

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 15, 2025

One book to write about this week, in the middle of cold, snowy February - it's been snowing, where I live, every second or third day for the past couple of weeks. It hasn't been adding up to much - slush and freezing rain and sleet and the occasional nice fluffy snow that almost immediately crusts up into gleaming ice - but it's been coming down from grey skies and keeping everything wet and slick and unpleasant. So why not stay inside and read books?

Jules, Penny, and the Rooster is a new book from Daniel Pinkwater, from Tachyon. They've published his last couple of novels - Adventures of a Dwergish Girl and Crazy in Poughkeepsie, both excellent - and it is wonderful to see a somewhat regular publication schedule from Pinkwater these days.

(My personal theory - based on nothing but his publication dates and a long-running love for his books - is that Pinkwater is just too weird for most publishing companies to be comfortable with in the long run. So they do a three-book deal, or something, and then run back to boring books about kids who eat their Wheaties and have some kind of trendy Problems to entice the award-givers once they realize just how individual and wonderful Pinkwater's work is.)

(It's not what you might call a well-developed theory.)

Anyway - new Pinkwater book!

Jules is a middle-school girl, who has been promised by her parents ("My father has an excellent job in the deluxe shoelace industry, and my mother is a house plant psychiatrist[.]") that they would get a job once the family moved out of an apartment to a house where dogs were allowed.

You guessed it: they have made that move, and still no dog. Jules is somewhat peeved.

So she enters a newspaper contest: the best letter will win a purebred collie dog. As I understand it, she wins the contest, names the dog Penny...and then, when the two start exploring the neighborhood together, they discover the usual Pinkwaterian weirdness happening on the other side of an old stone wall.

It's being published March 11th, and I doubt I'll manage to wait that long to read it. Consider that a recommendation.

Quote of the Week: No Aspersions Meant to My Fine Colleagues at Work

Miss Huskisson, like so many of the female denizens of the Middle West, was tall and blonde and constructed on substantial lines. She was a girl whose appearance suggested the old homestead and fried pancakes and pop coming home to dinner after the morning's ploughing. Even her bobbed hair did not altogether destroy this impression. She looked big and strong and healthy, and her lungs were obviously good. She attacked the verse of the song with something of the vigor and breadth of treatment which in other days she had reasoned with refractory mules. Her diction was the diction of one trained to call the cattle home in the teeth of Western hurricanes. Whether you wanted to or not, you heard every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 253

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 5: The Happy Prince by P. Craig Russell

This is the end of the series - Wilde wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted eight of them into comics format between 1992 and 2012, and it doesn't look like he's going to go back to do "The Fisherman and His Soul" at this point.

I made a little project of reading all of them this year (I'm writing this at the tail end of 2024) - The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket, The Birthday of the Infanta, and The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose.

So now I've come to The Happy Prince, the fifth and final volume. The prose is just as deliberately didactic, as let-me-tell-you-a-story-young-lad, as the previous tales, with that jeweled Wilde prose that comes right up to the line of being too ornate but veers back at the last minute. And Russell still uses great wodges of Wilde prose, as he tends to do in all of his adaptations: Russell, I think, adapts things where he loves the words and not just the underlying story, so he wants to keep the words as much as possible.

The Happy Prince himself is a statue, on a tall column in the center of some unspecified town in Europe. It may be the "now" when Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century, or a century or three earlier; in the usual fairy-tale fashion, a lot is vague. The Prince was once a living person, but he died young and now his soul inhabits the statue, for unspecified reasons but presumably so Wilde can have a plot.

The other main character is a swallow, a migratory bird that is tarrying in this city on the verge of winter for no good reason - he should be going on to Egypt to join his fellows, but was dallying with a reed in a river somewhere. (No, literally, he was flirting, over the course of weeks, with what seems to be one of the few non-sapient entities in a Wilde fairy tale, which is some kind of achievement, though not one speaking to his intelligence or discernment.) Anyway, the swallow swoops into town, perches on the statue, and meets the Prince.

The Prince is sad.

He is sad because some people are poor and other people are rich, mostly. So he induces the bird to take his valuables - first the ruby in the pommel of his sword, then his sapphire eyes, and finally the gilding covering the statue - and give those to specific, deserving poor people so that their lives can be better.

This delays the swallow long enough that he's killed by the frost, and makes the statue shabby enough that it's removed by the authorities and melted down. But both of them ascend to heaven immediately, on the direct orders of God. Yay!

It is just as didactic and middle-Church as the previous stories, as expected. These were improving stories for boys (and maybe girls, though Wilde didn't care much for girls) in the 1880s and 90s, and will always be that, no matter how many years later it now is. If you're in the mood for Victorian improving stories with Wildean prose and Russell art - both of which are gorgeous - there are five books available.

Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo

I think there's more to this story, that hasn't made it to my side of the Pacific yet. But that's nothing new for Trese - I said the same after the first three books, in 2010, when none of them had been published in the US yet. So I can wait, and maybe not expect, but anticipate and hope, to see an eventual seventh volume.

Trese, the series, is about a supernatural investigator: a young woman named Alexandra Trese, from a family intimately connected with the supernatural for generations. So far, so similar to a flood of contemporary fantasy starting in the '90s and plenty of "romantasy" today. But she lives in Manila, and the supernatural world she knows is particular and specific to the Philippines - and so strange and distinct and more fantastic to those of us from other places.

From the beginning, writer Budjette Tan used entirely local monsters and powers: these books, as published in the US by Ablaze, have short text features after each issue-length story to each explain one supernatural race or personage. He also made sure never to explain more than he had to, and kept a noir-ish tone to the proceedings, very appropriate for a place like Manila, a big city full of money and business and corruption and dark history.

And artist KaJo Baldisimo was also wonderful from the beginning, delivering gloriously inky pages of violence and terror and wonder and surprise, lovingly textured and filled with unique faces and (if I may use a cliché) even more unique monsters.

High Tide at Midnight is the sixth collection: there's a 2014 afterword from Tan, but this US edition was published in September of 2023. (Which is what makes me think there are more stories out there, from the past decade.) It picks up on major story threads from the fifth volume, Midnight Tribunal, [1] particularly the figure of The Madame - who is this fantasy world's version of a person many readers will recognize from the real world - and tells one long story in multiple parts, during a particularly devastating typhoon that hits and floods Manila.

In our world, a big storm is a force of nature. In Trese's world, there are powers that control storms - control water, control air, control fire, and so on. So a gigantic storm doesn't just happen: someone made it, for a purpose. And someone is taking advantage of it.

I shouldn't say much more than that. The Madame does get involved. There is a plot by supernatural entities to get more power. There's a new drug that effects supernatural beings in frightening, dangerous ways. Some of the supernatural creatures are very eager to kill humans, as often happens in stories like this. And Alexandra Trese can't handle this massive danger alone. Good thing she has four brothers and other allies - before this book is over, a larger group of Philippine supernatural protectors comes together, some people we've seen before in this series, some new, and go into a massive battle.

This is the biggest Trese story yet, and the series title is even more true: this is not just the story of Alexandra Trese, but of her family as a whole, all of them engaged in the family business, navigating the murky, turbulent waters between the human and supernatural worlds of the Philippines.

I wouldn't jump into the series here, but I do recommend getting here. Start with the first book, and know there's at least this much more waiting for you.

[1] Also see my posts on the earlier books: one, two, three, four.

Schtick Figures by Drew Friedman

Drew Friedman might have run out of themes for his big books of warts-and-all portraits. I say that because this, his most recent book, declares itself to contain "over 150 comedians, writers, humorists, musicians, actors, journalists, cartoonists, illustrators, editors, publishers, one art gallery owner, one magician, one photographer, two wrestlers, and one movie memorabilia store owner."

If that sounds like a coherent theme, I'll eat my hat. And I don't own a hat.

On the other hand, "Drew Friedman portraits" is arguably enough of a theme in the first place, and this book has, as mentioned, over 150 of them. They are miscellaneous, they are arranged in (mostly) alphabetical order, and they are glorious in their fleshy magnificence.

Schtick Figures came out this past summer, from Friedman's long-time publisher Fantagraphics, and I suspect it is the book that collects everything else he's done over the past decade or so - that it wasn't a specific project like Heroes of the Comics or Maverix and Lunatix. The pictures are presented full-page, captioned only by the name of the person - or, in a few rare cases, the project - with a section of short potted biographies at the back for those of us who don't know who (picking a few pages at random) Imogene Coca, Pigmeat Markham or Frank Kelly Freas are. (Friedman puts "Kelly" in quotes for Freas, which is weird and I think wrong, but oh well. There's also at least one entry in the bio section that doesn't have a portrait in the book, and a couple of places where the bio section is in a slightly different order than the portraits.)

The bios also contain occasional notes about the source of the image - there are a few commissions, mostly for the people pictured (which explains some of the weirder ones in the list up top), some covers for Mineshaft (whatever that is), work for Mad and The Village Voice and probably some other publications I don't recall right this second, and a few other oddities. Most are uncredited, which could mean Friedman has forgotten or wants to forget where they came from, that he doesn't have to mention original publication for those, that he drew them for this book, or that they came to him in a vision from the Man in the Moon.

Whatever: 150 Drew Friedman pictures. Mostly of people you will recognize, if you know who Drew Friedman is and have a passing acquaintance with 20th century pop culture. (Especially the odder, horror- and humor-tinged sides of it.) This book is a good thing, and it's fun to poke through. I may wish Friedman was still doing comics rather than single images - as I lamented when I wrote about his book The Fun Never Stops! some years back - but it's better for his health and bank account and probably life in general, so I can't kick too hard.

Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse

I still have a dozen or so Wodehouse books on my shelf I haven't read - and intend to collect the thirtyish more in the Overlook series I don't own - so I think I'll keep reading them every three or four months from now until I run out. Some are surprisingly good - Piccadilly Jim, for example, was a fully-formed mature Wodehouse novel from 1917 with a great impostor plot.

Indiscretions of Archie, from the same era - originally published in 1921 - is somewhat lesser, but still amusing.

Reading it, I suspected it was originally a series of short stories, and I was right - this appeared as eleven stories in The Strand (and most of them also in Cosmopolitan - back in the days when the Atlantic was wider, writers could sell the same material on both sides of it) during 1920 and '21.

Wodehouse rewrote the whole thing somewhat to make it fit more into a novel form, but it's still exceptionally episodic. Our hero is Archie Moffam, a Great War veteran of good family and no money, who arrived in America to make his fortune and found it in Lucille Brewster, the usual beautiful young thing, who he met in Miami and married after a whirlwind courtship.

Lucille's father is Daniel Brewster, the millionaire owner and manager of the Cosmopolis hotel in New York - the self-proclaimed best hotel in town - and Daniel dislikes Archie intensely. (Archie is another one of Wodehouse's dim bulbs, unable to say anything clearly but not quite as prone to self-satisfaction and causing mayhem as Bertie Wooster.) Archie is supposedly looking for his life's work, but makes no effort at doing so at any point in the novel - the premise is not that he's trying his hand at different jobs, with humorous results, but just that he's supposed to be finding himself a career, and not just sponging off his rich father.

But he is: the stories are of Archie helping friends, getting involved in various odd Wodehousian events (there's a pie-eating contest he puts a ravenous teen boy up for, two different unsuitable theatre-connected fiancées for his brother-in-law, an old war acquaintance with amnesia, and a stint with Archie as an artist's model, among a couple of others), and usually annoying his father-in-law along the way. Most of them leave the situation at status quo ante, but, as the book gets into the back quarter, one gets a sense Wodehouse realized he needed to have something like an ending, so Archie wins the role of manager at the new hotel Daniel is building downtown.

Oh, that hotel isn't constructed before the novel is over: Archie never works a day in the book. But he has the promise of a job and a career, and, at the very end, there's also the only Wodehousian reference to a pregnancy I can remember. (It is an exceptionally circumloqutious reference - touching primarily on Daniel going to become a grandfather - and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Wodehouse or to 1921 or both.)

So this has some amusing Wodehouse material, but it's a clump of short stories standing up in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a novel. If you know that going in, it can be quite entertaining, but don't expect anything like an overall plot.

Better Things: The Exploding People

"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.

When I write these posts, I need to turn off whatever music I have already playing, dig up a YouTube link for the song I'm featuring, and get myself into the right mindset.

This time, though, I already have some Cloud Cult playing - their 2022 record Metamorphosis - so I might let it run for a bit as I type here. It probably makes no difference on your end. It's not a thing you would even notice.

Cloud Cult is the most positive band I know. Even better, it's not the flabby usual American positivity, it's a tough, muscular positivity, the kind that fights through jungles to get to that point, the kind that insists that it is going to be positive, no matter what, because it has to. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

There are a few other songs I almost picked - When Water Comes To Life still strikes me as their essential song, the one about why that attitude matters and what the singer went through (and I hate to say it, but I'm slightly tearing up just thinking about that song), and 1x1x1 is compelling and stark and brilliant.

But most of my favorite songs of theirs are from their wonderful 2010 record Light Chasers, which is something like a SF concept record. (Not a whole lot like, I guess, but something like.) And, so, today, I want to feature The Exploding People.

Can't escape from yourself unless you don't run.

That's the Zen koan at the middle I keep coming back to, the triple negative. A lot of Cloud Cult is about that big question: how do you live your life? Again, it's not coming from a place of authority, but one of vulnerability, a voice saying "I keep doing this thing that hurts and I need to stop."

This is a song about death, I think.

You never see the present, cuz you're always looking back.
Or counting down the seconds to your heart attack.
Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.
Do what you do, cuz you can't come back.
And one by one, the people, they explode.

About death in the sense that we all will die, everyone will die, and every moment you have not dead is a moment to use, to live in, to be alive in.

All the best Cloud Cult songs are like that: muscular, energetic, complex tangles of emotion about the big things that are also the personal things, and about failure at those things more than success. About how the singer wants to live, wants to be: what he keeps telling himself in hopes he can actually get there. I appreciate that a hell of a lot. Some days I need it more than others.

Quote of the Week: Rain in LA

Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers that shine like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places. The rain drummed hard on the roof of the car and the burbank top began to leak. A pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain. I struggled into a trench coat and made a dash for the nearest drugstore and bought myself a pint of whiskey. Back in the car I used enough of it to keep warm and interested. I was long overparked, but the cops were too busy carrying girls and blowing whistles to bother about that.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, p.610 in Stories & Early Novels

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I'm also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I'll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights was Guy Colwell's new graphic novel this year - his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people's comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He's in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he's a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren't known but aiming to be realistic or plausible - this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it's most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it's about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell's telling, Bosch was a visionary painter - literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell - and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting - more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town - the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That's what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then - in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead - being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It's a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting - Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide - that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time - and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn't overdramatize the conflicts; they're mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell's art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern - a major benefit for this work - and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it's one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it's about. It's a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it's a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

You have to go back to the big books every so often. If you're a middle-aged man - and I am, these days - you may find that's what you mostly do.

So I re-read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel, for probably the first time since...maybe when I was a teenager? I remember reading Chandler, in whatever paperback editions were current at the time - maybe Vintage, but I think my first were mass-markets from someone like Berkley. I remember reading at least one by the side of a pool in Florida, while visiting my father for the summer in 1985 - the closest I could come to the gestalt of Chandler's LA, I suppose.

That was a long time ago. 1939 was even longer ago.

Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, had appeared in a number of stories before this first novel, and his character was already set: all the things that would be clichés later, the man of the mean streets but not himself mean, the tarnished angel, the rumpled knight, incorruptible because there's nothing he wants enough to be used to corrupt him with.

This is the Chandler novel with one death that's not quite solved - all of the others are clearly explained, and the mysterious one is closed by the police with a plausible story, which is better than real life and not bad for fiction. But I gather some mystery readers were snooty about it at the time, and ever afterward. You'd think they'd be mollified by the fact that the book has a butler in it, but they're never satisfied, of course.

I'm not going to detail the whole plot, at this point. Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to investigate a possible blackmail attempt, and absolutely not hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the old man's son-in-law, whom he'd quite liked. The millionaire has two daughters, both in their twenties: the older one is a bit wild, having married several times already and gambling much more than is good for her. The younger one is practically feral, vastly worse and more dangerous to herself and others.

Marlowe does what he needs to do, and what he can do, and bodies start to pile up as others react to what he does, and he sometimes hides evidence of those bodies and sometimes calls in the authorities. In the end, he does find out what happened to the missing son-in-law, which is the core of the book.

And, throughout, Chandler writes magnificently. We read Chandler for the writing - his plots were fine and thoughtful, his characters vivid and specific, but his turns of phrase and random observations were unique and striking over and over again. The best Chandler books - this one, The Long Goodbye - don't just tell a good detective story, but let us see the world in different ways, give us unexpected insights and viewpoints as they roll out a compelling story, too. We read Chandler to see the world through his eyes, and be surprised and excited by what we find there.

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.

Better Things: Lost in the Supermarket

"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.

If there was anyone out there who cared enough to think it through, this one would have been obvious.

Yes, The Clash, of course - given my age and my musical tastes, I of course had a Clash phase.

And Lost in the Supermarket as well, because I'm also clearly a fan of the emotional song over the agitprop. Sure, I really like London's Burning and I Fought the Law and Something About England and Safe European Home and London Calling, but the song that almost edged this out was Somebody Got Murdered.

This is that cliched thing, the song of suburban ennui - but that's what's neat about music, clichés in songs can work a lot of the time if done well. A song often is a cliché, since it needs to be simplified and focused.

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

It's full of specifics, not vagueness. This room, these neighbors, this hedge. A kettle, a bottle. The furniture of one normal life, and the gnawing feeling that it's not enough, that there must be more than this.

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I'll fully admit the time I loved this song most was my teenage years: that time when all of us are at our most cliched and disheartened and alienated. But it still strikes a chord, forty years later, as I live out my own suburban life. There are many days I still feel lost in the supermarket; maybe you do as well.

Books Read: January 2025

This is going up late, which is pretty common. I type this on February 24th - almost time for the next month! - but it's purely an index anyway, and one that's basically useless until I publish the posts in another couple of weeks. Anyway, I'm burying it on a weekend a few weeks back, and here's what I read the first month of the year:

Chip Kidd, Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts (1/1, digital)

A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 1/1)

Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Deponnier, Sartre (1/4, digital)

George O'Connor, Odin (1/5)

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, Once Upon a Workday (1/11, digital)

Patricia A. McKillip, The Book of Atrix Wolfe: 30th Anniversary Edition (1/11, bound galleys)

John Hendrix, The Mythmakers (1/12, digital)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 5: Black Wind (1/18/ digital)

Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels (1/18)

Jean "Moebius" Giraud, The Major (1/19, digital)

Michael Sweater, Please Destroy the Internet (1/20, digital)

Jack Vance, City of the Chasch (1/20, in Planet of Adventure)

Carol Lay, My Time Machine (1/25, digital)

Liniers, Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin (1/26, digital)

In February, I have continued to read books, and I'll post a similar list sometime after this month ends - maybe right away, maybe substantially later. We shall see.

Quote of the Week: Not Just Foxed, But Absolutely Badgered

The hardest part, though, lies in recording precisely in what ways a book has survived the ravages of time. An entire lexicon of book-related terminology has evolved over hundreds of years for exactly this purpose - terminology that means absolutely nothing to the average observer. It's traditional to adopt this baroque language when describing your books, for two reasons. The first is that the specific language of the book trade allows you to be exceedingly accurate and precise without using hundreds of words, and the second is that the elegance of it serves to dull the blow a little. Most rare books come with some minor defects, but that doesn't mean one has to be rude about it. It's much more charming to describe a book as "foxed" than to tell someone that the pages have developed an unsightly mottling, and that if this were a zombie movie we'd already have taken it out back and put it out of its misery.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, pp.25-26