Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown by Mike Mignola

It's been a while since Mike Mignola just made comics - especially if by "made comics" you mean writing and drawing them himself. His Hellboy-universe comics have been a parade of collaborators for the last decade and a half, at least, and the movies and potential movies have also taken a lot of his attention.

But he just put out a new book of folklore-inspired stories, Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown. And it is as close to pure Mignola as we've seen in a long time: he's joined here just by long-time collaborators Clem Robins (letters) and Dave Stewart (colors), handling aspects of the comics that Mignola never actually did himself. 

The title is a bit long and unwieldy, hinting that Mignola may still be working out what this project is, where it will go, and how much further he'll continue with it. It's not unlike the earliest Hellboy short stories - several loosely-linked supernatural tales, heavily narrated, coming out of odd or quirky bits of legend that Mignola has discovered over the years.

But with Hellboy, Mignola started with a character and built a world around him, bit by bit. Here, with what I guess we'll call "Lands Unknown," Mignola went in the other direction, starting from notebooks and sketches of an alternate medieval world - one similar to Europe in the Dark Ages, but much more stuffed with monsters and creatures and dark shadows - and telling various bits of story that he found or thought up or adapted into that world.

The art is dark and lovely and creepy, in Mignola's mature style. The stories are realistically folklore-esque, which could be a positive or a negative - they tend to be almost fragments, a collection of moments that sketch a series of events and hint at a moral or at a larger mythological framework rather than being robust specific stories - and often end with those minor characters elbowing the reader in the ribs to say the story is not over. Bowling with Corpses is a collection of related material about a new world rather than a book of individual stories; on the positive side, that means these pieces build on each other and refer back to each other. To the other side, it also means the individual pieces tend to stop rather than end definitively, as if Mignola is still building this world and doesn't want to close out any possibilities there. Much of the middle of the book is nicely atmospheric and well-told "tell this old bit of folklore in a Lands Unknown context," but for the "hey, this story isn't over; I'm going to bring back this character" notes that tend to undermine them as stories.

(It's the difference between a folktale that stands on its own and a flashback to tell the origin of a villain the book implies will be important later - made vaguer by the fact that it's pretty clear Mignola is making this up as he goes along, and doesn't yet have any overall story to tell, or that any of these people will actually be "the villain" in anything.)

There's a lot of fun dialogue here - it's very nice to see Mignola getting out of apocalypse mode and letting his characters wisecrack, especially the minor ones. If that doesn't necessarily lead to anything, well, this is a new project, and explicitly a "tales from" book, which we should not expect to be a fully-rounded single story.

Still, I'd like to see this project come into a bit more focus, assuming Mignola keeps telling stories in this world. He doesn't need to pick a single core character, but he really should make some more rounded characters, and have them run through actual stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends, rather than just the mythological moments he's most interested in drawing today. This could have been a more focused book about Yeb the Spoon and Una Krone if he wanted it to be, with multiple stories about both of them, commenting on each other, with the other pieces to give more background and detail to the world.

That could still happen, or something different could happen next. Either way, I hope Mignola does continues to tell "strange tales from lands unknown," and leans into his strengths of distinctive characters, zippy dialogue, and evocative but not necessarily over-explained supernatural backgrounds as he goes on.

Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson

When you make really big graphic novels, they take a long time. Your career becomes just a few signposts, at wide intervals. And if one of those books misfires, or just doesn't hit the audience you wanted, it can be a long time until the next one.

Craig Thompson has now had three big books, roughly a decade apart: he broke out with Blankets in 2003, followed that up with Habibi in 2011, and now returns with Ginseng Roots, which publishes today. Yes, Goodbye, Chunky Rice was before all of those, and was what first got his name out there and put him in a position to be seen and taken seriously for Blankets. And he had a couple of smaller books in between as well, specific things for particular purposes, but they didn't have the same heft or the same expectations.

It's no secret that Habibi was disappointing. I expect what Thompson found disappointing about it is very different from what readers like me found disappointing, but it clearly didn't work in the ways that everyone hoped it would - it wasn't loved and picked up and praised the way Blankets was.

Of course, that happens a lot in a creative career. The second major work - second novel, second record, etc. - is stereotypically a letdown; that's the base assumption. The breakout is fresh and different, from a new voice, while the second is "what have you done for me lately."

And then we come to number three. Two points define a line, but careers are not straight lines. Three points can define a volume, or at least show how close to each other they are, and what might lie between them.

Ginseng Roots is a step back from Habibi in some ways: Thompson is returning to non-fiction from fiction, centering his own life and experiences rather than telling a made-up story, returning to his family and childhood but telling us different things, and showing his current life and relationships with that family while also doing something like reportage on a global industry. His pages are generally less ornate than Habibi as well, more focused on storytelling, though there are more than a few tours-de-force in the four-hundred-plus pages and twelve chapters here.

In some ways, Ginseng Roots is the story of what Thompson left out of Blankets, and what those elements mean for his life now. Blankets was a focused, personal memoir, about breaking away from a hyper-religious family and finding his own place in the world. But it's now twenty years later, and, like so many people, Thompson didn't break entirely: he still visits his parents, and has what he portrays as a solid, if sometimes limited, relationship with them as they age.

What he left out, most importantly, was a whole sibling: his younger sister, in between the ages of Craig and his brother Phil. There's also the fact that Phil's real name seems to be Jon, which comes up once or twice - though "Phil" is the name used most often here. (I'm not sure if the sister is ever named, which I take to be purposeful.)

And, central to this book, is what they did for a number of summers as kids: hard, physical agricultural work in the local fields. Marathon, Wisconsin is the center of cultivation of American Ginseng - which, weirdly, is more popular in Asian than Asian ginseng, and vice versa - a crop that is tricky and finicky but was hugely profitable in the '80s and '90s when they were young. So they pulled rocks and weeded, weekends at the ends of the school year and full-time in the hot summers, to protect and nourish the fragile ginseng plants.

Ginseng was originally published as a twelve-issue comics series over the past five years, so it won't be a surprise to its core audience. That also means it breaks into equal-sized chapters, each about one moment or aspect of the larger topic - ginseng and how Thompson and his family have been part of it, both then and now, from growing to its use in medicine, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, mostly organized around various research or family trips Thompson made over the course of a few years.

Each chapter is somewhat self-contained, about a specific moment or aspect, but they flow together to tell the larger story. It's a lot like the prose non-fiction equivalent, from someone like Mary Roach, where it's clear each chapter was informed by a particular research trip, but the whole book is a larger, fuller project.

The big themes are physical work, both the joys and pains of it, ginseng itself and its uses and tastes and medicinal purposes (and some vague woo-woo about balancing humors or chakras or whatever; I didn't see any evidence that Thompson investigated any actual scientific evaluations of ginseng as a plant or any of its constituent elements), and how cultures interact and transact and rub up against each other - secular and religious cultures, national cultures, and just kinds of people and mindsets.

Thompson's pages are gorgeous and deep as ever - he tells the story of a lot of troubles with his drawing hand in this book, but it doesn't show in the work at all. (I hope that means the problems are more in the past, but who ever knows?) He's telling something that's not a single story here, so Ginseng doesn't wrap up so much as it hits the end of a set of stories. There could be more; his family is still going and so is the ginseng industry. This is not something that had a single beginning, and it's not the kind of memoir that has a clean single end. But Thompson tells a lot of stories here, about himself and his family, about ginseng in Wisconsin and China and Korea and elsewhere, and about how he personally threads through all of that, how he reacts to it and what he feels about all of it.

Ginseng is oddly both more and less ambitious than Thompson's earlier books. It wants to tell all of the stories it can get to about ginseng: personal, global-trade, farming, medicinal, social. But it also wants to be grounded and specific, not getting into the flights of fancy of Habibi or the raw emotion of Blankets. Maybe I mean that it's clear-eyed about what it can do, and keeps that focus throughout, to show us all of the things within its remit as well as it can.

Better Things: Detachable Penis

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

OK, this is a joke song, more or less.

But it's a great joke, told absolutely deadpan, over a jarring, fuzzy musical track. And I feel like it's mostly forgotten now, though it seemed pretty big at the time.

For this week, I'm all-in for Detachable Penis by King Missile.

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover
And my penis was missing again
This happens all the time
It's detachable

It's sung from the POV of a hipster-ish guy in NYC, thirty-some years ago. (The song is from 1992.) What do you do when your detachable penis is missing? Well, you go out and look for it, of course.

I really don't like being without my penis for too long
It makes me feel like less of a man
And I really hate having to sit down
Every time I take a leak

It's a story song; we get the story. It's funny along the way, and the music has that bounce and zip to it that underscores how silly it all is.

Yes, the song is basically a novelty. Yes, it can wear out its welcome, I suppose. But I love the guitar riff it's built on, and singer John S. Hall has a great deadpan tone throughout. It's not one of the great moving songs of our time, but it's not trying to be: what it is is just fine.

Quote of the Week: I'm Bored

No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics. The boredom of civilized life is trivial and terminable, a puny thing to be strangled between finger and thumb. The blackest things in European social life - rich women talking about their poverty, poor women talking about their wealth, week-end parties of Cambridge aesthetes or lecturers from the London School of Economics, rival Byzantinists at variance, actresses off the stage, psychologists explaining one's own books to one, Americans explaining how much they have drunk lately, houseflies at early morning in the South of France, amateur novelists talking about royalties and reviews, amateur journalists, quarrelling lovers, mystical atheists, raconteurs, dogs, Jews conversant with the group movements of Montparnasse, people who try to look inscrutable, the very terrors, indeed, which drive one to refuge in the still-remote regions of the earth, are mere pansies and pimpernels to the rank flowers which flame grossly in those dark and steaming sanctuaries.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.269-270 in Waugh Abroad

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh

How long can one be reading the same book? Well, I got a big omnibus Everyman's Library thing called Waugh Abroad back in the dying days of the last century, read the first book in it (Labels) in 2006, and set it nicely on a shelf to get back to the rest of the books eventually.

Somehow that book survived my 2011 flood, and ten years later I re-bought and re-read Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall, but Waugh Abroad stayed on one shelf or another for about twenty years. I've taken it down now and then - as you do to books on your unread shelves - and finally read the second book in it, Remote People, now that it's 2025.

(The omnibus has five further books. Unless I expect to live until 2120 - which would be nice, but not to be expected - I may have to pick up the pace.)

Remote People was Waugh's second travel book, and somewhat less random than Labels. It was 1930, Haile Selassie was about to be crowned Emperor of Abyssinia, and Waugh thought it might be interesting to witness that - so he got a newspaper to sponsor him as correspondent and set off to witness history. Once he got down to East Africa, he also spent some time in various British colonial outposts in the region - Aden in Arabia, Kenya and Uganda, and traveled through other administrative areas (British or other colonial powers) but didn't spend as much time in those other regions.

Waugh is a colonialist, but not horribly so for his era. I found him somewhat less racist than I expected, remembering how misanthropic he generally is - but this is still fairly early Waugh, when he hated society and his own people mostly, and not as deeply, before the loathing for everyone and everything set in after the war. He definitely is racist: he was an aristocratic British man in 1930, so he considered himself superior to not just everyone with darker skin than his own, but most of the residents of the UK and similar nations as well. And he has that arch British reserve; there's a woman he just calls "Irene" who he spends a bunch of time with in Addis Ababa, and I couldn't figure out if she was supposed to be someone the general 1930 audience would already know, or possibly a cousin or something like that, or if it was just someone he was having an affair with and he was flaunting it as much as possible given the mores of the era.

This is the kind of travel book that is largely about difficulties: getting to places through bad roads and railways and promised airplanes that never appear, heat and mosquitos and dust, food that Waugh detests, physical hardship, the laziness of natives and the random vagueness and lies of colonials, and so on. Waugh has a bunch of interesting set-pieces, though the biggest and most quirky one - Selassie's coronation - is right up front, so the rest of the book is a slight let-down, turning into the usual "this foreign country is a mess and a pain to get around" material after the wacky high comedy of the vast array of global envoys toasting this new self-proclaimed Emperor in in his half-built capital.

The best thing about Waugh is always his voice and viewpoint: he's crisp and mostly clear, but somewhat jaundiced, never expecting anything to completely work correctly or be what it promises. There is some political thought here, though not in any great depth, and fairly mild for its era. (Waugh seems to believe that Africans, or at least Ethiopians, can rule themselves just about as well as anyone else could, and his concerns about colonialism are mostly that it's expensive and not terribly useful for the colonizer.)

This is a world that's been gone for nearly a century now - swept away in the wave of nation-building that followed WWII - and I wouldn't want to claim Waugh was an unbiased or transparent guide to that world in the first place. But this is a fine book of Waugh insights and views of a weird, unusual part of the world at an interesting time, not long before everything got upended.

Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings 1980-2020

I've always been uneasy when I write about art books here. I have no art training - I saw people go to art history classes at college, and talked to some of the art history majors, and might even have glanced at their oddly small-format thick glossy-paper paperback textbooks now and then, but I don't have the vocabulary or the grounding or the historical knowledge or even, in the worst case, necessarily even know what to look for.

I have been reading and writing about comics for a few decades, though there I tend to lean more heavily on story elements - talking about story, I'm on much firmer ground. (And even wordless comics are storytelling vehicles: the art is always purposeful, and I at least think the tools I have can be useful.) But occasionally I wander into the pure art book, usually because it overlaps with some other interest - in the past, I saw a lot of SFF art books, especially when I worked as a book-club editor, and more recently, I sometimes dip into comics-related art.

That's how I stand with Jaime Hernandez's 2021 collection Queen of the Ring. It's not comics; the book makes it clear that this was an entirely separate artistic exercise. (There's even a discussion of how his tools and working methods were different for this work than for his comics - I found it vaguely interesting; people who actually understand how art is made will get more out of it.)

This is a collection of individual drawings - some black and white but mostly colored in pencils - of female wrestlers. Some of it is "in action" - showing a moment in the ring - and some of it is posed, often as if it was the cover of a wrestling magazine or program. All of it is fictional; all of the wrestlers here were invented by Hernandez, part of a vague - but probably fairly clear in his head - alternative timeline of wrestling from the 1960s through about the '80s.

He made these drawings over the course of forty years, as the book's subtitle makes clear. (He's probably still doing it now, five years later.) The book is not organized in chronological order - either by art-creation or the fictional history of Hernandez's wrestling world - and the short bits of text here, from an interview Hernandez did with the book's editor (and fellow cartoonist) Katie Skelly, essentially say that he didn't date any of this work at the time, and can only vaguely tag it by decade at this point.

So: this is a whole lot of undated, non-comics art, organized in a vague sequence to make a pleasant book. There are recurring characters, of a sort, and we get a vague sense of their careers and personalities from the fake headlines of their wrestling magazine covers and other flavor text Hernandez put on the art at the time. (His aim, I think, was to make his own world of women's wrestling, roughly congruent with what he saw in glances as a kid, with heroes and villains and long-running plotlines and rivalries and shocking betrayals and all of the other standard wrestling story beats. He's somewhat successful in giving a sense that history exists, behind these individual drawings, even though it doesn't.)

As I said, I'm not great at talking about art. But even I can see the changes in Hernandez's style over the years, and appreciate them. In what seem to be the earliest drawings, he has a lot of lines, trying to capture every fold and wrinkle. The more mature work, to my eye, is more concerned with defining volumes and shapes - his bodies are rounded but strong, crisply defined and real, with fewer lines overall and vastly fewer in the middle of shapes and bodies.

I doubt I got as much out of this book as I could: I flipped through it, looking at the pictures, and finished it quickly. Good thing I read it digitally: this is the kind of book I would probably never buy, so being able to get it through my library app is a huge bonus. If you are anything like me, I recommend the same - for this and any other books you're vaguely interested in but don't necessarily want to own forever.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland

The Freddy Lombard books are Belgian creator Yves Chaland's major work, according to everything I've seen. He died very young - in 1990, at barely more than thirty - but he'd done this five-book series over the previous decade, along with some other random works. I started with Chaland, maybe because I always go at things from an odd angle, with his quirkier, spikier collection of shorts Young Albert, and have read the first two Freddy books over the past year: The Will of Godrey of Bouillon and The Elephant Graveyard.

Those first two Freddy books started fairly conventionally (both stories in Elephant and the one in Will): Freddy and his friends Dina and Sweep are young and poor, and wander into a situation where there's the potential for adventure and remuneration, and so jump at it. Adventure then ensues.

The Comet of Carthage isn't playing that game; it isn't going to set up its plot or explain anything up front. It is about as in medias res as any book can be; we don't even see Freddie and his friends until the eighth story page (of 46).

What Comet does not tell you up front includes:

• We are in the French Mediterranean port of Cassis.
• A massive comet is approaching (this particular city?!), which will cause a tidal wave that may wipe out everything.
• This comet last appeared two thousand years ago, right at the time of the fall of Carthage, and This Is Important.
• Freddie and friends are near Cassis, camping on the beach, gathering crabs to sell their claws to...someone.
• They also may be searching for random old artifacts, or maybe they just find one or two without really looking for them on purpose.

The book opens with the storm rising, a dead body found on the beach, and a woman fleeing this city whose name we don't know. (Her name, either, I mean. She's Alaia and the dead woman is Ava - both of them are Tunisian, we eventually learn, and in France without papers.) Alaia tries to flee town on the local bus, to get to Marseille and, we think, get further away from there.

But the single road connecting Cassis with the outside world has washed away, so the bus is stopped. Alaia tries to pick her way around the broken section, on crumbly limestone cliffs, but she falls, injured and knocked out. Freddy finds and saves her, bringing her back, unconscious, to the camp he's sharing with Dina and Sweep.

By this point, the reader will have picked up some of the above backstory, but will also notice that the characters are talking around the situation, over-dramatically, and a few of them, especially Freddy, seem to be obsessed with the fall of Carthage and with the ancient Phoenician civilization for no obvious reason.

Alaia has been working as an artist's model in Cassis for Phidas, who I think is also Tunisian or Phoenician or something like that. He is tempestuous and demanding and mercurial, as a secondary-character artist in a fictional work often is, and Alaia is sure that he murdered Ava when she was done posing, that he's done it many times before, and that she is next. This is, obviously, why she fled.

But there's no way out of Cassis. Freddy says he'll help her, but his help, as we've seen in the previous books, is freely offered and energetically delivered but only occasionally useful.

Phidas both grabs and browbeats Alaia when she leaves, so she does go back to him - multiple times over the course of the book - and we do see him act violently in other ways. It's entirely plausible that he's a Bluebeard-esque murderer, we think. Whether he and Alaia and maybe Freddy are acting out roles from the fall of Carthage is much murkier and more confusing, made doubly so by the fact that no one actually makes that possibility clear at any point and the dialogue dances on the edge of being deliberately obscure.

Meanwhile, the usual mad scientist in a Franco-Belgian BD - here called Professor Picard - arrives in his bright red submersible, having run out of fuel. He has no French money, and the locals are suspicious of him. Well, they're suspicious of everyone about everything, being whipped into a frenzy by the approaching comet, and shouting wild-eyed things that may be more of the Carthage-come-again stuff or just random racist Frenchness. (Against the dark-skinned Tunisians as well as against the Belgians like Picard and our heroes.)

The comet does hit in the end, the flood waters rising and battering Cassis. Before that, the local rabble march with torches and Frankenstein rakes, yelling various things and attempting to stone Freddy and Alaia to death at one point. Everyone believes there is a single culprit for all of the bad things happening in Cassis: thefts of fuel, electricity cut off, Ava's murder, the comet itself, and perhaps even the perfidy of the ancient Carthaginians. They are wrong: multiple people have done multiple things, and the comet, I think, is just a natural phenomenon. (At least I hope it is; there's one portentous flashback, so it may actually be some sort of supernatural wrecking ball after all.)

Comet is a weird story, told somewhat sideways, and definitely the most interesting and exciting of the three Freddy books I've seen so far. Chaland's art is supple and precise, particularly good at big drama and ominous atmosphere. I don't know that I would call it entirely successful at what it sets out to do - and the dialogue is more than too much a lot of the time, in ways that make me wonder if it's quoting something I'm unfamiliar with - but it is big and bold and confident and I wish more books would take big risks like this one does.

Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance

This book, in recent years, has tended to be published as The Wannek, and the Vance estate likes to pretend that we never pronounced the alien race in the title as it was spelled for almost fifty years. But the edition I have - the Tor '90s omnibus Planet of Adventure, still available and my recommendation as the best way to read this series - proudly lists the second included novel as Servants of the Wankh, as it had been since the novel was first published in 1969.

So that's the title I will use, and if there are any snickering '60s British schoolboys about, well, I guess good for them for keeping their essential youth all these years later.

The overall Tschai series comprises four novels, published quickly from 1968 to 1970, telling a continuous story about Earthman Adam Reith on that planet, where four alien races and the human sub-species they have enslaved and/or co-opted and/or bred over hundreds of generations have been fighting, mostly in a low-key, occasional way, for thousands of years. The first one was City of the Chasch, where Reith was the sole survivor of a Earth expedition to this alien system. From about the middle of that book, Reith has been trying to obtain a spaceship any way he can, so he can warn his people that this planet exists and has a previously-unknown population of these various kinds of humans. And, of course, also the four alien races, two of them spacefaring and all moderately hostile to each other and at least potentially hostile to Earth.

Servants of the Wankh is, if you think of the overall Tschai series as a cruise-ship company, the repositioning cruise. Chasch took place on one continent, but Reith and his compatriots - he's gathered a couple of allies from different human sub-species on this planet in the first book, plus a not-exactly-princess he rescued and was taking home - are off to a major human city on another continent, on the other side of the planet. Most of the book is travel, which is pleasant and works to a lot of Vance's strengths - random moments, interesting cultural tidbits, local color, descriptions of scenery and types of people - but may be unexpected for people reading a four-book series with "Adventure" prominently in the title.

The plan is to return that "princess" - Ylin-Ylan, the Flower of Cath - to her home city of Cath, on the coast of the Charchan continent, where her noble father will, Reith hopes, be gratified enough to help Reith find or build a starship. Cath was the source of a signal sent out into space about a hundred and fifty years ago, so this hope has some factual backing behind it. They first set out in an air-car, hoping to zip across a mountain range, cross a narrow northern strait to Charchan and then zip down the coast to Cath. But the air-car is old and in bad repair, so they have to divert south and take ship on a much longer and more complicated journey across the Draschade Ocean.

Ylin-Ylan's father had sent out various envoys to find his missing daughter - or, rather, publicized that he would grant a boon to whoever did so, causing a bunch of the usual young and plucky sons of the nobility to set off to adventure in quest of her. One of them, Dordolio, meets them in the port, and they take ship together. Dordolio's plans for reuniting Ylin-Ylan with her father do not entirely correspond with Reith's, unfortunately, and Ylin-Ylan, now that rescue is closer, starts to be concerned about everything that has happened to her and what her place will be in society once she returns.

Cath is one of those complex Vancean societies, full of social pitfalls and things that are never said and tight strictures on everything - the kind full of pressures that burst out, not all that uncommonly, with Cathites launching a violent spree called awaile. During the long sea voyage, Dordolio tries to provoke Reith into fighting, Ylin-Ylan sinks into a depression, and then it all blows up.

(There are other events and characters as well - this book is somewhat a travelogue - but that's the main plot, and what connects to the rest of the series.)

Reith and company - what's left of it - does arrive in Cath, and does get caught up in more scheming there. Reith gathers a crew of human workers, and has a plausible scheme to steal a Wankh spaceship, which fails for reasons outside his control and leaves his band in the hands of the Wankhmen. I suppose it's not a spoiler to say that the hero manages to get away from them in this, the second of four books: he does. And he ends with a better sense of more parts of Tschai society, the satisfaction of having disrupted the society of a second alien race, and his health undamaged - but he's not any closer to having a ship to get off this planet.

Good thing there are two novels left!

This is a short book, and very much a middle one. It also has, as I said, essentially a travelogue plot, without as much of the action that readers may want in a late-60s paperback SF book. On the other hand, it's deeply Vancean, deeply entertaining, and full of lovely moments and descriptions. If you like Vance, read this whole series, and hit this one in the middle. If you like Vance in travelogue mode - there may be people like that - this is a good short example of his strengths in that area, and it works outside the series context on that level.

Better Things: Don't Drop the Baby

"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.

This is a song, and an artist, that I kept contorting myself to get into the original This Year list, but it never quite worked. (That's the problem with a Procrustean framework like that - you end up working the framework more than you do picking the stuff you like best.)

Well, there's no Procrustes this year, so I can share this early, propulsive, magnificent song by The Judybats, a great '90s alternative band from Tennessee that never got the recognition and fame that they should have.

From their 1991 debut record, Native Son, it's Don't Drop the Baby.

(And now I have to immediately say that their third record, Pain Makes You Beautiful, is much more consistent, and probably the best place to start with The Judybats. But if you want One Song, this is it.)

I want and want and need and need
Please pick me up please put me down
I am growing on you like a weed

It's a song about a baby - a needy, crying, demanding baby. (An actual baby, not a metaphoric one.)

The lyrics bounce back and forth - sometimes from the point of view of the baby, sometimes from the person taking care of it - even from line to line.

It's a quirky, particular song - and, OK, maybe there is something metaphoric about the baby after all. That just gives it more layers to unpick, to think through.

Quote of the Week: 'Twas Ever Thus

Gerald McCann was mayor of Jersey City from 1981 to 1985, and lost a re-election bid in 1985 to a former friend, Anthony Cucci. He ran again in 1989. Stapinski covered the election for the Jersey Journal.

I was assigned to follow one of the front-runners, a black guy who made it into a runoff election with McCann. Glenn Cunningham was a former cop, a decent, honest man who had been a city councilman for years.

He didn't stand a chance.

At one political debate, Cunningham questioned McCann about his lavish lifestyle. McCann lived in Jersey City's most exclusive waterfront development, Port Liberte, which was so close to Lady Liberty that McCann could stick his head out his window and practically kiss her ass. It was a gated community built along canals that separated one cluster of pastel-colored homes from another, which give it the nickname Venice on the Hudson. It even had its own private ferry to Manhattan. Since he had enough money to live in a place like that, everyone at The Jersey Journal suspected that McCann was somehow on the take.

When Cunningham suggested that McCann was up to no good, the audience at the mayoral debate applauded McCann, not Cunningham, and shouted "good for him." Why shouldn't McCann steal money and live in Port Liberte if he could? It was only natural. He should take what he could get while the gettin' was good. It was because of people like them that McCann was elected to a second term.

At first I thought the only explanation for McCann's was that voters, overwhelmed with the number of choices, went with the most familiar Irish face, that there was no way a black man was going to get into office. I blamed racism. But now I think their decision was even more stupid than that: Jersey City's voters missed being abused. It didn't feel like home without a criminal in office.

 - Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount, pp.202-3

Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings by J.L. Westover

I like to link to webcomics when I can, though these days, it's weirdly difficult. A lot of creators seem to just post on their normal social media, since that's where all of the algorithm-driven traffic goes anyway, and running an ad-supported site is basically a hellscape mostly left to the hardy souls who have been doing it for twenty years and have built up calluses in the right places.

So I'm going to talk about Mr. Lovenstein, and that Tapas link seems to be reasonably relevant. But I have no idea if that's the real home of the strip currently, or if you should just follow the creator, J.L. Westover, on Instagram or somewhere.

The good news is that the Mr. Lovenstein strip is being collected into books, which are slightly easier to point to. (Still: digital or print? Local store or chain or Internet behemoth? As usual, I pick the link that's most convenient to me.) And one of them is what I just read: Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings, published last fall by the Skybound arm of the mighty Image comics empire. (There was a time when I could remember which Image studio was connected with which original creator, but that was over twenty years ago. I dunno what else Skybound does these days, but, from the indicia, it seems to be the Robert Kirkman shop.)

This is another one of those roughly-ubiquitous strips: you've seen Westover's brightly-colored lumpy figures (and the occasional animal) on the Internet here and there, shared by random contacts and friends, even if you've never made an effort to read the strip itself. (I never did, until this book.)

Westover is a generation or so younger than me, so I don't know if he meant his characters to visually rhyme with the old Mr. Men and Little Miss books for kids. (And other readers might disagree that there's that much visual similarity, but it seems pretty obvious to me.)  They are cartoony, with fat rounded lines and simplified features - the kind of precise cartooning that looks simple but is unforgiving, where every line needs to be just right. And his comics are all individual gags, with some recurring styles of characters but no obvious continuing characters. These were Internet comics, so they all have "bonus panels" - have to get people to click through to the actual home of the strip - one or two additional, black and white, beats after the main (usually color) three or four-panel comic. Bonus panel comics have an odd rhythm, like a newspaper strip that always has its main punchline in panel 3 and a muted follow-up at the end, but adding jokes to a book of jokes is generally a good thing, so I won't complain about it more.

This particular collection focuses, as the title says, on feelings - and, in the Mr. Lovenstein context (and just a general funny-comics context) that means big feelings: crying, being upset by the world or by specific things, the desire to be loved and appreciated, some actual love or affection but not much, and a tiny little bit of actual happiness. Westover's characters are tormented and unhappy, most of the time, but in funny ways, and ways I think are relatable, especially to people closer to his age than mine.

I find the concept of doing themed collections of a webcomic a little gimmicky - the previous Mr. Lovenstein collection was Failure, and it looks like they'll continue in that vein - but I also remember legions of Garfield Eats Lasagna and Peanuts Baseball Gags and Jeffy Wanders Aimlessly Through the Neighborhood books, so it's not a new thing, or an unreasonable thing, or a surprising thing. It's just a little gimmicky, and sometimes you need a gimmick to stand out.

Mr. Lovenstein is, from the comics collected here, more emotionally honest than many gag strips - in that these-young-people-are-always-talking-about-their-mental-health way some people my age like to complain about incessantly - and it's also pretty funny a lot of the time. And Westover is a fine cartoonist.

Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski

Five-Finger Discount is a combined family and personal memoir by a reporter from Jersey City, focusing on the criminal activities of her forebears and extended family tree, as well as how she became a reporter and, more or less, came to write this book at the end of the last century.

Helene Stapinski mostly works in chronological order here, starting with her grandparents and great-grandparents - though anchoring most of her chapters in her personal experiences, starting when she was very young and her grandfather threated to kill her entire immediate family - and eventually getting to her own career in the last fifty pages or so of the book.

She's got a reporter's eye and a reporter's pen, pulling out lots of specific details and focusing on the most interesting/strange/surprising elements of each story, both the ones she lived personally and the ones she pulled out of newspaper morgues and family legends.

I read it because I'm from Jersey myself - though not the same end of it, and definitely not the same kind of family. My people are much WASPier, and from various bits of Upstate New York. We're from older waves of immigrants, mostly English and German - Stapinski had the kind of family with a clear Polish side and Italian side.

Apparently there is a recent documentary based on this book, which I haven't seen and didn't know existed until I started typing here. But it's the kind of thing that could turn into a movie, all sepia-toned mugshots and swirling newspaper headlines and voiceovers from everyone still alive.

Now, Stapinski came from a big family, and I don't think it was all that crooked. One lightly murderous grandpa - who was stopped before he could actually kill any family members, though there are legends about other less-lucky people - a father who regularly brought home things that "fell off the back of a truck," a cousin who ran the numbers for decades, a great-aunt who was politically connected but seems to have been as honest as any Jersey City politician ever was, and so on. It's a parade of interesting stories, but, against the background of dozens of other people who didn't go to Harvard Law and then get disbarred for misusing client funds, or killed by police during a standoff after a robbery, it's probably only a slightly more crooked family than most. Maybe not even that much. Just out in public more, maybe.

So this is an entertaining run through about a hundred years of local scandals - probably not local to you, and not super-local to me, but you know what I mean. Stapinski reasonably connects her family to a lot of other activity - Jersey City was famously corrupt for fifty-plus years of the last century - and tells a bunch of good stories along the way. Her personal life is probably the least compelling bit, but that's what makes it personal, and wraps it all up in the end.

Mechaboys by James Kochalka

I've said this before - multiple times - but a reading life goes through various odd turns and stages. Creators that you think of as being current favorites can have multiple books that you expect to get to "later," are for different audiences, or that you just never see.

And suddenly you realize it's been a decade since you read a James Kochalka graphic novel.

When my kids were younger, I read a bunch of his books for kids - with and to them, or passed on to them after - but that petered out when they were in their mid-teens; Kochalka's books for younger readers tended (at least then; we've just established I'm thoroughly outdated on his current career) to the younger end. And I read his American Elf diary comics, until those ended. (In fact, the last Kochalka book I covered here was the collection of the earliest American Elf strips.)

So when I saw a Kochalka book in my library app - one for teens, mostly, rather than little kids - I decided a decade was already too long to go without Kochalka.

Mechaboys is tonally closer to Superf*ckers than to the kid books, though even his work for little kids gets a bit snotty and rude - Kochalka, I think, is an old-school punk, and his characters are brash and pushy and in-your-face no matter what the story. It's the story of two high school seniors, Zachery (who wants to be called Zeus) and Jamie (who wants to be called James). They just built a mech suit in their garage - Zachery is living with Jamie and his widowed mom for not-entirely-specified problems-with-his-family reasons - out of what seems to mostly be an old lawnmower.

Because this is a Kochalka comic, the mech suit basically works - it makes the wearer bigger and stronger and tougher, though it does need to be started with a pullstring, because former lawnmower.

Our heroes are bullied in school - well, some jock-types pick on them for being weird and different, but it's fairly low-key for bullying in a graphic novel for teens. The jocks are jerks rather than assholes, basically: just about as thoughtless and impulsive and destructive as our heroes, only in different ways. Still, it's a huge pain for the guys, and they want to get even or win out or whatever - all those outsider "we'll show them" ideas.

The mech suit has multiple outings: crashing into a car, visiting a keg party at Booger's Hollow, and eventually disrupting the prom. But things don't go quite the ways either Zachery - the more alienated and angry and violent of the two - or Jamie - who thinks a girl in their class might like him, and wants to figure that out - expect. There are fights, including a huge mostly joyful free-for-all at the prom at the end. 

This is a quick, fun story that takes unexpected twists all the time, in Kochalka's mature cartooning style, all rubber-hose characters with rounded organic black lines. It reminded me how much fun Kochalka's work is, and how I really shouldn't have gone without it for so long.

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

Almost forty years later, what surprises me this time is that Frank Miller used to know how to be subtle.

He lost that, somewhere along the way - probably in the '90s; a lot of subtlety died in comics in the '90s - and has never gotten it back. But Batman: Year One is subtle, and carefully constructed, and insightful, and completely devoid of any fat whatsoever. This is a tense, lean story that has a lot of ground to cover and intends to show important points to the reader once at most, trusting us to pick them up.

It's also a heavily narrated book, which could add to the density but just makes it more precise. I know that style - overlapping narrative captions, in varying colors, to convey internal states and stream-of-consciousness thoughts from multiple characters - is now thoroughly out of fashion, and probably will never come back. But it's a huge shame: that style works really well for American-style adventure comics with some depth to them, and there's no reason American creators need to steal the techniques of French and Japanese creators when they've got a homegrown version that works well with the toolbox most of them are already using.

But that's a counterfactual: Year One, from 1986, is near the high point of this style of comics-writing, in that period when Miller and others (Alan Moore, most obviously, especially with Watchmen and Swamp Thing) used captions extensively and well. Every high point leads to a crash, I suppose.

I've read Year One at least twice before - probably more than that; but two stand out - first, as individual issues of Batman back in 1986, and then twenty years later, which might have been the first time I bought it in book format. (Though I think I also had the earlier trade paperback.)

Year One was one of the pieces of fallout from the massive Crisis on Infinite Worlds project at DC Comics: as the cliché went, worlds lived, worlds died, and nothing was the same again. And, since things weren't the same, DC wanted to tell readers how they were now. So there was a relaunched Wonder Woman by George Perez and a relaunched Superman by John Byrne, and lots of other tinkerings and changes. But the Powers That Be at DC thought Batman was basically right: they didn't want to change him substantially, just underline what they considered important. So instead of a revamp, we got a retelling of the origin - not the first time that happened in comics, but maybe the first really important time, the first time it was this crisp and precise and right, making a model that a thousand other creators would look to over the next decades, as they tried and failed (often miserably) to do the same thing.

It's not fair to blame a book for what comes after it, but Year One led to a lot of crap. A lot of What You Never Knew! A lot of Shocking Secrets of Superhero X! And, these days, any reader with a knowledge of the field needs to be able to ignore all of that to read what's actually in Year One.

It's set in grungy Gotham City, at its most '70s New York. The time is five to ten years before "now" - now being the 1986 when it was published, but also that eternal now of Batman and every other continually-published superhero. The main characters are Bruce Wayne, not yet Batman as the book opens, and James Gordon, a newly-arriving police lieutenant from Chicago. (Every time I read Year One, I'm struck that DC Earth seems to have a lot more mobility of mid-rank police officers around the country than is actually common, and shrug it off once again.)

Their paths cross and re-cross multiple times over the course of this year - the story is captioned with days, beginning in early January and ending in early December - as they both learn how corrupt this city is, and who the players are. Both of them are tough and committed, but they both have a lot to learn, and plenty of powerful people are looking to kill the new vigilante or suborn the new hero cop.

Every character is important. Everything we see, every scene, has a purpose, and adds up to something larger as the book goes along. This was four standard-size comics issues, and Miller was ruthless in his writing to get everything in, often smashing from one day to another on the same page to keep the narrative moving forward at pace.

And, of course, it was all drawn by David Mazzucchelli, at one of his career peaks. (He went on to a very different kind of career than anyone expected from this work, which is why I phrase it like that.) Every panel is dark and grungy and right, perfectly fitting Miller's taut plot, and propelling the story forward to make it all seem inevitable.

This is one of the great Batman comics: even forty years haven't damaged it. I suspect it reads better today than Miller's other contemporary Batman pillar, The Dark Knight Returns, which was always more overwrought and, if I can say it, Miller-esque. I don't usually make sweeping statements, but if you read only one Batman story, this is probably the one you want.

Better Things: There's a Starbucks Where the Starbucks Used to Be

"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 like sarcasm more than most people. Cleverness, wordplay, irony, complicated metaphors - all of that stuff. I do have an English degree, and I got it for a reason.

I've never been as big a John Wesley Harding fan as I think I probably could have been, because he's always been a clever, thoughtful musician and songwriter. Maybe it was that he shut down the JWS career - going back to his real name, Wesley Stace, and shifting to being a novelist for a while - or maybe things just never lined up quite right.

But I did hear this song, from his 2011 record The Sound of His Own Voice, and - as I implied above -loved the tone and style and message: There's a Starbucks Where the Starbucks Used to Be.

There's a Walgreens where there was no wall, just greenery
There's a theme park in a palace in Tennessee
That tree there is a pylon
But some things you can rely on
There's a Starbucks where the Starbucks used to be

I posted this song once before on the blog, calling it the Big Yellow Taxi of the millennial era. It's not a new message: capitalism is rapacious and destructive, and will take over everything everywhere if you let it. But we all need to learn that message for the first time, and new generations are born every day. And Joni didn't foresee the landscape where you can see the next Starbucks from the one you're already in.

There's a chain store where mom and pop once prospered
They're divorced now and they live in penury
Kids grown up and moved away
I hear that happens anyway
There's a Starbucks where they live, I guarantee

I love "I hear that happens anyway." That's what makes this song clever and specific, not just a rant against corporatism. The world rolls on, things happen that we don't want, and we just keep going.

And the good and bad news of keeping going is: there'll be a Starbucks there, whether you want it or not.

Quote of the Week: A Bit of the Old Blarney

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p.63

Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

Reading a second book by the same creator gives you some parallax: you start to realize what's just how she does things and which are the concerns and angles you can expect going forward. The quirkier and more specific the creator, the more interesting the process is.

Cathy Malkasian, I think, is a very particular and quite quirky creator. She's made half a dozen graphic novels over the past decade and a half, but I've only read two of them so far: first Eartha, her 2017 book and I think at least a bit of a breakout hit. And now Percy Gloom, her first book from 2007. (Because, if you're going to read multiple books by someone, it makes sense to try to start as close to the beginning as you can.)

Malkasian's work, I'm coming to think, is deeply constructed, at its core fabulistic, and is not concerned at all with verisimilitude or depicting worlds anything like the ones a reader lives in. Her main characters - at least in the two books I've seen - are childlike figures, tossed about by complex and challenging worlds, taught Lessons by their experiences, and making their worlds better by their inherent good qualities. The work is didactic at its core, but trying to teach tangled, complex morals, not simple ones.

Percy Gloom the book is all about Percy Gloom the character, a small man who seems to be quite old and whose lifetime dream is working for the Safely Now Cautionary Writing Institute, an institution that tests all manner of products to find all of the ways that they may harm people. They are incredibly baroque in this: their unstated goal is clearly to highlight how deadly every last thing in the world is, and to make everyone scared of everything all the time. But they seem to be mostly unsuccessful and unheeded.

Percy has, after what seems to be many years of trying, finally gotten an interview with Safely Now. So he's traveled to the unnamed city where they are headquartered. Since he's a Malkasian character, he both has complicated needs - he can only eat muffins and drink lemon juice, and apparently needs to do so with great regularity or else his guts make unpleasant noises and he is distracted, confused, and weepy - and is borderline incompetent to do anything or function in society. So he meets some well-meaning kids - who are themselves attempting to find the one magical stone that will make the whole city fall down by its removal - gets sidetracked, and then is caught up in an unpleasant scene at the muffin shop with a deeply grumpy, nasty woman named Tammy.

Those are most of the elements of the early book - shrieking Tammy, well-meaning but rambunctious kids, a blustery and imperious Safely Now interviewer, and the deeply sad-sack Percy Gloom cringing and whimpering at the center of it all. Percy does get a position at Safely Now, where he has a differently imperious manager, but his actual work there is only a minor thread in the book.

Because this is a book about Living. Not in the hairy-chested Hemingway style, but in the just-not-dying sense. Percy is immortal, we learn: from his father's side, he can do a particular thing that lets him die instantly, but, otherwise, we think he'll just go on forever. (Well, he almost certainly can be killed, and he's a small, milquetoasty sad-sack of a guy, so doing so would not be difficult, and he's also the kind of fellow who might just trip over his own shoelaces and fall into a corn thresher.)

Malkasian had a long career in animation, and that shows up in her stories, both the weird complications (Percy's diet, the Safely Now offices and activities) and the vague didacticism, as if teaching a lesson is both the most important thing and something that needs to be buried deeply enough that the kiddies won't notice it too much.

This is a book with a lot of events and hugger-mugger; I've only covered lightly the first of the three main sections. A lot more happens to Percy, but it's all the same sort of thing, and all vaguely didactic, as if the book is always urging its readers to pull up their socks, straighten their collars, sit up straight at their school-desks, and be better citizens. It is a very particular tone and style; no one else I've seen makes comics anything like Malkasian.

I like the way she draws - it's very soft and organic, but filled with detail and life. And I can take the didacticism, since it's so weird and strangely muted a lot of the time, as if she absolutely wants to teach a lesson, but it is a lesson so complex and nuanced that she can barely get to it through all the complications. Most of all, Malkasian is a deeply individual cartoonist; I can't think of anyone else who does anything even remotely similar. And that is a wonderful, special thing, something to be cherished.

The Mythmakers by John Hendrix

I don't usually start off her by defining a book's genre - it's too much like the reports I did for the SFBC for sixteen years back in my misspent youth - but sometimes it's the best way to be clear.  So John Hendrix's The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien appears to be a paired biography in comics form of the two most famous Inklings, focused mostly on their friendship.

It is actually a Christian apologetic, only partially in comics form, with some of the laziest vague callbacks to Pascal's Wager I can remember seeing, in which a group of men who study and interpret myth professionally are firm in their belief that this one myth, with massive parallels to multiple other things they know well, must be true, because of course what they were taught as kids is real and what other people believed in other lands is clearly entirely different, for reasons they will huff and bite their pipes and pile up formidable stretches of language to try to obscure.

Frankly, what Hendrix presents as the argument that convinced C.S. Lewis that bland 1930s middle-of-the-road Anglican Christianity is The One True Story of The Universe is so facile and dumb that I'm torn between hoping he's massively simplifying the thought-processes of professors very good at twisting ideas to their own ends or losing the bits of respect I had for Lewis.

I have to admit it: this book set my teeth on edge. In retrospect, the word "Fellowship" rather than "Friendship" in the subtitle should have been an important clue, but I missed it. It's not just that their faith was important to them; the conflict between Catholic Tolkien and atheist-turned-Anglican Lewis would have been an important thread in any book like this one. Hendrix deliberately and specifically made it central: it's the thing he most wanted to focus on. (And I see, looking at his other work, that he's a world-class god-botherer of long standing, so again I could have anticipated this with a bit more diligence.)

To me, the arguments that these men - there are other Inklings involved in Lewis's religious epiphany; I'm eliding their names for simplicity - made to themselves to justify keeping the precise faith of their ancestors are obviously naked justifications and thin excuses. I tend to cynically assume their arguments were entirely for show: they believed because it was emotionally comforting to believe, it kept them as part of the in-group, and they, as far as I can tell, pretty much all kept or went back to exactly what they had believed at about the age of five. I mean, there's no way anyone with two brain cells to rub together could seriously think "well, Balder and Tammuz and Osiris and a dozen other myth-figures have stories really really similar to that of Jesus, but Jesus is the one that God made true in the world, and I know this because...um, reasons!" is a plausible argument. It's the old circular proof of God dressed up in Oxford tweeds and wandering amiably across the countryside.

Anyway, the Christian faith stuff isn't the whole of the book, but it's central, and it distracts from the discussion of their actual work. I also think I tend to be more of a Tolkienian and Hendrix is more of a Lewisian - though, to be honest, Tolkien is a boring figure to write about, since he mostly sat and worked on things over long stretches of time, while Lewis has the religious conversion and more complicated personal life and vastly more publications and public-intellectual stuff to engage with.

This is a thoughtful, well-crafted book full of details and fine luminous art. Hendrix clearly has spent a lot of time engaging with the works of his two protagonists, and with the secondary sources about their lives and work. He has avatars of the two as paired narrators throughout the book, which is a bit transparent and a bit self-indulgent, but mostly works, in that it lets him drag a lot of subtext up and talk about it directly.

If you are a relatively orthodox Christian, the religious material will feel entirely normal and completely relevant; it may even give you some bulwarks for your own faith. If you believe in absolutely anything else in the world - if you are one of the billions for whom this is not the background noise of your life - it will be weird and off-putting and probably entirely unconvincing. I think Hendrix is writing entirely to the choir, so he probably doesn't mind.

Good Comics for Bad People by Zach M. Stafford

I seem to be unsystematically covering collections of all of the "standard" single-panel webcomics of the day - by "standard" I mean the ones that get shared and reposted widely, so random Internet users will say "oh, I recognize that guy's work" even if they don't know the name of the strip or the creator. And I immediately realize that my standard might not be everyone's, since social-media feeds are all algorithmic these days.

Well, it wasn't a conscious project to begin with. But I have read collections of Ryan Harby's untitled comics (Awkward Pause), Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines (Hope It All Works Out!), Ben Zaehringer's Berkeley Mews (How Not to Get into Heaven), Jake Thompson's Jake Likes Onions (The Book of Onions), Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich's War and Peas (Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers), Christopher Grady's Lunarbaboon (The Daily Life of Parenthood), Jane Zei's Pigeon Gazette (Success is 90% Spite), Ryan Pagelow's Buni (Happiness Is a State of Mind), Alex Norris's Webcomic Name (Oh No), and Nathan W. Pyle's Strange Planet, plus multiple books by both Grant Snider and Sarah Andersen. I don't claim that's everything - it might not even be the bulk of it - but it is a big mass of funny stuff commonly shared online, at least.

So what haven't I seen yet? Well, Zach M. Stafford has been making comics under the name Extra Fabulous for a decade or so (the site itself is the modern-style endless scroll, with no dates and no "about me," to give that feeling of The Eternal Now, so my timeline is vague). And what I think was the first collection of that strip - or, at least, a big, fairly comprehensive collection of that strip - was published in 2023 as Good Comics for Bad People.

To center it a bit, Stafford is the one who draws his characters with one eye floating in the air near their faces. Oh, and the one obsessed with butts. Seriously, something like a third of the strips involve, as Cartman famously almost said, something going in or coming out of someone's ass. (OK, there's also a certain amount of oral contact going on as well, which is not necessarily penetrative. But, still: butts. Wall-to-wall butts.)

Stafford works in a four-panel format, I think exclusively - I can't find anything in the book or on his site in any other style. He also lays them out as 2x2, to better fit into a scrolling feed. The book presents one of these strips on each page, over two hundred in total, including a section at the end of two dozen "book exclusive comics."

Stafford's work is bright and cartoony, with bold confident lines and very expressive characters (even with their facial features floating off their heads). The jokes that aren't about butts - seriously, it's butts more often than you think - are a mixture of often dad-joke level wordplay and various "life is hell" bits, about dating and jobs and the other standard cartoon topics. But, really, expect butts.

My Brother's Keeper by Tim Powers

When it comes to the Brontës, there are several camps of followers. I'm sure there are some Anne-ites, but they are the smallest and least-known group. Some, mostly men, mostly contrarians, strongly favor Branwell, and I tend to think do so for the wrong reasons. But the big division is between the Charlottes and the Emilies.

Tim Powers takes up the mantle of the Emilies in this, his most recent novel: My Brother's Keeper, which came out in hardcover in late 2023 and a paperback edition just a few months ago.

The obvious point of comparison is with Powers' 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, in which the Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats, and Byron) were involved with vampires. There was also a sequel, set a generation later, Hide Me Among the Graves, which brought the Rossetti circle into the mix. If Stress was "the Romantic poets owed their creative powers to vampires," then Keeper is "the Brontës owed their creative powers to werewolves."

Werewolves seem to be less of an obvious source of a creative muse than vampires - cool, aristocratic, long-lived, sensual, sophisticated - were, and that's one reason Keeper is not quite as successful as the vampire books. But it's still a Tim Powers novel, so it's an adept weave of actual history and invented fantasy, with his usual Catholic-tinged mythology which insists that everything - and in particular any touch of the ineffable or creative power - has a cost, and those costs run high very quickly.

The other reason, to my mind, Keeper is not as successful as Stress or even Graves is that it feels, like some of his recent novels - I'll mention Alternate Routes - lighter, less grounded, less thought-through than Powers' best books. The Brontës are somewhat caricatured here, with only Emily getting a fully-rounded treatment, and she's seen entirely in a hero-worshipping light. The prose is thinner, the world less detailed, the supernatural elements more bolted-on than in his best work like Declare or Last Call or The Anubis Gates. Keeper is not particularly short, but it feels too short for what it wants to do, like a book that needed to be about fifty percent longer and go through at least two more drafts.

After a short prologue set in 1830, and before a similarly short afterword, the book has three main parts, each covering a few days in 1846-7 (March, September, and April). The main characters are the Brontës themselves - the three then-surviving sisters and Branwell, plus their father, the local Anglican pastor Patrick - a few werewolfy villains, and Alcuin Curzon, part of an ancient Catholic order devoted to eliminating werewolves.

There is a two-person werewolf god, killed and mostly banished a century or so ago. The female half is buried under Patrick's church floor, without her head, under a stone carved with wards. The male half, called Welsh - and it's sadly typical of this novel that one main villain is unnamed and the other one is called "Welsh" and barely speaks to anyone - appears as a boy and should have been drowned in the Irish Sea, but, sadly, Patrick's grandfather saved him (not knowing the werewolf-god deal at that point) and entangling his family with the power of that biune god.

Branwell is Welsh's particular target, as the heir of the male line. As in other Powers books, Welsh plans to take over Branwell's body, rejuvenating himself and getting the energy to revive his other half. Branwell, weak-willed and hugely susceptible to flattery, falls for Welsh's promises of power and influence and creative energy over and over again, and has to be managed by his sisters, especially Emily. He also, in that prologue, did something Welsh showed him in a dream that tied the fates of Emily, Anne, and himself deeply with the werewolves, and much of the novel comes out of that action and the eventual lengths the Brontë women (Emily in particular) need to go to break that bond.

So: three sections. Each time the power of the werewolves rises, Branwell is weak and abets it, and generally Emily and Curzon (she meets him in the first section) manage to beat back the werewolf power in a way they think will be lasting...but, of course, turns out not to be. The characters share notes as they go, with Patrick providing a lot of relevant family history and Curzon explaining most of the supernatural backstory. In the third section, they finally do the final, most destructive thing - as always in Powers, magic has a huge cost - and settle it once and for all.

For a werewolf novel, we don't see wolves very much. The monsters are skeletons or ghosts or apparitions or flocks of birds for most of the book. Welsh is creepy and compelling when he speaks to Branwell, but that only happens a few times. The most important dog-like creature is Emily's constant companion Seeker, firmly on the side of the heroes. There is a scene or two of something transforming into a wolf, but these werewolves are not nearly as werewolfy as a reader expects.

There's also elements of the supernatural background that feel under-baked. The secret society that basically leeches from the power of these two werewolf gods is headquartered in London, and has some sort of leadership we never see. It's basically said flat-out that they would prefer to keep the gods "dead" (but slightly less dead than they currently are), so that they can keep siphoning power for their own purposes, but that they are being pushed by events to try to resurrect the gods to prevent them from really and finally dying. But the powers of the gods are clearly rising during this book, so I don't see why that organization doesn't pull back rather than blowing up this magical apocalypse they don't really want.

Also, how these gods connect to Powers' core Catholic theology is spikier and more confusing than in some of his books. There's a practically-spoken point that the Christian God can't save anyone from these mostly-dead werewolves, which is not a theological point I'd expect from Powers. (Having to die in the right way to reach a state of grace, absolutely. Some sacrifice too high for anyone to want to make, definitely. But not no way for faith in Yahweh to make things right.)

Tim Powers is a great writer, and even his second-rank books are fun and exciting and full of elements to think and argue about - as witness, see above. This is a second-rank book, but it's also a fairly new novel, in his core style, that I almost missed, so I'm happy I realized it existed and read it. If you haven't read Powers, though, and this material sounds interesting, hit Regard first.

Better Things: Intelligentactile 101

"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.

There are songs I can write a lot about, and have deep opinions on. There are other songs I love the sound of, the way they leap and move, and the sound the words make.

This is one of the latter: Jesca Hoop's fun, bouncy Intelligentactile 101, from her 2007 debut record Kismet.

It's a song about being alive, I think: being in flesh, and glorying in all things fleshy. But Hoop is singing it from the point of view of someone coming to that fleshiness as a brand-new thing: maybe an alien, maybe a personality that will become a baby any minute now, maybe something else strange and unusual and surprising.

Can I borrow your skin, blushing to get lucky in
Lucky lucky lucky lucky with a special friend
Well I hear that on planet earth that it's a sin, big sin
Well all the more fun for me to get lucky then

Hoop is one of the great originals, a musician and songwriter who makes soundscapes that sound like nobody else and goes to unexpected lyrical places all of the time. (Tom Waits was an early mentor - she was actually a nanny for his kids for a while - and, though the sounds and styles are very different, the quirkiness and specificity of her work has some things in common with Waits.)

This was the first song of hers I ever heard - I'm not sure if it was officially the first Kismet single, or just a bouncy, energetic, zippy song that the world picked up on. But it's a fine place to start for a great musician, and a weird little ditty all on its own.

Books Read: March 2025

Here's what I read this past month. I list it here mostly as a way to keep track of it for myself; if it helps one other person in the world I suppose that's a bonus. I add links as the posts go live; I'm currently running five to six weeks ahead, so you'll have a bit of a wait.

James Kochalka, Mechaboys (3/1, digital)

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount (3/1)

J.L. Westover, Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings (3/2, digital)

Jack Vance, Servants of the Wankh (3/2, in Planet of Adventure)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage (3/8, digital)

Jaime Hernandez, Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings: 1980-2020 (3/9, digital)

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (3/9, in Waugh Abroad)

Andrea "Casty" Castellan, Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension (3/15, digital)

Mike Mignola, Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (3/16, digital)

Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (3/16)

Julian Hanshaw, Cloud Hotel (3/22, digital)

Megan Nicole Dong, Sharky Malarky: A Sketchshark Collection (3/23, digital)

David Goodis, Down There (3/23, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Brian Michael Bendis and Bill Walko, Fortune & Glory: The Musical (3/28, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (3/28)

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches (3/29, digital)

Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, Space Circus (3/30, digital)

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (3/30, in Complete Novels)

Carl Hiaasen, Paradise Screwed (3/31)

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

Quote of the Week: A Child's First Heraclitus

I was excited to be moving, and I would be starting in an extra-good school, but what about my friends? What about Susie Q and The Raven? We'd been together since first grade. It was promised that they would all come out on my birthday, and here I was seeing them only a couple of weeks since moving, but there was already something different. The everyday stuff was gone. If I had asked them what happened yesterday, or the past week, they would have said nothing, nothing special, but they had all been part of that nothing, they knew exactly what kind of nothing it had been, and I hadn't, and I didn't. All at once I understood that the nothing was going to pile up, and while we would still like each other, we wouldn't know each other the same way.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, p.16

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles by Stan Sakai

This sixth volume is slightly longer than the previous ones, collecting seven issues of the Usagi Yojimbo series (#25 - 31, November 1990 through November 1991), plus a story from the anthology Critters #38. But it's otherwise much like the previous books, down to the mixture of one-off stories (several of the issues collected) and a longer "mythology" multi-parter in which our hero returns to his home village, hoping to settle down and get out of the killing-random-people business. Of course, if he could do that, the series would end, and there are seventeen more volumes of this series, so...you can guess he learns the old Thomas Wolfe lesson.

Usagi Yojimbo: Circles was originally published in the early nineties; the current edition (no indications of what's different; it's probably not much) is from 2014. It has four stories up front - three of them full-length, and one ten-pager, "Yurei" - and the four-part "Circles" to close out the book. It also has an introduction from Jeff Smith, dated 1994, which is a bit of a time capsule itself.

In "Circles," we learn that sex actually does happen in this very tween-friendly world, although it happens, as far as we see, in a chaste embrace while both characters are still fully dressed. Still, baby steps. And I should say that I am too cynical and jaded to be a really good guide to Usagi Yojimbo: I enjoy it and appreciate creator Stan Sakai's story-telling ability while still seeing it both as a very second-hand thing (an American riff on the historical fiction of actual Japanese people about their actual history) and as something deliberately cleaned up and sanded down for that younger audience. (To be blunt, I don't see why an adult would read this rather than going to the seinen classics like Lone Wolf and Cub: it is very much a derivative version of those.)

So Usagi battles a demon (not quite a troll, but the same sort of thing) in "The Bridge," protecting the village he's just wandered into randomly. He gets caught up in a gambler's scheme in "The Duel," unwittingly, and of course kills the gambler's hand-picked fighter, which is sad for that guy's wife and child. (There's also a fair bit of cop-movie-style "I'll just do This One Last Job, honey, and then we'll have enough money to retire from This Dangerous Life forever!" which is as ironic as it always is, in the same ways.) "Yurei" sees Usagi help out a ghost after mostly forgetting what she told him, in the traditional way of causing those who caused her death to die themselves. And "My Lord's Daughter" is a very over-the-top, battle-heavy story, full of monsters, in which Usagi fights through hordes to save the title character from a gigantic, vicious Oni and its minions...and which turns out to be a bedtime story Usagi is telling a bunch of kids, showing Sakai realizes what the whole of Usagi Yojimbo is, and is willing to joke about it.

Then we hit "Circles," which is the story of Usagi going back to the village where he grew up, and hoping to settle there. He first learns that his old teacher, who lives in a remote location not far from the village, is surprisingly still alive - Usagi last saw him falling from a high cliff towards the usual rapids - which is encouraging. But the new village headman, Kenichi, is married to the girl Usagi loved, Mariko, - they had a rivalry about that, among other things - and doesn't like or trust him at all. Meanwhile, the creepy supernatural samurai Jei from the third book is back - from the dead, actually - and is leading a band of bandits to find and kill Usagi on behalf of (he claims) the gods. Jei does have supernatural powers, so, on balance, I'm willing to grant that some gods are on his side

Jei's bandits threaten and harass and raid the village. Kenichi and Usagi, as the two trained samurai, lead the villagers in fighting them off and planning a counter-attack, but Kenichi's young son Jotaro is nabbed by the bandits, raising the stakes. There's a big fight, Usagi kills Jei once again, and Jotaro is saved. But Usagi learns a deep secret, and has to leave the village because of it, never to settle there. (He could, of course, settle somewhere else, and he'll probably think of that eventually - but the point of a wandering-samurai series is for the samurai to wander, so don't expect it any time soon.)

As before, this is well-done samurai action, in a register suitable for middle-grade readers. Sakai is a fine story-telling cartoonist, adept at large groups of random animal-headed people fighting with each other with medieval weaponry, and every bit of Usagi Yojimbo I've seen has been solid adventure-story material, superbly crafted with a fine control of tone to hit both comedic and dramatic moments. I still think the originals Sakai used as models are better and more interesting, but this is both excellent and something you can hand to your tweens without worry.