The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the MST3K writers & performers

I was a fan of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show back in the '90s - my town didn't have Comedy Central when it was on that channel, but I saw it a couple of times at my in-laws house (only people who know my family will see how very, very odd it was that I watched MST3K only at my in-laws in Haledon) and then got more obsessive for the last three years when it ran on the (then) Sci-Fi Channel.

I had this book at the time - I might even have bugged a publishing contact to send me a copy for free, and possibly (I hope not) even pretended that I was interested in it professionally for the SFBC. (It could have been vaguely plausible, since I think we did at least one of the Nitpicker's Guide books by Phil Farrand, which I could probably spin a line of bullshit as being similar to the gestalt of MST3K.)

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then - the show was revived almost twenty years later for two Netflix seasons (which I've seen most of) and then one Kickstarted pandemic-era season (which I own but haven't watched any of), and the final cast of the show has regrouped as Rifftrax and done about a thousand movies, including a series of annual live events (which I've taken my two kids to pretty consistently for a decade). There were quirkier offshoots, too, in The Film Crew and Cinematic Titanic, which I've seen less of.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide is a 1996 production, coming right as the team was creating the shortened Season 7 - their last for Comedy Central - and prepping their one and only theatrical movie for release. It is deeply out of print: I got this copy for slightly more than I wanted to pay, and it came with a noticeably rolled spine (which I've been attempting to coax back into shape by leaving it under one of those gigantic bug-crushing DC Comics omnibuses).

I read this again because I've been watching random old MST3K episodes with my kids: we do a "Movie Night" on Wednesdays, and I'm mostly alternating MST3K and "real" movies (like Beverly Hills Cop and The Big Lebowski and the like - originally, all three of us were going to suggest movies and go in a rotation, but it's all fallen to me as The Dad, so, by gum!, I am going to indulge myself). So I'm thinking about the series, and when I think about things, I want to read books - it's just how I'm wired.

This book was written by the main cast/writers - the two were basically the same - of the time: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Michael J. Nelson, and Mary Jo Pehl. It has thumbnail descriptions of the plot of each episode's movie (and short, where applicable), descriptions of that episode's host segments, and reflections by an initial-credited member of the team listed above. There's also some front matter - a jokey/silly/odd intro piece by each of the above and a quick history of how the show came to be, plus a list of "characters" as of Season 7. Back matter includes explanations of what are credited as the 50 most obscure jokes on the show, slightly jokey bios of the writers, a FAQ, and a description of the first (of two) conventions the show put on during its life.

This was a basically comprehensive view of MST3K, from the creators, as of when it was created. It's less comprehensive now, obviously, due to the passage of time, but it's still fairly definitive as far as it goes. If you like the show, you'll have to seek out a copy of this, and probably pay more than you want for it, but it's a quintessential big-fan thing, and does not disappoint on that level.

Better Things: Sometime to Return

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

OK - nothing against Grave Dancers Union. It's probably the most consistent record in Soul Asylum's career, with four songs that would be on any band's lifetime list. (Runaway Train, of course, Somebody To Shove, Without a Trace and 99%.) It is an awesome record.

But before they hit that, they were scrappier and a bit quirkier - Hang Time and And the Horse They Rode In On aren't as consistent (there are a couple of real clunkers), but We 3 and Gullible's Travels are two of the greatest heartfelt hard-rock songs ever. And their first song to get major national airplay - the one I want to celebrate today - is even more anthemic than that.

Sometime to Return is an almost Platonically perfect Midwest rock song, three and a half minutes of guitars and drums and propulsive force It's a song about that moment before you make it, when you think you might not make it, when you wonder what's going on and what you should be doing.

If someday comes early
Comes whipping comes whirling
To take you for all you have learned
The tables are turning
My bridges are burning
My destination sometime to return

And how do you deal with it?

Get up and do something
No time to choose it
Do it do it do it do it

That's how. This is a great song from a band on the cusp of something awesome, just reaching out to grab it and getting their first taste of that lightning.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 27, 2025

As I said last week, this is the first of three posts listing the books I just bought from Midtown Comics - "just," in this case, meaning "arriving Sep 15 and ordered Sep 2" - broken out into batches of five for my personal convenience. This first one has the beginning of the alphabet, according to author name.

I read a bunch of Art Bathazar and Franco's comics for younger readers - primarily Tiny Titans, but including other stuff - when my own kids were younger, and liked their energy and style a lot. And I am coming to realize, as I get older, that I don't need to stop doing things I enjoy just because they're supposedly for people a generation or two behind me. So I just got the Bathazar/Franco 2020 book ArkhaManiacs, which seems to be a goofy take on kid Bruce Wayne (not sure if it's pre- or post-orphaning, but I bet the book will resolutely not make that clear) and kid versions of his major villains.

I read Ludovic Debeurme's Lucille over a decade ago, and even, at that time, noted that the sequel, Renée, was on its way. I don't know why it took me that long to actually get Renée...well, yes, actually, I do: I forgot about it. The world is full of books, and we forget most of them most of the time. But I remembered this one, eventually.

I know very little about Betty Blues by the French creator Renaud Dillies. It's about a bird that plays jazz trumpet, and some kind of love affair either gone wrong or never actually started in the first place. But the art looks inky and complex and fun, and it's a big-format album, and I figured why not?

Similarly, I liked the energy of the cover of Robin Enrico's Life of Vice - about a reporter trailing along with celebrity Becky Vice on a trip to host an award ceremony in Vegas - even though I don't think I've read Enrico's work before.

Last for this batch is All the Presidents by Drew Friedman, one of his recent series of "I'm going to do a bunch of really detailed headshots, in my inimitable photorealistic style, of a specific group of people with some connection" books. This one was from 2019, and covered the first 45 Presidents, as the title makes clear.

Quote of the Week: A Fine Excuse for Any Circumstance

Glinnes looked out over Ambal Broad in bemusement., "I admit to perplexity. Alastor Cluster is thousands of years old; men by the trillions fill the galaxy. Great mentors here, there, everywhere across the whole pageant of existence, have propounded problems and solved them. Everything conceivable has been achieved and all goals attained - not once, but thousands of times over. It is well known that we live in the golden afternoon of the human race. Hence, in the name of the Thirty Thousand Stars, where will you find a fresh area of knowledge that must urgently be advanced from Rabendary meadow?"

 - Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262, p.90 in Alastor

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format - maybe just from an assumption that's how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains is Jeff Lemire's memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he's done, so I hope that isn't hubris - I'd like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it's not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues - but that's a very small part of the book, partially because I don't think Lemire's readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic - or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that's what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir "how I got to zero" section, covering his childhood and education and all of that - up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic - Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts - and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs. From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County and The Nobody, on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder and Trillium and Roughneck, on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender, Gideon Falls, and Plutona), on Black Hammer and Royal City, one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook, on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That's a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work - a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There's not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you're a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you'll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors - there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he's talking about - and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There's some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines - but I'm not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire's comics, you'll probably like hearing how he made them.

Sergio Aragones' Groo: The Hogs of Horder

I sometimes look at a Groo book and think "that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about." And then I'm wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now.

Groo looks quick and breezy, but it's a wordy comic, and creator Sergio Aragones, for all his speed and facility, draws a lot of detail. So the pages are engaging and light and fun, but they demand more attention than you expect. And then I remember, after finishing reading, that Groo (the character) is aggressively stupid, but Groo (the comic) nearly always has a point of view or moral or life lesson it's trying to impart, and untangling that takes effort.

The Hogs of Horder was the new Groo series in 2009-2010; its four issues started in October of '09 and the book came out in August of '10. So it is absolutely the "the Groo take on the Global Financial Crisis" book, just to warn you.

Aragones (here, as usual, assisted by Mark Evanier on something vague related to scripting, Stan Sakai on letters, and Tom Luth with Michelle Madsen on colors) is not a subtle or nuanced creator. And, in Groo stories, there can be villains, but most of the problems in the world will be caused by Groo himself. So Hogs of Horder both wants to blame some general long-term economic shifts (moving production overseas to a lower-cost country, for one main example) for the woe in this world and also wants to make Groo personally responsible for the shift, because he's an idiot who sinks ships and destroys stuff.

This means that we have a lot of panels with lots of mercantile folks - in Groo's medieval-ish world, carriage-makers and home-builders and flask-makers and so on - gloating about getting loans from bankers to spend on making their stuff, but more importantly "high salaries for ourselves" (even though, if they are the owners, what they actually get is a return on their invested capital, and if they are not the owners, how come we never see the owners?) after Groo breaks things.

This runs round and round for a while, as Groo goes from the cheap foreign country to the US-analogue, breaking things and causing all of the business owners/leaders to go to the banks for loans to rebuild everything they're doing and/or to set up new operations in that cheaper nation. It is all pitched in that speaking-to-children tone Groo often uses, and is about that level of sophistication; even readers who think capitalists are typically rapacious and destructive will find this version really overly simplified and silly.

But "silly" is the point of Groo. He breaks everything, and it is funny, and then he walks away to break something else somewhere else. Oh, and there are jokes about mendicants and cheese dip along the way. If you want a Groo story, this is one. I haven't yet figured out a good reason to recommend any one Groo story above any other one, so just pick the Groo thing closest to your hand at the time, if you want to read one. That's basically what I did. Maybe I'll take a longer break before doing so again, this time.

Trullion: Alastor 2262 by Jack Vance

I may discover differently as I read the rest of them, but my memory is that the Alastor books by Jack Vance are perhaps the least "series-y" of his many series - a sequence of three books set in the same stellar cluster that I think are basically separate novels connected by the involvement of the head of the government of this vast and vague nation.

Trullion: Alastor 2262 was the first of the three, originally published in 1973 as a serial in Amazing and then as a Ballantine paperback. Alastor is "a whorl of thirty thousand live stars in an irregular volume twenty to thirty light-years in diameter," with about five trillion people on about three thousand inhabited planets, all loosely ruled by the Connatic, whose succession mechanism is not describes but sounds vaguely hereditary. Like many Vance universes, pirates are a problem - here they are called starmenters and are hunted down zealously but still manage to attack and despoil settlements on random worlds fairly regularly.

The Connatic is a minor character here; I think he appears in all three books and affects the action somewhat. But the story of Trullion is about one family on the bucolic planet of that name, where the land is fertile and the people mostly indolent and happy because of it. That family had three sons: one older, and then twins. One of the twins, Glinnes Hulden, went to space to join the armed forces, the Whelm: the story proper begins when he returns, having resigned after ten years soon after learning of the death of his father Jut. 

He returns to find that his older brother Shira is also missing - Trullion has a native race, the merlings, who live underwater and have a long-running low-level conflict with humans; both sides kill individuals when they get the chance, and everyone assumes Shira fell victim to them. Glinnes is the older twin, so inherits the land, but his melancholy twin Glay has sold off half of the land as part of his joining a burgeoning movement of ascetics called Fanscherade.

If, or once, Shira is proved dead, Glinnes will be Squire of Rabendary, and is basically that in any case. But he wants to reclaim the lands Glay sold to a newcomer, and is stymied by Glay's recalcitrance and the fact that Glay has already given the money to his Fanscherade comrades.

The plot ambles from there, mostly focusing on Glinnes's new career as a player of hussade, a team game something like a gang version of the much later TV show Wipeout - played on walkways and trapezes above a tank of water, involving padded sticks with which they whack each other - as he tries to get the money to reclaim his lands. Meanwhile, somewhat in the background, Fanscherade is growing among the youth of Trullion - in a permissive society like this, the young rebel by becoming strict and rule-bound - and the racial sub-group Trevanyi (Gypsy-coded: secretive, clannish, nomadic, prone to schemes which may turn violent) are also causing some friction, particularly one group near Glinnes.

There are local aristocrats who sponsor hussade teams, not always well. There's a locally-famous man, Janno Akadie, who works as a mentor, something like a combination of independent arbitrator, lawyer in an advisory role, and notary. There are conflicts with a group of Trevanyi squatting on Glinnes's land.

There are a lot of hussade games detailed, as Glinnes plays on first one team under a local aristocrat who over-estimates his own skill as a captain, and then for a better open team. We learn most of the rules of that game, including the role of the shierl, a young woman - proverbially virgin, though Trullion society makes this reader cast some doubts - who is a "member" of each team, as essentially the goal-posts. (The cover above shows a shierl in a decent indication of her game costume - that white dress is designed to come off at a tug on the gold ring, and that moment is the standard ending of most games.)

All of that comes together near the end, with a starmenter attack during a major hussade game. Glinnes learns the truth of his brother's death, reclaims his land, and may have found a woman to share his life at the end of this short novel.

One of the things I appreciated here is that Glinnes is fairly ordinary: he's good at hussade, but as a position player. He's not the captain, not the top scorer, not some magnificent master. He's fairly smart and skilled from ten years in the Whelm, but he makes mistakes, misunderstands things, and is the hero of this book mostly because the book focuses on him. He doesn't track down the starmenters; he doesn't save the world; he doesn't even have anything to do with a major conflict between Trevanyi and Fanscherade near the climax. Trullion is his story, which means it's all about things that are important to him - but he's not important, other than being locally famous as a good player at a popular sport and owner of a major piece of land. For a series of books about a society of five trillion people on three thousand planets, that's about right, and entirely appropriate.

Note: I read this in the omnibus Alastor, which has all three novels. Trullion is also available separately, published by the Vance Integral Edition. Either way is fine, but, for me, I'll always pick the larger package.

House of Women by Sophie Goldstein

As I understand it, Sophie Goldstein has been making comics for about a decade and a half (along with teaching comics) and has at least two solo books and two collaborative projects. I've seen the two books she made with Jenn Jordan, the collected webcomic of Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell and the recent An Embarrassment of Witches.

House of Women was right in between those two projects - Darwin ended in 2013 and the book came out in 2014;  Embarrassment was a 2020 book; House hit in 2017. (There's also The Oven, just before House, and maybe projects more recent than Embarrassment.) House is a solo book, but her collaborative work has an asterisk: Goldstein was always the professional, trained comics-maker of the two; Jordan is a historian (described as a doctoral student during the Darwin years, which I choose to believe means she's a post-doc or working academic now) and, I think, the folklore expert.

So House is interesting for me to see what Goldstein does when she's not collaborating. Her art is basically the same, though this particular project is black and white - with particularly stark blacks at times. The story and the telling of it are driven by conversation, as the collaborative books were, but I feel like there are more silent pages, more sequences of motion and action, more pure comics panels without people talking.

And, while the two collaborative stories were contemporary and fantastic, set in a modern urban society like our own, differentiated from our world because basically every folkloric or mythical thing was real, House is medium-future science fiction. Four emissaries, all women, of "the Empire" arrive on the distant frontier planet Mopu, to "civilize" the natives. There was a previous expedition, which built or furnished or appropriated a large hilltop palatial compound, but it disappeared without a trace some time ago.

The only other person in the vicinity - possibly on the entire planet - from the wider Empire is Jael Dean, the representative of Grendel, Inc., who presumably exports some materials from Mopu for sale in the Empire - we don't see him do anything like this, or any ships come to gather his shipments. His role in the book is to be The Man - mysterious, sexy, knowing, possibly already "gone bush" in good or bad ways, the local guide.

We don't know if the fact that all of the emissaries are women is standard, or important. We suspect their modest, constricted dress - hoods, corsets, dresses with floor-length skirts and long sleeves - is important, and gives us a sense of the culture of the Empire. We're prompted to think of them as colonizers: benign ones, in their own minds, but looking to mold the natives in a particular way to fit the purposes of a larger human polity.

The main activity of this outpost will be to teach young natives civilized ways. The students are all female: again, we don't know if at first this is just because the emissaries are female, but we come to understand, later, that the Mopu natives have some kind of complicated transformational lifecycle, that perhaps they all begin as female and some or all change to male later on. All of the native girls are given human names; most of them are just background characters but one, Zaza, already knew some of the common language and is their leader and translator and exemplar and possibly student teacher.

(Sidebar note: some reviews have noted that House draws some inspiration or themes from the movie Black Narcissus; I don't know that movie but, at a glance, the parallels are really obvious. There's also more than a bit of Ursula K. Le Guin in House's influences, and second-wave feminist SF in general.)

Tensions rise, as more than one of the emissaries is interested in Dean and the lifecycle of the natives comes to be more clear. Everything comes to a head, and not all of the emissaries make it out in the end. As usual with stories of colonializers trying to change native populations without understanding them, it all ends badly.

House is a bit derivative, and a tad obvious in retrospect, but it knows the story it wants to tell and tells that story well. Goldstein's art is particularly impressive here, full of repeated motifs and intricate page designs. Anyone looking for Le Guinian SF should check it out.

Better Things: Bad Luck

"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.

Social Distortion started out as a punk band. They were one of the stalwarts of early LA hardcore. But, by the time I was listening to them more regularly in the '90s, they were much more like a mainstream hard-rock band. (And, still, when I think "hardcore," it's bands like Suicidal Tendencies and maybe Dead Kennedys.)

Don't get me wrong: they rocked. And they rocked in an era when rock was getting to be outdated and niche. (See the video for this song, below - they were already leaning into a retro, vaguely '50s look in 1992.)

This slot almost went to Story of My Life or I Was Wrong, but, instead, I went to the song that isn't about singer Mike Ness talking about himself: Bad Luck.

The song doesn't explain the exact why of it, but Ness is singing to some guy for whom everything goes wrong, and we think it's because of his attitude:

You got a nasty disposition,
No one really knows the reason why.

And the song is straightforward from there: this guy has bad luck, in all of the ways, and we run through the traditional three verses of details, with a great chorus (Social Distortion was always ready, willing, and entirely able to raise the roof) in between. It's not super-deep, it's not intricate, it's not a puzzle - this guy gets in his own way, no matter what he does, and we're watching him and shaking our heads.

It makes a great song, and maybe even a lesson for our own lives, if we can figure out how not to be this guy ourselves.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 20, 2025

It tends to be feast or famine in the Reviewing the Mail fields - mostly because, when I do buy books, I tend to make a major frenzy of it. So then I often dole those out over several weeks, partially because I suspect no one wants to read a long list of books someone else just got and partially because doing a long list of books somebody (me) just got is tedious and tiring.

This week, I got one newly-published book in the mail, from the usual publicity channels: I'll give the details in a moment.

I also got a big box from Midtown Comics, which was my "local" comics shop on and off for maybe a decade and a half, when I commuted through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Midtown recently had some sort of clear-out-the-overstock sale, with some big discounts on specific, mostly fairly obscure, books, and I took advantage of that to buy fifteen of them. Those books arrived this week, but I'm going to space them out over the next three Sundays, five at a time, for the aforementioned reasons.

I don't think you care, but I might read this myself, two or three years from now, trying to remember when I got The Disappearance of Charley Butters. And so now I'm telling future me, and you're welcome, future me.

The newly-published book is from Tachyon: The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale. The official publication date is October 8th, but I have a real book in my hands, so you might be able to find yourself a copy right now, too. It assembles sixteen stories from Lansdale's whole career - including some of the obvious choices, like "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks," "Bubba Ho-Tep," and "Night They Missed the Horror Show" - along with a new intro by Lansdale (as they say) hisownself and an appreciation by Joe Hill.

I am not much of a horror reader, but Landsale is one of the major names in at least one sub-segment of that area for the past four decades - I know that much. So I imagine this will be a welcome find for a lot of people - and, as is traditional for horror, it's being published just in time to read it at Hallowe'en.

Quote of the Week: Childhood Idylls

In the mountains of Central Spain, set high in the hills above Toledo, was the village of Arabella. It was very small and the air was always clear. That was all you could say that was good about Arabella: terrific air - you could see for miles.

But there was no work, the dogs overran the streets and there was never enough food. The air, clear enough, was also too hot in daylight, freezing at night. As to Inigo's personal life, he was always just a trifle hungry, he had no brothers or sisters, and his mother had died in childbirth.

He was fantastically happy.

Because of his father. Domingo Montoya was funny-looking and crotchety and impatient and absent-minded and never smiled. Inigo loved him. Totally. Don't ask why. There really wasn't any one reason you could put your finger on. Oh, probably Domingo loved him back, but love is many things, none of them logical.

 - William Goldman, The Princess Bride, p.89

Asterix the Gladiator by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

I thought I wanted to read the whole Asterix series, like I did with Tintin a few years ago: it could be a fun way to wander through other people's childhoods, to engage with famous popular works that I wasn't familiar with. But I'm starting to wonder if Asterix is more review-resistant than Tintin, so much its own comedy universe that I have nothing to say.

I did read an omnibus of the first three Asterix books two years back, and had my usual grumble that smaller-format omnibuses might be OK for young readers with eager eyes, but it's not the best way to present works created in album format. Large-size omnibuses would be just fine, but I think those are massively out of fashion - or maybe economically infeasible.

I've now read the fourth book, Asterix the Gladiator, which is the third in a row where the main plot is set in motion by one of the Gauls getting kidnapped. That is still an odd thing to be so central, though this time it's at least a different character: the humorously incompetent bard Cacofonix rather than the kindly druid Getafix. It's even more of a random plot McGuffin this time: the local Roman Prefect (Odius Asparagus, ha ha ha) is heading to Rome, which means he needs a fancy gift for Caesar. He wants "an invincible Gaul," which presents obvious issues - they're invincible - but Cacofonix is mostly harmless and easily nabbed.

The actually invincible Gauls discover the loss, and are offended: Cacofonix may be a horrible bard who only makes unpleasant music, but he's their horrible bard who only makes unpleasant music, so he must be rescued. And so, inevitably, Asterix and Obelix set off Romewards to rescue him.

They take a merchant ship that is soon afterward attacked by pirates, which attack they foil handily. This also has the additional benefit of showing the merchant captain that his original plan to enslave these Gauls would have been a very bad idea, so he delivers them intact and happy to the capital.

There, the two rubes are impressed by the width of the roads, humorously slightly misunderstand some things, and are caught up in some hugger-mugger about attempts to capture them to fight in the Colosseum. There's a big Games coming up, at which the useless Cacofonix will be thrown to the lions amid other acts, and our heroes eventually do get into gladiator training, which they engage in spiritedly but not in line with expectations.

Eventually, the Games come, and It Is Funny. There's a funny chariot race, some funny fights, etc. The Gauls are indominable, unstoppable, and slightly misunderstand nearly everything - in the end, Caesar lets them go back home with their bard.

It's all amusing, but essentially weightless. The narrative knows the Gauls will always succeed in every last thing, there will be no moments of tension, and their slight misunderstandings will be funny. It's not quite digging the reader in the ribs every page, but it's close, like a friend who raises his eyebrows after every supposedly "funny" line, begging for a laugh. Albert  Uderzo's art is solidly amusing, too: his people a bit cartoony without going full rubber-hose.

But there's not a lot of there there. No tension, thin plot, bland worldbuilding - this is a sitcom in comics format, and one made for younger readers to boot. It's definitely fun, and reading one Asterix book is recommended - but, so far, I'm not seeing that additional books add anything new or different, just an opportunity to see the same thing all over again.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I thought I'd reviewed this one at some point; you'd think I would have, by now. But I read the novel when the SFBC did it in 1995 - I might even have bought it for the club then; I can't remember - and the copy I have is of that edition, with a cover by Ruth Sanderson that now makes me feel bad. (The SFBC sometimes got good covers, but we regularly had tight schedules and we generally paid on the low end of acceptable, which combined meant that we could get artists who do good work - like Sanderson - but often couldn't give them the time and space to deliver that good work for us. But then, life is pain, isn't it?)

So this book has sat on my shelf for thirty years since the last time I read it. I've seen the movie several times in that stretch - I think once even in a theater, for some anniversary or other - and author William Goldman has died since then. For whatever reason, I picked it back up.

The Princess Bride, the novel, is subtly different from the movie Rob Reiner made from it - the movie is a somewhat simpler, less gnarly thing, with screenwriter Goldman taking out all of the bits author Goldman put in about his fictionally unhappy life. The book has a lot of digs about Goldman's fictional wife, Helen the psychologist (not Ilene the model) and about his fictional son Jason (not his actual daughters Jenny and Susannah). The frame story is more complex in the novel - it's not just a grandfather reading to his grandson, but a fictionalized Goldman deliberately trying to recreate the "good parts" version of the (fictional) S. Morgenstern original that his father read to him while he was young and sick, after discovering the "real" book is full of long, tedious details when he tried to get his son (the aforementioned fictional Jason) to read it. All of the editorial commentary came out for the movie and most of the metafiction - a little metafiction goes a long way in a visual medium.

The core story is exactly the same: if you've seen the movie (and who hasn't, at this point?), you know all of the beats of the story and all of the good dialogue. Goldman wrote a lot of strong, memorable lines into Princess Bride, and he recognized that when he turned it into a screenplay - he even repositioned my favorite line (the aforementioned "life is pain" bit), which was in the Inigo flashback in the novel.

That's my favorite line partially because it's more important in the book. The movie gestures towards the idea that stories don't necessarily have happy endings, and that life is unfair, but the book has those themes embedded deeply and consistently. The last lines of the novel make that clear:

I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

Otherwise? Princess Bride the novel is deeper and wider than the movie, as novels - even fairly short ones, like this - have more space and more words to do that. As Goldman's fictional barber father puts it in the book, this story has "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

If you've only seen the movie, you're definitely missing things - whether you'll be happy with the additions, I can't say. (But, again, life is pain: expect it.) It's a smart modern fantasy novel that's more complex than it looks, that balances sweetness and cynicism brilliantly, and an interesting object lesson in how a very good novel can become a very good movie, and what had to change to make that happen.

Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson's great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang, a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder - especially in his comics - than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he's a child with a child's enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics, belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello's introduction to this oversized single-volume collection - they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly - sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn't have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I'm shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That's not something this world's DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves...though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics - more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless "who would win" arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains - is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn't accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You'll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes - not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for "Sunday comics" here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that's essentially a single issue of story for each one of them - call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page - Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn't flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert's (impeccably drawn, I'll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I'll be frank: there's not a single story here I'd pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker's work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman - that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it's all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope's mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don't love the art-style, but it's different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods - there's even a "new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified 'they're the real bad guys' reasons," as required for any project like this - but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys - which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don't need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy by Doug Savage

When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble.

OR - and this is what I seem to do most of the time - you could not even notice the creator has material in a different genre for about a decade, and then stumble on it randomly when the "new thing" has a fifth book published, and wonder where the time has gone, alas, where are the green fields of our youth?

Doug Savage is a funny, inventive cartoonist. I discovered him with the Savage Chickens project, which I think was either his first big thing or his breakout. Adults don't buy books of funny drawings very consistently these days - this is sad, because in my youth, the small funny book of cartoons by the cash-register was a dependable publishing category, with big successes every year, but the Internet ruined that like it has ruined so many things - but, and here's the trick, kids still do. So a lot of funny, inventive cartoonists have found that, if they can tune their sensibility to middle-schoolers or grade-schoolers, they could have a really awesome career making fun things, visiting a very appreciative (though often massively rambunctious) audience, and enjoying a mostly supportive community of peers.

I don't know if any of that went into Savage's decision to make Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy in 2016 - many cartoonists fall into making books for younger readers because they have younger readers roaming around their houses - I'm talking about their own children, usually, not semi-feral bands of tweens - and there can be other reasons as well. But Savage made a graphic novel for middle-schoolers, got it published by Andrews McMeel, which also handled his "Savage Chickens" books, and has gone on to do four more books about these characters in the decade since then.

This first book has three mostly separate stories, all set in this same forest and focused on the main characters. They're superheroes, I guess. They fight evil, or try to, or intend to. Laser Moose is a moose who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs for unspecified reasons, and who takes his responsibilities as a laser-shooting moose very, very seriously, probably too much so. Rabbit Boy is his sidekick, a sunny and positive rabbit with no visible superpowers but a somewhat more grounded view of reality that is desperately needed to keep Laser Moose from just cutting everything within sight in half.

In this book, they "battle" aliens who don't seem to really be invading at all. They discover a hideous Aquabear, transformed into a monstrous chimera by toxic waste, and, after some setbacks, return the monster to the human facility that created him, making him the humans' problem. And they foil a new plot by Laser Moose's arch-enemy, Cyborgupine - yes, a cyborg porcupine - who has created a fiendish minion, Mechasquirrel.

It's all fun and zippy, in an appealing kid-friendly cartooning style, mostly thin lines and flat colors. It's the kind of style that looks like an evolved version of the drawings those kids themselves are making - accessible, immediate, quickly readable. And Savage is as funny here with delusional moose and sunny bunnies as he was with wage-slave chickens. You don't need to be ten to enjoy Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, though, if you can access your inner ten-year-old at will, that definitely helps.

Better Things: Behind the Wall of Sleep

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

I'm from New Jersey, so I had to get to the Smithereens eventually. The only question was: this song or Blood & Roses? They're both bad-love songs, both have that core-period Smithereens rhythm-section power propelling them forward at top speed, both are muscular and smart and gnarly and stark.

Maybe I just feel like being a little more positive right now: Blood & Roses is about something already broken and irreparable, but Behind the Wall of Sleep is about something that hasn't happened - maybe can't happen - but the singer hasn't really tried yet. It's a song that holds out at least a slim chance of hope.

I'll take that.

The singer is in love with a woman he doesn't really know:

Well she held a bass guitar
And she was playing in a band
And she stood just like Bill Wyman
Now I am her biggest fan

He spends the first two verses describing what's attractive about her, mostly in third person, but the song shifts to calling her "you" as well - half the time he's describing her, half the time talking to (at?) her. He hasn't connected; he's seems to be in that fabled "she doesn't know I exist" spot. But he still has hope, and the song barrels forward.

Now I know I'm one of many
who would like to be your friend
And I've got to find a way
to to let you know I'm not like them

It's not that deep, it's not that different - but it takes that core longing-song idea and does it perfectly, which is what a three-minute single needs more than anything. This is a great one.

Quote of the Week: Working Conditions

Having arrived at work, there was a whole new set of dangers to contend with. The Victorian workplace was renowned neither for its healthy environment nor for its safety record. This held true if you were working out in the fields just as much as if you were bent over a spinning machine in one of Lancashire's mills or scrubbing floors in a stately home. Open fires and unguarded machinery were common, and the air was filled with smoke, fumes and dusts of various degrees of harmfulness. Horses bolted, sending carts, carriages and machinery flying; poisons were in use everywhere; heavy and debilitating lifting was the norm; and protective hard hats were yet to be introduced into common practice.

 - Ruth Goodman, How To Be a Victorian, pp.187-88

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

I use the tag The Past is a Foreign Country mostly to indicate books that are old themselves, but it's broader than that - it's for books that, in one way or another, are full of the thoughts and ideas of past eras - whether that's one generation ago or several hundred.

How To Be a Victorian is an example - it's a decade-old book, I think a companion piece or line-extension to a TV show the author, Ruth Goodman, presented about life on a farm in the 19th century. I don't know if Goodman is still doing that, or if her career has moved into a different phase, but it looks like she spent a decade or so making TV shows about farming using the tools of various ages in UK history - and, as I type this, I'm pretty sure my wife watched those shows and told me about them. If you want a capsule explanation of how different the two of us are, "and I read a book by the same person many years later for unrelated reasons," comes close.

The subtitle is "A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life," which explains the book pretty succinctly. Goodman organizes her material into fifteen chapters, starting with getting out of bed in the morning and ending with getting back into bed (this time to cover sex) at the end. In between, she covers clothing, grooming, work, play, school, leisure, and a lot of detail about food - obtaining and cooking and eating, how meals were presented and who ate what, when and how.

Goodman, I think, is a trained historian, and she repeatedly makes the point that the Victorian era is a long period - sixty-plus years from 1837 to 1901 - and the world was not static during that time. She also is clear about the differences between classes, urban vs. rural, and especially men vs. women - all of those groups had very different experiences of life. She also tries to cover geographical differences as much as possible: occasionally mentioning America, mostly in the context of media or advertisements, but mostly falling into the general UK dichotomies like North vs. South or London vs. everywhere else, with occasional color about specifics in places like Wales or Ireland.

I still read things with my editor brain, which often is specifically a SFF editor brain, so I kept thinking this would be a good research book for anyone writing historical fiction or alternate worlds going through their own Industrial Revolutions. There's a lot of small detail of how lives are lived - some of it seems general to the level of technology, while more is contingent of specifics of religion (most fantasy worlds, he said archly, should not have a cod-Christian church in charge) and history (the US Civil War had a surprisingly large effect on what people wore in the UK) and other real-world things. All of that could be useful to anyone writing in a similar world: specifics and details are always important, vagaries and genericism are lazy and make for dull stories.

But most of the people reading How To Be a Victorian are probably more like me: vaguely interested, with some knowledge (as much as I specialized in anything for my English degree, it was 19th century novels) and a desire to understand more about how people actually lived during those times. This is a fine book for that, full of nuanced details and excellent comparisons, good to tell you not just what "a Victorian" ate and wore, but how a poor woman differed from a rich one, or a housemaid in the 1890s from her grandmother fifty years earlier. I doubt most of us will ever need to know those details, but knowing pointless, interesting details is one of the great small pleasures of life, isn't it?

Night Drive by Richard Sala

This was Richard Sala's first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala's last book.

Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn't die of COVID, but I have to believe he's one of the many, many people who would have had a much better chance of surviving that horrible year - getting better health care, being seen by more people who could notice something was wrong, etc. - if it hadn't happened. But that's the deal with the past: it's already happened, its horrors and unfairnesses already baked in. And that's a pretty solidly Richard Sala thought, frankly.

The original Night Drive was self-published by Sala in 1984, a 32-page comic in 500 signed copies. It got appreciative reviews, sold a decent number of those copies, and was useful for Sala to open doors to get illustration work - and then the long last story, "Invisible Hands," was picked up by MTV's Liquid Television, which gave Sala another paying gig to help get his career started.

This expanded edition of Night Drive came out this May, just about doubling the size of the original and turning it into a small hardcover book. It includes a foreword remembering Sala by his friend and fellow comics writer Dana Marie Andra, an interview section with answers from Sala about this book over the span of several decades, and a number of stories and illustrations from the same era - some almost made it into Night Drive, some were for the potential follow-up that was shelved when his work on Liquid Television and illustration jobs got too busy.

The art is both deeply Sala - scratchy, black-and-white, with scrawled lettering and quirky misshapen faces - and deeply 1980s, full of design-y borders and title panels. His work got somewhat easier to visually "read" later, when he moved into working most commonly in watercolors, but this is Sala at his darkest and most cryptic, all of his old horror-movie and noir influences coming out in a flood of tropes and dialogue and ideas. The pieces here are more vignettes than stories, as if Sala was trying to get down all of his inspiration and his ideas his way as fast as he could. He got clearer than this, he told more complete and satisfying stories than this - he definitely got better at his craft and I think moved closer to doing exactly what he wanted to do - but this package is full of pure unfiltered Richard Sala, early in his development and heady with the possibilities of comics.

"Invisible Hands" is still the standout here - long enough to give Sala room to maneuver, full of fiendish plots and mysterious characters, shocking reverses and new complications, quirky and entirely Sala but close enough to a normal narrative for the parallax to be deeply satisfying. But the whole package is fun, a deep dive into the beginnings of a unique artist and the style of a very distinctive, and now long-gone era.

Nancy Wears Hats by Ernie Bushmiller

I don't entirely get the way Fantagraphics has been publishing their collections of Ernie Bushmiller's great classic Nancy strip - I'll admit that - but I totally dig their vibe, and I'll read 'em once I notice new ones exist.

I think Fanta is mostly working chronologically, though without the mania for completism that their massive Peanuts project had. They've published...I don't know, five or six? maybe more? books of Bushmiller, starting (I think) with Nancy Is Happy about a decade ago. That book had war-time strips, and the books since, as far as I can tell, each collect roughly two years of dailies.

So Nancy Wears Hats, which was published earlier this summer, collects many - it doesn't seem to be all; the description says "over 300" - strips from 1949-50.

Let me digress for the potted history lesson. The strip Fritzi Ritz, one of many jumping on the flapper bandwagon (Blondie is the only thing left standing in that field), was started in 1922 by Larry Whittington. A twenty-year-old Bushmiller took it over three years later and did mostly flapperesque gags for the next decade, but then invented a niece for Fritzi in 1933. Nancy gradually took over the Fritzi Ritz strip, as Bushmiller gradually added different supporting characters and dropped the showgirl and office gags associated with Fritzi, with the strip finally changing names in 1938. Bushmiller wrote and drew Nancy until his death in 1982; it was continued by other hands since then and is still running, recently rejuvenated by the pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes. Bushmiller is beloved in comics circles for his simplicity: he drew cleanly and made precise gags that famously are easier to read than not to. His best period is generally considered to be the '50s, but it seems more to be that he took a few years first to turn Fritzi into Nancy, and then to tune Nancy to his preferred pure-gag level. I don't think there's a generally-recognized decline at the end of his run.

So: this book is full of fun Bushmiller gags, from the beginning of his best period. If you've been reading the Bushmiller reruns on GoComics - and why wouldn't you? - it might be a bit of déjà vu, since they're right in the middle of this period right now. (I guess that means everyone agrees this is peak Bushmiller.)

There are a few short "continuities" here - a week or maybe two of gags on the same theme or starting from the same premise - but Nancy was never a continuity strip. It was about the gags, and there's a flood of fun gags here: some timeless, some very 1949. I like the latter, since they're often still funny, in their own way, and I find that kind of thing fascinating - your mileage may vary.

I think Bushmiller got his drawing a bit simpler than this in the immediately subsequent years; there's some places where his drawing is more detailed - not fussy, but more lines, drawing things that later Bushmiller probably would simplify to make the gag sharper - than at his very peak. But this is a big batch of fine funny strips from a master.

Elric of Melnibonè by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and P. Craig Russell

When I started reading Michael Moorcock, around 1980, there were six Elric books, and Elric of Melnibonè was the first one. The series has been reassembled several times since then, and I think at least one new piece inserted earlier in the timeline than the 1972 novel - but this is still, I think, roughly, the beginning by internal chronology.

Well, the novel is. I didn't read the novel this time.

Moorcock's stories of the Eternal Champion - Elric being the most popular and best-known of his avatars - have been adapted into comics, directly and as inspiration and with new stories scripted by Moorcock himself, many times over the past fifty years. Almost as soon as there were Moorcock Elric prose stories, there were comics adaptations - the guy just called out for dramatic pages, with his bone-white skin, howling black sword, and endless woe-is-me affect.

The most sustained adaptation series started in the early 1980s, scripted by Roy Thomas and drawn by various sympathetic artists, and I think it covered all six of the novels that teen Andy would consider "real." It started at Pacific Comics, and, when that company died, moved with most of the rest of the Pacific publishing program to First, where the project expanded to do some adaptations of other Eternal Champion stories as well.

I don't know if I can get through all of the Eternal Champion material, but Titan Books, out of the UK, has been reprinting it in uniform editions for about the past decade. And I can at least take another look at those Elric adaptations, about forty years after the last time I read them.

The comics version of Elric of Melnibonè was originally a six-issue series, adapted by Thomas from Moorcock's novel, and illustrated by Michael T. Gilbert and P. Craig Russell in a detailed, Rackham/Beardsley-esque style that worked very well for the decadent-aristocrat atmosphere of Melnibonè, and adds a lot of visual interest to the book. This edition seems to keep the original coloring, which was subtle and careful and very detailed for its day but can look a bit garish now due to advances in computer coloring and printing technology. From the credits, it looks like Gilbert did the pencils, Russell did layouts and inks, and both worked on the colors.

Thomas could be an inventive comics-writer, but here the gig was to take as much Moorcock prose as possible and present it on the page, and Thomas does that well. This is still in the caption-clotted era of comics, and Thomas was one of the masters of that form. This Elric is wordy, but not in a bad way: both the rococo illustrative style and the long dialogue and captions serve to slow down the reader, to focus attention, to allow the story to flow at a slower pace.

Elric of Melnibonè is a tragedy that doesn't quite happen before the end of the book. Elric himself is the emperor of his decadent people, once world-dominating but now happy to scheme and live on their one small island in the middle of the world, while the human nations of the Young Kingdoms wax in power and threaten Melnibonè itself more and more. Their assaults used to be separated by centuries and repelled easily; now they come multiple times in one life and Melnibonèan resources are beginning to be stretched to destroy them. At some point - Elric thinks within a century - Melnibonè will lose one such battle.

Elric is an albino, physically weak, the only son of the previous emperor, his mother dying in his birth and his life only possible through a combination of sorcerous and pharmaceutical supports, which luckily his nation can provide. But his scheming cousin Yrkoon wants to depose him, and Elric can't bring himself to deal with the rival as his ancestors would. (Have him tortured to death on a whim, on some trumped-up or true charges.) And Yyrkoon's younger sister Cymoril is Elric's love - though not yet his Empress, mostly because the grand celebration of their marriage would traditionally entail the sacrificial death of more Melnibonèan aristocrats than Elric is comfortable with.

So this is the story of Yyrkoon's schemes - he tries to kill Elric during one battle with a human invading force, and fails. Then he flees to the Young Kingdoms, with Cymoril as captive, and Elric chases him, through more battles. This all is, readers who have read the written-earlier but set-later stories know, being stage-managed by the Lords of Chaos, particularly Arioch, the traditional patron deity of the Melnibonèans, to bring them back to power on this world.

For the climax, Elric and Yyrkoon end up on another plane of existence, holding two famously powerful swords - Stormbringer and Mournblade - and fighting each other, with Elric having already pledged his loyalty to Arioch to get to that point. As the narration makes clear, his doom is already set - though it will take much longer to work out. Melnibonè has not yet fallen as this story ends - but we know it will, and that Elric will be one of the few survivors.

Readers new to Elric should hit the novels first - depending on your tastes, either starting with the original Elric of Melnibonè or using one of the reprint projects that puts the stories in the order they were originally published. (The latter is reasonable, but does mean you hit Stormbringer, with Elric's death and the big climax of the series, practically at the beginning - most of the history of Moorcock writing Elric is him adding more stuff in the middle.) Adaptations should come after that, for readers who want more pictures and color and decadent atmosphere - all of which this edition provides in abundance.

Better Things: Troy

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

This is another big one - one of the handful of songs that I kept trying to fit into the original This Year series, and it just didn't go. But it was a song I loved and was awestruck by from the first time I heard it - I think a whole generation of us heard it, probably on MTV, and were struck immediately by its power and raw force.

Sinead O'Connor had a long, complicated, winding career. She made a lot of great music, and lived a tumultuous life in public probably more than was good for her. She wore her heart on her sleeve - no, even more than that, she ripped her chest open metaphorically, over and over, to show her most vulnerable side in her music.

And never more so than in her first great song, her debut single.

This week, it's Troy.

Full of devastating lines, full of deep insights. Full of pointed lines sung by one woman to one other person - I think, in the context of the song, a man, though O'Connor said later in her life Troy had other origins than the broken-love story it tells.

You wouldn't have begged me to hold you
If we hadn't been there in the first place

It's a song of regret and anger, of stalking around the ashes of something definitively burned to the ground and describing how it came to be that way.

We were so young then
We thought that everything
We could possibly do was right

Some break-up songs are about what the singer did wrong; some are about how she was wronged by the one she's singing to. Troy circles accusations and confessions, over and over - it's never clear what happened or how, but it sounds like the other person was two-timing the singer and it's just recently come out:

Oh, does she love you
What do you want to do?
Does she need you like I do?
Do you love her?
Is she good for you?
Does she hold you like I do?
Do you want me?
Should I leave?

O'Connor sings all of this like an avenging angel, going from full-force - and her voice, at its peak, had force like no one else - to barely whispered, sometimes in the space of a single line, as the orchestral background rises and falls to match. It's a big song in every way - big instruments, big emotions, big themes, aiming as high as humanly possible and hitting right where it wants to. If you've never hear it before, buckle in - you're in for a hell of a ride.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Winners and Losers

The fighting had been hard and continuous; that was attested by all the senses. The very taste of battle was in the air. All was now over; it remained only to succor the wounded and bury the dead - to "tidy up a bit," as the humorist of a burial squad put it. A good deal of "tidying up" was required. As far as one could see through the forests, among the splintered trees, lay wrecks of men and horses. Among them moved the stretcher-bearers, gathering and carrying away the few who showed signs of life. Most of the wounded had died of neglect while the right to minister to their wants was in dispute. It is an army regulation that the wounded must wait; the best way to care for them is to win the battle. It must be confessed that victory is a distinct advantage to many requiring attention, but many do not live to avail themselves of it.

 - Ambrose Bierce, "The Coup de Grâce," p.11 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Week: This Is Where I Belong

He had that feeling, which comes to all quiet men who like to sit at home and read, that this was the sort of atmosphere in which he really belonged. The brightness of it all - the dazzling lights, the music, the hubbub, in which the deep-throated gurgle of the wine-agent surprised when drinking soup blended with the shriller note of the chorus-girl calling to her mate - these things got Henry. He was thirty-six next birthday, but he felt a youngish twenty-one.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Man With Two Left Feet," p.242 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez

Serious comics sometimes combine the complications of literary fiction with those of their less reputable drawn counterparts. Take Jaime Hernandez, for example: he has a novelistic sweep and depth of characterization, with a large cast seen over decades in hundreds of pages of comics - told in usually two-to-ten page installments, half short stories and half chapters, published in a variety of formats under the title Love & Rockets, alongside unrelated work by his brother Gilbert, and then collected into books that mostly don't overlap.

Life Drawing is the new Jaime book this year, collecting stories from Love & Rockets. It's a book about both Maggie, his longtime heroine, and Tonta, a newer character a generation younger. It's most directly a sequel to 2021's Tonta, which gathered the initial cluster of Tonta stories, and 2020's Is This How You See Me?, which saw Maggie firmly in middle age and more settled than we ever thought she would be.

There's at least one page here - the story "99° 36°" - that I remember seeing before; I think in See Me. I'm less sure about the Tonta material, but some of it could have been reprinted in the earlier book. That's the way Hernandez works: lots of short bits, circling characters and themes and events. I know he sometimes edits or updates stories between periodical publication and book publication; that may have happened here, too.

The table of contents of Life Drawing lists thirty stories - the first one is dated 2014 and the last 2024. Tonta - a young woman at the end of her high-school years - is our main character; Maggie plays a more supporting role here, maybe because she's older and more settled. Tonta can be the young hothead making bad decisions, running around frantically in search of love or friendship, burdened with a big complicated messy family full of people who don't seem to like her.

Tonta's life here is a continuation of what we saw in Tonta: she bounces between living with two of her older half-sisters, Vivian and Violet, both of whom are horrible people in different ways. This book is less about that family drama, though it does come up a few times. Here, Tonta is growing up and hitting the point where she and her friends need to figure out their next steps - the coach she idolized, Angel, is caught in a scandal and had to quit teaching high school students; Tonta's best friend Gomez is going away to college on the east coast.

Tonta has a bit of a crush on her art teacher, who is Ray Dominguez - Maggie's long-time live-in boyfriend. She also has a random run-in with Maggie, as some random older woman in the neighborhood, along with a friend. Tonta's friends, Gomez and Judy Fair and Brown Alice, are major supporting characters - the people in Maggie's life, aside from Ray, are more secondary. We do see Hopey twice, grumbling her way through middle age, just as angry and unsatisfiable as she ever was.

Hernandez works like a literary writer, building up events and character through individual moments. So we see these characters, and many more, bouncing off each other over the course of what seems to be several months, probably the late spring into the summer in this stretch of Southern California. Tonta and Maggie meet several times on the beach; the beach is more important here than I can remember it ever being in Hernandez's work before - I'd always gotten a sense that his work took place further inland, in the sunbaked minor cities of the Inland Empire.

Hernandez doesn't always avoid the big scenes and moments - there are two weddings in this book - but it's striking that this stretch of time probably included the graduations of Tonta and many (most? all?) of her friends, which is not even mentioned. What he does is only include the moments important for the particular story he's telling here - not all of the things going on in any of his character's lives, not even the things they might consider the most important.

Life Drawing is the story of how Tonta grows up, at least a bit. How she comes to get a bit better at talking to other people, relating to other people, navigating relationships, understanding what she wants. She's a Jaime Hernandez character, so she's not going to get that good at any of those things - Maggie, thirty-some years older, has maybe hit a point where those things are pretty solid, after only forty-five years of comics with her as the main character.

This is not as flashy or dramatic as Hernandez's most famous stories - there's nothing like The Death of Speedy or The Love Bunglers. He does have Tonta to give it that young energy, that screwing-up-everything phase of their lives that all his characters have, but we think Tonta, despite all her goofiness, all her mistakes, all the things she avoids or tries not to think about, will be OK in the end.