Quote of the Week: "I'd like to say a few words. Uh, this guy's dead, the end."

"Our Father-" began Father Alerion, pulling down his Navy watch cap.

"Nondenominational," Lucien reminded him. Alerion sent up weary eyes at him.

"Dear God in heaven-"

"Nope." Lucien shook his head intransigently.

"How 'bout 'Good luck'!" shouted Father Alerion.

So "Good luck" it was, and then a long spell as the earth reclaimed Mr. Kelsey, as the soil of the American West fell upon him; and suddenly, for all of them, there was something sad about this because, for example, who was he? The eight men stood in pyramidical silence.

 - Thomas McGuane, Something to Be Desired, p.114

Just Act Normal by John McNamee

Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee's Pie Comics - it's called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears; it's funny; you should read it - I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip's three collections were available in my library's app.

Well, sometime over those three years, a second Pie Comics collection popped up there - yclept Just Act Normal - and I just noticed and read it. In possibly even better news, McNamee has started posting to Tumblr again, with a half-dozen new cartoons this year after a six-year silence.

So the TL;DR for those of you with short attention spans: McNamee is quirky and funny, he's got a great semi-stick-figure style - a little in the Tom Gauld vein, which is high praise - and there's the promise of more stuff from him, too. This book is good; the first book is good. (I can't figure out what the third book's title is, and suspect it may be a mirage - on the other hand, the book I read, which clearly has Just Act Normal on its pages, has Book Learnin' as a header/title in the Hoopla app, so maybe that's the title of his third book?)

McNamee has the kind of art that's instantly readable and is much harder to do than it looks. (The fewer the lines, the tougher it is.) And his jokes are wry, sarcastic, modern, and true - he got his start at The Onion, which gives you a sense of the comic sensibility and tradition he mostly works in.

There are no continuing characters; it's mostly four-panel bits, different every time. You can jump in anywhere. So you might as well.

Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary

Daisy Ashford was real. She was born in 1881, and wrote a cluster of stories in her youth: weird, oddball things with eccentric spelling and an often-shaky grasp on how people actually lived and talked to each other, all bathed in the sunny happiness of a coddled girl of the Victorian age. After she grew up, she rediscovered those stories, and some of them were published around 1919 with the help of J.M. Barrie. There have been periodic revivals and rediscoveries since then; a movie of her most famous "novel," The Young Visiters, was made by the BBC about twenty years ago. (I know I saw it, but it must have been before the life of this blog.)

Daisy Goes to the Moon is about Daisy, but not by Daisy. Matthew Klickstein wrote a short novel in Daisy's style - which seems to me to be the opposite of the point of juvenilia, frankly - and it was published in 2009, full of 1950s imagery and ideas. And now Rick Geary, master of both whimsy and Victoriana, has turned Klickstein's story into a short graphic novel, full of authentically Daisy-esque spelling and moderately appropriate Daisy-esque situations and comments.

(Daisy herself died in 1972 at the age of 90, so she's no more going to complain about what people have done to her memory than Shakespeare is.)

This begins with Daisy about the age of nine, when she wrote her most famous works, and dressed up in the usual Victorian-girl look, down to the big bow in her hair. She's sitting under a tree, Alice-like, when a "rokit" lands nearby. It's piloted by Mr. Zogolbythm (Mr. Z), a tall, skinny man all in black who comes from the moon, to which he proceeds to whisk Daisy for an adventure.

The story continues somewhat episodically, somewhat along the lines of the usual tour-of-the-future style for utopian works. Daisy experiences the high-tech of the moon - including a "so-you-can-hear-and-read-too" device implanted in her brain to allow her to understand moon language - flees Moon Monsters and creatures from other planets, shops for shoes and goes to an automat, and so on.

Soon, though, another character pops up: Mr. Blahdel (Mr. B) an American time-traveler from the 1950s, lugging a TV that's missing an important part. B and Z have some mostly minor disagreements, which lead to further adventures when they dispute over the navigation of a spaceship. We also descend into metafiction when Daisy finds a book written by her sister Angie, which retells the first half of the story badly - the bratty Angie has followed Daisy (somehow; this isn't clear) to the Moon.

And, of course, in the end Daisy gets back home safe and sound, and declares that to the best place to be.

Geary's art is as detailed and energetic as always; quirkiness and whimsy typically brings out some of his best work, and that's the case here. I might think that was an odd project, but it's done as authentically and honestly as it could be, and this is a fun, amusing story.

Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension by Andrea "Casty" Castellan

If you read comics at all, you probably know there's a whole mythology around Donald Duck and his Uncle Scrooge - maybe even if you don't read comics, but are old enough to have seen DuckTales and the related TV shows. You need to be somewhat deeper into either Eurocomics, history, or Disney fandom to know there's a similarly-sized mythology around Mickey Mouse himself, starting with the work of the American cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson in the 1930s and expanded a lot since then mostly by the European licensors of Disney characters for their own ongoing comics.

For example, there's an Italian comics publication - started in 1932; weekly since 1960 - called Topolino, featuring Mickey. Now, I'm sure there have been plenty of reprints and re-runs over the course of the last nearly hundred years - Disney is a smart enough organization to know that the kid audience completely regenerates itself once or twice a decade - but that's still at least tens of thousands of pages of comics.

Fantagraphics has been translating and republishing that work for the past couple of decades, building on the work of earlier publishers in first publicizing and rediscovering Gottfredson and the "Good Duck artist" Carl Barks starting in the 1970s. The Fanta series, which explicitly aims to reprint great EuroDisney comics, is called "Disney Masters," and it looks like they've had twenty-three volumes so far, most of them entirely separate stories by different creators from different nations, and spanning both the Mickey and Donald universes (which are not always entirely separate, but usually are at least distinct).

I'm no expert in this. I read piles of Duck comics as a kid in the 1970s at my grandparents' house in Utica, New York, and saw a bunch of DuckTales in college, but Mickey's mostly been the corporate icon to me, not an actual character in adventure stories. But I intermittently want to check out new frontiers of the comics world, so I checked out Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension, which collects three multi-part stories from the acclaimed Italian creator Andrea "Casty" Castellan, originally published in Topolino a little over a decade ago and translated by an unnamed person for this 2022 US collection.

I don't know if modern EuroDisney comics are entirely obsessed with their history and continuity, as US superhero comics are, or if it's just that the famous, best-loved stories are the ones that bring back famous characters and do new things with them (a la Batman: Hush, to give a US equivalent). But the three stories here are all in that mode: every big character is someone I learn was created decades ago by someone else, and the joy lies in seeing them brought back out of the toybox to play again.

The title story leads off, with Dr. Einmug (the usual genius scientist, created by Gottfredson) in the background and his creation Atomo Bleep-Bleep (a humanoid enlarged atom, so the narrative says) coming back to join Mickey in investigating the mysterious masked Mr. Benevolence, who has been giving away piles of gold bars to make various problems in Mouseton better. Mickey is suspicious, of course, and it does turn out there is a fiendish plot, with missing scientists, a parallel dimension, and a world-dominating plot by Pegleg Pete to be unraveled and foiled.

In the middle is "Uncle $crooge in The Terrible, Triple-Dimensional Beagle Boy," which is one of the traditional "Gyro Gearloose invents A Thing, Scrooge tries to make a fortune on it, and then The Bad Guys take advantage" plots. This time, Gyro makes a super-duper 3D printer, along with an extensive network of pipes to feed it, and Scrooge sells it to all of Duckburg for all of their needs. The reader thinks there will be some interesting satire of capitalism, as everyone in Duckburg stops buying everything but "gyro-gel" for their printers, but that's not the way the story goes. Instead, to get this scheme approved, Scrooge has to promise to make a gigantic statue of the Mayor, and the Beagle Boys hijack the 3D printing of that statue, turn it into a giant Beagle robot, and rob Scrooge's money bin. But Scrooge and Gyro do use the same invention to beat the Beagles in the end.

Last is "Mickey Mouse and the World to Come," which oddly seems like someone saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (and maybe a few other things like The Iron Giant) and decided that should be a Mickey Mouse story. There are four giant robots, another old super-science character as a Mickey sidekick (Eega Beeva), the standard vaguely-European small country ruled by a king who has been duped by the villains, and a world-dominating plan from another old villain, The Rhyming Man. Minnie is a character, but mostly just gets to be kidnapped and be vaguely plucky; she doesn't save anyone, even herself. Our heroes do of course win out in the end against the king's evil nephew and the (supposedly sinister, but I found deeply silly) Rhyming Man.

These are fun adventure stories pitched at kid level. Castellan does a solid job in this style, keeping the action moving and getting in some amusing dialogue. It's fairly light and always kid-appropriate, plus, of course, Disney-sanitized, but it's entirely copacetic for a harmless collection of kid comics stories.

Something to Be Desired by Thomas McGuane

So it's clear where I'm coming from, I first need to explain how much of an expert I am in Thomas McGuane's life and career.

I am nothing of an expert in McGuane's career or life. In fact, reading this book, and having a vague sense his 1985 he-man-isms were the product of an older man at the time, I had a vague question in my head - nothing as well-formed as a theory - that the thinness and sketchiness of Something to Be Desired was due to McGuane being old or even dying during the writing of it, so it could be forgiven or even celebrated as a triumph of  his writing power.

But I checked afterward. McGuane was born in 1939. This was his fifth novel. He's written four more since then, and is still alive today. So I have to revise my theory, and say that this is just how he wanted to write this story: to have a main character who falls backwards into everything, but usually success; to have women who are cyphers at best and sex-rewards or markers for time passing most often; and to have a plot that meanders vaguely and randomly and mostly functions to allow McGuane to toss in his various post-Hemingway musings and attempted Deep Thoughts.

I've only read one McGuane novel before - The Bushwacked Piano - and so any general conclusions I might draw will be badly-informed and slapdash. But both of those novels focus on one guy, and my description of Piano's hero as a "magnificent asshole" applies almost as well to Something's Lucien Taylor as well.

Like Piano, Something begins with an Important Moment in its hero's youth, so we readers are clear that he's messed up because of his relationship with His Daddy. Again, I can't say if McGuane does this consistently throughout his career, but both of these novels are in the the hyper-masculine mid-century style, featuring men who are endlessly self-destructive in ways that never quite damage them in any serious way, endlessly attractive to only the women that readers of these books will find compelling and sexy, and endlessly lucky as the author presses his greasy thumb on the scales to make sure every last aspect of their lives works out for the best in the end, after the requisite amount of hell-raisin' and drinkin' and whorin', of course.

Something mostly takes place over about a year - it's vague in this, as it is in so many things - in Lucien's life. You see, Lucien had Two Great Loves of His Life in college: Emily, who was wild and with whom he would have been two twinned artists' spirits, and Suzanne, who was stable and solid and who he eventually married after Emily dumped him for a doctor.

That was some number of years in the past - let's say ten, since Lucien and Suzanne have a son, James, whose age is never clear in any way whatsoever. (He could be a typical five, or a dreamy ten. McGuane is only interested in the sons of his heroes as signposts to their virility and markers of his line-of-men theories.) Lucien has been working around Latin American for USIA.

But Emily has just murdered her husband, for reasons the novel never quite gets into but assures us are he-was-abusive and entirely justifiable, and, besides, it means she's available for Lucien again, which is the real point. So Lucien immediately abandons his non-working wife and young son in the foreign country his job dragged them to with one of the most obnoxiously stereotypical "I need to figure myself out" speeches in literature, and flies back to his beloved Montana to circle Emily and try to get into her pants and/or save her from the consequences of her actions.

Lucien puts up the money for Emily's bail - where a mid-level foreign-service functionary has that kind of money is never clear; Lucien in general does not seem to be leading the life he actually has in this novel, but something closer to the life of rich, famous writer Thomas McGuane, fawned on by all and serially married - and her ranch is put up as security for his money. This doesn't seem to align to how bail actually works, but, anyway, Emily runs off with another guy to avoid trial and Lucien loses his money but gets the ranch, which seems to be more valuable.

Lucien mopes around, off-handedly sleeping with all of the female barflies of the fictional town of Deadrock - one of them gets a name and almost a personality; she is, of course, crazy. He then gets a bank loan, in a scene that even McGuane doesn't seem to want anyone to believe, and converts a hot spring on the ranch into a massively successful and lucrative spa. Lucien finds running the spa, and generally being a functional, useful adult, to be unpleasant, but he does it, perhaps in McGuane's attempt to show his growth as a person.

He hectors Suzanne, first at long distance - though she seems to have returned to Montana at some point as well - and then in person, when he installs her in a cabin on the spa's land, to return to him, because he's learned his lesson now that he's rich and the crazy women ran away from him.

Suzanne, I'm sorry to say, does somewhat reconcile with Lucien, or at least seems to be heading that way late in this short novel. But, of course, we learn that Emily has killed the guy she ran away with as well - crazy bitches gonna be crazy, right? - and she comes back...for no good reason from her point of view, and really only for McGuane's narrative purposes.

At this point, there's maybe a dozen pages left in the novel: this is a short book and McGuane does not go into detail of anything ever other than Lucien's random he-man thoughts about random bullshit. It has an ending that I seriously hope McGuane didn't intend to be reminiscent of Casablanca - Lucien sticks Emily on a plane with a speech - and then he watches Suzanne drive off with James for a roadtrip the she promises she will return from. And...scene!

I think McGuane is a writer for men of his generation, and maybe somewhat for the generation afterward (mine), but only for the ones already steeped in all of the outdoorsy, he-man women-haters club mindset. His work is often described as funny, and he does have a wit and energy to his writing, but it's in the service of these horrible assholes, and I have a hard time seeing the appeal. I would very much not recommend McGuane to women readers, or to any men readers who have actually liked and understood women at any point in their lives.

Better Things: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry

"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.

As I come to type here, I'm surprised at myself: I really didn't have Nick Cave in that first-year list? That's the Procrustean splendor of list-making, I suppose - not everything can fit. Things that seem entirely central get edged out.

Better Things is a way of exploring those centers and edges, so, now, I can come back to this compelling, stark, demanding song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry.

I've got eight songs by Cave as five-star in my library, so I suppose this could have been the moody clang of Red Right Hand or the more straightforward love of Straight to You or the neo-apocalyptic story of (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World. Or the different levels of moodiness of The Ship Song and The Weeping Song.

But I started to listen to Cave and his band in the early Aughts, when I was chasing after two young sons. I don't think Henry is exactly, or entirely, about a real father and a real son - it's a nightmare vision of a world gone wrong, a travelogue of Hell - but the refrain keeps coming back to that boy:

Well, the road is long
And the road is hard
And many fall by the side
But Papa won't leave you, Henry
So there ain't no need to cry

And both of those things struck me then, and have stuck with me now: the nightmare landscape, and the protective impulse of a father for his son. It's a dark vision, full of surprises and horrors, almost darker than the mind can imagine.

And the tears that we will weep today
Will all be washed away
By the tears that we will weep again tomorrow

The verses are horrors; the refrain is that unsettling reassurance to the son, and the insistence that the singer is, and will keep, walking down that road. The road is a metaphor of course. It's all a metaphor - except the bits that are absolutely true reportage from Cave's own life. That's the tension than makes it: you can tell this isn't just a list of images, a sequence of ideas, some fancy words for a song.

Quote of the Week: A Genuine Hollywood Indian

He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. His collar had the snug fit of a horse-collar and was of about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare and magnificent throat, above the dirty collar, he wore a wide piece of black ribbon, like an old woman trying to freshen up her neck.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.870 in Stories and Early Novels

WuMo: Something Is Wrong by Wulff & Morgenthaler

The WuMo panel runs in my paper, so I've been reading it for a while. It's weird in multiple ways, which I enjoy, but I've also had a sense that there's some story behind it that I didn't know.

I might have picked up this book to have an excuse to do a little goggling and figure out that story, as my fingers type here.

WuMo: Something Is Wrong is a 2015 collection of the strip - I say "strip," but it's always a single panel, laid out in the wide horizontal format of an American daily, with one joke and no continuing characters - with a big note on the cover to say that it collects the best strips. Even assuming that the strip has gotten better in the past decade, since we always hope things get better over time, that looked like a good place to start.

OK, let me start with my assumption: I think "Wulff" and "Morgenthaler" are real people, probably both men, and that they're not American. My guess is that they're European, something vaguely Germanic. I have no idea how a panel by a couple of Europeans would have gotten into American syndication a decade or two ago, but let's see if I can find out.

According to Wikipedia, which I always believe when it says I'm correct, I am basically correct. Mikael Wulff, a comedian, writes the strip, and Anders Morgenthaler, a cartoonist and animator, draws it. [1] They're Danish, and it started in Denmark in 2001, getting syndicated in the US in 2013. It was originally titled Wulfmorgenthaler (apparently without the internal capital, a good idea to keep them from looking like a law firm), but switched to the shorter version about a year before the American syndication deal (i.e.: mid-2012, a long time ago).

It's a gag-a-day strip, in that vague post-Far Side territory where a strip has a sensibility and a style and a tone without having continuing characters or a sitcom-style set-up. WuMo panels take place just about anywhere, featuring animals and people and fantasy creatures, all drawn a bit lumpy and rumpled. The tone is more goofy than iconoclastic - perhaps why it has found a home in American newspapers - and often drops into "the secrets of modern life" mode. It reads smoothly, but I've always thought the phrasing is subtly off: I've always thought it was translated from some other language, so I was happy to find out that was Danish.

(I also see that the panel might be somewhat different in Europe: there's a major, very popular character - also appearing on related TV shows! - called Dolph the Fascist Hippo who I don't think has ever showed up on my shores. And that's a shame: if there had been a big, brightly-colored idiot on newspaper pages every day starting in 2012, saying self-evidently stupid fascist things that people actually laughed at, it might have stolen a market niche from a different brightly-colored fascist idiot who rose to his current prominence slightly later.)

It's funny, and it's off-kilter, and its sensibility is subtly different from anything else on American comics pages today - my working assumption is that's because Wulf and Morgenthaler are not American. The drawing is funny, too: that's nice to see.

I don't think there are a lot of WuMo books in English. (On Amazon right now, I'm finding a handful of what look like pre-name-change Danish collections, and some calendars from the late Teens, and only this book.) So, if you want to try the strip, this is your best package when reading in English.

Or, as always with an ongoing strip, you can just go to the page where the strip lives - it's on GoComics; I linked it up top - and read today's strip. Then come back tomorrow, rinse and repeat.

I probably don't need to explain that to you people, do I? I hope not.

[1] Wikipedia does not actually say this explicitly. It credits the strip to both of them, and says what else they do: Wulf makes jokes, Morgenthaler draws and animates. It's possible they both write gags for the strip, or write gags together. It's also just barely possible that Wulf is involved in the art in some way. But I'm sticking to the most boring possible explanation.

Your Flying Car Awaits by Paul Milo

I don't know if it's me in particular, or a general ennui that strikes the middle-aged in general, but my reading life has never really recovered from the one-two punch (more than a decade ago) of first losing my editorial job and then the flood that destroyed most of the books I owned. I still keep a list of books I want to read, and even add to it, now and then, but it's full of stuff from twenty years ago. I have what looks like a huge to-be-read backlog - most of three big bookcases - but it feels like that's mostly stuff that's been there since the post-flood restocking or  the random things that survived. And the "new" things I add - to the shelves, to the list, to my eyeballs by reading them - seem to mostly be old, either actually so (by decades, in many cases) or in style and tone and audience.

What I'm saying is: I feel like I used to be smart and connected and in charge. Nowadays, I've got a bunch of random oddball things that I poke through, and I read some of them, as I get farther and farther away from any literary or genre mainstream, or even coherent set of interests. I don't know if that's something I even could fix, but it comes to mind in particular when I find myself reading one of the most random books on my shelves.

Your Flying Car Awaits is definitely one of those. It's a 2009 non-fiction book by Paul Milo, which I got in 2014 for no particular reason. Working on this post, I learn that Milo is somewhat local to me: he's been a reporter in New Jersey for a couple of decades, so I've possibly read his by-lines more than I thought. (I first had an inkling when he said he researched much of this book at Montclair State University, whose train station I used to commute into NYC for a few years.)

Milo assembled a breezy but informative look at a whole lot of things that looked plausible but didn't actually happen. From cloning to flying cars to moon colonies to power "too cheap to meter" to domed cities, Milo runs through a few dozen interesting ideas in nine themed chapters, with short potted histories about things that seemed reasonable up until the point where something stopped them from happening.

This is a particularly good book for SF writers and readers, especially those around my age. We remember a lot of these predictions, and many SF people still passionately believe that fusion power or the great asteroid mining land-rush or L-5 colonies are right around the corner if only we believe hard enough. But Milo explains how contingent so many things are - some of the ideas here were impossible, and that became clear after further study, but most of them were entirely possible, and just didn't happen for various reasons. It just wasn't steam-engine time.

Some of the most intriguing sections are on things that have started to happen, or happen in different ways, since Milo wrote the book. He has a section on the videophone, which didn't happen as expected in the late 20th century, but Facetime and similar technologies are definitely used now and video conferences are a big thing in business. And he gets into self-driving cars, which still don't quite exist, but that area has seen a lot of activity and claims over the last two decades. So his message might not be as purely "this didn't happen" as a reader might think - it's closer to "at this point in time, it hasn't worked yet."

So Your Flying Car isn't directly dated in quite the way I expected. It's retrospective to begin with,. and mostly looking at mid-20th century ideas, so the landscape was settled - most of the time, for most of the things he writes about - at the time. It likely will continue dating, bit by bit, especially if we do get undersea cities or mainstream bug- or algae-based protein sources. For now, though, it's an entertaining survey of the ideas of a generation or so ago, and what happened to them on the way from big concept to failed idea.

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley

The back is overstuffed; the beginning is as laconic as the series gets. Bryan Lee O'Malley has a lot to get done in the last book of the Scott Pilgrim series, but he starts in a moment of stasis - a moment that takes up roughly half the book.

In the previous book, Vs. the Universe, Scott sort-of cheated on his girlfriend Ramona Flowers - or, more specifically, drew her attention to the fact that their relationship started with her as the other woman while he was supposedly dating "17-year-old Knives Chau." They had a fight - as much of a fight as the conflict-averse Scott could ever participate in, at least - and she ran off to parts unknown.

In Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, it's a few months later, or maybe those months pass as the book goes on. Time is passing, in that way that seems confusing and unusual to people in their mid-twenties, dropped into a world much less structured than they were used to for so long and realizing they have to make their own lives themselves, out of whatever materials they have at hand. Scott, of course, is not good at this, and is mostly lying on a couch in the apartment his parents got him, playing video games and talking distractedly to whatever friends come to try to get him back out into the world.

The world has moved on. Knives has turned eighteen [1]; Young Neil is no longer young; we don't learn if Sex Bob-Om's record came out, or if anyone cared; Kim has rusticated herself at her parents' place back up north; Scott does something similar in the middle of the book.

And the new big name in Toronto is Gideon Graves, some kind of promoter whose hot new club is opening soon. He's also Ramona's last evil ex - and, of course, the most evil ex, the ringleader who gathered the others in the first place.

Scott is sure that Ramona is missing because Gideon has kidnapped her, and is holding her hostage - as I like to think of it, in this or some other castle. It's a reasonable assumption, and isn't entirely wrong - Gideon has infiltrated himself deeply into Ramona's head, in a very literal way - but he is not physically holding her.

Scott is painfully immature and oblivious; the whole series is about how he sort-of grows up a bit, and becomes slightly less of a clueless goofball. For me, this line from Envy Adams sums up the Scott early in the book:

So: Scott gets whacked with a whole bunch of cluesticks for a long time, and some of it finally starts to take. He goes to the big opening of Gideon's fancy club, and the inevitable final boss fight ensues.

It does not initially go as you might expect, unless you are both tracking to the Hero's Journey and remembering a minor moment from the third book. But Scott finds Ramona again, and they reconcile as best they can, as two conflict-avoidant, messy, immature people. And then they both fight Gideon, on a couple of planes of realty, as a whole lot of backstory and explanation is shouted among them at high volume. (This is silly and a bit much but entirely appropriate.) And then they walk off together into the sunset...more or less.

It's a good ending, and it doesn't promise too much. Scott is still a forgetful goofball, starting another currently-horrible band. And he and Ramona will have relationship stuff they can't fix by punching evil exes in the future - but, we think, they're in a better place, and can maybe talk about things, at least somewhat, now. We'll take that as a win: they're still, as I said when I started this re-read, so, so very young still.

And, looking back at the whole series, the arc is still strong and still works well, even twenty years later. The style and video-game tropes are quirky and specific in ways that kept Scott Pilgrim from being obviously dated, at least so far. O'Malley's art is occasionally goofy - I thought that at the time; I thought it again on this re-read - with eyeballs blowing up to nearly full-panel size disconcertingly. But that's the look of this project; it's part of the whole deal. Last, added to the deal for this revised edition are Nathan Fairbairn's colors - and the best thing I can say about them is that I forgot that this was originally black and white while reading it. (And I say this as a GenX '80s-comics black-and-white snob.) The color works entirely, and looks like it always was and should have been there.

[1] Signposted by a caption, which apparently Scott can read. As always, the metafictional elements are rich and deeply integrated - this is a world that operates on video-game logic much of the time, and everyone knows that.

William of Newbury by Michael Avon Oeming

The publisher calls this book "Hellboy meets Redwall," which hits the major touchpoints, as far as that goes. Yes, fighting supernatural monsters. Yes, medieval times. Yes, anthropomorphic characters. But it's much more authentically medieval than a reader would expect, in quirky and unusual ways, much more inspired and growing out of actual research than it is a story stuck into that world for vague coolness reasons.

First and most important is that William of Newburgh - "Newbury" is a variation creator Michael Avon Oeming decided to use here - is an actual 12th century monk, and this collection of ghost-fighting stories about a raccoon and his rabbit brother is actually based on the writings of the real person.

Now, Oeming clearly fictionalized some things to turn the historical record The History of English Affairs - an actual book written by the real William covering the period known as The Anarchy when King Stephen and Empress Matilda battled for control of the country (and Normandy) after the unexpected death of Henry I and his heir - into William of Newbury, the collection of the first four comic-book issues of the anthropomorphic William's adventures. But the bones of the story seem to be much closer to the original than I would have expected.

(For one change, I'm pretty sure the historical human William didn't have a semi-reformed thief sidekick, Winnie, whom he was teaching to read.)

The four issues tell a continuous story, but each issue is basically one event - each works as an individual issue or story. There's an encounter with the supernatural each time, plus complications and larger issues.

The supernatural elements are explicitly based in the medieval worldview. The dead do rise, because they are tormented by devils of Satan. The land of faerie exists, and is made up of fiends who want to torment and tempt Christians. 

William, despite the Hellboy comparison and Oeming's moody Mignola-esque art, is not going to punch any of these creatures. He is going to talk at them, to call on the angels and saints, to use the power of God to force the devils and faeries to leave and the dead to lie still. He has a staff with a cross on it, which he brandishes at the arisen dead - who are nasty and violent and murderous and tossing hellfire at times, too - but what will stop them is not anything violent, but the power of God, possibly channeled or empowered by William's faith.

(It does work consistently, as we see. Punching would not. This is not a world in which punching evil has any effect.)

The other major theological point, which is an important undertone throughout and becomes central in the fourth issue, is that William and his brother Edward were almost kidnapped by the faeries as children, and that means their souls were stolen and they are doomed to oblivion after death. (Not even hell, as they understand it: their souls are gone, so they will just die.) There's a hint at the end that this may not be entirely true, and it may be theologically suspect as well - can an immortal soul be stolen? do these pagan spirits have the power to destroy something made by God? - but that, as they say, is probably for the next volume of William of Newbury stories.

William himself is a fascinating, quirky character: devout, scholarly but muscular in his faith, devoted to doing good as he sees it and using his abilities to help those around him. But also scattered and often cheated in everyday things, not necessarily that good at the rough-and-tumble of life - which is understandable for a monk. I think there will be more of these stories, and I hope so: I don't know how much more of William's writings Oeming still has to work from, but there's enough material here for at least another couple of stories of this length.

Better Things: What Do All The People Know

"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.

We all have one-hit wonders that we love. The one song that came out of nowhere, by a band we never heard of before or since, but is just perfect in its way.

(The band itself almost always hates that idea - they were around before and after, and spent long hours getting to the point of that one great song. But attention is fickle and most bands get at best one shot.)

One of mine is the Monroes, and the song is 1982's What Do All The People Know.

Could you be the one I'm thinkin' of?
Could you be the girl I really love?
All the people tell me so
But what do all the people know?

It's a bit New Wave-y in its sound and bounce - maybe a bit more of its time forty years later than we thought it was then.

I love the way it can be both straightforward and subtle, all framed as this one conversation the speaker is having with his girlfriend. Everything should be great, but...somehow, for reasons he doesn't quite say, it must not be. It's one of the great songs of that gap, between what Is and what Should Be.

And the title is just perfect, almost a Zen koan, the ideal response to something we've all heard a million times - maybe it wasn't the first time anyone said it, but it's the iconic version.

Quote of the Week: One of that Sort

He was young, blond, tall, broad, sunburned, and dressy, with the good-looking unintelligent face of one who would know everything about polo, or shooting, or flying, or something of that sort - maybe even two things of that sort - but not much about anything else.

 - Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse, p.201 in Complete Novels

Paradise Screwed by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen wrote a column for the Miami Herald for about thirty-five years, from 1985 through 2021. It was the old-school style op-ed, mostly focused locally and mostly about outrageous things - stupid politicians and other prominent folks taking bribes and wasting public funds and backing boondoggles and making big giveaways to their friends and building badly-conceived construction projects and just generally being corrupt, shameless, money-grabbing, and pandering.

He had a lot of material: he did work in Florida, after all.

There were three books of the column: Kick Ass came out in 1999, and I read that at some point before the birth of this blog. Dance of the Reptiles cane out in 2014, and I covered it here. In between was 2001's Paradise Screwed, which covered mostly the same stretch of years as Kick Ass (1985 through 2000), and which I have been ostensibly reading almost since then. (In my post on Dance of the Reptiles, I noted I'd been reading Paradise for a dozen years at that point.) I had it next to a chair where I sometimes sat and read, in a stack with other books, many of which also had bookmarks in them, but it mostly sat quietly there for what I have to admit turned into two-plus decades.

I finally started again from the beginning, putting Paradise Screwed in the smallest room of the house, and read it through, one column at a time, over the past few months.

It's a time capsule at this point: oh, sure, the general outlines are still very familiar, because pandering and rent-seeking and bloviating are eternal - but the specifics are very '80s and '90s, back in the era when Florida thought it might be able to control development and possibly not destroy the habitats of every last kind of animal that lived there. Hiaasen has the standard tone and stance of the local columnist: vaguely fiscally conservative, not otherwise particularly partisan so he can attack all sides equally as required by the facts of the day, but generally only writing about things that are mistakes, scams, frauds, corrupt bargains, or otherwise expected to be shocking to the sensibility of his mass-market newspaper-reading audience.

It's divided into twenty-two thematic chapters, with allusive titles - things like "The Bearded One" for stories related to Cuban exiles, for example - in each of which the columns run chronologically, from 1985 through 2000, over and over. The columns themselves were selected and arranged by Diane Stevenson - she did the same for all three Hiaasen column collections - who was a teacher of writing at the University of Florida. (For those hoping for one last collection to cover the end of his column career: she died in 2016, so I suspect there will not be a fourth book, even though there's at least enough material.)

It's a book that would have been better closer to the time it was published; newspaper material ages quickly by design. And it's better in small doses: again, that's inherent to the column format, and to the decision to organize this one thematically. (Reading a half-dozen pieces about Elian Gonzalez in a row, for example, is pretty pointless thirty years later.) Luckily, I did read it one piece at a time, so I could do that part, at least.

I haven't read one of Hiaasen's novels in ages - I keep thinking I will, but it hasn't happened. So I can't compare this to his better-known work. I think it's got roughly the same tone and something of the same stance, and Hiaasen was always deeply concerned with ecological issues. Though, in the columns here, it mostly comes up because he wants to keep places wild so he can go with rod and gun to kill various things there, which isn't what many of us think of as the core ecological issue.

Politics has gotten even nastier and stupider and more punitive since then - in Florida as nationally, though for once maybe not more in Florida than nationally - so this is somewhat of a nostalgia trip, for the days when politicians were only corrupt and stupid, and not actively malevolent and anti-democratic on top of that.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

In some other world, this was the second of a long series of novels about The Continental Op, bringing Dashiell Hammett a steady income and some manner of fame and a continuing career. In our world, this is the last time we see the Op - Hammett wrote three more novels, more and more different from each other, then moved into screenwriting, and then seemed to give up the idea of working entirely for the last twenty-five years of his life.

But when we read The Dain Curse, we might as well be back in 1929, with Hammett and his main character coming off Red Harvest the year before, that unnamed private detective for the Continental outfit back in San Francisco and caught up in a few related cases over the course of a few months.

And it really is "a few related cases." Dain presents itself as a novel, but it's really three closely-linked novellas in a trenchcoat, or maybe a three-part serial. Each time, the Op solves the particular situation - and several people end up being murdered - but he doesn't untangle it all finally until the end.

The Op is first sent in to investigate the theft of industrial diamonds from the home laboratory of a Dr. Leggett. It turns out Leggett has a dark secret past: his current wife is the sister of his first wife, and there's a supposed curse on that family, the Dains. By the end of the first section, Leggett's daughter, Gabrielle, is the focus of the curse and one of the few main characters left alive.

In the second section, Gabrielle, who believes in the curse, has been caught up in a creepy religious cult headquartered in a renovated apartment building - with all manner of unexpected gadgets to cause various weird effects. The Op, this time hired by her guardian, comes in to keep an eye on her and ends up smashing the rotten cult when, once again, murder crops up.

Then we get to the back half of the book, the longest third section, where the Op is called in by Gabrielle's new husband to come to the usual corrupt small town, where they are honeymooning, and of course he finds one body immediately on arriving. Gabrielle is missing - possibly kidnapped, possibly fled as a murderer; different local officials have different theories - and the Op needs to find her and finally work out the details of this supposed "curse" before he gets himself killed, possibly by an amateur explosive device.

It does all come together in the end, and the Op has a nearly Agatha Christie-style long speech at the end explaining everything that happened, why it happened, and how this particular fiend manipulated it all. It's a fine bit of plotting, and does tie up the whole book in a bow, but it falls on the too-neat site of the great mystery divide, particularly when hardboiled books are typically much more comfortable with the messy and contingent and confused.

So Dain is slightly disappointing, coming after Harvest - it's less stark, less focused, more of a general mystery entertainment. And, as far as I can tell, all of those things made it much more successful at the time and put Hammett's career on an upward path - which his next novel strongly solidified. (That was The Maltese Falcon, if anyone doesn't know.)

Note: I read this is the Library of America omnibus edition of Hammett's Complete Novels; they also have a companion volume with all of the stories. As I said with Harvest, if you think you might want to read more than one Hammett book, that's a good package to get.

Space Circus by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier

This is not Groo. But it is Groo-adjacent, I suppose: more work by the same people, with something of the same tone and sense of humor, aimed at a mostly young audience and telling a...let me say dependable story for them.

The book of Space Circus only came out at the end of the last year, but it collects a four-issue series from 2000 (for the first time, as far as I can tell). I have no idea why it took that long; maybe they just forgot about it for a while.

The story is written by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier - I suspect it's something like their Groo working relationship, where Aragones could have done all of it, but Evanier polishes up the writing to make it all better throughout - and drawn by Aragones. Lettering is by Stan Sakai and colors by Tom Luth.

It's a story about running away to join the circus, basically - though this kid, Todd Cooper, does it accidentally and it's, as you might guess from the title, not an ordinary circus. It is in fact a galaxy-traveling space circus, the Doodah Brothers’ Astral Traveling Entertainment and Fun Brigade, which landed unexpectedly on Earth to make repairs after a run-in with pirates.

The pirate leader hates circuses, for the usual trauma-in-childhood-from-not-getting-to-go-to-the-circus reasons, and has a fiendish plan to take over the circus and use it to plunder the fat starships and worlds inside the otherwise impregnable Shield that protects Secured Space. All legitimate starships have a whoositz that lets them pass instantly through the Shield, which pirate ships can never, ever obtain...but pirates can steal entire other ships, which seems to slightly defeat the impregnability.

Anyway, pirates chase mostly oblivious circus. Circus picks up an Earth kid, who means well and is enthusiastic about helping out but whose lack of space knowledge leads him to make a series of unfortunate, large, and humorous blunders. Pirates manage to trick the circus to a planet where they can steal the circus ship, leaving the circus behind and using their vessel to plunder civilized worlds as if they were the circus.

And, of course, the kid is instrumental in the plan to use the pirate ship to chase the pirates, get back the circus ship, and bring the miscreants to justice. All that, and he's home in time for dinner, with his meatloaf not even having gotten cold, because of handwaved time dilation. And he has, of course, Learned a Lesson About Life - not to spend so much time on videogames, actually, and I am not joking here - as required by the form.

There are other characters, mostly of the goofy variety: that pirate captain, his affection-starved henchmen, the two-headed circus owner, various good-hearted circus folks. They all do pretty much exactly what you would expect of them: this is a fairly short story, so it only has time to hit the high points in its plot, and that plot will not be a surprise to anyone this side of third grade.

Aragones, as always, has a detailed, cartoony, energetic style, crammed with details and interest, which breaks out regularly into spectacular two-page spreads. He's not the kind of artist that the comics world thinks of as a superstar, but he can draw pretty much anything - as long as it's in his style - and do it well. I tend to think he spends his efforts on stories that are...again, let me say something like reliable or familiar here, but it's made for a good long successful career for him, and this is a pleasant, fun-looking book that can entertain pretty much any person able to read the words.

An Embarrassment of Witches by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

This is not a sequel to Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell. It is, though, the only other project I know of by the team behind that webcomic, and it's set in a world very similar to Darwin Carmichael's. It may even be the same world, though not necessarily so.

Darwin Carmichael ran from 2009 through 2013 and then was collected into a book. Sophie Goldstein drew about 90% of it and co-wrote it all, as far as I can tell, and Jenn Jordan drew a few bits and did the other half of the writing.

An Embarrassment of Witches was a 2020 original graphic novel. This time out, it looks like Goldstein (the professional comics-maker and teacher) did all of the art, but the book is still vague about their roles, so I continue to assume they write it together, in whatever way. (Probably not Marvel Method. My guess would be some variety of co-plotting, with Goldstein maybe doing page breakdowns and then coming back together for dialogue.)

Darwin was set in a modern NYC where everything in myth was true - there were minotaurs on the subway and stoner angels were important to the plot. In Witches, we only see humans, but it's a world with industrialized, systematized magic - our milieu is the academic world around magic, focused on two young women and their post-graduate lives.

As required in a story about two people, they're quite different: Rory is impulsive, unsure, flitting from one idea to the next. Angela is driven, focused, serious. And the story is thus mostly about Rory, since she's more interesting and active.

They've both just graduated. Angela is about to start an internship with Rory's Type A mother, Dr. Audrey Rosenberg. Rory is heading off to work at a dragon sanctuary in Australia with her boyfriend Holden...who, just before getting on the plane, tells her that he wants to open up their relationship to other people. (We get the sense that this sort of thing happens to Rory all the time - she misreads signals, dives into everything headfirst, and gets hurt all the time by everything before bouncing off into something totally different after a big emotional scene.)

So Rory impulsively doesn't go to Australia, begs Angela to let her stay in the walk-in closet of their apartment - they've sublet her room to a guy named Guy for the summer - sells off most of her stuff, and then falls for Guy and decides to follow him into his new Interdisciplinary Magick program. (Every time Rory does something, you can assume the word "impulsively" is there. The narrative doesn't say she always does this about a boy, but the two cases we see here both fit that pattern.)

Meanwhile, Angela, in a somewhat more low-key manner, is one of six interns working for Dr. Rosenberg (Rory's mother, again), who is demanding and exacting and apparently has not one iota of human feeling for her employees or family.

They both crash, of course. Angela because she's been doing the boiling-frog thing, with pressure building up bit by bit probably since she was five, and she just cracks. Rory because that's what she always does: throws herself into something but only half-asses it, misunderstands other people and doesn't say what she wants or needs, and then collapses into an emotional wreck when it inevitably breaks apart. 

They yell at each other, they break their friendship...but only briefly, because it's that kind of story. They also have familiars - I think everyone in this world does, but the familiars are pretty independent and seem to wander off for weeks at a time - who kibitz on their relationship, squabble with each other, and help to mend everything in the end.

It's a story I've seen many times before - you probably have, too. One part quarter-life crisis, one part best friends assuming too much of their relationship. Goldstein and Jordan tell it well, and their quirky, specific world adds a lot of depth and intertest to what could otherwise be a pretty general and bland story. Rory would be deeply annoying in most stories; she's the kind of person who goes out of her way to step on every damn rake on the ground, over and over again.

In the end, they both move on to things that we think are good for them - at least, we hope so, and it is the end, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. It's a solid ending, open and forward-looking. I don't know if we'll get another story by Goldstein and Jordan set in a world of industrialized magic, but...if we got two, surely there's no reason there couldn't be three?

Better Things: A Nail Won't Fix a Broken Heart

"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.

The Low and Sweet Orchestra was a supergroup, at least by my definition: a bunch of musicians who had other bands, and were reasonably successful in them, but they came together to do this project. And, like so many supergroups, they made one really good record and then disappeared entirely.

The record was 1996's Goodbye to All That. And, in a lineup of great songs, the one I want to praise the most is what was their single: A Nail Won't Fix a Broken Heart.

Wish we were dyin' holdin' hands
Alone just me and you
That's sad but it's true.

It's a breakup song, one of the purer ones. There's no animosity, no anger, no explanations, no history. It's just about the singer, telling us purely about his love and how it's gone forever. We don't even know for sure who initiated the breakup, though it's unlikely it was this guy - he's still smitten.

The instrumentation is gorgeous, in a folky way - the band was largely made up of members of the Pogues, backing the guy I knew as singer of Thelonious Monster - and it's one of those almost-perfect pop singles that sounds entirely like itself and nothing else.

And the title could be a saying you just never managed to hear before, something your grandmother might have said when you were young. (Maybe it was, maybe it is. It wouldn't surprise me.)

Maybe you'll find yourself saying it someday, giving advice or ruefully reminiscing. "A nail won't fix a broken heart, you know."

Quote of the Week: How The Other Half Lives

As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their clothes themselves, and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Aunt and the Sluggard," p.172 in My Man Jeeves

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is the first-published collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories - in fact, it's so early (1919) that half of the eight stories in it aren't actually about Jeeves and Wooster, but feature a proto-Bertie character named Reggie Pepper.

It is also, along with all of the material in it, solidly in the public domain. So although I read the Overlook Collector's Wodehouse edition from 2006 - I'm still planning to gather all of them, even though the first two or three dozen I bought and read and put lovingly on a shelf were destroyed by a flood in 2011 - this book, and some variations on it, are widely available in other forms.

For example, I recently read a still short but substantially longer book, Enter Jeeves, that contains fifteen stories - almost twice as many as My Man Jeeves - including all seven Reggie Pepper tales and the first eight Jeeves.

The two books have slightly different titles and texts for a few of those stories - I believe this is the difference between American and British texts; I noted that Enter Jeeves seems to use mostly American texts but is not entirely consistent - which can be slightly confusing. But everything in My Man Jeeves is in Enter Jeeves, though slightly differently presented.

So I can recommend either book, but definitely not both of them. Enter is probably cheaper, and definitely longer. My Man is more "authentic," and was assembled by the young Wodehouse himself, if that matters. I was going to recommend The World of Jeeves as an even better choice for Jeeves stories - larger, more comprehensive, with a jaunty cover - but I see it's firmly out of print and rather pricey these days, so it's no longer as convenient as it was when I found it in the early Nineties. There's probably some similar book out there: the idea of an omnibus of all the Jeeves short stories is an obvious one, so I imagine someone has done it recently.

Anyway, the Jeeves stories are among the best humorous fiction by anyone anywhere. The first few are a bit more sartorially-focused than the best of the series, but still energetic and full of Bertie's great voice. The Reggie Pepper stories are perhaps one step down from that, but still solidly amusing Wodehouse, and fascinating as an object lesson of how a writer works his way into the best version of an idea.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical by Brian Michael Bendis & Bill Walko

Brian Michael Bendis's Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it's clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical was published at the end of January - I don't think it was serialized first, which is a little unusual for a book written by a guy like Bendis and published by an outfit like Dark Horse - and it tells a different story of a younger Bendis getting pulled into writing stuff for other creative media. While the first F&G centered on trying to turn his creator-owned early noir GNs into movies - Spoiler alert! it didn't quite happen, though Bendis got contacts and contracts and some income for a few years and other things eventually did get made - this second one is about one project that we readers might not have known Bendis was ever part of.

The famously...um, troubled Broadway musical of the early Teens, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark [1], had a book attributed to director Julie Taymor, playwright Glenn Berger, and (after a hasty rewrite during previews) playwright and comics scripter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. But it was no secret that other writers, including several comics writers, had been part of the project earlier. And Bendis was one of them, having been pulled in by Marvel head Avi Arad in 2004 to meet with Taymor and, everyone hoped, write the book of this musical.

(The music and lyrics were always going to be by Bono and The Edge of U2, and they were.)

The Musical is written by Bendis and features him as the main character, with roughly the same character design as the Bendis-drawn original F&G. But this time the art is by Bill Walko, with colors by Wes Dzioba and letters by Joshua Reed. It is the story of his involvement with Turn Off the Dark - which is actually pretty short and minor - as well as loosely-related material about his youth and the usual how-I-got-into-comics stuff.

Bluntly, Bendis took a couple of meetings with Taymor (one by phone, one after being flown down to LA), where he was impressed by her energy and passion but reacted really badly to two major pieces of her vision. First, that the musical should end, like a comic book, with a big "To Be Continued!" message - but he thought he could finesse that. Second, and more seriously, that she wanted to change Spider-Man's origin from the standard radioactive spider-bite, so that instead Peter Parker got his powers by praying to the Greek goddess Arachne.

(That stayed in the final work, more or less, so it clearly was a deal-breaker for Taymor. I'm more surprised that Marvel allowed it; they could have fired her instead and gone with another director. But I suppose this was post-bankruptcy, pre-Iron Man Marvel, a company more willing to take a crazy chance on someone who was well-known and successful in her area of expertise.)

So Bendis wrote up a treatment, and had another meeting to pitch it. He did not include the Arachne origin, and got only about that far into the pitch before Taymor blew up, and Bendis's involvement in the project quietly ended. (Bendis thought the project ended, and was surprised when the musical popped back up a few years later.)

That, as I hinted above, is only one small thread in The Musical - maybe 15% of the pages at most. It's not a long story, and not a lot happens. Most of the book is flashbacks to Young Bendis, dewy-eyed and obsessed with comics, bugging people like Walt Simonson and making crappy comics as a teenager and, eventually, forging an indy self-published crime-comics career in his twenties.

I don't know if anyone will come to The Musical for that story, but, if you're a Bendis fan, you'll probably enjoy it. It's the standard story of a lot of fans-turned-pro, and Bendis tells it with a lot of self-awareness and humor. Walko brings a slightly cartoony, caricatured line that adds energy and big facial expressions to pages with lots of captions and dialogue.

The Musical does not provide much background on Turn Off the Dark; Bendis was only involved briefly and inconclusively several years before it actually happened. But it's an amusing "creative people are obsessive weirdoes with quick tempers" story, and the rest of the material in the book is at least loosely and vaguely connected to that story.

[1] I actually saw Turn Off the Dark on Broadway with my two kids. Sadly, I saw it after the retool, when it was just kooky and not full-on insane. I  didn't write about it at the time, and that was fifteen years ago, so all I have are vague memories. It was very technically impressive and full of excellent on-stage talent doing impressive things, but the story was...well, I don't want to say "a confused mess," since that would be insulting, but it wasn't the most clear and understandable thing I've ever seen.

Down There by David Goodis

I read a cluster of David Goodis novels back in the 1990s, in the striking Black Lizard editions - probably coming to him from Jim Thompson, like so many other readers for the past three generations. Looking at this blog, I don't seem to have read any Goodis over the past twenty years - that's the way a reading life can flow: you read "everything" of someone, get to the end of it, and put it down for a while.

But maybe you always come back, eventually.

Down There is probably Goodis's most famous novel, because it was adapted into Francois Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player - which title the novel has had, more often than the original, ever since. And it was included in the Library of America book Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, alongside books by Thomson and Chester Himes and Charles Willeford and Patricia Highsmith. I've been going through that omnibus, and so it was Goodis time again.

Eddie is the piano player in a Philadelphia dive bar, Harriet's Hut, sometime in the mid-50s. He's quiet, withdrawn, meek - like he's given up on life, just keeping his head down and getting through each day, with no desires or dreams. But one day his brother Turley shows up after three years with no contact, on the run from two thugs, and begs for Eddie to help him, to hide him. Eddie doesn't do what Turley asks, but he does intervene when the two thugs arrive, giving Turley a little time to run away.

And that starts to make his small, constrained life start to come apart. The new waitress at the Hut, Lena, wonders about this changed Eddie. The bouncer, an ex-wrestler named Wally who has been harassing Lena despite being common-law married to Harriet, the bar owner and tender, also wonders what's going on.

And then there's those two thugs, who know Eddie's connected to Turley somehow - and soon learn how. Turley and Eddie's other brother are criminals, though we don't learn the details of this particular operation until nearly the end of the novel. But we do know they have the old family home - more of a hide-out, as everyone keeps saying - out in the South Jersey barrens, and that's where the thugs want Eddie to guide them. They want to "talk" to Turley, of course.

We readers think Turley might even survive that conversation, at least early in the novel.

Eddie used to be someone else, of course - no one is born a bottom-tier barroom piano player - and we learn those details, of his upbringing in that hide-out house with two wild and criminal older brothers, how he got out, his classical-music career and marriage, what happened after that, and how he ended up at the Hut.

This is a noir novel, so Eddie's past is tragic and his future is constrained. He's broken and damaged, though it looks for a while like he might have the skills he needs to get through this and end up on the other side with Lena. But, again, it's noir. Happy endings aren't in the cards.

Goodis tells the story through Eddie's eyes, after a quick opening sequence following Turley. His thinking is contingent, complicated, twisted, all options that he can't see himself taking and memories he doesn't want to remember. He's often thinking like he wants to convince himself of something, or keep himself settled in his current life, his current way of thinking - not return to any of the men he used to be in the past. But the hero of any noir novel doesn't get to choose what happens to him, or how he reacts to it, or even whether he'll make it out the other end.

Sharky Malarkey: A Sketchshark Collection by Megan Nicole Dong

As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the "Sketchshark" comic - more than that, it's creator Megan Nicole Dong's only book to date, and "Sketchshark" was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr, which now uses the book's title.

On the other hand, she's got a day-job in animation as a director and storyboard artist (including what looks like three shows this decade, one upcoming for 2027), which probably takes most of her artistic energy and drawing time the last bunch of years.

Sharky Malarkey feels like one of those "throw in everything to fill up a book" collections, divided into chapters with somewhat different kinds of cartoons. There's a twenty-page introduction, which I think was new for the book, in which the creator is picked up for a rideshare by her shark character (Bruce), incorporating what may have been a few separate individual strips about Dong's life and cat. That's the only major autobio material; Dong doesn't seem to be the kind of creator who wants to talk about herself.

The first chapter, Malarky, has a bunch of general cartoons  - people on phones, anxiety issues, other life issues and relatable content, and a bunch of comics about butts. (Millennial cartoonists cartoon as much about butts as Boomer-era cartoonists did about tits - though the millennials are more gender-balanced, both the cartoonists and the butts they draw.)

Then we get the Bruce-centric chapter, There's a Shark in Los Angeles. Bruce is shallow, self-obsessed, and a minor celebrity (at least in his own head). The fact that he is in Los Angeles is definitely not random, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dong started doing this character when she began looking for work in Hollywood. (The book includes some pieces - older, I assume - in which the main character is still in art school, too.)

Next up is Ladythings, which somewhat heads back to the general humor of the first chapter - but focused on physical or cultural issues that are female-coded. (Often in weird ways, because Dong is a cartoonist and they have goofy ideas; there's a short sequence about prehensile boobs, for example.)

Then comes The Animal + Plants Channel, which is pretty random. For most cartoonists, a chapter about animals would imply pets - dogs and/or cats, depending - but Dong's work is wilder than that, with a lot of squirrels and horses, plus whales and a few returns of Bruce. And, yes, there are strips about plants as well.

Fifth is A Toad Makes New Friends in the Forest, which starts out as a picture-book-style story and morphs over into more traditional comics as it goes. It's also an unsubtle racial allegory, and runs into the final section, Some Sort of End, in which Bruce returns for one last time to lead the big kids-movie all-singing, all-dancing ending. (Dong spent most of the first decade of her career making animation for kids - I'm not sure she's entirely moved beyond that now - and is deeply familiar with the story beats and particular bits of laziness of that genre.)

Dong has an organic, appealing style, with bright colors enclosed by confident black lines all basically the same weight. And her humor is quirky and specific - the jokes and ideas and setups in Sharky Malarkey aren't derivative, or ever obvious. It would be nice if she had time and energy and enthusiasm to make more comics like this, since her work is so distinctive, but it looks like animation has been taking her creative energy since the book came out - and probably paying much better. But time is long and Hollywood is fickle; who knows what will happen next? Maybe she'll make more cartoons and be a massive success at something unexpected. 

Better Things: Cuckoo

"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.

My "rules" for these song-series have so far said each artist gets only one song. It makes me focus, and keeps me from being self-indulgent in one specific way. But, like any rule, it can be gamed - there can be bands that change names, or frontpeople who go solo, and so on.

So I had a one-word-title song from Kristin Hersch's band Throwing Muses last year: Sinkhole. For this year, I have a one-word-title song from Hersch's solo career, which I am claiming is something entirely different.

This week, my song is the short, folky, one-woman-and-her-guitar song Cuckoo, from Hersch's 1992 record Hips and Makers.

Oh the cuckoo she's a pretty bird
She wobbles when she flies
She don't ever holler cuckoo
Till the fourth day of July

I say "folky," but I think this is an actual, authentic, old folk song, the kind where we don't actually know who originally wrote it. And so I'm not going to try to explicate the meaning - it's an old song about a bird, and has probably been meant as symbolic in a dozen different ways by a dozen different singers over the past century or so. I'll just leave it here: a short, quirky song performed well, to mean whatever you think it means today.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 3, 2025

My eye doctor used to be really convenient. (I promise this is relevant.) I started seeing her about twenty years ago, when I worked at Bookspan. One quick subway ride downtown - really easy. Then we moved to Madison Square, and it was even easier: just a walk. From Wiley's Hoboken offices, just a hop on the PATH - the office was down the street from the 14th Street stop.

Thomson Reuters brought me back into the city, and the subway ride was a bit longer, but still pretty straightforward. Then I was back in Hoboken briefly, and the PATH hadn't moved.

But then I was declared full-time work-from-home - my office was closed, which was OK, since I was only there a few days a month anyway - and suddenly my eye doctor is at the other end of a long train or bus ride.

So my annual checkup now needs to take up its own day, basically, and I try to take at least a little advantage of being back in the city on that day. This time, I hit the Strand - a bookstore you may have heard of - which is right in that neighborhood. And here's what I found:

Transcription - a 2018 standalone novel by Kate Atkinson. I've been reading her "Jackson Brodie" mystery series - well, they're not exactly mysteries, and it's not a traditional series, but you know what I mean - and I recently decided I really need to read all of her books. (And started that project with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a few months ago.) I'm actually reading another Brodie novel right now. But this book is a historical novel, about spies during WWII - or, I think, about one young woman who gets a low-level job at MI5 - and the years soon after.

The Keep is the novel Jennifer Egan wrote just before her big breakout award winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I think is still the only book of hers I've read. And that was ten-plus years ago. So I stopped at the shelf with her books on it, poked through them a bit, and picked out this one, which is about two cousins trying to renovate a medieval castle and which may have odd elements (thriller or supernatural or both or neither) in it.

Nightmare Alley is a1946 noir novel by William Lindsay Gresham that I thought I might already have in one format in the house, but I bought it anyway. Reader: I do have this novel about carnies and freaks in a Library of America omnibus, but I guess the good news is that now I have double the chance to read it.

The Midnight Examiner is a 1989 novel by William Kotzwinkle about tabloid journalism that I think I've had on my "look-for-it" list since then. (I may have had a copy of the paperback before my flood, but I'm pretty sure I never read it.) Kotzwinkle is an odd, quirky writer who was genre-adjacent for a lot of his career - he won a World Fantasy Award; he was a bestseller with two books based on the E.T. movie - and this has always sounded like my find of thing.

In the Walled City is a collection of stories by Stewart O'Nan, whose novels I've been reading more slowly than they deserve. In the traditional manner of literary writers, it was his first book - before the novels - and I don't think he's written short fiction since.

Cluny Brown is a novel by Margery Sharp from 1944; I only know Sharp from the "Rescuers" books for children, which I read as a child. But I saw some appreciation or other of her adult novels a few years back - maybe when this and a clutch of others were republished; the cover design is very familiar. This one was, I think, one of her most popular: the story of a parlor-maid just before the war.

Thurber: Writings & Drawings is a big Library of America collection of, yes, the writings and drawings of James Thurber. I would have preferred a big Thurber omnibus that had complete books, rather than the excerpts this mostly traffics in, but it's what was available, and a great big wodge of Thurber is a great big wodge of Thurber.

Last is Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. I just read a travel book by Waugh, which reminded me I read his novels back in the '90s (except Decline and Fall) and maybe it's time to hit a few of them. This one, you might know, is about a journalist, and seems to be based on much of the material that he also wrote that travel book about - so I hope to get to it soon enough to compare them.