Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn't get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn't. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren't completely explained or fleshed out here - but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn't. Who Is AC? is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it's just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst - location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn't over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He's got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He's also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things - but that's the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby - clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book - tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that - he's called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin's secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn't cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn't have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it's not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It's not quite a complete story, but it's fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 4: Holiday in Budapest by Yves Chaland

This fourth Freddy Lombard book has me rethinking the whole series. The first three books didn't say when they took place, so I assumed they were "contemporary" - set roughly when they were written, in the '80s. That seemed plausible, in that timeless Eurocomics way, and the '80s is pretty historical to us today anyway.

But the fourth book, Holiday in Budapest, is explicitly set in 1956 - that and "Budapest" will tell the more historically-minded of you some major events in the bande desinée - and they've got the same car as in the first book, and are wearing the same clothes as before. So maybe the whole thing was historical all along, and I just didn't realize it. (The previous books are The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, The Elephant Graveyard, and The Comet of Carthage.)

It's the summer of 1956, and our three heroes - Freddy, Sweep, and Dina - are in Venice. Dina is giving Latin lessons to Laszlo, the fifteen-year-old nephew of a Hungarian politician, staying in a grand hotel with his aunt in something that isn't meant to be exile yet but could turn into it if necessary. Freddy and Sweep have no prospects as usual, and are camping by a lake and working on their car in a desultory fashion.

They're poised for a new adventure, in other words - or at least Freddy and Sweep, the less forward-thinking and disciplined characters are. Dina seems to be doing just fine, and could probably have a normal life if she didn't keep getting swept up with these careless, thoughtless young men into danger and trouble.

Lazslo's parents died in one of the many Russian crackdowns in Hungary; his uncle is a politician who we readers can tell (even if Laszlo doesn't appreciate it) very carefully navigates his complex political environment to keep his family as safe as possible. Though "as possible," right now, is "not very," which is why his wife and ward are in Italy, outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dina somewhat indulges Laszlo's romantic and revolutionary notions, but it's Freddy and Sweep who offer him their car and their company for a roadtrip to Budapest, to get him close to the action and (they think) get them some of the family money for their help.

So Laszlo runs away, with Freddy and Sweep thinking their helping him back to Hungary will get them in good with a new government and lead to big payouts. Dina chases them, getting to Budapest first to warn Laszlo's uncle.

And things are uneasy and unsettled in Hungary. There is a popular uprising, bubbling in both the political class and the general population, but the Russians and their political officers are solidly in charge currently. Opinion on whether the Soviets would just let Hungary peacefully go its own way are divided - the firebrands insist that the will of the people cannot be stopped, even if the streets run red with blood.

Laszlo would be a firebrand if he were a little older; he's an attempted firebrand, at least. His uncle locks him up to keep him safe, but again Dina indulges him, and again Laszlo finds a way to sneak out to find more trouble.

About the same time, the Russian tanks roll in.

The last roughly third of Holiday in Budapest is full of street-fighting and armies, sieges of offices and running around to get forms signed to, they hope, save Laszlo from being shipped as a political prisoner to Siberia. (Because of course he got picked up and detained by the invading forces almost immediately; he is young and strident and doesn't have the sense God gave a horsefly.)

There's a lot of action and color and interesting moments and historical detail here. The historical event is the center of the book; Freddy himself is secondary at best in his own story. (Sweep, being more hotheaded, drives more of the action - and Dina even more so.) And creator Yves Chaland draws it all magnificently, with great architectural and military details that never detract from his clean, crisp story-telling.

I still have a hard time getting my head around what the point of the Freddy Lombard series was - my sense is that it was reacting to and reworking ideas and styles and viewpoints from the history of Belgian and French comics of the previous forty years, so each book should probably be seen as a counterpoint to specific older works. If so, it's not something a monoglot English reader could trace forty years later, so I'll just gesture in that direction, and note that an answer might possibly be found in that territory, if my guess is correct. If not...I'm open to other theories.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

I've been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big '90s crash. I'll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days, so I don't really know either way. But my point was that captions were useful, and did work well in a lot of the iconic '80s stories, so, geez, maybe don't throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Well, I hadn't taken a look at any bathwater for a while. My opinion may have shifted somewhat.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1 is the first of three fairly large volumes collecting their combined run on the Daredevil character, from 1979 through 1982. Now, there's an asterisk there - several asterisks, actually - since this is corporate comics, and it was created assembly-line style. Janson was the inker before Miller joined as penciler, working over Gene Colan, and took over as penciler/inker afterward. And Miller started off as "the hot new artist," picking up co-plotting after a few issues and eventually taking over as writer as well. So what most readers think of as "the Frank Miller Daredevil" starts up about halfway through this book.

But comics fans are completionists, and this is a complete package, so that's a good thing. It also has extensive credits of who did what - something comics weren't good at for a long time, but they made up for it starting sometime in the 1970s, and became obsessive about it in the flood of reprint projects starting in the '90s.

Included in this book are:

• Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man issues 27 & 28, written by Bill Mantlo and inked by Frank Springer; it's basically a Frank Miller try-out, I guess, since Daredevil guest-stars
• Daredevil #158-161, 163-166, written by Roger McKenzie (with Miller contributing for 165 and 166)
• Daredevil # 167, written by David Michelinie and Miller
• Daredevil #168-172, written by Miller

Now, Bill Mantlo has definitely written better comics than this. So has Michelinie. I don't know McKenzie's work well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But the stories here - even the ones when Miller takes over at the end - are filled with long, verbose, tedious captions that "set the scene" and "provide color commentary" but mostly tell us what we're looking at and repeat standard phrases about the character and world.

Daredevil doesn't have a single phrase that gets beaten into the ground like Wolverine's "I'm the best at what I do and what I do isn't pretty," but both "man without fear" (including related references to DD never giving up on anything ever) and "hey, don't forget this guy is, like, totally blind!" come up like a bad penny every few pages.

The stories are also...what's a more polite word for cliched and standard? There were a lot of comics like these in the 1970s and 1980s, and only slightly different before and after that - superhero yardgoods, rolled out to fill up pages and entertain an audience that just wanted to see this guy in this costume punching a particular group of villains and repeating his catchphrase.

Miller was an solid artist from the beginning, which is good. And Janson supported him well. They worked well together to make eye-pleasing pages full of superhero action, only slightly marred by the reams of words pasted on top of all of it.

Once Miller starts writing the stories, the elements of his later work slide in. The last five issues here are one plotline, in which The Kingpin - up to this point entirely a Spider-Man villain, and at that point retired in Japan - comes back to New York for a vaguely described plea deal in which he will hand over a dossier on his successors to the Manhattan DA in return for complete immunity on all of his previous crimes. (Which is, what thirty years of murders and gang-lord-ing and attempted spider-squashing? Nice deal.) We also get a flashback to Daredevil's college days, to meet the One Great Love of His Life, Elektra, the beautiful daughter of a Greek diplomat who drops out of school when Daddy is murdered by terrorists that not-yet-Daredevil isn't quite able to stop. She drops out, of course, to become an international assassin in a skimpy costume made up of mostly red straps.

As, of course, you do. In superhero comics, at least.

Bullseye, the most iconic Daredevil antagonist - basically his Joker or Lex Luthor - turns up several times, with a lot of hugger-mugger and opportunities for Daredevil to emote and express his pure goodness and desire for justice, including during the Kingpin plotline at the end. (I do have to admit that Miller makes better use of him, with less histrionics, than McKenzie did.)

So the front half of Vol. 1 is just a slight step up from a standard Marvel comic of 1979 - Miller is energetic, but there were plenty of good, energetic artists then. The end shows more promise, but Miller is still working in the same mode: characters talk too much, and the narrative voice might be pulling back just slightly, but it's still too intrusive, and spends far too much time telling the reader things he should already know or can see right there in the same panel.

I'm assuming all that gets better in Vol. 2; I'll have to take a look.

Better Things: Here Comes a Regular

"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're getting deep into the list at this point, hitting songs and bands that I keep being surprised that I didn't fit them into the original This Year series. (But that's the point: any list is limited, and leaves a lot off - there's always more good stuff than any one list can contain.)

For this week, it's The Replacements, who were the best band in the world, at least intermittently, one night here and there, for a while in the '80s. And, again, there's all the other songs that almost took this place - The Ledge most obviously, though loving that song, forty years later, might be holding onto something far too teenagery. But there's also their awesome covers: the goofy strut of Cruella DeVille and the breakneck thrill of Another Girl, Another Planet. The song that came second - and was knocked out mostly on points, since it's an alternate version that came out much later and I didn't hear until the 00s - was I Can't Hardly Wait (The Tim Version).

But for the 'Mats song I loved at the time and kept listening to for years, it has to be the boozy, depressive Here Comes a Regular.

Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst
After a hard day of nothin' much at all

It's got some of Paul Westerberg's best lyrics: precise, true, world-weary, knowing, allusive.

Opportunity knocks once then the door slams shut
All I know is I'm sick of everything that my money can buy

And it's one of the saddest, bleakest songs I know. I don't know what it says about me that I gravitate to that kind of song, but this is one of the best, the truest.

I used to live at home, now I stay at the house

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 2, 2025

Two books this week, both of them from the library. And both of them are somewhat oversized - one much more than the other - which is the reason why I went for physical copies rather than trying to read them digitally.

I guess I'm trying to read the Asterix series. Asterix the Gladiator is the fourth one, by original creators Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (I think Goscinny was involved, however old he was then, in the most recent new material, but Uderzo has left us). Gladiator was originally published in 1964, with this English-language edition coming in 2004. I read the first Asterix omnibus almost two years ago - I thought it was much more recently than that! - and have had the next ones in my library app, to get to "eventually." Eventually came a few weeks ago, but I found cramming Uderzo's album-sized pages down to my tablet - and especially their smallish lettering - was not going to be a good experience. So, instead, I checked to see if a real ink-on-paper edition was in my reach, and this one was. It's a pretty battered thing, from the YA section of a random library in a town near me, but it'll do.

The other one is a gigantic oversized thing: Wednesday Comics, which reprints a project that presented a bunch of DC superhero comics by major creators on tabloid-sized newsprint, as if they were Sunday newspaper comics. Now, as far as I can see, the content of these stories is all very standard DC - guys in costumes punching each other until the bad guy gives up - which is slightly disappointing. (How awesome would it be to have Superman and Lois goofing around a la Blondie, or Krypto in Marmaduke situations, or Zatanna doing Broom Hilda? But no one ever asks me for my crazy ideas.) So this is a big, physically unwieldy thing that exists to showcase the same kind of art and stories, just bigger. And Big Two stuff always wants to be bigger anyway. So I didn't want to spend money on this, or try to store it, but getting it from the library is just about right.

Books Read: July 2025

This is what I read this past month. I post these as indices, mostly for my own benefit later, and add links when the posts go live. Apologies for interrupting your Sunday-morning browsing with such trivia.

Dale Sherman, The Warost We Can Find (7/1)

Alexandro Jodorowski and Mœbius, The Black Incal (digital, 7/4)

Julian Hanshaw, Free Pass( digital, 7/5)

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973, 7/5)

Manuelle Fior, Hypericum (digital, 7/6)

Chris McCoy, Safely Endangered Comics (digital, 7/7)

Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days (in Waugh Abroad, 7/7)

P. Craig Russell & others, Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? (digital, 7/12)

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (digital, 7/13)

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 7/17)

Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi, Dante's Inferno (digital, 7/19)

Tom Fonder, Business Cat: Hostile Takeovers (digital, 7/20)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Man With Tow Left Feet (7/20)

Jaime Hernandez, Life Drawing (digital, 7/25)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and P. Craig Russell, Elric of Melniboné (digital, 7/26)

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Wears Hats (digital, 7/27)

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

Quote of the Week: The Economic Half-Life of Bad Movies

Pod People was rare for an MST3K film in that it was released in the 1980s, a time when it became less likely that we'd be able to license the rights to a given cheesy movie. Once you get into the modern era, severe mediocrity becomes more expensive. It's just a fact of life, although something like Pod People has a cheapness that transcends era and epochs. Its shittiness gives it a timelessness that says, "You will ALWAYS be able to afford the rights to this."

 - Frank Conniff, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever, p.28

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Where to start? This is a novel overshadowed by a movie, a novel that stands as the most successful piece of a stunted career, a novel that's more conventional than a reader might think, a novel that doesn't necessarily show well against later entries in the same genre.

I've been reading Hammett and Chandler recently, and as a guy with an English degree, Chandler runs rings around Hammett in every way possible - character insight, striking language, verisimilitude, atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with Hammett, but his work comes across, a hundred years later, as workmanlike and interesting rather than compelling and fresh.

The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930. The famous movie - the third adaptation, actually; Hollywood was quick in those days - came a decade later. Hammett's writing career was over by then, and his fall from grace with the public just about to come: it turns out that America wasn't fond of avowed Communists in the post-war era.

I think I need to mention the plot, though it almost seems absurd to do so. Sam Spade is a detective in San Francisco; he gets a client in a young woman who tells him and his partner (Miles Archer) a story about a runaway younger sister that neither of them believe. Archer is killed that night, following the man the girl says lured away her sister.

There is no sister, and that other man is killed later that night. The cops half-heartedly try to pin one or both murders on Spade, mostly to see if it will work, but it doesn't. Spade is hard-boiled, spitting tough dialogue at the cops and everyone else, and heads out to investigate - there's that famous speech at the end where he talks about the death of Archer. (There are four or five famous passages in Falcon; speeches you probably already know, from the book or the movie. I don't want to pooh-pooh those: they made it into the movie because they're said exactly right, because they're perfect expressions of their moments.)

Anyway, it turns out there's a fantastically valuable statue that the girl - Spade eventually learns her name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy - and several others have been chasing around the world. Spade learns more, runs around San Francisco for a few days, gets involved with one more murder, gets (basically out of nowhere) a package with the statue, has a tense meeting with all of the major players at the end, and hands over the killers to the cops so we can have an ending. The plotting is decent enough, though it does suffer from the mystery-novel issue of being all running around and talking to the same people over and over again, like a particularly unpleasant fetch quest in an CRPG.

The idea of the falcon is slightly silly, the ending is a dying fall in a way that doesn't quite strike me right, and I've never quite bought that Spade and O'Shaughnessy "loved" each other, as the dialogue at the end wants to say. Spade is a bit too much the stereotypical tough guy to really become a fully-rounded person - for me at least.

And, just saying, in the book he's tall and blonde.

All in all, for me, The Maltese Falcon is no Red Harvest. It's iconic and famous and full of moments familiar from later parodies and references, but, on its own, it's just a solid B- hard-boiled mystery novel from early in the genre, told mostly in a meat-and-potatoes style and featuring a main character without a whole lot to make him distinctive other than "hard-boiled PI."